Soxblog has best perspective on Ron Artest’s Devil’s Night.

Aside from being overly kind about my much-diminished hoop skills, he has a great story about a pack of Boston Bruin players taking into the stands in Madison Square Garden 25 years ago. There, they proceeded to beat down a bunch of rowdy New Yorkers, going so far as to bludgeon one putz with his own shoe. This story is not to be missed.

Charming item on Page Six today. William F. Buckley, on Election Night, commented to the New Yorker’s Ben McGrath that the field looked grim for a Republican presidential candidate in 2008. Running down the list of likelies, Buckley paused over the names Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki. (How strange that the Republican party should look to New York for its future.) Giuliani Buckley hopes will run. Pataki? “No,” says the father of modern conservatism, “he’s epicene.” Pataki’s office had no comment for the Post about the governor’s alleged condition of being neither male nor female. Probably Buckley meant neither Republican nor Democrat, or simply, not the kind of unmistakably ambitious creature who becomes a contender for president.

I don’t want this to mutate into some sort of manifesto, but for those of you who keep asking what kind of traffic Galley Slaves is doing, this post from the normally excellent Patterico is why I don’t have a site meter:

Traffic has been steadily dropping off. Today was a drastic drop.

What’s the deal? Am I starting to suck that bad?

Or is this happening to other people?

Weird that this would happen the same day I top half a million visitors.

UPDATE: You know what this means–another request for you to tell people about the blog!

This is nothing against Patterico, whose blog I generally like quite a bit. But when you’re driven to begging for readers, that’s just not right. I mean, these things are just blogs, for cryin’ out loud. I’ll let you in on a secret. Shhhh, lean in closer so I can whisper: They don’t actually matter.

Can they be fun? Sure. Can they occassionally be useful? You bet. But to the extent that blogs seduce people into whittling down their dignity–by writing about their boyfriends or their wives or their traffic or their hospital stays or their dogs or their penchant for salted, cured meats, all in the name of keeping the numbers up–they can also be quite pernicious.

It turns out that there’s a reason Jon Klein, the blogosphere’s own personal Dick Dastardly, hasn’t been posting much to his blog recently: It turns out that he’s been named U.S. head of CNN. Lisa de Moraes is, as always, so bad that it’s good:

. . . after Klein gave the obligatory “it’s about the storytelling” speech–really, new hires at CNN should be required to take a pledge not to say anything sounding remotely like “it’s about the storytelling”–one reporter opened the Q&A portion of the festivities by noting wearily that CNN has “talked about ‘storytelling’ the last three rounds of management changes” and asked Walton how many times they thought they could discuss “storytelling” as the reason for an executive change “before it becomes sort of toxic.” Walton responded that not every ratings point is created equal; Klein added, “There’s storytelling and there’s storytelling.”

Not mean enough? She adds: “In a statement, Fox News Channel said it wished ‘CNN well on their annual executive shuffle.'”

I’d like to say that, contra the blogosphere, I found Klein quite pleasant and responsive in my dealings. Best of luck to him on the new job–and I think it would be great if he kept his blog going while at the new gig. A blog that gave an inside look at how executive cable news decisions are made? That would interesting.

If you checked out of work early last Friday, you might have missed the news that the Washington Post finally decided to drop Ted Rall. You’ll recall our last brush with Rall, when we found him doing his best Mike Kinsley impersonation.

In the midst of the Post flap, Rall asked readers of his blog to email the paper and defend him. One enterprising Galley Slave reader decided, instead, to email Rall and–well, there’s no delicate way to put this–rub it in. Our reader’s exchange with Rall can be read here.

You may (or may not) be surprised to here that Rall doesn’t like having his cage rattled. The man who thinks it’s funny to mock women whose husbands were murdered on September 11, who thinks it’s amusing to mock Pat Tillman’s death, emailed back this whiny, indignant response: “People like you are encouraging lots of creative people–including conservatives–to avoid posting online content. Nice job, fascist.” Poor widdle Teddy!

In addition to everything else, it turns out that Rall is a bully, too. He can dish it out, but he can’t take it. I hope that other Galley Slave readers will refrain from emailing Rall. We don’t want to hurt his feelings.

Those creative types, you know. They’re very sensitive.

The AP reports that my birthplace, Camden, New Jersey, has been named America’s most dangerous city. It’s about time.

For years throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Camden was routinely named America’s “worst city” by, I think, U.S. News, or some such magazine. Camden has had three of its mayors indicted in the last 10 years.

You have to laugh at Camden, because otherwise you’d cry. I remember seeing pictures of Camden from the ’40s when it was a beautiful, shining town, nestled on the Delaware river across from center city Philadelphia. And if you drive through Camden today, you can still see echoes of the past in the architecture of detailing on old brownstones and brick townhouses.

I’ve always thought that Camden would be the perfect laboratory for a government that wanted to fix inner-city blight. It has all the afflications of Compton or Detroit, but it’s small enough to manage. If someone in either New Jersey or the federal government was serious about figuring out how to rescue America’s inner cities, they would start with Camden and try every tool in the box–empowerment zones, school vouchers, broken-windows policing, faith-based community outreach–to see what works.

Michael Scheuer looks less and less credible with everything you read about him. Steve Hayes has the goods on Scheuer’s unsustainable position regarding the connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. Apparently Scheuer did research on this connection and came up with “nothing.” Which contradicts everything else we seem to know about Saddam and bin Laden’s relationship. (Spare me the email; all available evidence says that the two of them had a relationship; the question is whether or not it was operative.)

Then Matt Continetti has a report on Scheuer’s feud with Richard Clarke. Scheuer does not come off looking terribly good.

I’m just digging into Scheuer’s books, but I’m struck by one passage from the acknowledgments in Through Our Enemies’ Eyes:

At the day’s end, I would like to thank those who granted my request and those who opposed publication. Indeed, the latter steeled me to press the issue to a conclusion and not yield to men who, in Mark Helprin’s 1998 words, “knowing very little or next to nothing, take pride in telling everyone else what to do.”

I understand–and applaud–holding grudges. But this doesn’t sound like someone with much respect for opposing judgments. Or someone who’s much of a team player.

I’m hardly a fan of the Bush twins–who strike me as the unpleasant end-product of congenital nepotism–but this story from Gawker is disgusting:

“Freemans tuesday night the 16th of nov. the bush twins along with 2 massive secret service men tried to have dinner they were told by the maitre ‘d that they were full and would be for the next 4 years upon hearing the entire restaurant cheered and did a round of shots it was amazing!!!”

Could this be true? I don’t want to make too much out of it until we have some confirmation, but imagine if this had happened to Chelsea Clinton or one of the Kerry girls in Utah. But of course you can’t imagine that. If Chelsea or the Kerry girls showed up at a restaurant in Utah, they would no doubt be fawned over and treated with respect and decorum.

Only in New York.