You know it’s bad when I’m the one defending the blogosphere. John Hinderaker points us to two pieces by David Paul Kuhn, of CBSNews.com. In the first piece, Kuhn elliptically hints at the need for FEC regulation of blogs, while in the second he makes a few factual errors himself. CBS News, Hinderaker points out, isn’t subject to any regulation, and would scream bloody murder if someone tried to impose regulation on them.

I’m four-square with Hinderaker on (a) the foolishness of regulating blogs and (b) the hypocrisy of old media types who want to do so.

There’s just one wrinkle: The example which bothers Kuhn isn’t the Swift Boat Vets, but the South Dakota Senate race where bloggers Jon Lauck and Jason Van Beek were surreptitiously on the Thune payroll.

By any estimation, Lauck and Van Beek are a black-eye on the blogosphere. But what they did probably isn’t illegal. Unless it is, of course. Blog law is going to evolve and the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform laws (restricting political speech is hard work, you know; thanks President Bush!) aren’t going to make it any easier for free speech to win out.

I’ve never been particularly impressed with Lloyd Grove, but this column about Paris Hilton is so good it could have been written by Lisa de Moraes. (Yes, it’s that smart, funny, and mean.) Sample:

I admit that Paris and I have been snared in an ugly web of mutual addiction: She to all the lurid ink, me to all the pointless drama.

But on the “Today” show this morning, I’m planning to announce my New Year’s resolution: going cold turkey. No more Paris Hilton.

Far be it from me to advise other practitioners in the gossip game, but I’m through with her.

We’re a better country than that.

Iraq is a better country than that.

Not that it matters, but I’d like to join hands with Grove on this one–just on general principle.

But before we throw her overboard, if anyone has a link to the devastating Vanity Fair piece on the Hiltons from a few years back?

There’s a bunch of excellent stuff up this morning. Start with Hugh Hewitt’s dissection of the New York Times‘s Richard Stevenson (he’s a reporter!).

After that, move on to Tom Donnelly’s interesting argument about why, despite everything, we were right to disband the Iraqi army after the fall of Saddam.

And then, check out Soxblog’s riff on Daily Kos, which goes even further than Oxblog.

I found this story on Fark, one of the five greatest websites in the world. Browsing the Fark headlines two or three times a day is like mainlining the Onion–it’s that funny. Fark’s headline for this story: “Alaska man builds 18-foot fighting robot for local race track, military, SkyNet.”

Jonathan V. Last may have been a little too quick to poke fun at my Georgetown Hoyas’ admittedly disappointing defeat at the hands of Oral Roberts University at the Rainbow Classic in Hawaii. As other Galley Slave readers have pointed out, ORU’s basketball coach is none other than Scott Sutton, son of legendary Oklahoma State coach Eddie Sutton. The Golden Eagles are also still undefeated at 8-0, having bested other teams in their Mid-Continent Conference including Tulsa. Forward Caleb Green is a force to be reckoned with, having earned Conference Player of the Week twice this season and firing off 26 points against the Hoyas. Last might have thought it a joke, but I am betting Oral Roberts just might make it to the Big Dance come March, assuming they beat conference rivals Valparaiso and IUPUI.

Meanwhile it is a rebuilding year at the Hilltop. Georgetown coach John Thompson III has had to remold the team after years of intransigence. But according to local fans and critics who have seen them play thus far, the general consensus is that the players have returned to fundamentals–passing, dribbling, looking, breathing, and even showing signs of that Princeton-style offense that Thompson learned under Pete Carril.

The Hoyas are currently playing against Long Beach State, a game they should win. If they don’t, I’ll blame it on jetlag.

Allow me a kind word for Maria Full of Grace, which arrived in theaters this summer and is now out on DVD. It is the quietly heart-wrenching story of a Colombian drug mule, who turns to crime after quitting her demeaning job clipping thorns from roses in factory-style plant.

What distinguishes the movie is its restrained use of violence and uninterrupted focus on the drug trade from the point of view of a secondary agent. For every drug lord, of course, there are hundred of small-time operators, helping the business along. This is the perspective of Maria Full of Grace as the 17-year-old main character learns to swallow large pellets of drugs by practicing with grapes.

The little things add up, ultimately to a very good movie, one made of character and fantastic real-life details, and none of the brutality associated with drug movies.

The movie’s writer-director Joshua Marston has avoided making an arse of himself in the press, by, say, extolling the sudden rainshower of blessings that would immediately follow legalization. In fact, the one comment I heard him make during a brief listen to the director’s commentary was that he hoped, after watching this movie, American drug users would keep in mind the black market they were funding and its dehumanizing effects on innocents like Maria.

Postscript: If we are to take individual movies as signposts of where the culture is heading, then I would definitely say Maria Full of Grace represents progress over past drug movies. When Traffic came out, I wrote up a memo on how the movie might affect public perception of the drug war and the office of the national drug control policy. In case you care:

“There seem to be two groups of people who take the drug policy very seriously: people interested in criminal policy and people interested in drugs. In the first group, you have liberals and conservatives duking it out over the usual issues, from whether to imprison or treat individuals who are guilty of possession to how America should address supplier countries like Colombia. In the second group, you have users, from pot enthusiasts to junkies, and their friends and family who do not see drugs, primarily, as a policy issue. The vast majority of people, while they may have opinions (even electorally consequential ones) on the subject of drugs, do not consider the issue a national priority.

“Most likely, Traffic’s intellectual influence is negligible. Members of the above first group were probably unmoved by the movie, though those who found its politics agreeable were likely to champion its cinematic importance and may continue applauding it as an important piece of social criticism. As far as position papers go, Traffic isn’t a very good one. But Hollywood isn’t in the business of writing position papers. It is in the business of engaging vast numbers of people. And Hollywood is definitely capable of propaganda. Because of this, Traffic, though it may be irrelevant to how intellectuals and policy people think about drugs, should be thought of as a major cultural point of reference, the biggest, most important piece of dramatic fiction concerning drugs in years.

“Which means that, while Traffic may have almost no influence over the members of the first group, it may have influence over the second group and everyone else. What message exactly has Traffic sent to members of the second group and all other Americans? That drugs have brought to our lives only moral ambiguity and tragedy. The drug traffickers aren’t necessarily bad: Witness Catherine Zeta-Jones’s role as an expecting mother who is compelled to become involved in her husband’s drug business in order to support herself and her children. And the cops aren’t necessarily good: The drug czar played by Michael Douglas is a heavy drinker and a negligent father. Indeed, the dealers have family values, while the czar’s an outrageous hypocrite who doesn’t realize how the drug problem is tearing apart his own household. Such storylines may be laughable, but they take up a significant portion of the only two hours many Americans have recently spent thinking about drugs.

“To see the movie’s message most clearly, we should compare it to the last major movie about drugs. If Traffic is a panorama encompassing everything from international drug trafficking to the families torn apart by drug abuse, then Scarface is a movie about one very bad man. In a world where the problem of drugs is traceable back to a bad guy like Tony Montana, there is a need for a good guy, a sheriff. This is a world in which the idea of a “drug czar” is welcome and makes sense. In Traffic, where drugs do not simply trace backwards to a single villain, the idea of a “drug czar,” a sheriff above all sheriffs, is offensive. Incidentally, Traffic is not politically unusual, as drug movies go. Trainspotting, the Basketball Diaries, the recent critically acclaimed Requiem for a Dream all focus on the abuser’s side of the story. Scarface, along with the recent unheralded Blow, are actually the standouts for telling drug stories as crime stories. Traffic and the others tell drug stories as tales of moral haziness and individual human weakness. And weakness, unlike criminality, requires tenderness and compassion, a federal nurse as opposed to a federal narc.”

A hearty welcome to Hogue Blog, the new blog from Sacramento radio talk-show host Eric Hogue. Glad to have you on board, Eric.