"THX 1138."

George Lucas's first film, "THX 1138," is about to come out as a "director's cut" DVD. You can pre-order it on Amazon and get "at no additional cost--a collectible aluminum replica of the THX 1138 ear tag featured on the DVD packaging art (while supplies last)." Good thing it's collectible, because I wouldn't want an aluminum replica of an ear tag that somehow stood in the way of my collecting it. And what does it even mean to collect a single item? If there's only one, isn't it just ... keepable? A keepsake? And what is the charm of an ear tag anyway? I'd like to run across someone actually wearing a THX 1138 ear tag, just to test the image I have in my head of the kind of guy who would wear a THX 1138 ear tag. I'll just leave it at that.

I won't be buying this DVD, even with the added incentive of the ear tag, because I've seen this movie. I saw it when it came out in 1971, and I consider that a bit of a distinction, because it was a pretty obscure movie. The name George Lucas meant nothing then. Francis Ford Coppola produced this movie, but it was still a year before "The Godfather." Back in those days we had a bit of a thing for "You're a Big Boy Now," the 1966 Francis Ford Coppola movie, but I doubt if that was the draw. As nearly as I can remember, we just liked science fiction movies. "2001: A Space Odyssey," "The Green Slime"--whatever. And "THX 1138" was "supposed to be good," which was enough. I saw this movie at a drive-in that summer (the same summer when I saw Alice Cooper in concert--or thereabouts). I was stranded in southern New Jersey. You know how you feel when you've gone away to college and then you come back in the summer and live with your parents? But it was worse because my parents moved right after I graduated from high school. So instead of going back to Wayne, New Jersey, where I knew people and could easily get to New York City, I had to go to Blackwood, New Jersey, a desolate place--literally "The Pine Barrens" (that is not just the name of an episode of "The Sopranos").

It was really dull and depressing, somewhere along the White Horse Pike, midway between Philadelphia and Atlantic City (pre-gambling Atlantic City). The closest thing to anything to do there was to play pinball in a bowling alley. I've only been punched in the face once in my life, and it was in the parking lot of that bowling alley. I made fun of the words to "Born to Run" yesterday, but "a death trap ... a suicide rap" is about how it felt. People think of those early Bruce Springsteen songs as being about New Jersey, but they are about southern New Jersey, and it really was an awful place to be in the early 1970s. People in New York who laugh at New Jersey are talking about northern New Jersey. Southern New Jersey is a big step down.

But we did have a drive-in, and they were playing "THX 1138." I remember that the set was blank white, but not in the happy "Isaac Mizrahi Show" way, in the extreme sensory deprivation way. And--if I remember correctly--everyone was dressed in white, had shaved heads, and spoke in a flat, lifeless way. I was already living in southern New Jersey and that was already more sensory deprivation than I could take. Normally, I loved bleak cinema: we saw every Ingmar Bergman double feature that played at Cinema Guild during the school year back in Ann Arbor, and, believe me, Cinema Guild showed a lot of Bergman double features. But that summer, in that place, in a drive-in, "THX 1138" was profoundly, profoundly boring.

So I will not be competing with all you ear tag collectors and George Lucas fans. In my alphabetized DVD bookcase, "Three Kings" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" will for now remain side-by-side.

UPDATE: Chris points out that "THX 1138" is getting a theatrical release too.

Tuesday in Madison.

The new school week starts, a day late. The morning is spent reading cases about the Constitution's religion clauses and teaching the class at 11--lots of good discussion, both in class and after class. I tried to memorize the 33 names on the seating chart before class today, then in class, I kept getting the names slightly wrong. I'll get the first letter right, for example. I called Mike Matt, a mistake caused by my mnemonic device, which let me know it was an "M" name, and my readiness to say Matt, which seems to be a really popular name for this cohort. (You know what has become a really popular name in recent years, that I've never run into anyone in Madison actually having for a name? Madison.)

But now it's time for a little lunch and some fresh air, so I walk down Bascom Hill and into the Library Mall. There's the Red Gym and lots of students enjoying the day:



The view toward State Street, with food carts. Notice anything about that tree? It's this tree. See the remnants of the art project?



I go to Fair Trade Coffeeshop and set up at a little table by the window. The garden tables look enticing, but I like it here by the flowers.



The table seems a little wobbly, so I set my coffee mug on the windowsill.



I start to download my photographs. I like this one of a lamppost plastered with leaflets, with a bit of a view of Park Street, as it runs toward the lake.





And here are the nice sidewalk cafés along State Street.



But what is this strange image? Some message from the spirit world? Somehow it's well composed and intriguing. I don't know what it is, but I like it.



And what is this? A leftover photograph from the blogger dinner last Thursday. I was struggling to upload my photos and for some reason, I decided to photograph my struggle. Man, look at the beautiful torte and that lovely glass of cognac. How can I have put a computer on that table! But I wasn't the first. Look, there in the upper right corner of this picture. That's Jeremy's computer.

The grandiose propagandist.

Filmmaker Michael Moore gloats (via Drudge):

My pollster friend told me that he believes if Kerry wins, "Fahrenheit 9/11" will be one of the top three reasons for his election.

Yes, why don't you just go ahead and take credit in advance? One thing about Moore, which is kind of a safeguard against Moore: his ego is bigger than his desire to help the candidate he supports. Moore wants his movie "Fahrenheit 911" to air on television before the election, but the mean old DVD distributor says it would violate the contract. But the greater problem, he asserts, is sacrificing Oscar eligibility:

Academy rules forbid the airing of a documentary on television within nine months of its theatrical release (fiction films do not have the same restriction).

Although I have no assurance from our home video distributor that they would allow a one-time television broadcast -- and the chances are they probably won't -- I have decided it is more important to take that risk and hope against hope that I can persuade someone to put it on TV, even if it's the night before the election.

Therefore, I have decided not to submit "Fahrenheit 9/11" for consideration for the Best Documentary Oscar. If there is even the remotest of chances that I can get this film seen by a few million more Americans before election day, then that is more important to me than winning another documentary Oscar.

I love the way he flaunts his willingness to forgo an Oscar, when the home video contract also prevents him from intruding himself into the last days of the presidential campaign. It's obviously not going to be on TV, so the gesture of stepping out of the Documentary Oscar category obviously has other motives. Isn't it hugely big of him to forgo the Documentary Oscar for the sake of the greater good, when it doesn't make him ineligible for the Best Picture Oscar? Read for yourself how Moore asserts that he was a sure bet to win the Documentary Oscar, so that his withdrawing will give some of the lesser documentarians--whose success he made possible!--a chance.

How is Moore disadvantaged in any way in all of this? He gets to parade as some sort of political saint, promote his DVD, and put pressure on the Academy to nominate him for Best Picture! Does this grandiose character even help Kerry? But I'm not going to feel sorry for Kerry until he distances himself from this propangandist!

"Of course I pitied the children."

From a surviving Beslan terrorist:

"Of course I pitied the children, I swear to Allah. I have children myself. I didn't shoot. I swear to Allah," he said. "I don't want to die. I swear to Allah, I want to live."

I was going to call this post "Abject cowardice," but I just heard on a Fox News broadcast that some of the Beslan terrorists did not know that children were going to be the hostages and had the humanity to refuse to participate when they saw what they had gotten themselves involved in. According to the news report, these persons were killed. Conceivably, the quoted terrorist was another who was willing to participate initially and actually did withdraw his support when he saw the children. It is impossible for me to imagine people so evil that they would do the things that took place at Beslan, and a relief to think that at least some of those who willingly participate in the lowest evil still have something beyond what they will do.

If this man really refused to kill children, why was he not killed like the others? Conceivably, he hid his noncompliance with the others and avoided the fate of those who openly objected. Whether he pulled the trigger or not, he is still a murderer, because he went too far into the conspiracy to back out and avoid responsibility for their acts. My first thought with respect to this terrorist who survived was: he'll say anything now, begging for his own life. So I'm not inclined to believe him, yet even though I think he's loathsome to try to avoid his guilt, I take some shred of solace in his plea "I want to live." The inhumanity of persons who reject their own lives has been one of the most appalling aspects of terrorism. Loathsome as it is to try to beg for your life when you were willing to kill others, it is at least a very human form of loathsomeness. There is some small hope in that.

Necco Wafers redux: the Catholic version.

One of the nice things about having this blog is that former students of mine happen upon it and drop me an email. Yesterday, I heard from a student who attended the Law School back in the mid-80s when I was just starting out. What particularly amused me about the email was that she commented on what I have always considered my most obscure post, the Necco Wafers post! The former student wrote:

By the way, as a Catholic kid, Necco wafers were THE candy we all used to play "Communion". We meant no disrespect...we just wanted to practice receiving the Body of Christ before we actually got to do it for real in 2nd grade.

I wrote back and asked if I could quote her and if she wanted to be named, and she said yes. Her name is Ruth Anne Adams. In her email reply she added some detail:

In our house of 3 daughters and one son, it was an elaborate rainy-day activity. My brother who was an altar boy back when it only could be boys was de facto the priest. He wore his blue robe backwards [closest he had to black in his closet], so as to look clerical. We were post-Vatican II kids, so we didn't fashion a kneeling rail. Anyway, the three girls would rotate through the line until the package of wafers was nearly exhausted. Then my brother would return to the "altar" [piano bench] and consume the remaining hosts. We didn't have a pretend ciboria or tabernacle, so all the hosts had to be consumed. I'm pretty sure this is a universal experience, with minor variations, for the cradle Catholic kids. I've checked. You know, once is an anecdote; thrice is a trend.

Consult Shrinkette.

The blogging psychiatrist. She just got started yesterday. (I noticed because she linked to me.) She's promising to do political commentary with some psychiatric expertise on subjects like: "Does Zell Miller really have a psychiatric diagnosis (as many bloggers have decreed)?" and (in response to Frank Rich's "How Kerry Became a Girlie-Man") "Is every contest between powerful males inevitably a macho slugfest, with primitive, libidinous, murderous undertones, and is the weaker opponent always an emasculated, pitiable loser?"

Ideas for the official Wisconsin state rock song: Part I .

Earlier today, I asked readers to email suggestions for the official state rock song. I'm getting some good email, so I'm going to do a Part I post. More parts to come (presumably). If you're in a state other than Wisconsin (or Ohio, which already has a state rock song), feel free copy the idea and try to get an appropriate song for your state. Or country. Feel free to send me ideas for the official United States rock song. My choice is not "Surfin' U.S.A." and of course not "Born in the U.S.A." ("You end up like a dog that's been beat too much") or "Living in the U.S.A." ("We're living in a plastic land"). It's clearly and definitely "Back in in the U.S.A."! ("Well, I’m so glad I’m livin’ in the U.S.A./Yes, I’m so glad I’m livin’ in the U.S.A./Anything you want, we got right here in the U.S.A.").

But back to Wisconsin: keep sending Wisconsin suggestions. And here's what I've got so far.

As expected, I'm getting some cheese-based ideas. But another Wisconsin product, motorcycles, seems much more suitable for a good rock song. In that vein, one reader suggests Bob Seger's "Roll Me Away," which expresses some appropriate sentiments. The rider starts out in Mackinaw City, and the question is does he take Route 75 south on his way out to California, or does he go north, via the Upper Peninsula so that key events in the song take place in Wisconsin? "Twelve hours out of Mackinaw City/Stopped in a bar to have a brew…" I say he took the northern route: first, it's much more scenic and in the spirit of the motorcycle, and, second, he had "a brew" in a bar and that sounds like Wisconsin. It also gets in a plug for a second Wisconsin product. On the downside: local do-gooders will not like alcohol in the state rock song, especially in the driving context. I'll just note that he says "a brew." The emailer notes that the singer meets a woman in the bar—"definitely a Wisconsin woman"—and that as the lyric goes on she "misses her home and heads back (which I think is a common story for Wisconsinites who leave then come back.)" The song also has a hawk, as a symbol of hope, and we have some fine hawks here in Wisconsin. So I like this idea.

To follow Ohio's lead, you could look for who the Wisconsin musicians are. I see there's Steve Miller, who wrote "Living in the U.S.A.," mentioned above. There's also "Space Cowboy," where he says "I told you 'bout living in the U.S. of A." and explains why he prefers space:

I was born on this rock [in Wisconsin]
And I've been travelin' through space
Since the moment I first realized
What all you fast talkin' cats would do if you could
You know, I'm ready for the final surprise.

Now, that's just too pessimistic. It reminds me of how New Jersey once contemplated making "Born to Run … the unofficial rock theme of our State's youth" (here's the resolution)(don't ask me why they would go to so much trouble to make it unofficial!). But the lyrics really aren't what the state ought to be saying to the youngsters:

Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we're young …

"Rips the bones from your back"? What kind of an attitude is that? Personally, I would vote against any Springsteen song for the Wisconsin rock song, because he's too associated with that other state. And, since he's endorsed Kerry, we can't get both campaigns to play us our song.

One Wisconsin band suggestion is "Closer To Free" by the Waukesha band, the BoDeans. The words are appropriate, I think:

Everybody wants respect
Just a little bit
And everybody needs a chance
Once in a while
Everybody wants to be
Closer to Free

Not a bad idea!

UPDATE: An emailer notes that there is this album, "Viva Wisconsin," by the Wisconsin group Violent Femmes. I don't think we need an official state rock album, and I don't know the album, so someone else will have to suggest a song. Some of these titles--like "Dahmer Is Dead"--make me suspect that nothing is going to express the right sentiment.

Observing Labor Day.

In observation of Labor Day and the time-honored labor tradition of getting paid for working, I'm adding an Amazon PayPage for this blog. I love writing this blog--I love my regular job too--but it seems appropriate to make it possible for readers to support my work here and to help me cover some of my expenses. I've written over 300,000 words and almost 1300 posts since starting the blog on January 14th. Check the SiteMeter and see that it is about to hit to the quarter-million mark, after hitting 100,000 less than a month ago. So I've picked up a lot of new readers lately. Maybe some of you, new or old, will be in the mood to chip in a dollar or a few dollars just to show you care. Whether you do or not, thanks for reading. It's a huge gratification just to see that there are so many people reading this!

Absent tools.

Kerry senior advisor Tad Devine blames Kerry's failure to convey a clear message on the lack of a sufficient number of advertisements in the last five weeks:

"If you want to deliver a powerful message, you need all the means of message-delivery at your disposal. Absent those tools and those means it's just harder to deliver that kind of message."

Having a clear message might help too.

Bush campaign music, especially "Hang On Sloopy."

Elisabeth Bumiller writes in today's NYT about the music used by the Bush campaign. I took note the other day of the Kerry campaign's use of the Springsteen song "No Surrender," so let me take a look at the Bush campaign's selections. They've got a new video that uses "Taking Care of Business," and they follow something called the Karl Rove rule, according to campaign strategist Mark McKinnon:

"We go by the Karl Rove rule," Mr. McKinnon said, referring to the president's 53-year-old political adviser. "If Rove has heard it, we can't use it."

Hmmm.... Karl Rove and I are the same age. Same age as Rush Limbaugh too (Rush and I were born on the very same day). Karl Rove doesn't know "Taking Care of Business"? I guess it's not terribly hard to find songs he hasn't heard.

The Bush campaign is really sick of "Eye of the Tiger":

"We finally sent out the mandate that if anybody plays 'Eye of the Tiger' again we're going to come out and kill them," Mr. McKinnon said.

They also play "Hang On Sloopy," supposedly, according to McKinnon because it's "so old it's cool." Wait, I think "Hang On Sloopy" has always been cool. It was cool when it came out, it was cool in the 70s, and it was cool in the 80s. When wasn't it cool? Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is one song that did not have to age to regain coolness.

The Times notes that it's the "official rock song of Ohio State University," and they were playing it in Ohio, which, we all know, is the single most important state in the union. This is an election about what Ohio wants, it seems, so by all means, play them their song.

Wisconsin is a swing state too, not as big as Ohio, but I bet we could make them cater to our taste too. But we don't have an official rock song, so I think we ought to have one. Email me at althouse at wisc dot edu with some ideas for an official rock song for Wisconsin. I don't like our rival Ohio having one and not us. We've already got a better state song, so maybe that means we don't need a state rock song, but it would be interesting to try to think up what the right state rock song would be.

If you're wondering why "Hang On Sloopy" is the state rock song for Ohio, you can read the actual resolution here. The "whereas" clauses include:

WHEREAS, In 1965, an Ohio-based rock group known as the McCoys reached the top of the national record charts with "Hang On Sloopy," and ...

WHEREAS, If fans of jazz, country-and-western, classical, Hawaiian and polka music think those styles also should be recognized by the state, then by golly, they can push their own resolution just like we're doing; and ...

WHEREAS, Sloopy lives in a very bad part of town, and everybody, yeah, tries to put my Sloopy down; and ... therefore be it

Resolved ...

UPDATE: Maybe I'm too hard on the New York Times. I appreciated this article quite a bit, and I loved learning about "Hang On Sloopy," but did you notice the Times referred to it as the "official rock song of Ohio State University," when research shows it's the official rock song of the whole state?

As I write this, I can hear the UW marching band practicing playing "On Wisconsin!"--which is not just our official school song, it's our official state song. For an early post discussing my interest in state songs, go here. You can see all the Wisconsin state symbols there, including the state fossil (trilobite!). I remembered blogging about the state motto, "Forward," and I found the post back here in mid-February. It turns out it's a post about John Kerry being boring by working "Forward" into a speech he gave in Wisconsin.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I've gotten some email doubting that "Hang On Sloopy" is really the official rock song of the state of Ohio, so I did a little Nexis search and found plenty of confirmation, including a March 14, 1999 article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, written by Joe Dirck. Here are some highlights:

14 years ago I led the successful drive to have "Hang On Sloopy" named Ohio's official rock song.

It started as sort of a joke. The state of Washington was considering making "Louie, Louie" its state rock song, and I suggested in a column in the old Columbus Citizen-Journal that Ohio adopt "Sloopy," which never fails to send Ohio State fans into a frenzy when the OSU marching band plays it at football games.

Well, the thing took on a life of its own. A team of morning radio jocks ran with the idea, and pretty soon there were "Sloopy" rallies and petition drives being held around town. … I picked my sponsors carefully. …

Well, I don't want to brag, but we won. Big. It passed at a festive session marked by the OSU band performing its rendition of "Sloopy" in the hallowed chamber. …

Answers to two recent blogpolls.

On Saturday, I asked readers to guess which one of three performers--Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd, or Alice Cooper--I had seen in concert, and then Sunday, I asked readers to spot the lie in a particular post about the construction of Madison's Overture Center. I've been checking the results all along and find it interesting how stable the numbers are, which gives me some inkling of why actual scientifically done polling based on relatively small numbers is reliable. And not only has the pattern of answers in both polls stayed about the same all along, but the answers have been correct! I saw Alice Cooper (and only Alice Cooper) in concert and I completely lied when I asserted a belief that the dome is "beautiful." So, now, why did people do so well getting those answers? Do readers know me so well and am I that knowable on the question of what concert I would happen to have seen and what I would lie about, or were both questions surrounded by clues and cues that helped people guess correctly?

The easier question, by far, is spot the lie. With five potential answers, purely random guessing would lead to more errors, but having more answers dilutes the strength of the random-guesser vote. And two answers are quite unlikely to be lies ("gleaming" and "elegant," which came in at the bottom of the vote, with 8.5% and 11% respectively). Also near the bottom was the fussy-about-facades answer, with 11.4% of the vote. Of course, a place like Madison would tend to have historical preservationist types who would get involved in a big project like this. The second place answer, that I find random junk "picturesque" still only got 28.9% of the vote. People were attracted to this answer above the other wrong answers, I assume, for the obvious reason that junk is not in fact "picturesque." Regular readers might remember earlier pictures of junk on this blog and know to avoid this answer. The correct answer--that the dome is "beautiful"--got 40.2% of the vote. I'm thinking people got this because they were looking at the picture and did not themselves think the dome was beautiful. Certainly, it does not approach the beauty of the other dome in the picture, the one on the state capitol building. By the way, I regret writing "I knew I was lying" in the post setting up the poll, because it implies that one can tell a lie without knowing it is untrue, and I am critical of people who do that in political debates. And I was even alluding to the political slogan "Bush lied!" in the title of the poll ("Althouse lied!").

But, now, why did you guess that I would have seen Alice Cooper (51.2%) of the vote and not Pink Floyd (34%) or Bruce Springsteen (14.8%)? My theory is that you thought about my present day motivation to ask the question. Since Alice Cooper was the most interesting choice, I probably felt like doing that particular poll because Alice Cooper was the answer. It's too boring to have gone to a Bruce Springsteen concert, and that's why that answer came in last. Thus, correct answering doesn't really have anything to do with an understanding of my musical taste. In fact, it's pretty random that I even went to see Alice Cooper at all. It was a long, long time ago, by the way. It was back when "I'm Eighteen" was a hit (1971). I'm not even sure if "School's Out" was out yet (1972). It was the summer of either 1971 or 1972, in an obscure part of southern New Jersey, and my younger brother wanted to go to the concert. Even though I thought it was embarrassing to go to an Alice Cooper concert--people my age (20 at the time) considered him a joke--I loved the single "I'm Eighteen," so I went. There was an elaborate stage show, which I can't remember anything about. I do remember, I think, that at one point he stripped off a layer of his costume and had on a skin-tight gold lamé body suit, and that was the sort of thing that just wasn't done at the time by anybody my friends would respect. In fact, I remember Iggy Stooge performing on campus (at the University of Michigan) in 1969 or 1970 and everyone shaking their heads and expressing pity for this late-stage has-been who was taking off his shirt, writhing on the ground, and suddenly stooping to the pathetic ploy of renaming himself Iggy Pop. How astounded we would have been if we could have known that 35 years later these two would still be around and would be respected and that Iggy would still look good with his shirt off.

UPDATE: One of the reasons we thought Alice Cooper was a joke was because he was seen as a Frank Zappa side project, a Zappa prank. The album I listened to every day back then was "The Mothers Live at the Fillmore East," which includes some comical references to Alice Cooper:

Well, it gets me so hot
I could scream
ALICE COOPER, ALICE COOPER! WAAAAH!
ALICE COOPER, ALICE COOPER! WAAAAH!

You can read all the lyrics here. [Not for the faint-hearted.] I still love that album! People who love the song "Happy Together" but don't know "Live at the Fillmore East" are missing a key perspective.

"Hero."

I almost never go to the movies anymore. I used to go out to the movies two or three times a week and watch movies almost every day on videotape/DVD. But for some reason, a year or so ago, I lost interest in watching movies, not that I've turned against movies, just that on any given day, I don't feel like spending my time watching a movie. In the last year, I think I've only gone out to see "The House of Sand and Fog," "Kill Bill--Volume 1," "Kill Bill--Volume 2," and "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." So, clearly, it takes a lot to draw me into a movie theater. I've tried to analyze why. Sometimes I say I don't like committing to the physical confinement of two hours stuck in a chair. Sometimes I complain about the people: Why are they eating and drinking so much and walking in and out of the theater? Maybe it's that I'm never bored when I'm on my own and always bored some of the time when I'm at a movie, and I'm just trying to avoid having to be bored. Maybe it's that movies are really made for other people, not for me. For example, I detest "women's" movies like "The Hours" or "The English Patient." And "action" always bores me. Sometimes I encounter a movie I really love. In recent years, I loved "Memento" and "Fight Club." But the chances are high that I'm not going to like a movie, so I just don't want to make a commitment.

But, as I said a while back, I wanted to see "Hero." My primary reason: Beauty. I want to see beauty, and I had plenty of reason to see that this was a movie that went very far toward the extreme of cinematic beauty. So today, we went to see "Hero." I fixed my eyes on the beauty of the images and that caused me to miss a subtitle here and there, and pretty soon, I had to admit to myself: I don't understand the story! God forbid they should use dubbing instead of subtitles! Though the letters on the screen mar the image, the attitude about dubbing versus subtitles is so intense that they simply have to stick with subtitles. Snobs would denounce a dubbed art movie. But this movie would have been much better dubbed, because you have to choose between reading the text and seeing the grand images. I made my choice, then I had no idea what was going on, and as time passed, the images began to bore me. I started thinking things like: Has there ever been a movie with so much swirling, blowing fabric? And what's with all the cast of thousands? Why do they sometimes shoot a million arrows simultaneously and sometimes just stand back and allow the fate of a nation to be determined by two people having a sword fight? I could tell this was a movie that was designed to make other people very excited and to feel deep feelings. I didn't feel it.

This movie has gotten incredibly good reviews. Critics can see, as anyone can, that the filmmakers cared deeply about beautiful sets, beautiful costumes, beautiful shots, beautiful landscapes, beautiful images. It is hard not to give credit for that. But I did go to the movie out of a love and desire for beauty, and it left me cold, so I am going to have to admit that. I had an "English Patient" reaction: Everyone else is saying this is great, and these two lovers suffering in a grand landscape is supposed to be mindbendingly tragic, but I'm not feeling it and I'm resenting feeling that I'm supposed to be feeling it.

Interview with the would-be SLOTUS.

So, Elizabeth Edwards, you have a husband who tons of women think is incredibly attractive, and you're asked what's it like traveling around now without him, and this is what you come up with:

Since I quit traveling with my husband, I no longer have the air-conditioner set so high in the hotel room, so I am not getting sick anymore.

In other words: he was making you sick!

And you, elite New York Times Magazine interviewer Deborah Solomon, you want to ask a question about Elizabeth Edwards' campaign efforts meeting with groups of women, and here's how you ask it:

You've been making an effort to meet with groups of women. It reminds me of Tupperware parties.

What the hell? This reminds me of the way years ago men would refer to any group of women as a "kaffeklatsch." But I think Solomon's theory of this interview is to try to push Edwards to reveal that she doesn't appreciate being relegated to a retrograde women's role, because later she asks, "Do you find it hard to play the role of the submissive wife?" and "Do you ever wish that you, not your husband, were the candidate for vice president?" Of course, Edwards is savvy enough not to take the bait.

Great new "Hardball" ad.

The ad for "Hardball" that ran midway through this morning's "Meet the Press" featured a clip of Zell Miller saying to Matthews, that quote for the ages: "I wish we lived in the day when you could challenge a person to a duel." (And also ZM's "Get out of my face!") Is that duel challenge a real gift to Matthews? It does also call attention to Matthews propensity for talking way too much and interrupting people. But maybe that hilarious interchange can make people think that Matthews is quite a lot of fun ... as opposed to incredibly annoying.

The time I outright lied on this blog.

I really do try to be honest on this blog, but last night, I had to admit that there was one time when I just plain lied. I knew I was lying and I just went ahead and did it anyway. It's in this post. See if you can spot it:



UPDATE: The correct answer is discussed here.

"How 'Flex Time' Became a Republican Idea."

Is it "simply a scam to avoid overtime payment"?

The Kerry that didn't roar.

Regular readers of this blog will know why this paragraph--from an article written by Adam Nagourny and Jodi Wilgoren--on the front page of today's NYT caught my eye:

President Bush roared out of his New York convention last week, leaving many Democrats nervous about the state of the presidential race and pressing Senator John Kerry to torque up what they described as a wandering and low-energy campaign.

Yes, it's "roared." Friday's New York Times had an article, which I blogged about here, that began:

Roaring back at his Republican rivals, Senator John Kerry called President Bush "unfit to lead this country" for "misleading'' America into war in Iraq and said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney avoided fighting in the Vietnam War.

I found it a little hard to believe that Kerry was "roaring," and today, with two days to cool off from the post-convention mania, the Times is seeing Bush as the roaring one, and Kerry as still having failed to roar. I was thinking of roaring in terms of a lion, but now I'm thinking it's more of a motorcycle: Bush "roaring out of" New York, and Kerry needing to "torque up." As I wrote on Friday, the Kerry roaring was mostly a matter of the Times's wishful thinking. I've watched the whole Kerry midnight speech, and I don't think it's much of a roar in the sense of the lion (noise and fierce fighting) or the motorcycle (noise and momentum).

But as to this article today, the one that has Bush doing the roaring and Kerry "wandering and low-energy," it seems that everyone is constantly badgering Kerry to fight harder, to do more, to emphasize domestic policy and not national security or vice versa, and telling him to become "more engaged." What is the poor guy supposed to do? He was already trying to do all of that with the midnight speech. How can he do more without seeming unhinged, which is the kiss of death, as Howard Dean knows? Do something! Anything! people seem to be telling him. Don't be so "cautious," so stodgy! But isn't all of that to say, his style and image were never very good? He got the nomination when Dean's candidacy imploded, and he got it because he was just standing around, being the most normal, solid, grown-up person left on the stage. He is what he is. If he tries to change, he will seem bizarre. Remember in 2000, when Al Gore radically changed his style after each debate? Long ago, it was a brilliant strategy to "let Nixon be Nixon." Let Kerry be Kerry.

Of course, Kerry does seem to be on the path to defeat right now, so his supporters can't help panicking and find it hard not to yammer a lot of (conflicting) advice at him. But I think his best chance lies in continuing to be the lumbering, dull but solid and grown-up guy that he is, so that when election day finally comes and the excitement-seeking is over, people will look at him and say--perhaps: Yes, he's a frightful bore, but put him in the office and he'll probably earnestly work hard and make a decent share of good-enough judgments, which is all we really ever hope for anyway.

"We never knew how happy we were."

C.J. Chivers, in the NYT, writes the story of the Beslan tragedy.

People did what they could to take care of themselves, shedding clothes to cool down, and tearing apart textbooks to use as fans. "For two days I was continually waving my arm to fan my children," Ms. Bekoyeva said. [Paper copy adds: "They kept asking for more.] ...

Azamat recalled one terrorist, a man with a short beard whom the others called Ali, saying, "Have you ever seen such kind terrorists?" ...

Another boy who survived, Atsomaz Ktsoyev, 14, said the hostages were so hungry they ate the floral bouquets they had brought to school for the first day of class. "I never thought in my life I'd be eating flowers," he said. ...

Others who survived dived for shelter, pressing flat. Emma said Azamat fell atop her and his younger brother, trying to cover their bodies and hold them to the gymnasium's floor. "He said to me, 'Don't be afraid,' " she said.

Who says "strong"?

Joe Klein on Tim Russert's CNBC show this evening:

One thing I'd like to do is check and see how many times the President used the word "strong" or "strength" in his speech ... on Thursday night. I don't think it was very many. John Kerry used it again and again and again. Only someone who, kind of, on some level thinks he's weak or thinks the public thinks he's weak is going to use the word "strong" so often.

This is a good point, but I can't understand why Klein, if he was planning to make this comment, didn't locate the text of the speeches and actually do the count. Here, I'm going to do it, over here on my little blog. Bush said "strong" twice, neither time referring to himself (the references are to the Prime Minister of Iraq and to military families). He said "strength" four times, again, never referring to himself (the references are to Americans, to his wife, to "American strength" (which should be used "to advance freedom"), and to military families). Kerry says "strong" or "stronger" 21 times, also not directly referring to himself, and "strength" five times. That took less than five minutes to figure out. Come on, Klein!

UPDATE: Typo corrected: I had "Joel" for "Joe," as an emailer pointed out. Sorry.

Kerry's late night speech.

I've been trying to capture a clip of John Kerry giving that late night speech after the convention closed on Thursday. I wrote about the NYT article about the speech and made fun of the Times's characterization of the speech as "roaring," so I really wanted to see some actually footage of the event. Why aren't we seeing it? Did he look too ridiculous? I TiVo'd hours of news analysis shows on three cable news networks on Friday, and no one had any film of it.

Anyway, I was just looking for the text of his remarks, which I didn't find, but I did find an additional quote from the speech that struck me:

"With two months to go, the choice could not be more clear," the statement continued. "A president who sides with the special interests or the Kerry-Edwards team who will put middle-class families first."

When and why did we start assuming that government should "put middle-class families first"? Why not children? Why not lower class people who would like to make it into the middle class? Or is "put middle-class families first" now what politicians say to oppose those they accuse of putting the "wealthiest Americans" first when they are afraid of making of voters worry that tax money will be channeled to the underprivileged? (And it's always "families" now. Has anyone ever heard a politician offer to lift a finger for single people?)

UPDATE: There is streaming video of the event at the C-Span website. So now I've watched it. Kerry seems looser than usual, grinning happily in the beginning. Words here and there are dropped and some words are garbled. At least twice he says "our guntry" for "our country," and he says "I dink" for "I think," and "attack" for "the fact." He refers to "the sunset goin' down"--not to be confused with the sunset goin' up. It's late at night and he may be quite tired. But it's not especially embarrassing. It's not that exciting either. It's a long speech that is basically the stump speech, punched up a few times with references to the Republican Convention. These references are what the press has excerpted and printed in the articles. There's a large banner behind him that reads "A Stronger America Begins at Home." A tad isolationist for my taste. He calls this "the most important election of a lifetime," which of course it is for him, but I'm tired of hearing that assertion. There are plenty of important elections, and it's a distortion to assume the one closest to you is so much bigger than the ones farther away.

The event begins and ends with the blaring of Bruce Springsteen's "No Surrender": "Well, we busted out of class, had to get away from those fools/We learned more from a three minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school." Is there a more anti-education song this side of "School's Out" and "Another Brick in the Wall"? I guess he doesn't want to be the Education President. And why would you blast the lyric "had to get away from those fools" just as the two candidates are walking out on stage? Anyway, here's a quiz that made me think up:



ANOTHER UPDATE: The Sunday NYT has a funny collection of old quotes making the "most important election" assertion. The truest quote comes from George W. Bush. Asked by Larry King whether this is "the most important election ever," Bush said "For me it is."

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: The correct answer to the poll is discussed here.

How to film a remake: more character development ... for King Kong.

So you're remaking "King Kong," and you're Peter Jackson. Why remake a classic? Others might say, because of the computerized special effects now available. Jackson's idea is more character development, especially for Kong:

"He's a very old gorilla and he's never felt a single bit of empathy for another living creature," Jackson said.

So a lot of thought has gone into exploring what would happen if there were a relationship between an old, brutalized gorilla and a young woman.

"You introduce this other person into his life which initially he thinks he's going to kill and then he slowly moves away from that and it comes full circle," he said. "That's what we're exploring and its really fun to go into that psychological depth with it."

Who knew Kong was old? So his interest in the girl is of the dirty old man variety. These Hollywood movies: they always put an older male with a much younger female. Or is Jackson going to de-sexualize the story? Maybe a war and peace allegory? Kong is the victim of empire, driven to terrorism. The girl, Ann Darrow, then somehow affects him so that he throws off his terrorist ways (and falls from a tall NYC building). But what is Ann in this War on Terror allegory? The U.N.?

UPDATE: Can you imagine how different the history of the United Nations would have to have been before it would work to have a remake of King Kong in which the building he falls from is the U.N.?

"Barking mad."

I've been trying to chase down the "barking mad" meme. Wonkette has a post a couple days ago about Googling "Zell Miller" and "barking mad": only 16 hits at the time, but it was still early. It's up to 74 now. But it's not just a reaction to Zell Miller. On "The Daily Show" in mid-August, Maureen Dowd called Dick Cheney "barking mad." Since then, I've been noticing the phrase, which I think is funny, because I have a literal mind, and I picture the person actually barking. There's a great section of Spalding Gray's "Monster in a Box" where he describes going a bit mad and literally barking. But it seems to have become the standard way to call someone crazy. When did that happen? I used Nexis to try to trace the meme down, but unfortunately I was using a newsgroup file that included British and Australian newspapers. I could barely see the American examples! Clearly, the phrase has a British origin. But why the sudden outbreak here? And it's not just that people have gotten crazier lately, so don't try to sidetrack me. I know everyone likes to call people crazy in this election season, especially since "he's crazy" worked to down the most promising of the Democratic candidates in the primaries. Maybe it will work again: Cheney's crazy! Bush is crazy! Wolfowitz! And they're not just crazy, they're barking mad!

I'm going with the suspicion that Maureen Dowd is the American infection point. (Email me if you have another suspect.) Here's the Google result for "barking mad" and "Maureen Dowd." 213 results. I see she made a big impression a year ago, after the Supreme Court issued its opinion in the University of Michigan affirmative action case, Grutter v. Bollinger. She wrote:

The dissent is a clinical study of a man [Clarence Thomas] who has been driven barking mad by the beneficial treatment he has received. It's poignant, really. It drives him crazy that people think he is where he is because of his race, but he is where he is because of his race. Other justices rely on clerks and legal footnotes to help with their opinions; Thomas relies on his id, turning an opinion on race into a therapeutic outburst. In his dissent, he snidely dismisses the University of Michigan Law School's desire to see minority faces in the mix as "racial aesthetics," giving the effort to balance bigotry in society the moral weight of a Benetton ad. The phrase "racial aesthetics" would be more appropriately applied to President George W. Bush's nominating convention in Philadelphia, when the Republicans put on a minstrel show for the white fat cats in the audience.

Ah! But the Maureen Dowd "barking mad" infection point could be traced even farther back, as a Nexis search revealed. I found an October 14, 1999, piece in The San Francisco Chronicle interviewing the writer Edmund Morris (author of the Reagan biography "Dutch") about what he thought about Dowd calling him "barking mad." (He said "Like all barking mad people, I feel perfectly normal.")

Well, I don't claim to have solved the mystery of the "barking mad" meme. My sketchy research leads me to think Dowd has only labeled three persons "barking mad": Morris, Thomas, and Cheney. And she's already dealt with Zell Miller's speech, and she did not call him "barking mad" or even "mad." She said:

Zell Miller, playing Cotton Mather behind the cross-like lectern, made Mr. Cheney seem rational, with a maniacal litany of weapons he said Mr. Kerry had opposed that can destroy any mud hut in any third world country: B-1 and B-2 bombers, F-14A Tomcats, F-15 Eagles, Patriot and Trident missiles, and Aegis cruisers.

She did imply Miller was way beyond "barking mad" though, if he made the "barking mad" Dick Cheney seem rational. I guess Miller was so crazy, in her view, that one cannot speak directly of that craziness but can only indirectly approach the topic with a comparison to another person already established--in Dowdworld--as "barking mad."

And speaking of memes, is it Dowd who got the lectern-looked-like-a-cross meme going? "The Daily Show" used it later the same day. No, here's an earlier reference (in the NYT). I wrote about the lectern on the second day of the Convention, and, though I said it reminded me of a pulpit, I didn't see the cross. But clearly we can't blame Dowd or the NYT for setting off the observation that the lectern looked like a cross. How do I know? Because a Google search using the word "lectern" produced 409 hits, and a Google search trying the misnomer "podium" produced 7,350 hits.

First sign that it's a football Saturday.

I don't go to football games, and I don't keep track of the Badgers' schedule, but I do live about five blocks from the stadium. I'm sitting at my dining room table, next to open windows that look out on my quiet street in University Heights. Rarely does a car even drive down my street, because it's a very slow route: there are stop signs at each end of the block, and it's a two-way street that is so narrow one car has to pull over to let another car pass. So I hear the footsteps and the quiet conversation of anyone who walks by. And they all look in at me. They aren't nosy. People just can't help it. The window is close to the sidewalk, because the front yards are very small in this old neighborhood, in the style that was considered suburban in the early part of the twentieth century. I hear the shuffling footsteps of a slightly large group of pedestrians--maybe six. I look over. I see red and white clothing. Okay, it's a football day. Over the course of the next few hours, the pedestrian traffic will increase, the people will be wearing a lot of red and white, and every parking space on my street will be taken. If I wanted to make fifty dollars, I could repark my car on the street, and let people park up my long driveway. My kids used to do that years ago. Good luck to the Badgers and to all Badger fans. If I hear a cheer drifting over from the stadium, I will feel a mild half-second of pleasure.

UPDATE: This surprised me:

Today, the entire season is already sold out and the Badgers will draw over 81,000 for their 2004 opener against the University of Central Florida. This will mark the 70th consecutive crowd of at least 70,000.

I really had no idea that many people were converging on my neighborhood.

From "gauzy-sounding talk" to "slashing indictment."

The NYT continues its effort to cheer up Kerry supporters. Today's front page piece by David M. Halbfinger tells us that John Kerry has issued "a slashing indictment of President Bush's record on jobs and health care, saying he had misled the United States into war in Iraq and left a trail of broken promises and worsened problems at home." Yes, that indictment really slashes.

Mr. Kerry has for the most part avoided harsh political attacks on the president, instead emphasizing his expansive plans and offering gauzy-sounding talk of sunrises and grabbing onto dreams. But he returned to the offensive after his character, voting history and even his patriotism were questioned by Republicans in New York this week, and after Democrats faulted him for a hesitant, halting response last month to televised attacks on his military record.

You know how gauze sounds, don't you? In fact, some folks would rather listen to "a thin, loosely woven surgical dressing" than the Senator's drone. But don't worry, he's got a whole new approach. He wasn't actually on the offensive before, because he's too big a man to attack the President just as a way of campaigning to defeat him. But now that Bush has dared to question him, now he's going to fight. Isn't it great that the NYT doesn't clutter its print with too many quotatation marks, such as around "even his patriotism"? You all know the Republican Convention was an outrageous, low, unfair, personal attack on Kerry's character and patriotism, don't you?

Criticizing the Republican convention as bitter and insulting one moment, then calling Mr. Bush dishonest the next, Mr. Kerry attacked against what he called his rivals' distortions and said the president's address Thursday made clear he "will literally say anything and do anything in order to try to get re-elected" - a line stolen from Mr. Bush, who used it regularly against Al Gore.

Bush absurdly misused the word "literally"?

Unlike bloggers, by the way, the NYT has editors, who polish the writing on every page, but especially make the front page perfect. For example, they won't let a sloppy writer get away with saying "Kerry attacked what he called his rival's distortions" It will be "Kerry attacked against what he called his rivals' distortions," because you need to establish that he didn't "attack for," he "attacked against." Every misplaced apostrophe will be moved to its proper position.

Mr. Kerry was upbeat and feisty on the attack, even noting "this lonely voice over here" of a Bush supporter on the periphery of his rally. When his supporters yelled, "Two more months!" at the man, Mr. Kerry did their barb one better.

"A mind is a terrible thing to waste, ladies and gentlemen," he said, laughing.

Stop, you're literally killing me with these upbeat, feisty barbs!

"Every Picture Tells a Story."

I don't know what got into me, but I'm listening to my vinyl LP of "Every Picture Tells a Story" tonight. "Night time is only the other side of day time."

I think there are a lot of people who first heard "Amazing Grace" here.

The "therefore" symbol.

Have you ever stopped to think about how different everything would be if the "therefore" symbol (a triangle of three dots) were one of the standard symbols on a keyboard like % or # or @? I think we would be more rational, and "the world would be a better place," as Jackie DeShannon once sang ... not about the "therefore" sign, or rational analysis, but ... Jackie DeShannon is a wonderful artist, so when she crosses my thoughts, even to take them astray, I feel like giving her some credit.

UPDATE: Tony Rickey emails html instructions, so let me try:

&there4

But that doesn't satisfy me, because it's still easier to write the word out. And I'm interested in how the long-ago choice of which symbols to put on the number keys has shaped our world. Many years ago, I used to wonder why @ was chosen. Obviously, it was not on the level of & or $ or * as a useful symbol. But then email addresses were created and @ earned its place. But if, instead of @, long ago the choice had been made for &there4 , who can know how things would have turned out?

"Kerry has been given a little favor."

On Fox News this evening a panel of commentators was asked about the supposed problem of Clinton's surgery and Hurricane Frances overshadowing Kerry's attempt to fight back after the Republican Convention. I was struck by Morton Kondrake's response:

I actually think that Kerry has been given a little favor, because ... what Kerry said today diminishes him, actually. His response to this soaring speech ... of President Bush's was a petty, small response, talking about Dick Cheney's draft deferments and how his patriotism had been questioned, which his patriotism had not been questioned. You know, Zell Miller delivered some low blows, but they weren't questioning his patriotism. And for him to start out, out of the box, resuming the campaign, with that as the lead story, I think, would have undercut him. So, he's probably lucky ..."

The interviewer, Brian Wilson--he's good, sitting in for Brit Hume--posited that John Kerry's people were just "crazed" by the Clinton surgery development.

UPDATE: At the end of the interview, Brian Wilson asks the panel which speaker helped Bush the most. Was it Miller? Schwarzenegger? Giuliani? McCain? Everyone on the panel says it was Bush himself. Interesting point not mentioned: the poll they were discussing, which showed Bush with an 11 point lead, was completed before Bush gave his speech.

Coronary bypass surgery.

Instapundit mentions that his grandfather died from complications of early coronary bypass surgery. My grandfather had one of the earliest bypass operations, in, I believe, 1954, and he lived another 15 years as a result. He was fortunate to live in Ann Arbor, Michigan where the surgery was being developed. I'm sorry I don't know the specific history of the development of the surgery. But I remember that my Grandpa Beatty died in 1969, and that the family always said he lived 15 more years because of the new surgery. I remember being a little kid--I would have been 3 in 1954--and seeing my mother prepare to fly to Ann Arbor to see her father, having been told "If you want to see your father alive again," you must come immediately. That said, both of my own parents died in Florida, where, I believe, inferior medical care deprived them of many years of life. In fact, I believe medical malpractice caused both of their deaths. And let me add that no lawsuits were possible. Suffice it to say, I don't cheer when arguments about "frivolous lawsuits" are bandied about. It would be pleasant to believe that there are too many medical malpractice lawsuits, as our President does, but highly disturbing to find out that there are too few. From my personal experience, I feel there are far too few. That said, I also think it is very hard to be a doctor, and mistakes are part of what happens. I am thankful good people go into medicine, even though they will go on to carry the burden of seeing their own mistakes grievously injure people. But there are also people who are not so good, who lay their hands upon human bodies every day. It is easier to whine about lawyers than to think about them.

UPDATE: Regular readers know that I voted for John Edwards in the Democratic primary. This post contains some of the reason why I respect him.

Two things about the Clinton bypass story.

1. It's 8 Central Time, and Salon is still running the retracted story that a Bush crowd booed when the President asked that people pray for Clinton. Drudge has been reporting all afternoon that the booing story was retracted. Instapundit is linking to this. My question: Was the false report an anti-Bush dirty trick or an honest mishearing of the soundtrack? I've heard the clip a few times on radio and on TV, and there is a confusing sound in the beginning of the crowd reaction that might be people saying "no" or something, but there is a positive crowd sound after that and certainly nothing to justify tarring Bush for failing to chide the crowd. It is such an easy dirty trick to go to the rallies of the candidate you don't like and act like a jackass in one way or another.

2. Do you think it's in bad taste to cover the Clinton surgery story in terms of the effect on the Kerry campaign? Two points I've heard more than once on TV tonight: Clinton won't be able to campaign for Kerry and the Clinton story today is messing up Kerry's chance to respond to the Republican convention. New spin potential: Kerry's lackluster campaign is Clinton's fault. Or, what the hell, why not Kerry's poor campaign is the fault of the fast food industry that put Clinton in his current condition? (And I'm hearing similar commentary about the hurricane: everything that happens can be characterized as depriving Kerry of the opportunity to have his message heard, because anything in the news is keeping Kerry from finally getting his chance to speak to us.)

UPDATE: I'm ashamed of myself for thinking about such things, but I wonder if the Kerry and Bush campaign people are brainstorming about how Clinton's death would affect the campaign. Are the Kerry people speculating that a Clinton death would create warm feelings that would radiate onto Kerry and weighing that against the negatives: that a Clinton death would absorb an immense amount of attention and lead to the replaying of Clinton's best moments that would be so obviously more attractive than Kerry? Are the Bush people running through their own version of the analysis? Are they planning ways to revive the Reagan death story and thinking about the beautiful role the current President would play in any Presidential funeral? Sorry. I love Bill Clinton and want the best for him. When Bush said pray for him, I contemplated praying for him. When Kerry said yell for him, I contemplated yelling for him. Good luck to dear, sweet Bill and to everybody, everywhere with a heart problem or any medical problem of any kind.

For Democrats looking for ways to spin the devastating Time poll.

I emailed the link to the Time poll to my son, John Cohen, and he wrote back what seemed to me to be a fine effort at putting the best face on it. So, with his permission, here it is:

Clearly Bush has a really good trajectory. Remember that in 2000 Nader got surprisingly few votes. There might be a lot of people defecting from Nader to Kerry at the last minute out of pragmatism. Nader has 3%; assuming (arbitrarily) that two-thirds of Nader voters will end up defecting to Kerry, then we should consider Kerry to be at 43% right now instead of 41, which would mean we should consider the split among likely voters (which is the headline of the story) to be Bush 51 / Kerry 43. The margin of error is 4%, so that's a statistical tie. (Even if you don't buy my calculation about Nader voters, it's still CLOSE to a statistical tie.) So I would consider this one poll obviously a great sign for Bush, but it's not proof that Bush is in the lead. Bush can only be considered to have a strong lead if other polls corroborate this one.

He adds:

The poll was done from Aug 31 to Sept 2. It will be interesting to see what the numbers are like after the convention. As I've said before, considering that Kerry got almost no bounce from the convention, I think it will be terrible news for Kerry if Bush gets a significant bounce out of his convention, since people's views of Bush are more solidified. If Bush doesn't get much of a bounce out of his convention, then you could say that both conventions were ineffective for reasons unrelated to the specific candidates or parties (the country is polarized, the conventions got relatively little coverage, etc.).

Yes, when Kerry got no bounce, the spin was: conventions don't really produce bounce anymore. So what can you say now? I predict: the Republicans did very bad things at the convention and thereby unfairly obtained the bounce that they got; if they had conducted an honorable convention, like the Democrats, there would have been no bounce.

UPDATE: An emailer observes:

I wanted to note this:  a 51/43 split with a margin of error of +-4 is not a statistical tie.  It does indicate that there is the possibility that there is a statistical tie in the actual populace, but there is no reason to think that the likelihood of this possibility is any different from the likelihood of a 55/39 split in the actual populace (which would render Kerry about as significant as I am in the coming election).  Moreover, neither of those extreme possibilities is as likely as a 51/43 split in the actual populace.  Similarly, rolling a sum of 2 on two dice is as likely as rolling a sum of 12 is, but neither is as likely as 7.  Obviously, the dice rolling is not correlated in the same way that the polling is, and while this correlation does support your son's comment, it does so only weakly.

I agree, definitely. But what I like about my son's comment is that it's amusingly in the vein of what would Susan Estrich say if she had to figure out something positive to say. I'll see if John comes back Estrichishly and re-spins.

ANOTHER UPDATE: If you want to shore up your knowledge of what "margin of error means," go here. And Matthew Yglesias argues about that here. I don't think you really need to invest a lot of time in studying all that, but if you're bummed out about the poll, it might cheer you up. Especially the first link. I'm pretty sure John is literally correct about the meaning of the term "statistical tie." At the same time, the emailer is right about likelihood of different results. But if you were trying to spin the bad news, you would avoid pointing that out. Indeed, I think Yglesias, who supports Kerry, was saying what he was saying because he was enjoying polls that showed Kerry ahead and he didn't want his pleasure spoiled by people wielding the "statistical tie" concept.

Finally getting around to TiVo-blogging last night's convention.

I wasn't really properly simulblogging the Convention last night, and I'm told that I had my priorities straight. Yikes! Going over to Vodkapundit for that last link, I saw this new poll information. Wow! That's distracting me from my plan to watch the TiVo'd night 4 of the Convention. An 11 point lead for Bush now! "57% trust Bush to handle the war on terrorism, while 36% trust Kerry." I'm surprised but also not that surprised. I predicted a landslide for Bush a long time ago. Well, let me nevertheless record a few observations about last night.

1. I was a total sucker for the film about the Bush twins. Showing the home movies is a little exploitative, but they are so damn cute! I like that one of things they love about their dad is that he didn't come around to politics until fairly late in life. That is usually held against him--proof he's a lightweight. But I like the other side of the argument: the best person to trust with power is someone whose psychological makeup does not contain a needy urge toward power. Kerry, of course, is usually portrayed in a positive light for rising into the limelight of leadership early in life, but obviously there is a negative way to portray that history.

2. After all the bad music, they have a really great singer doing "Dancing in the Streets," but the camera can only show her from a distance. She's standing down with the band and is not identified.

3. Seeing the arrival of President Bush's motorcade, I stop and think how good it has been that both conventions (and the Olympics) took place without a terrorist attack.

4. Now Donnie McClure is singing, along with a bunch of really cute kids. He's great!

5. Pataki gives a decent speech. Somebody seems to have coached him in how to use that passionate whipering effect like a cornball actor. Did he say "With supreme guts and rightness"? That's a rather awkward turn of phrase.

6. The short film. The in-person narration--by the sublimely resonant and folksy-sounding voice of Fred Thompson--is very effective. The framework of the film is a series of vignettes about Bush and another man : Bush and the firefighter (he put his arm around him as he did the megaphone speech); Bush and the dead police officer whose badge was given him (and whose mother remains Bush's friend), Bush's invitation of a man who'd lost his leg in the war (the two "ran the track three times, three laps on the White House lawn, and then they just hung out for a while"); Bush and Derek Jeter (Jeter goads him into pitching from the mound, and Bush took up the challenge, not mentioning that he was wearing a heavy bulletproof vest and could "hardly move his arms"). These vignettes convey the message that Bush is a man that admirable, manly men relate to in a very natural way. Bush comes across as modest, compassionate, and manly.

7. After the film two flag panels move across the stage from opposite sides, and after they overlap and pass by each other, Bush is there standing in the center. It looked like a magic trick. Kind of comical.

8. The speech itself is quite good. He is forceful and clear and with almost no flubs--and no embarrassingly funny flubs. Nothing makes me laugh out loud, like Kerry's "senators and menators." That still makes me laugh.

Bush has lots of specific details, making it seem as though he has a well-thought-out plan. Biggest applause line (it seemed to me): "We must make a place for the unborn child." A couple complaints about too many lawsuits. The amendment banning gay marriage is characterized as protecting marriage "from activist judges."

A woman protester is dragged out kicking--we see Bush's face: he winks. I love that calm, subtle confidence, like the time during the debate with Gore, when Gore was weirdly invading his space and he turned to Gore and gave a little friendly-style nod.

His main theme, woven through the domestic and foreign policy: freedom. "Free" or "freedom" appears 23 times in the speech. [And "liberty" appears 11 times.]

I liked this line:

So our mission in Afghanistan and Iraq is clear. We will help new leaders to train their armies, and move toward elections, and get on the path of stability and democracy as quickly as possible. And then our troops will return home with the honor they have earned.

That contains a subtle slap at Kerry, who is attacked for playing a leading role in depriving Vietnam vets of honor when they returned home. I cannot help but think of the Swift Boat Vets criticisms of Kerry, though Bush says nothing against Kerry's war record. The implication seems plain: if Kerry is President, somehow he will arrange things so that Iraq war vets will come home, after all of that effort, and be seen as the bad guys. Bush never says anything like that. But enough was said to make me think that, and I don't believe I'm alone. This passage, somewhat later, made a similar impression:

I've met with parents and wives and husbands who have received a folded flag and said a final goodbye to a soldier they loved. I am awed that so many have used those meetings to say that I am in their prayers and to offer encouragement to me. 

Where does that strength like that come from? How can people so burdened with sorrow also feel such pride? It is because they know their loved one was last seen doing good because they know that liberty was precious to the one they lost.

Funniest line: "Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in Texas is called 'walking.'"

9. Minimal balloonage. I think the idea was let's not show off that we can do balloons so much better than they can. Confetti! Upward shooting streamers: the crowd loves them. Bush pays a lot of attention to how Laura feels, I think. It's a big moment, and they all know they really only have to make this look right, and maybe pretending to care about whether she feels okay is part of making it look right, and maybe I'm a chump, but I think he really cares.

The Kerry that roared.

The New York Times begins a news article about a Kerry speech this way:

Roaring back at his Republican rivals, Senator John Kerry called President Bush "unfit to lead this country" for "misleading'' America into war in Iraq and said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney avoided fighting in the Vietnam War.

I didn't hear it. I'm just reading it. But I don't know what it would have been about Kerry's speech that would have constituted "roaring"--aside from the Times's dear wish that Kerry would turn into a lion-like fighter. I suppose it took some courage to bring himself to say the word "unfit," so searingly used against him in recent weeks. But what is this roar? It's this:

"For the past week, they have attacked my patriotism and even my fitness to serve as commander in chief ... Well, here is my answer to them ... I will not have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could've and who misled America into Iraq."

So, your big answer, after all of these attacks, is that you somehow "will not have" any questions. I simply will not have it. You hear that? He does not want to be questioned. He went to Vietnam, and therefore, he simply will not have any questions about whether he has the qualifications to be President. Come on, that's a roar, isn't it?

And by the way, any man who didn't volunteer to go to Vietnam who was of age at the time--all you Baby Boomer men who had student deferments or even if you served in the National Guard, I mean were in the National Guard--you were all refusing to serve.

Give 'em Zell.

I was going to write a post about how a lot of people commenting on Zell Miller's speech the other night took advantage of the Zell/Hell rhyme to go for some easily within reach wordplay, but the first example I found was Jonah Goldberg commenting on how everyone was doing Zell wordplay:

First off, as a journalist, let me take the time to do what no other pundit has been willing to do: thank Georgia Senator Zell Miller for being named Zell. It’s been a long time since a politician offered such euphoria over euphony in political commentary. From the conservatives I’ve already heard “Give ’em Zell!” and “Zell it like it is!” and “Zelling it Old School!,” and from the other side of the aisle we’ve had “Zellotry” and “Zell-out.” Who the Zell knows what else is coming down the pike — Zello-Dolly?

Day 4 of the Republican Convention.

I see that Instapundit advance-linked me, before heading off to a poker game. Yet here I am at Nina's, consuming a glorious gourmet meal, eating the last of the chocolate torte with the cassis creme anglaise, with a glass of cognac. We've put the Bush speech on. There's a little postage-stamp-sized TV on the counter and now we're all blogging. No one is throwing things at the screen. Occasionally, I put in a good word. Nina is saying "Come on, oh, come on!" Anyway, here are some pictures from earlier in the evening. I'll try to get it together to say something more apt about the President's speech later, but my general sense of the speech, overhearing it through a cognac-haze is that he's saying the things he always says with the speech mannerisms he always has.











I've got to say, getting those pictures up, under the influence of the cognac, has been really really hard. I hope you appreciate the look of this dinner party and forgive me for not minutely dissecting the speech. I will need to do that later. Ah! There is our President and Our First Lady all in orange-red. Now, let's just sleep on all of this speech-making, and wake up tomorrow and begin to take the details of all of these arguments seriously.

UPDATE: "There is our President and Our First Lady ..." That was not a subtle allusion to "Is our children learning." That was just me, blogging under the influence! And what's with the religiously tinged "Our First Lady"? What does that mean? I have no idea at all. Anyway, here's how I looked as I was making these mistakes:



That's from Tonya, whose account of the dinner can be found here. She's got a closeup of the torte and pictures of Jeremy and Nina looking surprised. I forget why. Jeremy has the most dinner coverage, the only real play by play. Good comments section too. Nina, because she did all the cooking--she love to cook! she wanted it this way!--was restricted to after-blogging. And there's another picture of me there too.

The first day of school, the last night of the convention.

Today was the first day of law school, and I had my first "Religion and the Constitution" class. It seems like a lively group. After some preliminaries, we had a nice discussion about a 19th century case that refused to find a religious exception to a ban on polygamy. That class, like my other class, Civil Procedure II, meets at 11 am and runs for an hour, so I'm looking forward to the consistent rhythm through the week. Today, it was a bit hard because we had a long faculty meeting that began at 12, and I had not planned ahead and packed a lunch. So my usual antsiness at long meetings was exacerbated by hunger. But today is a good day for hunger, because Nina is cooking dinner for Tonya, Jeremy, and me. And it is the last night of the Convention I've been simulblogging all week. So unless some frightful breach of dinner party etiquette occurs, my convention blogging will get a later-than-usual start. I probably won't comment on the early evening doings, such as how they performed the National Anthem and what the cleric giving the invocation was wearing. But I'll have my TiVo'd convention to review and I intend to stop back here later and hit the high points or say whatever I happen to think. Now it's time to hop in the car, stop at Steve's to buy some cognac, and make my way over to Nina's.

UPDATE: Okay, live from Nina's, let the record show, Jeremy and Tonya got their computers out before I did. Nina's doing all the cooking, so she's not blogging. Outrageous! I can believe Jeremy is blogging this, but Tonya? Tonya! She's the one who called us on what a breach of etiquette it would be if people blogged at a dinner party. Ah! I took some pictures of Nina rattling the pots and pans. She fried sage leaves in olive oil and they came out like sweet potato chips or some such un-Atkinsy snack, but they're totally Atkins-compliant. Other things that are not so Atkins-compliant include gougere. And now, haricots verts. Nina's a master chef of some kind and now she's ordering us to put away the computers. She's got another course coming. It's tomato, basil, etc. risotto.

What is a "personal" attack?

I see there is a lot of fallout from the Zell Miller speech last night. And "fallout" is an especially good image if you take Chris Matthews seriously ("[I]t‘s as if somebody dropped the atom bomb on the Democratic Party"). Unfortunately, I missed the big fight between Miller and Matthews last night. So I read the transcript (previous link), and I'm not going to call the shots there except to say that I think Miller really did mishear Matthews at a key point. [ADDED: Since I'm about to get picky about language usage, let me point out that "call the shots" is the wrong expression there! I mean I'm not going to dissect it.] What I want to talk about is the "personal attack" meme. First, Tim Russert says:

[T]he question is, will Zell Miller‘s comments attract the so-called Bubba vote that Democrats, Republicans call it down South, particularly in north Florida, or will it turn off swing, independent voters or proportionally women who don‘t like negative attacks, because it was very, very personal?

(I love the way he sees us all as Bubbas or faint-hearted females or some such thing, reacting only to the tone of things.) Russert's "personal attack" meme infects Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews, who repeat it several times. At one point, Matthews says:

That attack about Ted Kennedy and John Kerry was personal. Nobody is going to step back and say it wasn‘t. The idea that this guy is going to shoot spitballs in defense of country that he risked his life to defend some years ago is a personal attack on the guy. This is serious business. I want to ask everybody, did Democrats make a mistake in not shooting at their opponents?

Okay, I just want to step back and say it wasn't personal. Aggressively pointing to the deficiencies in a politician's political record is a political attack, not a personal attack. A personal attack aims at the candidate's personal or family life or addresses some more intimate matter outside of his political actions. Miller certainly attacked Kerry last night, and it was powerful and harsh, but it was not about personal matters. It was effective precisely because it pointed to and characterized the candidate's political record. You can complain that it was exaggerated, that it was incorrect or slanted, but it wasn't personal. It was political! There actually is a difference!

Now I'm sure plenty of people will tell me that "personal" ought to include anything that specifies an individual person. That would fit with one dictionary definition of the word. But why should we have a problem with a political argument that specifies an individual when that individual is the candidate? He's the candidate; we're allowed to single him out! So the attack wasn't personal in any way that is illegitimate in a political battle. I think the reason the attack was called personal is that it would be lame to admit the real complaint: the attack was strong. The Kerry campaign and the various people who support it, like Matthews, spend a lot of time expressing outrage that their opponents are fighting hard. But it is a political fight. Fight back! Don't whine that it's somehow unfair for Miller to point to your record. Defend your record. Presumably, you've got arguments. If you don't, you deserve to lose.

A NYT headline to disapprove of.

Here's the main point of this article about the police in NY this week:

[I]t appears that the New York Police Department may have successfully redefined the post-Seattle era, by showing that protest tactics designed to create chaos and to attract the world's attention can be effectively countered with intense planning and a well-disciplined use of force.

It sounds to me as though the police deserve lavish praise for their work. So what's with the headline?

Tactics by Police Mute the Protesters, and Their Messages

It sounds as though the police set out to squelch free speech. And who knows what those tactics were?

Who's got the nuance?

The NYT editorial page approves of President Bush's acknowledgement of the complexity in the idea of "winning the war on terror":

President Bush was absolutely right when he said it was impossible to win a war against terrorism - it's like announcing we can win a war against violence. Terrorism can only be minimized and controlled ... The president has been honest about saying we will never be totally safe. ..."

Of course, the editorial is full of criticisms too, but that's not my point here, so I've elided them. The Times and its columnists usually slam Bush for the "lack of nuance" in his thinking. He thinks he knows the right answer and then he doggedly sticks to it. And that's bad. Kerry, on the other hand, has all the nuance and complexity, we're told. He sees all sides. And that's good.

But what is this?

"I absolutely disagree with what he said in that interview in a moment of candor," Mr. Kerry said here at the American Legion's national convention a day after Mr. Bush, before the same audience, retreated from a televised comment in which he said he did not think the United States could win the war on terror.

"With the right policies, this is a war we can win, this is a war we must win, and this is a war we will win," Mr. Kerry said. "The terrorists will lose and we will win, because the future does not belong to fear, it belongs to freedom."

When Kerry sees an opportunity to make some headway against Bush, where's the nuance? He claims to be the one who can get to the "right" answer, he predicts the future, and he predicts victory. Well, the whole "nuance" theme of this election has long seemed phony to me. It's a buzzword thought up to knock down Bush and excuse Kerry's record of taking multiple positions. But Kerry doesn't even seem to want to be Mr. Nuance. So can we please stop saying "nuance"?

Medical news from Madison.

The front page of the Wisconsin State Journal reports: "UW-Madison researchers think they've found a protein that could stop Alzheimer's disease in its tracks."

Day 3 of the Republican Convention.

Here I go again. As before, I'll keep all my commentary in one post and use numbered paragraphs to indicate the updates.

1. A Baptist choir sings a terrific version of the National Anthem (even if they did quite clearly sing "Whore the land of the free..."). The Greek Orthodox Archbishop Demetrios, wearing beautiful vestments, gives a beautiful invocation. Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle gives some introductory remarks. She's wearing a lei, and Chris complains about it. I defend it as an emblem of her state. Chris rejects the defense: "Would the governor of Wisconsin wear a big cheesehead hat?"

2. Senator Rick Santorum: a boo is heard in the room here in Madison. He has a smug, wise-guy attitude, and I don't think I'm saying that solely because I disagree with his attitude about gay rights. "The torch of marriage is dying out." Do we want the federal government to pay for marriage counseling? Even if it is religious? That's a hard question. He has a good line: "[Kerry] says he is concerned about the separation of church and state. Senator Kerry should worry more about the separation of children from their fathers."

3. Wisconsin, for some reason, and I don't object, is recognized to make a motion to proclaim Dick Cheney the VP candidate by acclaimation. "And the motion is agreed to." A little "Cheney" chant breaks out.

4. I caught up to the live feed and I needed to let TiVo get back out in front of me to re-enable fast-forwarding, so I went upstairs to fold laundry, and I put on the upstairs TV--the TiVo-less Sony Wega (where the colors are always so comparatively crisp)--and I caught a little of Wolf Blitzer, Judy Woodruff, and Jeff Greenfield on CNN. And what were they punditizing about? It was practically word-for-word taken from this Instapundit post, from way back this morning, about manipulating the Iowa markets!

5. Representative Paul Ryan from Wisconsin. You can tell he's from Wisconsin because he clearly pronounces Wisconsin "Wi - SCON - sin," not, as I say even after 20 years here, "Wis - CON - sin." [ADDED: They're really playing up to Wisconsin tonight, aren't they? It must be something in the polls.]

6. I think it's a good sign that there is so much amateurish material. The party really isn't that slick. So much bad music! The faux interviews with community leaders. That lame comic segment with Barney the dog (who at one point had a debate with a white French poodle puppet dog named Fifi Kerry). I think 20 years from now the political convention will be a seamlessly acted entertainment extravaganza that everyone will watch and enjoy. But right now, we still live in the real world, because everything's a little bit pathetically ragged.

7. The tribute to Reagan. Beautiful. Many beautiful images. Reagan's voice: "We got America to stand tall again."

8. Is there some rule that every woman has to wear a light blue suit?

9. Finally, Zell Miller. It seems silly to say that and an indication of how much filler we've had to put up with tonight. I like Zell Miller and think he's a good speaker. He's speaking quickly for some reason. "My family is more important than my party." Only Bush is good enough for his family, he asserts. Then he reels back to the story of his life: he's a little boy, FDR is President, there's an "overriding public danger." He brings up Wendell Wilkie, with whom he clearly identifies. He's making a plea to overcome partisanship in a time of danger. He condemns the Democrats of today for putting their partisan politics above the nation's security. His voice trembles with anger as he says: "Nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling America's troops occupiers rather than liberators! Tell that to the one half of Europe that was free because Franklin Roosevelt led an army of liberators, not occupiers!" Similarly, Eisenhower and Reagan. The soldier, not the protester, has given us our freedom. Don't dare to think of being President if you don't think of our soldiers as liberators! But the leaders of the Democratic party see America as the problem! They blame America. They believed in Carter's pacifism. "And no pair has been more wrong, more loudly, more often than the two senators from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry!" Miller is unleashed. His opposition to his own party erupts here tonight. Kerry voted against so many arms programs, so what would he mean to be Commander in Chief of? "Spitballs?" Kerry would wait for the UN to approve of military action: "Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending." He would "outsource our national security." His opposition to Kerry slams down heavily. John Kerry would give terrorists "a yes/no/maybe bowl of mush." Bush would clamp down hard and not let go! He admires that Bush believes God "is not indifferent to America." He's like an old-fashioned preacher. He speaks with straight conviction, with almost a defiant sneer on his face. It's very effective!

10. Lynn Cheney introduces her husband, who, as a teenager in Casper, Wyoming, did not, like the other kids, cruise back and forth between root beer stands. He did not do the twist. She knew he was the guy for her. Imagine Dick Cheney as the love of your life! That's the way it is for them. Who are we to question love? Now, here he is. The grinding, grim flatness of Dick Cheney is just what it is to be Dick Cheney. He is what he is. It doesn't play to the big hall terribly well, especially not after the great revivalist Miller, but what did you expect? Perhaps even less. He lays it out. And you can take it or leave it. He's not doing the twist. He's Dick Cheney.

11. "A Senator can be wrong for twenty years without consequence to the nation, but a President always casts the deciding vote." Cheney is warming up as he lays into John Kerry. He's amusing himself. He chuckles: "Senator Kerry's liveliest disagreement is with himself. ... Senator Kerry says he sees two Americas. It makes the whole thing mutual. America sees two Kerrys." A man in the audience is seen rhythmically waving two flip-flops.

So you think you're a film buff of the loftiest type?

Living in Madison would put you to the test. Look at what is playing at the Madison Cinemateque this semester. Here's your chance to see 20 Ozu films. And don't say you don't have the money: admission is free, at the terrific screening room at Vilas Hall. The great Wisconsin film studies professor David Bordwell was recently asked by my son (a UW student) what the best films of all time were, and his answer was that what you should do is to see all of the films the very greatest directors, and then he proceeded to name perhaps three directors, and one of them was Yasujiro Ozu. So, film people of Madison, you have your work cut out for you.

Scary bloggy proposition.

So Nina's cooking dinner tomorrow for Tonya and Jeremy and me, and I broached the subject "we're not bringing computers and simulblogging the convention, are we?"

Nina responds, "There are few limits as to what you can/ can't do once you arrive! I do have wireless, though very basic cable. We could take a pause for THE speech if people are so inclined."

Then both Jeremy and I respond, each before seeing the other's response, that we ought to just all four of us simulblog the dinner too. I add, Nixon-like, "but it would be wrong." But Jeremy's all: "OMG! Four person simultaneous co-present political simulblogging! Although I think we should blog throughout dinner as well. We've never had this kind of wireless possibility before."

No word from Tonya yet, but perhaps she'll stake out the you-people-are-all-crazy position.

Meanwhile, I rue the lack of a webcam to project the bizarre excess of bloggery, and Jeremy notes that we can take digital photos and post them. I think we've all posted photos of half-eaten food before.

Dick Morris on the "female state of the union address."

I don't consider myself to be in some kind of special position to say whether Laura Bush came through last night and said what women need to hear about the presidential election, so let me consult this column written by Dick Morris:

Her incredible speech reached women voters in a way that other speakers at either convention have failed to do.

Unlike her husband, the first lady drew explicitly the connection between the offensive operations in the War on Terror and the work to defend our families from the threats that haunt them

Her speech was almost a female state of the union address — taking each of the administration's policies and relating them to the concerns of the half of the electorate that the male political establishment doesn't understand and rarely appeals to.

Women, you see, can't really grasp foreign policy unless you restate it and couch each point in terms of the effect on the family. Men—other than Dick Morris, that is—really don't understand that.

Like presidents do in state of the union addresses, she brought Bush's policies home to each of us by naming real people, real families and real soldiers working for our freedom.

Dick, if you're going to praise a schoolteacher, use good grammar!

George needed to relate his education reforms to the average parents worrying about their children in school. Laura did it.

George had to explain why sending troops to Baghdad protected our families at home. Laura did it. …

Thanks for making appealing to women sound like translation for the mentally challenged.

Unlike the shrill sloganeering of Hillary Clinton and the ritualized comments of other wives of presidents, Laura Bush explained her husband's policies with a clarity and simplicity that reached everyone who watched it — except for the shortsighted and self-involved male commentators who didn't get it and put her down after it was over.

See, I would not have known that without the help of the un-self-involved commentator, Dick Morris. Here she was, reaching out to everyone, and I was thinking about where they got that crazy shower curtain backdrop and whether her amateurish delivery was charming or just boring. But apparently, she said a lot of things about children and family that really had a big effect on my half of the electorate.

Ted Koppel on "The Daily Show."

Was Ted Koppel the worst guest ever on "The Daily Show"? I know there's some sort of feud in the past between Stewart and Koppel, but why go on the show unless you want to patch things up or look good in some way. Koppel was strangely snippy on Stewart's home turf, and as soon as the segment ended, he jumped up and stalked off.

WiFi city.

I see (via Drudge) that Philadelphia is considering making the whole city a WiFi zone. What an effective use of tax money. The cost is low ($10 million), it provides a great benefit to citizens (WiFi phones are part of the plan), and it is excellent PR for the city (Philadelphia seems hip and cool!). As my local politicians push for a $53 million twelve-mile rail line (an "exciting new technology" that will have "rails embedded into the street pavement so that train cars would use the same paths as cars"), I'm really jealous of people in cities that are thinking a lot more clearly about what people would actually enjoy having.

UPDATE: Madison (and Dane county) residents ought to take a look at the Houston experience with light rail: there have been a surprising number of collisions with cars.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader asks whether Madison's mayor is reading my blog.

The new iMac design.

Sorry, I prefer the old iMac design to this new one with the processing unit fattening the screen. The old one (which I have at work) has that hemispheric base and, at the end of a manipulable steel arm, a very thin screen. The new design is touted as making the "box" disappear, but what kind of wonder is that? On every laptop, the box "disappears" into the keyboard. What's the charm of having the box disappear into the screen? We found a new place to hide the box? But the screen is an unsatisfying place to hide the box because it makes the design top heavy. It gives it that tipping-over feel. On the older iMac (my iMac), the screen floats elegantly, and the processing unit provides weight and stability--a base--in a form that is not at all boxy. The new iMac has an unstable-looking foot under the top-heavy, clunky screen, which is, of course, rectangular: a box. The new design might appeal to businesses that think the old hemispheric base is too toy-like and unserious. I can picture this new iMac on an airline counter or some such place where playful cuteness is the wrong message--not that playful cuteness is really the right message for a law professor's office.

"He was much less uptight as a Democrat."

So says Ron Silver's 21-year-old daughter, quoted in this NYT article about the actor who spoke at the Republican Convention Monday night.

[H]e is still a registered Democrat, and Mr. Silver told his convention audience that he has not disavowed the left's social agenda. But at the moment he represents a particular slice of the American political spectrum: voters who put national security before ideology and want to keep President Bush's hand on the nation's rudder.

"I'm a 9/11 Republican," he said. "If we don't get this right, all the other things don't matter worth a hill of beans. I'll live to fight another day on health care, environmental concerns and sensible gun legislation. But this is such a predominant issue that it towers above all others, and I'm not certain both parties are capable of handling it the right way."

Well put. I think a lot of people agree with him.

Day 2 of the Republican Convention.

Okay, here we go again. I'll simulblog and keep all my comments in one post with numbered paragraphs to indicate updates.

1. Observation #1: My first observation last night was about the look of the set, and there's one other thing I've been wanting to say about the set, so I'll begin with this. Look at that humble wooden lectern! What is that all about? It's like a pulpit in a Protestant church that puts great stock in avoiding ornamentation. I can't remember what the Democratic Convention lectern/pulpit looked like--I tried to find a picture--but I think it was extravagant and florid and flag-oriented. The Republican lectern is aggressively plain, perhaps to avoid upstaging the speaker or perhaps to avoid upstaging the dramatic video screen behind the speaker. Maybe they considered using one of those almost-invisible plexiglass lecterns used in Hollywood awards shows, then rejected that as too reminiscent of Hollywood awards shows, and plain, plain wood was the fallback alternative. [ADDED: Here are some shots of the Democrat's lectern.][ADDED 9/4: I finally got a good look at a photograph of the Democrat's lectern. It has a large medallion right under the speaker's microphone that says "America 2004" on top and "A Stronger America" at the bottom. In the center is is a waving American flag, and there are little stars circling the whole arrangement.]

2. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson introduces the singer of the national anthem, Gracie Rosenberger, and my initial reaction is: what is this saccharine, sentimental, mawkish glop? But twenty seconds into it, tears are rolling down my cheeks. Damn! Stop that! The undulating flag on the giant video and the C-Span closeups of guys in VFW hats complete the effect.

3. A Christian minister does the invocation tonight and doesn't stop at just praying in Jesus' name (which I can understand might be necessary for some ministers in order to make the words a prayer), he goes on at some length about the crucifixion and the need to believe in Christ. Afterwards the colors are retired, and on the big screen we see the Statue of Liberty, with the words "Live--Statue of Liberty." Chris says, "Why do we need live footage of the Statue of Liberty? It's not going to do anything."

4. Princella Smith, a young black woman, winner of an MTV essay contest, talks about rejecting the label Generation X, which seems to have a lot to do with inspiration provided by George W. Bush. She posits "Generation EXample." Immediately afterwards (unlike any of the other speakers), Smith is interviewed backstage. The interview is projected onto the big screen for the whole hall to see. Smith effuses about her wonderful experience, and in there amongst the effusion is the stray line "I certainly didn't think I'd be twenty years old." She's informed she gave "a fabulous speech."

5. Roll call. The TiVo fastforward function is employed to good effect.

6. Uh! Wisconsin! Stop! The official icon of Wisconsin: a cow. The chairman of the Wisconsin party invokes the names of the "beloved" former Governor, Tommy Thompson, the Badgers (yay, Badgers), and the Green Bay Packers. Wisconsin is the pioneer of school choice and welfare reform, he tells us. Forty votes cast for George W. Bush.

7. Elizabeth Dole offers up a stilted peroration: "blue skies of freedom ... we believe in life ... marriage is important ... between a man and a woman ... those not yet born ... Republicans will defend ... the treasured life of faith ... two thousand years ago ... I have the freedom to call that man Lord, and I do ... activist judges ... freedom of religion, not freedom from religion ... values ... virtues ... truths ... the shared truths of the American people ... " As the speech progresses, she warms up, not like Giuliani last night, of course, but she essentially fills her role of expressing the night's "compassion" theme in terms that are particularly appealing to the social conservative sector of the party that is not to be heard in prime time this evening.

8. George P. Bush: wooden ... something about immigrants and entrepreneurs. He's cute though. Then, "God Bless America," sung by Dana Glover. She's okay, like someone who'd be voted off "American Idol." She's pretty and quite dolled up. Next, Miss America. What is this? The good-looking-people section of the show? The screen banner says "People of Compassion." It's horribly dull. Yes, yes, good people are good. And pretty people are pretty. My TiVo has caught up with the live feed and I can't fast forward. Aaaah! [ADDED: An emailer quips: "What you need is one of those hi-tech TiVos like Lewis Lapham's. "]

9. Dr. Frist: he's tedious and ignored by the convention crowd until suddenly he says the phrase "trial lawyer" and the audience erupts. The name John Edwards comes up. Now he's airing the stem cell research issue. This section of the convention is terribly slow. Oh, good lord, they're bringing out Elisabeth Hasselbeck, the nonentity component of "The View." She's talking about breast cancer. What does this have to do with Republicans? Health care policy is important, but she's not talking about that. She's doing a public service announcement: do self-examinations, get check-ups. I don't get it. Is it just the idea that Bush cares? Because they assert he cares? Compassion night is not proceeding along the confident arc that security night (last night) swept us along.

10. Finally, Schwarzenegger. He starts off with some bad jokes, then the story of immigrating. Amazingly, he praises Nixon. How strange! He heard Humphrey and Nixon debate in 1968 and decided right then, what that man is, I am. Startling! Best press for Nixon in decades. Like Giuliani last night, he stresses that you don't need to agree with all of the party's positions. Giuliani emphasized supporting Bush, despite some disagreement. Schwarzenegger stresses supporting the Republican Party. The core of the party, as portrayed by Schwarzenegger is none of the things Elizabeth Dole spoke about a while ago.

"If you believe that this nation and not the United Nations is the best hope for democracy, then you are a Republican. And ladies and gentlemen, if you believe that we must be fierce and relentless and terminate terrorism, then you are a Republican. Now, there's another way you can tell you're Republican: your faith in free enterprise, faith in the resourcefulness of the American people, and faith in the U.S. economy. And to those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say: Don't be economic girlie men!"

Huge cheer.

11. Jenna and Barbara Bush: They have nice comic delivery. They are fun and self-effacing. They razz their parents. "We had a hamster too. Let's just say, ours didn't make it." They introduce their dad, on the big screen, and he introduces his wife. Laura walks out to the tune of "Isn't She Lovely."

12. The actual speech given by Laura Bush? She seems sweet and pleasant, but there was no content that struck me in particular. She loves her husband.

Iraqi talk radio.

Sabrina Tavernise writes, on the front page of the NYT, about Dijla, the first all-talk radio in the new Iraq. Huge numbers of people call in, many simply to express frustration about the lack of garbage collection and things of that kind. But there is also the torrent of political opinion that flows when the radio host poses a question. What should be done with Saddam Hussein? "Most people wanted him executed." I found this striking:

The program director and host, Majid Salim ... asked listeners what they thought about the insurgency that has roiled Iraq, claiming most of the energies of the new interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and putting the American occupation in danger of failure.

"We asked them, is it terrorism or is it resistance," he said. "A very large proportion, almost 100 percent, said terrorism. They did not like it."

Interesting. The American media always seem to speak of "rebels" and the "resistance" or, as in this Times article, the "insurgency." How different it would sound if the reports were of "terrorists" and "terrorism" in Iraq. If "almost 100 percent" of the Iraqis perceive the violence as terrorism, maybe our reporters, who seem to care about Iraqi self-determination, should adopt the Iraqis' terminology.

Madison, not Madison Square Garden.

It was fun blogging Madison Square Garden from Madison, Wisconsin. Thanks to Instapundit's linking last night's snipe at Ron Reagan and the ten-part convention simulblog that followed, I had the strange and fascinating experience of having thousands of people hearing the comments I made thoughout the night, which--before blogging--I would have just said to whoever happened to be in the room. So here I was sitting in my TV room in Madison, watching a huge crowd of people in Madison Square Garden, but probably more able to watch the proceedings than someone who was actually there in the crowd, because I had the camera view and the ability to pause and rewind, and I was more able to make comments than if I had been watching with a big group of people (most of the time I was alone), because I had my blog and my Instapundit link. In fact, if I had been watching with a big group of people--which would have been more fun, I'm sure--there is no way that we would have paid attention to all of the speeches: we would have had to talk over the speeches and become engaged in back and forth talking with each other. So my strange and fascinating experience consisted of being separated from two large groups--the people in Madison Square Garden and the people who were hearing my comments. You could say, what a shame that we live in this internet world where we are so alienated that I was not at the convention and I did not have live human beings to interact with last night. But internet or no internet, I wasn't going to any political conventions and being alone and in possession of a TiVo, I was able to get some writing done and to find a readership immediately. That was wonderful!

Day 1 of the Republican Convention.

(I'll put all my observations for tonight in this post, with numbered paragraphs to represent the updates.)

1. I love the grand video screens behind the speaker's podium. They showed a live view of the New York streets as the flag was presented, then a huge waving flag during the National Anthem (which was sung by a young green-eyed girl from Michigan) and the invocation (given by a Muslim). Now the screens are gone, and a platform rises up with a band and what I've got to assume are Broadway performers, who proceed to sing a medley of rock-solid old favorite Broadway songs (e.g., "Seventy-Six Trombones"). These songs have no discernable political content. Following that is a really well-done intro in the style of "Saturday Night Live," complete with blaring saxophone, Don Pardo [style] voiceover ("Arnold Schwarzenegger!"), and snazzy video clips of Manhattan at night. Now we're back in Madison Square Garden for the roll call, as a fabulous and comical animation of a trunk-flailing elephant appears on the giant screen behind the speaker. As each state is called, the video screen shows an image befitting the state--a little like the state quarters: Maine gets a lobster, Maryland gets a crab, and so on. Okay, I get the idea. Nice production values, but I'm going speed through this.

2. Hastert: too dull to blog about.

3. The Cheneys are introduced and we watch them walk to their seats in the stands. With them are two cute little girls, presumably granddaughters. The younger one is very lively and dances to the song, which is "You're All I Need" (possibly squelching rumors that Cheney will be replaced as the running mate: "There's no, no looking back for us/We've got a love and sure enough it's enough"). We see the Bush twins: they look great, very natural and adorable. Next to them is a young woman I don't recognize, who is wearing one of those "Carrie Doesn't Speak For Me" T-shirts.

4. A cute Austin band, Dexter Freebish, plays. Lyric that jumps out at me: "The world is your playground." In the end, the lead singer holds up a "We salute our troops sign."

5. The New York actor Ron Silver introduces the subject of the 9/11 attacks. He yells: "We will never forget. We will never forgive. We will never excuse." At that, a huge cheer bursts out ("Yeah!"). The camera scans the crowd and shows George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush laughing and nodding and clapping. Following the long cheer, Silver quotes General MacArthur: "At the end of World War II, Douglas MacArthur ... said, 'It is my earnest hope, indeed the hope of all mankind, that from this solemn occasion, a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past, a world found[ed] upon faith, understanding, a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfilment of his most cherished wish for freedom, tolerance, and justice.' The hope he expressed then remains relevant today." There is no cheer, but Silver pauses and waits for a cheer, and a short cheer ensues. But definitely, and disturbingly, for this crowd "We will never excuse" was a much more popular sentiment than the hope of a better world. Later, he gets another heartfelt cheer: when he says "This is a war in which we had to respond." He criticizes his fellow entertainers who catalogue the world's wrongs but are unwilling to fight against them. He says, emphatically, "The President is doing exactly the right thing."

6. Representative Heather Wilson of New Mexico presents the subject of war dead in terms of courage and individual choice to serve in a cause worth fighting for. She introduces a film showing veterans interviewed aboard the the U.S.S. Intrepid. The veterans are lively and proud. George Bush Sr. is there, paying tribute, citing "a timeless creed of duty, honor, country."

7. A chorus rousingly sings the full-length anthem for each branch of the military. I don't know that I've ever heard the Coast Guard Anthem sung before, but this is quite a military display. I especially like the Air Force anthem. Well, they didn't do this at the Democratic convention.

8. I'm skipping over much material. Now: here's John McCain. He defends the war in Iraq against "a disingenuous filmmaker who would have us believe ... [Michael Moore is there and he's mouthing 'Thank you.' The crowd boos, then begins a 'four more years' chant] ... that Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace when, in fact, it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture, mass graves, and prisons. ... The mission was necessary, achievable, and noble." This last part is, of course, what the convention needs to do: make the case that both wars Bush took us into were right and good. McCain offers his own credibilty for Bush as he says that Bush is the right man to see us through what he took us into. McCain says, "I salute him," calling up memories of John Kerry saluting as he "reported for duty" at the Democratic Convention. The idea is: if McCain, clearly a greater war hero than Kerry, salutes Bush, then the Kerry salute is nullified. McCain's theme is that what we have fought for is worth fighting for. Here is his final crescendo: "Take courage from the knowledge that our military superiority is matched only by the superiority of our ideals and our unconquerable love for them. ... We fight for love of freedom and justice--a love that is invincible. Keep that faith! Keep your courage! Stick together! Stay strong! Do not yield! Do not flinch! Stand up! Stand up with our President and fight! We're Americans! We're Americans and we'll never surrender! They will!" Brilliant!

9. A September 11th memorial follows McCain. Three women tell stories of family members who died. It's very moving and genuine. "Amazing Grace" is sung. Then: Rudoph Giuliani comes out and welcomes the crowd to New York. His rhetoric is built upon the "hear from us" line in Bush's famous ad lib at Ground Zero. Our enemies have heard from us, and if we keep Bush in power, he argues, they will "continue to hear from us." He doesn't get too embedded in sadness about September 11th. The three women who preceded him carried that weight. He's lively and good humored. He expresses pleasure at seeing so many Republicans in New York. He says: "I don't believe we're right about everything and Democrats are wrong. They're wrong about most things. [Big laugh.] But seriously, neither party has a monopoly on virtue. We don't have all the right ideas. They don't have all the wrong ideas. But I do believe there are times in history when our ideas are more necessary and more important and critical and this is one of those times when we are facing war and danger."

Next, he talks about seeing a human being jumping from the World Trade Center tower and other experiences of September 11th. He says that on that day he said, "Thank God George Bush is our President," and he repeats that declaration tonight. He speaks emphatically of the weak response of the German government to the Olympic terrorists in 1972, which became a typical response to terrorists over a long period of years. "Terrorists learned they could intimidate the world community, and too often, the response, particularly in Europe, would be accommodation, appeasement, and compromise. And worse, they also learned that their cause would be taken seriously, almost in proportion to the horror of their attack." This is how Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize, he says. Bush is the one who realized we must take the offensive. Bush changed the direction, announcing the Bush doctrine. "Since September 11th, President Bush has remained rock solid. It doesn't matter to him how he's demonized. It doesn't matter to him what the media does ... Some call it stubbornness. I call it principled leadership. ... President Bush sees world terrorism for the evil that it is."

He turns here to John Kerry, who has no clear, consistent vision. He says this isn't a personal criticism of Kerry and that he respects Kerry's military service, which draws spontaneous applause from the crowd. But the two men are different: Bush sticks with his position, and Kerry changes. Kerry voted against the Gulf War, Giuliani says, and when the crowd boos, he ad libs, "Ah! But he must have heard you booing," because Kerry later supported the war. Giuliani is animated and comical as he talks about Kerry. He quotes Kerry's famous voted-for-it-voted-against-it line and does a cool New York shrug with perfect timing. He has a punchline: maybe that's what Edwards means by "the two Americas." Giuliani is having a great time. He's passionate about fighting terrorism, biting as he criticizes Kerry.

His speaking style is far more engaging than McCain's--and McCain did well. Giuliani seems to be speaking extemporaneously and really talking to us. Now, he's talking about New York construction workers talking to Bush on his trip to NY after 9/11. He's describing a huge man grabbing Bush in a big bear hug and squeezing him--Giuliani does a vigorous physical demonstration of the maneuver--and a Secret Service guy saying to him, "If this guy hurts the President, Giuliani, you're finished." The crowd is laughing like mad and so is Giuliani. He thanks everyone for the support they gave New York back then, and he ties this to a desire to be unified today.

He talks about Saddam Hussein and the Middle East in general. He's going a little long now, and the audience is getting a bit restive. But he's still cooking. President Bush is the man! Giuliani is willing his beliefs into us. I'm not sure he has a way planned out of this speech. Freedom! Mission! Wait, I think he's coming in for a landing. He's got a final approach: "We'll make certain that they have heard from us." And a final line: "God bless America." Great, great speech.

10. And suddenly, it's the video screen: Frank Sinatra! "New York, New York."

Things about the Republican Convention I'm already sick of.

It's just starting, and I will be blogging, here in Madison with my iBook and my TiVo'd C-Span, but I'm just watching a little MSNBC Chris Matthews-moderated pre-show, and I realize I'm about ready to scream from the over-repetition of a single tedious-the-first-time observation: Republicans don't seem to belong in NY. Let me quote a choice example, as spoken exultantly by a commentator I was sick of the first time he opened his mouth, Ron Reagan:

In Boston, of course, the Democrats were home, you know, Boston is a Democratic city, like New York is, but here we have people like we just saw on television, the woman with the very large cowboy hat, plunked down into the middle of Manhattan, which has gotta be like droppin' somebody onto Mars for these people. Can you imagine her walkin' by, you know, an ad for the Vagina Monologues, and just freakin' out. That's what's interesting.

As if "The Vagina Monologues" hasn't been playing outside of New York. It has been playing everywhere, for years! What planet is he on? The only one "freakin' out" is you, Ron, from the sight of a woman in a cowboy hat. Do you think you could pull together a slightly more cosmopolitan attitude of ennui?

Mind your Ps and Qs and Rs.

Nina recounts an email thread about planning dinner in which she disguises the identity of three participants with the code letters P, Q, and R, which don't have anything to do with our real initials. Regular readers of this blog may be able to decipher which one is me. (And scroll down for some photoblogging of New York City and New Haven.)

UPDATE: No, it's all New Haven. I saw a hot dog vendor and just assumed. ("A hot dog makes her lose control.")

"Welcome Admitted Students"

So says the sign on the door leading into the Law School. Why not just "Welcome Students"? The people we didn't admit aren't really "students" at all, are they? Or is it "admitted" in the sense that they are willing to openly proclaim their student status--like an "admitted drug user" or an "admitted adulterer"? But we welcome our students whether they're keeping their student status a secret from the rest of the world or not.

Feeds.

I'm not interested in technical things about computers, and this whole Atom vs. RSS controversy is really not the sort of thing I want to spend time understanding. But my praise for Blogspot the other day brought email that made me think I had to do something to get an RSS feed. I tried Feedburner, and I have the impression I solved some technical problem that I really don't want to think about anymore. I hope this helps in some way (that I don't want to have to understand).

UPDATE: I don't think this worked. If you know how to get a Blogspot blog to produce an RSS feed, please email me some simple instructions.

FURTHER UPDATE: Columbia law student Tony Rickey helped me figure this out and wrote up a nice post to help other Blogspot bloggers get some good RSS feed going (and to explain why this is worth doing).

Booing the Kerry daughters?

I saw on Drudge last night that Vanessa and Alexandra Kerry were booed at the MTV Video Music Awards, so I set the TiVo to record the repeat presentation of the show during the night. Fastforwarding this morning, I saw that Jon Stewart was also on the show, so I kept an eye out for his appearance too. His spot preceded the Kerry kids, and I stopped to take a look. Piped in from the New York set of "The Daily Show," he did his trademark comic sputterings as he carried out his role of inviting viewers to vote for the Viewer's Choice Award. This little performance had many points where a "Daily Show" audience would have laughed a lot, but the hall itself--in Florida--was completely unresponsive.

I don't think this audience was the political type. So, it isn't really surprising that the crowd did not enjoy having its fun interrupted for a public service message about how important it is for young people to vote. It might not have been a particular dislike of Kerry or his daughters, I think, because the Bush daughters were also introduced and they appeared on a large video screen at the same time. But the Kerry daughters are significantly older, and they took a long time sashaying in high heels down a staircase before Vanessa began to speak, which she did ploddingly, in the political manner. Then Barbara and Jenna Bush spoke. They were dressed in a much more youthful, hip way, and they read the teleprompter the way an average person would read a teleprompter, stiffly. I don't think they were aware of the audience response. Then Alexandra, who looked incredibly sad, spoke. It must have been awful for them, because the whole thing went on for a long time, yet they knew from the outset that the audience did not want to hear from them at all. It's really MTV's fault for stopping the party for a public service message (which was repeated later in the show by the thuddingly unglamorous John Mellencamp).

Vodkapundit has this comment (based on reading Drudge):

There comes a time to, ah, lay politics aside. And that time, uh, comes when hotties are on the stage. And the brunette daughter, whose name I'm sure is either Alexandra or Vanessa, is a hottie.

I'm convinced that at least half of what wrong in politics in this country is due to people too concerned with politics to stop and appreciate the scenery. The Kerry girls (at least the brunette one) deserved better.

Yeah, but you should have seen the rest of the women on that show! I was only fastforwarding, but the Kerry daughters were much less attractive that the extremely glamorous, glitzy women that filled the rest of the show. By the way, I think Alexandra (the brunette one) looks like Laura Nyro. But women in music today, at least the ones on MTV, are not like the music women back in Nyro's day. And the political theme doesn't seem to fit as well with the music either.

You could conclude that it's a shame that these young people today don't care about politics, but that's not the impression I got. I think it's politically savvy to reject an attempt to usurp a music party for a political purpose. It's a solid political opinion to believe that politics don't belong everywhere.

UPDATE: A reader astutely connects the VMA booing with the booing that Hillary Clinton endured when she appeared on stage at the "Concert for New York." Like the VMA show on MTV, that concert, on VH-1, was a Viacom event.

Some people see a gathered throng as an opportunity, and it's a good thing for them to learn that individuals who become a throng for one reason do not appreciate being treated like a general-purpose throng. Note: I'm still mad about the 9/11 Memorial at the University of Wisconsin that drew 20,000 people to the Library Mall three days after the attacks. Appallingly, the speakers harangued us about war and racism, subject matter which, if announced, would have drawn virtually no crowd on that day.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader sends this link to a beautiful Laura Nyro page. I've linked to that in the past and should have remembered it. So go there and see if you agree that Alexandra Kerry looks like Laura Nyro, or just forget about Alexandra Kerry and discover or rediscover what a brilliant and beautiful artist Laura Nyro was. I especially love the album "New York Tendaberry."

"Donnie Darko."

Apparently, I've just got to see "Donnie Darko" (the director's cut version, now in theaters). That's what I've been told!

A very grand project.

Here in Madison, what was once a block that included, among other things, an arts complex called the Civic Center, is being transformed, segment by segment, into a very grand arts complex called the Overture Center. Lord knows what arts events the city is going to pull in that will justify an arts center of this magnitude, but a very generous benefactor gave the city $205 million dollars to glorify the arts. You know those American Girl dolls that a lot of folks go wild over? That's where all the money came from. Our lovely benefactor's wife, Pleasant Rowland, thought up the dolls that created the fortune, but she stays in the background now as the husband, Jerry Frautschi, is the public face of the extravagant philanthropy. The architect Cesar Pelli was given the project, and Madison people got fussy--Madison-style--about preserving some existing State Street facades (and one grand old interior), so these had to be incorporated into the project. The project is being completed in segments over the years, so that the center can stay in use. Right now, part is gleamingly finished, and part is a gaping hole. I walked around the project today and took some pictures.

Here is one completed side of the building, showing the clean lines used in the parts of the building that do not contain preserved old facade:



Around the corner, the elegant, sharp lines continue:



Construction vehicles park along the street:



Turn the corner and walk down halfway down the block, right across the street from the federal courthouse, and you see part of the old Civic Center that has not yet been torn down. I find random junk like this picturesque:



At the end of the block, there's a big gaping hole where a large chunk of the old building has been demolished:



Turn the corner and walk up State Street, and you can see, next to the gaping hole, the preserved facade of the Oscar Meyer Theater, a relic of the days when the philanthropy flowed from the low-priced meat and not the high-priced doll sector of the local economy:



At the end of the block, you can see a finished part of the building that has already incorporated an old facade, the front what was a department store, not really all that distinguished of a facade, but it was old, old, I tell you, so you can't tear that down, I don't care how famous your architect is!



On top of the old facade, the architect mounted a glass dome:



So now we have two beautiful domes within steps of each other:

Cognac, again.

A while back, I had a post about Cognac, provoked by this post in which Tonya razzed me for ordering a cognac and said: "I don't think I've ever seen anyone even order a cognac. My only association with cognac is remembering that it was a favorite drink of former DC mayor Marion ('The bitch set me up!') Barry." But I've got to do some more cognac-blogging after reading this article in the Business section of today's NYT about Navan, the vanilla-flavored cognac put out by the same company that makes Grand Marnier, the great orange-flavored cognac. The article begins this way:

JUDGING from its prodigious intake of Cognac, the hip-hop generation doesn't seem to share the White House's antipathy toward France. Inspired by the lyrical tributes of rappers from Nas to Ghostface Killah to Busta Rhymes - the last of whom penned the 2002 hit "Pass the Courvoisier" - young urban consumers have taken a shine to the drink. They are largely responsible for its stellar American sales, which climbed 13.8 percent from 2001 to 2003, according to the Adams Beverage Group. ... The rap duo OutKast had this to say about it in the 1998 song "Mamacita": "To the front, to the back, there's Cognac/Got my throat burnin' like burlap."

Well, maybe there are hugely popular rap songs--I wouldn't know--about the Margaritas and Cosmopolitans the rest of you were drinking that night, but if not, I am going to rely on this New York Times business news article as a mark of coolness.

Our sublime First Lady of love and respect.

Here's the portion of the Time Magazine interview with Laura Bush that deals with gay rights. Note that the Time interviewer, Matthew Cooper, introduces the topic with an invitation to speak from the point of view of someone who disapproves of gay people:

TIME
I was curious if there are ways that people can help those who have gay people in their own lives and be supportive of them, even if they maybe disapprove—

BUSH
Well, I think everyone should be treated with dignity. And I know the President thinks that too. That's something he says all the time.

And we're all different. And I particularly think that from having been a teacher, [one learns] to treat every child in their classroom with dignity and with respect.

Laura Bush neatly and astutely interrupts as soon as Cooper says the word "disapprove." She instantly recrafts the discussion in terms of "dignity," defends the President from what was at most a completely vague indirect criticism, and portrays herself, as always, as a benevolent teacher.

Next Cooper introduces the gay marriage topic:

TIME
And did you have a take on this gay-marriage question?

BUSH
Well, I think it's a debate. People want to be able to debate the issue, and that's exactly what the call for a constitutional amendment does. It opens the debate up. The people of the United States didn't really want the Massachusetts Supreme Court or the San Francisco mayor to make the choice for them. And we're seeing a debate on it. And I think that's good.

TIME
Did you have a take on the amendment yourself?

BUSH
I also think there should be a debate on the issue. People want to be able to talk about it—and come to terms with it, if that's what people decide.

Again, instead of responding to the question in its own terms and taking a position on the specific issue, Laura Bush reframes the subject in terms of something good, this time: "debate." And I see a hint of what her real position is: she supports gay marriage! Where do I see that? I see that in the phrase "come to terms with it." Even though the amendment seems hostile to gay people, it will create a debate on the subject and people will talk and think. The amendment process--which will, of course, ultimately fail--will turn America into the schoolroom of the benevolent teacher. Her vision is this: through the process of debate, with respect for difference, and dignity for all, Americans will "come to terms" with gay marriage. She softens that prediction with "if that's what the people decide," lest anyone who is opposed to gay marriage feel left out and dispirited by a forgone conclusion.

The interviewer persists:

TIME
Right, but are you of an open mind about the amendment?

BUSH
Sure.

A one-word answer, but one that does not match what the President has said in public. The interviewer shifts to a clever question:

TIME
Have you ever had a gay couple stay with you in the White House or in Texas?

BUSH
I'm sure we have.

"Stay with you" strongly implies staying overnight and presumably sharing a bedroom, so if Laura Bush is "sure" that has happened, that's saying quite a lot. Cooper seems surprised by the answer and doesn't blurt out a gay-sex-in-the-Lincoln-Bedroom question. Look at his next question:

TIME
You wouldn't have any objection?

Why "wouldn't"? Why not "didn't"? Didn't you hear that she just said it's already happened? I think Laura Bush was a couple steps ahead of Cooper all along. He seems to have wanted to find a way to invite her to express disapproval of gay persons. Surely, she'd draw a line at allowing a gay couple to sleep together in her own home! But she says:

BUSH
No, of course not.

Yeah, Time. How could you even imagine that Laura Bush would feel anything but love and respect for the dignity of all people?

Did the media fall out of love with John Kerry?

Instapundit connects my "lame" post from yesterday to this post from Captain's Quarters that I was halfway through writing a post about last night before I became overwhelmed with pity for John Kerry and deleted my draft. CQ writes:

After waiting weeks for the mainstream news media to cover the collapse of John Kerry's narrative on Viet Nam, and waiting out the media attack on the testimony of over 200 combat veterans, two bellwether media outlets have suddenly reversed themselves and reported on Kerry's lies and prevarications in their news sections ...

I expected the media to eventually get closer to the truth on the Swiftvet group and John O'Neill, although I never expected the Los Angeles Times to take the lead in doing so. I am stunned that the Post has, after six months of silence, started reporting on the Phoenix Project. It signals the end of the media's honeymoon with John Kerry and serves as a call for open season on the Democrat's campaign narratives.

So what happened? Did the media reach a tipping point in the last few days and, if so, why? Here's my theory.

The media are looking ahead and imagining how the history of the 2004 presidential campaign will read and how their performance will measure up. The first chapter of that history was the Howard Dean story, and the mainstream media brimmed with stories about the wonderful Howard Dean, explaining why he had all the magic. Then, they looked at bit silly when he deflated, and they quickly shifted to shining their light on Kerry as the candidate who would come out on top, and that light even influenced the voters to select him--he's such a winner--now that they had to slough off Howard Dean. So Kerry rolled into the nomination, and the media were prepared to keep a steady flattering light on him until he ascended into the presidency in November. They thought the Kerry ascendancy would be chapter two of the history of the 2004 election, and they thought they were looking good and getting the story right.

But what if chapter two was the story of Kerry making Vietnam the centerpiece of his candidacy setting off an out-of-nowhere takedown by a bunch of veterans who have been pissed off at him for 35 years? No, no way could that be the story! We aren't going to talk about that. No, no… wait a minute. Check out these polls! The ads are making an impression. The ads are seriously wounding Kerry. This looks like the turning point of the whole campaign, and it seems that from here Kerry will fall into defeat. This is chapter 2 of the history of the 2004 election, and we are going to look ridiculous if we aren't actively involved in telling the story of what happened in the 2004 election. Time to pile on John Kerry! Our interests have now officially diverged.

UPDATE: Will Collier at Vodkapundit responds, speculating that, in the end, the media will write the history in terms of the "low-down, dirty, nasty, meaner-than-we-are Republican[s]."

"That was a mistake - we need to seize on it."

Adam Nagourney reports in the NYT that this is what President Bush said to his aides after Kerry said he would have voted to authorize the President to go to war even if he had known that weapons of mass destruction would not be found. The linked article is long, but it's a long hammering of the same point: that Bush is very involved in his reelection campaign.

New "email this" feature.

I just noticed that Blogger has a new little feature, so I turned it on, which accounts for the little envelope icon there. More clutter, but possibly useful.

ADDED: And there is another new feature, which you can't see, that lets the author click directly from a blog post to a window to edit that post, something that used to take several slow-loading steps. I'm impressed that Blogger keeps improving! Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't see why people don't prefer Blogspot blogs.

Graphing politics.

Professor Bainbridge recommends Chris Lightfoot's political survey (which he especially likes because it aligns him with Margaret Thatcher). If you're ready to slog through 75 questions, take the survey. Here are my results:



Surprised?

UPDATE: Email exchange with a person who read my question and answer page:

QUESTION: You disagree that "Aggressive foreign policies can put a stop to international terrorism"?!!

MY ANSWER: I took the word "stop" literally!

This goes to show that there is a lot happening at the level of question interpretation. In fact, I picked the "no opinion" answer to many questions, because I did not think the question could be answered without more information or a clarification, which I'm sure dragged me toward dead center (where I would have been happy to have ended up!).

FURTHER UPDATE: I want to abandon the notion that the center of this graph represents moderation. Just look at where Stalin appears on that graph. How did that happen? Someone with a particularly toxic mix of right and left ideas and of idealism and pragmatism, quite extreme ideas in all four categories, could average his way into the center. That's a huge problem with visualizing political ideas spatially!

"Lame."

Last night, David Letterman had Maureen Dowd on his show. Here's a striking exchange:

LETTERMAN: Just tell me your thoughts generally about the Democratic candidate. What about John Kerry? What comes to your mind there?

DOWD: Lame. I think, uh, [laughs] very, very lame [winces].

LETTERMAN: [giggles] You said, "lame." Is that right? Lame? Uh-huh. ...

Later, they reprised the theme:

LETTERMAN: Do you think, looking at it right now, uh, John Kerry can overcome his lameness?

DOWD: Um, looking at it right now, I don't think so. No. I don't know.

UPDATE: A propos of the Instapundit link to this post, I've got some comments here.

Contracts and the Kerry Vietnam archive.

The Washington Post has an article about Douglas Brinkley's book about Kerry, "Tour of Duty." I found this interesting:

The Kerry campaign has refused to release Kerry's personal Vietnam archive, including his journals and letters, saying that the senator is contractually bound to grant Brinkley exclusive access to the material. But Brinkley said this week the papers are the property of the senator and in his full control.

"I don't mind if John Kerry shows anybody anything," he said. "If he wants to let anybody in, that's his business. Go bug John Kerry, and leave me alone." The exclusivity agreement, he said, simply requires "that anybody quoting any of the material needs to cite my book."

So Kerry, preparing to run for President and planning to lay great emphasis on his service in Vietnam, makes a contract giving exclusive access to his personal records to an author who proceeds to tell the story in the desired heroic form. Then when opponents raise questions and make people want to check the record, Kerry points to the contract he made with the hand-picked hagiographer. That turns out to be a too-neat device for suppressing the materials.

Brinkley now acts as though he's not part of the suppression of the record, but he is still demanding that Kerry meet the terms of the contract by requiring "that anybody quoting any of the material" cite his book. How could Kerry possibly make everyone do that? The various reporters and other writers aren't bound by the contract. Does Kerry have to get all of these people to sign agreements to cite Brinkley's book? It seems that Brinkley either isn't thinking this through clearly or he's being disingenuous. It seems to me that if Brinkley doesn't give up his contractual rights, he is responsible for suppressing the records.

Kerry is also responsible for the suppression. Even if Kerry can honestly say now that he'd like to release the records, he made the deal in the first place, he stood to benefit from the glowing biography that flowed from it, and he went on to make his Vietnam story the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. Now the public is expected to say oh, okay, he made a contract with an author? Clearly, Kerry should give reporters access to the record, even if it means breaching his agreement with Brinkley.

Those poor celebrities.

The NYT has an amusing article today about celebrities attempting to manage their interaction with the world of politics. Some of them are just tired from too many parties, and some need help figuring what the right parties are.

"If you're going to the Oscars and trying to go to parties, you know what all the good ones are ... But here it's brand-new territory."

And some celebrities saved up the treasure of their endorsement for such a touchingly long time that we ought to really, really care when they finally bestow it on anti-Bush:

Bruce Springsteen is probably the biggest name to be recruited by the left this campaign season, having announced his participation in a series of anti-Bush fund-raising concerts. A fellow performer said that Mr. Springsteen told him recently that he had long felt like the "Switzerland of political endorsements.''

Mr. Traub said that getting Mr. Springsteen to attend an anti-Bush event in New York would be "like getting J. D. Salinger to come to a literary conference."

But we don't care, do we? Or does the near-unanimity of celebrity endorsement for anti-Bush create a deep-seated feeling that all the cool people are on the left?

How different is Cheney from Bush on gay marriage?

There has been a lot written about the difference between President Bush and Vice President Cheney on the issue of gay marriage, but let's look at what Cheney actually said the other day at that town meeting in Iowa when he was asked what he thought about gay marriage:

Well, the question has come up obviously in the past with respect to the question of gay marriage. Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it's an issue that our family is very familiar with. We have two daughters, and we have enormous pride in both of them. They're both fine young women. They do a superb job, frankly, of supporting us. And we are blessed with both our daughters.

With respect to the question of relationships, my general view is that freedom means freedom for everyone. People ought to be able to free -- ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to. The question that comes up with respect to the issue of marriage is what kind of official sanction, or approval is going to be granted by government, if you will, to particular relationships. Historically, that's been a relationship that has been handled by the states. The states have made that basic fundamental decision in terms of defining what constitutes a marriage. I made clear four years ago when I ran and this question came up in the debate I had with Joe Lieberman that my view was that that's appropriately a matter for the states to decide, that that's how it ought to best be handled.

The President has, as result of the decisions that have been made in Massachusetts this year by judges, felt that he wanted to support the constitutional amendment to define -- at the federal level to define what constitutes marriage, that I think his perception was that the courts, in effect, were beginning to change -- without allowing the people to be involved, without their being part of the political process -- that the courts, in that particular case, the state court in Massachusetts, were making the judgment or the decision for the entire country. And he disagreed with that. So where we're at, at this point is he has come out in support of a federal constitutional amendment. And I don't think -- well, so far it hasn't had the votes to pass. Most states have addressed this. There is on the books the federal statute Defense of Marriage Act passed in 1996. And to date it has not been successfully challenged in the courts, and that may be sufficient to resolve the issue. But at this point, say, my own preference is as I've stated. But the President makes basic policy for the administration. And he's made it clear that he does, in fact, support a constitutional amendment on this issue.

Clearly, Bush has stated his opposition to gay marriage, as has Kerry for that matter. But did Cheney say he was for gay marriage? No. He said he was for leaving the definition of marriage to the states. Now, obviously, in the last part of his statement, he's holding back from saying everything he thinks, but at that point, the issue is whether there should be a constitutional amendment. Cheney refers to the concern that the actions of judges in one state will take away the ability of the individual states to continue in their traditional role of defining marriage for themselves. In that context, there is a debate about whether a constitutional amendment is needed to preserve the states' traditional role. Cheney notes the existence of the Defense of Marriage Act, and the suggestion here is, I think, that that may be enough. I think there is also a suggestion here that the amending the Constitution is a bad idea, and the point where Cheney really seems to bite his tongue is "I don't think -- well, so far it hasn't had the votes to pass." He knows (and I'm sure Bush knows) that the amendment is never going to be adopted. So what really is the difference between Bush and Cheney on this issue? The difference is over the willingness to use support for the (dead on arrival) amendment for political purposes.

We could speculate forever about what Bush and Cheney (and Kerry) really think about gay rights. But on the surface, both Bush and Cheney rely on the same leave-it-to-the-states approach that Kerry embraces. It is worth noting that Kerry was one of 14 Senators who voted against the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, but even then he expressed his opposition to the Act (in part) as "a power grab into states' rights of monumental proportions."

UPDATE: I really am missing an important point here. Bush did say, when he spoke in support of the amendment, that "[t]he amendment should fully protect marriage, while leaving the state legislatures free to make their own choices in defining legal arrangements other than marriage." So Bush does seek to deprive the states of an aspect of their traditional role, and the first sentence of Cheney's last paragraph is expressing a disagreement with that when he says "he wanted to support the constitutional amendment to define -- at the federal level to define what constitutes marriage."

"Persepolis 2."

I went over to Borders today to have some coffee and read a manuscript but took some time first to browse. That picture on the cover of Premiere magazine of Colin Farrell pretending to be Alexander the Great made me laugh, but--ah!--what is this? The second volume of Marjane Satrapi's beautifully drawn memoir has come out! I take it with me to my table along with my manuscript and my mug of Borders blend coffee. I read the first chapter slowly, savoring the crisply drawn, Bushmilleresque pictures of the feisty Iranian girl starting her new life in Austria, where she soon enough ends up in a boarding school run by nuns. Oh, this is too good! I could read the whole thing right now! I close it up, read half of the manuscript, finish the coffee, and go buy the book, which I will carefully consume in small, picture-gazing doses.

The marching band.

There is something new in the air this morning and I feel it pulling me into the Fall Semester: the sound of the UW Marching Band. It's a sound of the season woven into my life for twenty years. The band practices down in a field over by Lake Mendota and something about the acoustics of the lake and the hill of University Heights where my house sits transforms the marching music into something ethereal and poignant--a bit like a Czechoslovakian emigré composer in Canada rearranging "The Star Spangled Banner."

Two articles about politics and art.

As I've said before, politics and art usually means bad politics and bad art. A lot of people favor keeping religion separate from politics (with good reason!): I favor keeping that other sublime thing, art, separate from politics. Every once in a while there's a Guernica to provide the counter example. But Guernica is to art and politics, as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. is to religion and politics.

So these two articles caught my eye this morning:

The High Art of Highbrow Protest: Antiwar hacks invade New York, by Eric Gibson in the Wall Street Journal

Caution: Angry Artists at Work, by Roberta Smith in the New York Times.

Both articles cover artists reacting to the Republican conventioneers coming to New York City. Be sure to click over to the Smith article if only to see the reproduction of the painting of John Kerry that makes me give thanks once again that the English language contains the word "bathetic." But most of Smith's lengthy article is a round-up of the various art shows in town that have snagged a big write-up in the Times by being about the election.

Gibson's much shorter piece refers briefly to a few of these shows and is, to my liking, much more barbed:

There is ... a deadening uniformity of manner and outlook. The same bugbears appear over and over: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, the Patriot Act--even the supposedly hawkish media. The work fairly seethes with dire assessments of our current condition, expressed in trite cliché.

Two categories of Vietnam draft avoiders.

Did you know that those who found ways to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War ought to be put in two categories? There is one category, which President Clinton belongs in, and one category, which President Bush belongs in. What are those two categories? Democrat and Republican? No, as Neil Sheehan, Pulitzer Prize-winner, writes in an op-ed in today's NYT:

One must be careful in pointing a finger at those who avoided service in Vietnam. Many, like President Clinton, had moral objections to the war. The gimmicks they used to stay out of it were tawdry, but they acted from motives of conscience. Mr. Bush - like his father's vice president, Dan Quayle, who sheltered in the Indiana National Guard, and his own vice president, Dick Cheney, who obtained five draft deferments - are in a different category. From what can be discerned, none of them opposed the Vietnam War. Had the younger Mr. Bush not stood aside from the central, transforming event of his youthful years, his performance as president might have been closer to that of the wise and capable commander-in-chief he claims to be but has not been. He might have learned a lesson from Vietnam - do not become involved in an unnecessary war.

Yes, one must be careful, because you wouldn't want to create an argument that will be used against the many, many men who did what they could to avoid service. Don't be so short-sighted in your efforts to promote Kerry! You need a more nuanced argument, an argument that will allow us to continue to sneer at Bush and Cheney and future Republican candidates and still preserve the path to power for the many Democrats who avoided service. Here's the concept: we'll divide up the Vietnam-service-avoiders (including those who served in the National Guard) into those who "acted from motives of conscience" and those who thought only of their personal safety and comfort. In this analysis, Clinton gets to be the man of conscience, because he opposed the war, and Bush, despite his service in the National Guard, is the selfish one, because we can't discern from the record whether he opposed the war.

In fact, let's even divide up the men who did serve into the same two categories: the ones who participated in the "transforming event" of their time and opposed the war and the ones who did not:

Unnoticed in the controversy over the Swift Boat group's accusations is an undercurrent that lingers from the war. The men who fought in Vietnam and survived came back as divided as the public at home. Most suffered in silence, then picked up their lives and went on. But some, like John Kerry, were so disillusioned that they felt they had to do something to stop the war. Another minority persisted in their faith that the war could be won, that America is an exception to history and can do no wrong.

(Unless you were with those who wanted an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, you believed America can do no wrong?) Sheehan goes on to say that Vietnam was an "unnecessary and unwinnable war, a tragic, terrible mistake" and that all the veterans deserve respect for their valor even though they had the "ill luck to draw a bad war." He titles his op-ed "A War Without End," suggesting that we need to get past Vietnam, but he is introducing a new litmus test for candidates: did they oppose the Vietnam war when they were young? Let's comb over the old record and see if we can discern anti-war activities, and if not, we'll say you were out of touch with your transformative time and you failed to learn the lessons needed to qualify you for leadership. At that rate the "War Without End" will never end.

Two observations about Kerry's 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Last night, like many people, I watched the C-Span presentation of Kerry's 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I found this opening line a bit strange:

I would simply like to speak in very general terms. I apologize if my statement is general because I received notification yesterday you would hear me and I am afraid because of the injunction I was up most of the night and haven't had a great deal of chance to prepare.

The "very general" remarks turn out to be an elaborate and eloquently written statement. The Committee Chairman, Senator Fulbright, seems to accept the image of Kerry dashing off the statement at the last minute: "You said you had been awake all night. I can see that you spent that time very well indeed." This draws a laugh from the crowd, and it made me laugh too. Hearing it last night, I couldn't help but think that Kerry has an intense drive to make a myth out of himself: he's a man who, sleep-deprived, can, at the last minute, jot down what turns out to be a brilliant and devastating speech (written out longhand on a yellow pad?). But it isn't really very funny: the urge to self-mythologize is not a desirable quality in a President.

Of course, I also see the deniability written into the statement. He doesn't literally say he wrote the speech himself during the night, only that he didn't have "a great deal of chance to prepare." If pressed, he could easily concede that the speech had been written well in advance and that he merely meant that he hadn't had a chance to practice delivering the speech. I'm not saying he lied, only that he crafted his words to create a heroic image of himself.

Another things that struck me that Kerry said right at the beginning of his testimony was:

I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of testimony.

The Swift Boat Veterans' second ad has been criticized for taking Kerry's testimony out of context and not making it clear that he was only quoting other people. But look at Kerry's introduction: it is a grandiose assertion, claiming to say what all veterans would say. Senator Fulbright proceeds to accept his statement as the statement of all veterans ("Mr. Kerry, it is quite evident from that demonstration that you are speaking not only for yourself but for all your associates, as you properly said in the beginning"). I can see how that might create a simmering anger in the veterans who felt their own stories were preempted, an anger that boiled over when Kerry premised his presidential campaign on his status as a war veteran. Kerry's portrayal of the Vietnam experience, which he claimed was every vet's story, was one of atrocities and war crimes and the realization that they had fought for nothing:

I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.

Kerry took it upon himself to say what millions of men felt, and it is not surprising that a good number of them resented being characterized as a tiny subcomponent of an angry "monster." Kerry contributed to the painful stereotype of the Vietnam vet as a crazy, violent misfit.

Kerry was, I think, "laser-beam focused" on stopping the war. His words were well-received by many who put that goal above all else, because those words powerfully expressed complete negativity about the war. I think there are many people today who oppose the Iraq war the same way and who use the same rhetoric: everything about the war is abysmally, hopelessly wrong. Yet the situation then as now was more complex than will be admitted by many who have formed a firm belief that they know what the right outcome is. Those who choose to express themselves this way, however, can create a lot of angry opponents as well as a lot of ammunition for their opponents' arguments. Of course, taking the position that the war is actually a complex problem--as Kerry has done with Iraq--creates another set of opponents and arguments.

Soccer gold.

"Running with Scissors"--the movie.

I'm glad to see there's going to be a well-cast movie of the book "Running with Scissors." Here's the relevant portion of the Black Table interview with the author Augusten Burroughs:

[Black Table interviewer LITSA DREMOUSIS]: Hey, what's up with the film version of "Scissors"? Julianne Moore is in it, right?

AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS: Yeah, she is.

LD: Is that finished? Is that in post-production now?

AB: No, no, no. It's not finished yet. I think it's going to start shooting--I think Ryan Murphy told me it's going to start shooting in January, I think. The first draft of the script is done and he's going to make some revisions on that. I've read it and he did a great job.

LD: Is he the guy who writes and directs "Nip/Tuck"?

AB: Yeah. That's his little baby, one of them. I like him a lot. He's not an established film director, but I just have a gut instinct about the guy. To me, that's just as important. And he had a similar mother, so he totally got her [Augusten's mother]. I mean, it's different, the treatment of the book is different because it's a whole different media, you know? And I wasn't expecting it to be slavishly devoted to the book, but it's a lot closer than I expected, actually. A lot of the dialogue is just lifted up from the book.

He's switched some stuff around and made it great. It's going to be a great film, I think. I think it has a chance to be a great film. I mean, Julianne Moore, though, she could just sit there. She's got one of those faces that's just very interesting to watch.

LD: Anyone else we'd recognize?

AB: I don't know who else has agreed officially. I think, Cate Blanchett. I think she'll play Hope. Like I said, I'm not sure, though.

I'll just go out on a limb and say Julianne Moore will finally win her much-deserved Oscar. The role in question has everything an actress could ever want.

UPDATE: I wonder who is in the running for the fabulous role of the crazy psychiatrist Dr. Finch? I would think Tom Hanks, perhaps, or Robin Williams.

Forced Wisecrack of the Day.

ABCNEWS.com reports this reaction from Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt to Kerry's proposal that there be weekly debates between the candidates:

There will be a time for debates after the convention, and during the next few weeks, John Kerry should take the time to finish the debates with himself. This election presents a clear choice to the American people between a President who is moving America forward and a Senator who has taken every side of almost every issue and has the most out of the mainstream record in the U.S. Senate.

The repopulated Law School.

It was fun to walk into the Law School atrium today and find it suddenly brimming with people! The new students are here. The old students are back. Life in Madison shifts into fall mode. Welcome as summer is, fall always feels great.

A developing wave of revulsion.

David Carr (in the NYT) reports, amusingly, on the disgust New Yorkers are feeling about the approaching Republican conventioneers. The best quote is from The Weekly Standard's Matt Labash:

They can say that they won't even know we are here, but they will. We will plunk down our garment bags in their hopelessly trendy hotels, standing out like Good Humor men in our summer-weight khaki suits while all those hipster squirrels scramble for our tips. ... They needn't worry. The contempt is mutual."

I also liked this, from Details editor Daniel Peres:

I don't want to see a lot of bad Men's Warehouse suits and a lot of badly parted hair walking around my neighborhood. All Republicans part their hair the same way.

Note the assumption that all Republicans are not only repulsive, but male. Or do Republican women have Trent Lott hair too?

The article also contains an interesting comparison between the way power operates in in New York and in Washington, which is connected to the feelings of mutual contempt. The theory is that Washington power is all about what position of power you hold, but New York power is less "hierarchical" and more "dispersed": In New York, you can be powerful through physical beauty or controlling access to a trendy place. The notion seems to be that people who have succeeded playing one city's power game find it quite unsettling to share physical space with the set of powerful persons produced by the other city's game.

Hardball: Max Cleland and the Chairman of the FEC.

On Hardball tonight, Max Cleland (he of the undelivered letter) fast-talked his way through a series of accusations against Bush, most notably that it was absolutely clear that Bush had broken the law by having connections to the Swift Boat Veterans. Chris Matthews loved Cleland's rant and told him he was more articulate than Kerry. Later, Matthews brought out Bradley Smith, the Chairman of the Federal Election Commission and asked him why the Democratic lawyer, Robert Bauer wasn't in the same position as Ginsberg, the Bush lawyer who quit today. Smith's answer was enlightening:

People have to decide how they want to handle their own affairs, but I was surprised to see, for example, Senator Cleland be so aggressive on saying that's proof that they're violating the law, because clearly a lawyer can advise two clients. What he can't do is transfer inside information from the campaign from one to another.

MATTHEWS: Why'd Ginsberg quit if he did nothing wrong?

SMITH: Because he thought appearances were perhaps bad. I mean, the thing is if that's the standard, merely having the same lawyer, then the Kerry campaign and a lot of these Democrats have a big, big problem on their hands for the reasons you've already suggested.

MATTHEWS: So you think that on its face, prima facie, there's no case to be made for coordination, simply by the presence of a shared lawyer.

SMITH: That, in and of itself, wouldn't be enough. Now, it might be something that might be enough to trigger an investigation into various ties between the groups, but that's going to be sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.

MATTHEWS: How do you prove that some guy like Bob Perry didn't get a call from somebody like Karl Rove or anybody else in the Bush world and said, you know, we could use a little money. Shake some money loose for these vets? ...

SMITH: Well, this is very hard stuff to prove. How do you prove that Americans Coming Together isn't coordinated with the Kerry Campaign? They've got offices next to one another. Kerry's former campaign manager runs one of these groups ... These are fact-intensive investigations. ... I'm surprised to see how aggressive the Kerry folks have come out on this.

Smith notes that the FEC will investigate if it receives a complaint, but it must take 60 days before issuing a finding, at which point it might impose a fine. I guess that shows why aggressively asserting that there are legal violations might work as a political argument: the FEC's finding will come too late to undercut those assertions. Meanwhile, the mere fact that Ginsberg has resigned will be waved around as proof that there was a violation. Quite deceptive. But will people see through it, or will they just say: oh, it's a big, weird legal tangle, so let's forget about all of this Vietnam stuff? That's the "swirly mass of confusion" strategy I theorized Kerry was following, and it irks me no end to see these spurious claims of legal violations being thrown about. The campaign law is already burdening free speech, and the ease of making these accusations seems to be causing people to restrict themselves even beyond what that law requires. The law didn't make Ginsberg quit: people's willingness to sling accusations about did. Cleland's performance on Hardball tonight was a very low sort of partisan politics, which I hope will be ineffective.

UPDATE: Ginsberg appeared on "The O'Reilly Factor" tonight and, not surprisingly, stated emphatically that he hadn't violated the law, that he was entitled to have several clients, and that he didn't pass information from client to client. He quit, he said, because he'd become a distraction. This was his parting shot, in answer to O'Reilly's question "Do you think Kerry's an honest man":

I don't know that. I think that the tactics that they've taken towards the Swift Boat Vets and, frankly, towards my role in this controversy is far from honorable and far from honest.

And speaking of Millet ...

There's this Millet and this proposal for the Nebraska quarter, which Jeremy is blogging about. [UPDATE: Sorry I had the wrong Millet link before!]

Jeremy directs us to a website for Nebraskans to vote on the quarter designs, and let me just say that I love the state quarters project, but I keep being disappointed by the choices. No state has yet equaled the fine Connecticut coin, which came out in the first year of the series. Connecticut did it right: it picked one thing, and the thing looked right on something small and round. The first state to do a bad job, also in the first year, was Pennsylvania, which introduced the terrible idea of including the outline of the state, especially bad if you've got a state with a boring shape. I can understand Texas falling for the state outline choice, but Pennsylvania should be penalized.

For Nebraska, I like design #8, because it commits to a single distinctive element, however I'd be a little afraid to pick a natural rock formation, given what happened in the aftermath of the New Hampshire quarter.

Innovative blogging: "Law & Entrepreneurship."

My colleague Gordon Smith has started a Law & Entrepreneurship blog, which you'll definitely want to keep track of if you're interested in law and entrepreneurship, but is also generally interesting for anyone interested in professor's blogs, because he's recruited a group of students to do the writing, with each student assigned to cover a particular topic: Alliances, Bankruptcy & Debtor/Creditor, Blog Reviews, Comparative Entrepreneurship, Contracts, Copyright & Trademark, Corporations, Employees, Family Businesses, Franchising, International Trade, Patents & Technology, Securities, Small Businesses, Taxation, Unincorporated Entities, Venture Capital, Wisconsin. From what I can tell, this a pretty innovative (and entrepreneurial) approach to blogging. Congratulations to all involved!

Here's Gordon's individual blog, where he's got a nice post today about how to become a law professor. (He's chair of the Appointments Committee this year at Wisconsin Law School.)

And let me just add that the Law & Entrepreneurship site looks good, and the choice of Millet's "Les Glaneuses" to illustrate entrepreneurship is really interesting. Though some may see this picture as expressing pity for the lot of the lowest class, the picture really can also be seen as beautifully idealizing hard work at the individual level.

12 observations about John Kerry on "The Daily Show."

Assorted observations made while watching John Stewart's Daily Show interview of John Kerry. (Full transcript at Wonkette.)

1. John Kerry has a sheepish look on his face as he lumbers out, which I interpret to mean that he thinks it's a bit odd for him to be on the show. As he's walking he spreads his arms open a bit, as if to say, here I am. He claps once, which I interpret to mean: I am here to have fun.

2. Rather than wait for Stewart's first question, he says, "I didn't understand it. Turf, trees and boxes," which refers to a pretty funny segment earlier on the show and reinforces my belief that he really wants to show he's having a great time. It sounds a bit forced, but so what? He prolongs it with: "That's why I'm running for President. We're stamping them out. Turf, trees and boxes. ... And agencies I--" Stewart cuts him off--mercifully?--so we don't get to find out where he was going with that "I." Actually, it might be fun to hear where a liberal Senator would go with the idea of "stamping out agencies" ... but probably not that much fun. Better to let Stewart steer us into the fun.

3. Stewart opens with "I watch a lot of the cable news shows. So I understand that apparently you were never in Vietnam." Kerry leans his head back and laughs heartily, because he's having fun, you know? Even though there's no way this matter can be fun for him. He says his line--"That's what I understand, too. But I-- I'm trying to find out what happened ... That part of my life. I don't know."--with a smile, but not such a broad smile. It's a bit of a wince. When he says the last part he puts his hand out, palm down, and gives the little back and forth rotation gesture that normally signifies: I'm not quite getting this right. He then clasps his hands in his lap, and his forced smile falls away, as Stewart launches into the next question. Kerry rubs his nose with his knuckle.

4. The "overtalk" in the transcript after Stewart asks "Is it-- do you-- do you-- is it hard not to take it personally?" is in fact easy to understand. Kerry says: "They said that too." That means that the interchange that follows--Stewart's "Oh, with you as well?" and Kerry's "Yeah"--refers to Stewart's previous joke, that the Swift Boat problem is like having your friends say that 35 years ago you "had cooties."

5. Stewart tries to get Kerry to talk about how this attack makes him feel, which is a little like the old what-if-your-wife-was-raped question asked of Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential debates. And Kerry, like Dukakis, ignores the opportunity to show passionate feeling. (By the way: I liked when Dukakis did that. I don't want a hothead President, and it was an opportunity to display rationality and deep-rooted oppostion to the death penalty. No one else seems to think so, however.) Kerry simply plugs in the argument that Bush is relying on these attacks because he doesn't want to talk about his record. This plugged-in argument bugs me because: 1. Bush does not control the speech of the Swift Boat Vets and 2. Kerry just used the whole Democratic Convention, which he did control, to talk about his Vietnam record and not anything more recent.

6. The transcript at this point says:

You know what it is, Jon? It-- it-- it's disappointing because I think most Americans would like to have a much more intelligent conversation about where the country's going. And-- (APPLAUSE) yeah, I think that-- you know, and-- and, yeah, it's a little bit disappointing.

There's a pause after "going," and there is no reaction from the audience. Kerry starts to slowly say "and," at which point there's a sudden cheer from the audience. I'd like to see the long view of the set at that point, because surely, an applause sign or human cheerleader was required for that response.

7. Stewart asks him if he was "surprised" by the attack. As I've written a couple times in the last few days, Kerry should have seen the attack coming. He says:

Sure I'm surprised. But surprised in a sense. But now that I begin to see the web and the network, I'm not surprised. I think-- you know, it's politics. And for whatever reasons, the-- the-- and I think Americans will discover it as we go forward in the next four or five weeks, George Bush doesn't wanna talk about the real issues. I mean, what's he gonna do? Come out and say we lost 1.8 million jobs? ...

The web and the network. It's a veritable skein of connections, isn't it? And only now can he see it. And then he fumbles back to his big talking point: Bush doesn't want to talk about the issues.

8. As he goes into shopping list mode--jobs, health care, the environment, everyone in the world being angry at us--Stewart interrupts with what is for some a serious question but what Stewart surely sees--as his finger-wagging and tone of voice reveal--as another example of a distracting non-issue:

Sir, I'm sorry. Were you or were you not in Cambodia on Christmas Eve? (LAUGHTER) They said-- you said five miles. They said three. (LAUGHTER)

Kerry throws his head back and laughs. At "they said three," he scratches his left thigh quite vigorously. [CORRECTION: right thigh!] Stewart leans way forward, resting on his crossed arms, in comic imitation of a stern interrogator, and stares straight at Kerry. Kerry gets the idea and does a mirror-image pose, with their faces five inches apart, which is either cute or scary, depending on who you're planning to vote for in November.

9. Stewart asks "Are you the number one most liberal senator in the Senate?" and I realize that this is the exact point where I fell asleep last night when I was watching the show live in the room without a TiVo.

10. Kerry keeps plugging in his stump speech and it isn't very lively or fun or personal, which seemed like the idea of going on "The Daily Show." Stewart leans forward to make a quip, and Kerry reaches out with both hands and grabs him and mutters something unintelligible. I think Kerry could see that he needed to give Stewart a chance to make the situation fun. Stewart's question was, "Can-- can you get me on a network?" which I find really funny, in part because it's typical of the jokes we make around the house when listening to one of Kerry's lists of promises: Will you come over and pay my bills? Can you help me with my homework?

11. Wonkette got a big kick out of this line:

Well, you should hear some of-- I'm telling you. The-- the-- no, I-- I shouldn't go into that out here. But I've been in some-- some-- you'd be amazed the number of people who wanna introduce themselves to you in the men's room.

In case you're wondering where the hell that came from or was going (he didn't get to finish), I'm certain it was a reference to the GQ article, "A Beer With John Kerry," which begins with an anecdote about the author being treated coldly by Kerry when he tried to talk with him as he was coming out of a men's room. (Who wants to shake hands with a guy that just came out of the men's room?) I'd guess that Kerry sees "The Daily Show" in a way similar to the "A Beer" article: a chance to get personal and to show he's a regular guy. But Stewart has to stop him, because he's running out of time and he really does have a lovely ketchup joke. Kerry takes the joke gracefully.

12. After Stewart ends the interview and the audience applauds, Kerry turns to the audience and SALUTES! He doesn't wave, he salutes. The kids love that.

Lawyers and the campaign law Catch-22

One strategy to make the Swift Boat controversy go away might be to refocus on a topic so eye-glazingly tedious that people will prefer to talk about anything else. That topic is lawyers and the requirements of campaign finance law. Here's the front-page story in today's NYT about the travails of a lawyer--Benjamin L. Ginsberg--who specializes in helping people comply with the complicated campaign finance law. Is campaign finance law a Catch-22, where it's so complicated you need a specialist lawyer to avoid violating it, but if you go to the specialist, he will then be a hub that connects you to other people who are trying to comply with the complicated law, and that in itself will be the violation of the law?

According to the NYT, Ginsberg has a counterpart, Robert Bauer, who advises the Kerry campaign as well as groups that are not supposed to coordinate with the campaign. Both sides need to get technical legal advice to attempt to comply with the law, so shouldn't both sides avoid calling foul over every line that can be traced from a 527 group to the candidate's campaign through through a lawyer who specializes in campaign law compliance? The law requires that there be no coordination between the campaign and the 527 group. I'm no specialist in this area of law, but to "coordinate" means "[t]o work together harmoniously." We shouldn't be so ready to call every connection coordination unless the real goal is to deter the independent groups from operating at all. Of course, President Bush has openly embraced that goal--which I think contravenes free speech principles--and Ginsberg himself, as the article describes, was involved in using a strong interpretation of campaign law to control the 527s that were working against Bush. Poor Ginsberg looks hypocritical now that the pro-Bush 527s are finally kicking into gear. But I don't see how the pro-Kerry forces can complain about Ginsberg when they have Bauer.

I think a terribly complicated problem has emerged here, as everyone tries to win political advantage and everyone takes every opportunity to exploit the campaign law to his advantage. The campaign now threatens to devolve into a dispute about lawyers and legalistic matters. That's likely to turn everybody off.

UPDATE: And now, Ginsberg has severed his ties to the Bush campaign. Bauer?

Weirdest link of the day.

Sadly, No has an odd reaction to my post from yesterday about the Times reporter who seems to think all blondes look alike. And check out some of the comments! One hears about the "dumb blonde," but this reaction seems to indicate that blond hair is disabling to the mind of the beholder.

UPDATE: Jeremy comments, using formal logic notation!

Philosophy and terror.

I would love to hear more of the story of Micah Garen, who, John Burns writes in today's NYT, "spent 10 harrowing days this month, as a captive of Islamic militants who took him hostage in the southern city of Nasiriya and threatened to execute him unless American troops withdrew from Najaf."

[H]e had resolved at the most threatening moments of his kidnapping ... not to allow what he called the "moments of terror" to shake him out of a cool, rational appraisal of his situation.

To that end, he said, he spent his days held captive in a date palm grove, with his hands tied behind his back and his eyes often blindfolded, discussing Hegel and other scholarly topics with his fellow captive, Amir Doushi, an Iraqi English teacher working as his interpreter. ...

There were a few moments of terror," Mr. Garen said, "but my main thought was to keep my mind clear so that we could figure out what the people holding us were going to do, so that we could try and control the situation. My thinking was that we should be ready, so that if they said, 'We're going to kill you,' we'd have at least a chance of fighting back."

What a profoundly beautiful and inspiring commitment to learning and rationality!

"Blogress."

It was nice to get linked today by the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web, which I've enjoyed reading for years. I see BOTW's James Taranto refers to me as "Blogress Ann Althouse." What do I think of that? Well, first, I see "ogress" in it, and that makes me think maybe a male blogger should be called "blogre." Second, I realize Google will come in handy, since it's an unusual word. Calblog complains about the coinage here (reacting to a usage by Best of the Web). I see some people have used the word "blogress" to refer to blog progress. And here's Boi From Troy noting that Best of the Web called Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox a "Left-Wing Blogress," but not really objecting. Regular BOTW readers know of Taranto's thing about getting people to use the word "kerfuffle," so maybe "blogress" is another one of his projects. Ah yes! So it is! Oh, well, if it's good enough for Wonkette .... if Wonkette is good enough for Wonkette.

Not blogging on trashy TV shows anymore?

I'm really in the mood to blog about trashy TV. Ah! For the days of "American Idol 3" and "The Apprentice." I don't know what's wrong with me, but I'm not watching any trashy shows at the moment. I've given the Olympics high priority on my TiVo "wish list," and there's really not much to say about the Olympics, other than it's getting a bit tiresome, even with TiVo--or maybe especially with TiVo. I've got all those old "episodes" to watch. It's really grueling getting through all those rounds of gymnastics. How many stuck and unstuck landings do you need to see? The mind drifts. I find myself wondering why the men wear long, roomy stirrup pants and the women wear high-cut leotards. Does it have anything to do with the fact that the women have substantial, muscular legs and the men have strangely undersized legs (at least in proportion to their gigantic upper bodies)? And racing: What's to watch, really? Somebody or another is going to get there first. There are no fancy antics on the way. Ennui sets in! Are the team sports better? Not for me. I care least about the team sports. There's the vague amusement at the large amount of airtime given to women's beach volleyball, but to me it drives home the point that much of what we are doing as viewers is ogling extremely specialized, well-developed bodies. That's slightly fascinating for a while. And yet, at this point, I'm quite tired of it all. I've gotten to thinking that it will be fun to watch the Republican Convention next week, which is really rather an absurd thing to think.

Out of vogue word.

You don't normally notice when a word everyone used to say a lot falls out of favor. Then sometimes someone uses that old word again and you notice. Today, I heard a man use the word "interface" to refer to making a phone call, and I thought, yeah, it's nice that people don't say that anymore ... except that guy.

That three strikes Purple Heart rule.

Sam Schechner, writing in Slate, answers the pressing question: How do you get a Purple Heart anyway? Citing various military texts, he paraphrases: "a Band-Aid boo-boo is fair game, so long as enemy action is somewhere obvious in the causal chain." He concludes with the Slate "Explainer" sign-off: "Next question?"

Okay, I have a question. If it is so easy to get a Purple Heart, how was the military able to have that rule allowing you to go home early upon winning three? Three "Band-Aid boo-boos" and you can go home? How did that work exactly? How many people left early that way? How eagerly did people write up scratches in the hope of escape? As I write that, I worry that I'm insulting the people who went to war and did their duty and did not look for an out. But is that not what Kerry did? I don't particularly blame him, because virtually all the young men I knew--I went to college in 1969-1973--openly and on a day-to-day basis looked for ways to avoid Vietnam.

Did the three Purple Hearts rule work because when you were in action, fighting with a group of men, peer pressure would keep you from pursuing that out? If so, and if Kerry overcame the pressure and took the out, then the Swift Boat Vets are the peers returning to express the very anger that those swayed by peer pressure strive to avoid.

The swirl continues.

I complained yesterday that the Kerry camp is trying to create a swirly mass of confusion about the Swift Boat Vet ads (specifically about who's really behind them), and I see today the NYT TV critic Alessandra Stanley is visualizing cable news as a swirly mass: an industrial laundry dryer, tumbling "Facts, half-truths and passionately tendentious opinions ... without the softeners of fact-checking or reflection."

Somehow, on all-cable news stations - CNN as well as Fox News - a story that rises or falls on basic and mostly verifiable facts blurs into just another developing news sensation alongside the latest Utah kidnapping or the Scott Peterson murder trial. (It is particularly confusing on Fox News, where so many of its blond female anchors look like Amber Frey.)

Yes, all those blondes look alike, don't they? I think most Fox News viewers can tell the difference between the beautiful Laurie Dhue and anyone else.

Fox News, which delivers its news with "Fight Club" ferocity, has relished the controversy the most, seizing hungrily on charges that Mr. Kerry lied to gain his medals.

From this, you'd never guess that Bill O'Reilly, by far the most prominent news analyst on the channel, repeatedly states his strong opposition to the Swift Boat ads. Stanley makes this point, however, that I agree with:

[Cable news] has grown into a lazy habit: anchors do not referee - they act as if their reportage is fair and accurate as long as they have two opposing spokesmen on any issue.

This is really the basic "Crossfire" idea for a show. It goes back at least as far as the old "60 Minutes" "Point/Counterpoint" bit that Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd spoofed on "Saturday Night Live" in the 1970s. It seems to work well enough to bring in an audience of the subset of TV watchers who are willing to watch political shows. But I don't know if anyone is getting confused by this sort of thing. People in the middle who want to decide between the two sides just won't watch--you don't sit and watch the laundry tumbling in the dryer. The people who are watching are already bound to one partisan side, and for them it's more like watching a sports match and cheering for your team. You enjoy a lively competition, you don't rethink your support for you team, and you don't long for a more interventionistic referee.

UPDATE; Bill O'Reilly had the Stanley article as "The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day" on his show last night and noted that he'd be vindicated if the Times would print a transcript of his show from the previous night, which really did have a long segment cooly going through the Swift Boat charges (with Chris Wallace) and evaluating them. His final slam unnecessarily slurred blogs, as he said her article "belongs on one of those bomb-throwing websites, not in a national newspaper." Some day, it may be a compliment to say something sounds like what is written in the blogs. To be fair, he did specify the "bomb-throwing websites" and not blogs in general.

Man in the paint store.

I went to the paint store to pick up some special string I had ordered to fix my window blinds, and there was a man in front of me who had a bizarrely robust way of saying everything. His wife was going to come in later to pick something up, so he said the "Sargent Major" would come by. Then, he had had to agree to something and he said "ten four." Then, the clerk handed him something and he declared: 'You're a man among men."

Memorial.

Iran Focus (via Metafilter):

On Sunday, August 15, a 16-year-old girl in the town of Neka, northern Iran, was executed. Ateqeh Sahaleh was hanged in public on Simetry Street off Rah Ahan Street at the city center.

The sentence was issued by the head of Neka’s Justice Department and subsequently upheld by the mullahs’ Supreme Court and carried out with the approval of Judiciary Chief Mahmoud Shahroudi.

In her summary trial, the teenage victim did not have any lawyer and efforts by her family to recruit a lawyer was to no avail. Ateqeh personally defended herself. She told the religious judge, Haji Rezaii, that he should punish the main perpetrators of moral corruption not the victims.

The judge personally pursued Ateqeh’s death sentence, beyond all normal procedures and finally gained the approval of the Supreme Court. After her execution Rezai said her punishment was not execution but he had her executed for her “sharp tongue”.

Judge Posner is blogging!

Over at lessig blog. So far it's all about copyright. Copyright and "The Matrix" is his favorite movie. It's "a portent of one of the directions in which technology is moving us."

Fall semester approaches.

Today is the deadline for getting class materials to the copy shop at the Law School, so I've got to put the finishing touches on my packet of Civil Procedure II cases. Deadlines are helpful: I'm sure I'll get it done today because today is the deadline. (They wouldn't duplicate my materials if I handed them in tomorrow?) But deadlines can cause delay too: I could have polished off the materials two weeks ago, but when I got an email saying August 23rd was the deadline, somehow the materials decided to refuse to be done until August 23rd.

Classes don't begin until next Tuesday [ACTUALLY: Thursday], here in Wisconsin, where leaving the students free to work through Labor Day is good for the state economy, given the many resorts. But elsewhere, law school classes are starting. I'm incredibly excited to hear about my son's classes at Cornell. Most law schools start their first year students with something very much like the same four courses that have started law school for as long as anyone can remember: Contracts, Torts, Criminal Law, and Civil Procedure. But there are some variations. At Cornell, they save Criminal Law until second semester and offer Constitutional Law instead. I don't know why. Perhaps because students always seem eager to study Conlaw, but the reality of Conlaw may be quite a shock. How can anyone deal with Marbury v. Madison as their first assignment? How many class hours would you need to spend on Marbury if it was the first thing you were inflicting on first years? Six?

But I have no first year students in the Fall semester. My students are always the more seasoned type. My CivPro is CivPro2, an elective for second or third year students, who have all had four credit hours of Civpro already. They are onto the ways of Civil Procedure and primed for arcana of jurisdiction and the Erie Doctrine. My other class is "Religion and the Constitution," a Conlaw 2 course that deals with the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. I'm teaching the course as a two credit class this time, after doing three credits last year, so I need to pare down the syllabus. I don't need to rearrange it, but I'm inclined to anyway. There are so many interesting places to start with the religion cases: what inroad should we take this year?

"When those connections are made in this campaign and are imputed to this president, it's going to be a very bad thing for the president."

The NYT reports on the Kerry response to the Swift Boat Veterans ad:

Mr. Kerry's advisers said they believed that voters would turn against Mr. Bush if they were convinced that he was behind what several described as unethical campaign behavior.

That's an interesting "if," because it means that if Bush is not behind the ads, it suggests a hope of gaining the advantage by creating the impression that there is a connection.

A senior Kerry adviser, Tad Devine, said in an interview that there had been a number of instances over the years in which outside groups had run damaging advertisements against Democrats in races involving Mr. Bush or his father.

"When those connections are made in this campaign and are imputed to this president, it's going to be a very bad thing for the president," Mr. Devine said.

How is this not an open admission of a smear campaign against Bush?

Bill Carrick, a Democratic strategist who is not involved in the presidential race, also said: "It may be voters presume there are two sides in this contest and one side is attacking the other and they blame Bush for the attacks."

So it seems that Kerry's idea for how to deal with this huge Swift Boat Veterans problem is to churn up a swirly mass of impressions and imputations and then hope that he is the one who looks clean in the end. The Kerry people seem to be hoping that people are too dim to understand that a group of Bush supporters could operate independently or conspiracy-minded enough to think they all coordinate behind the scenes in plain violation of the law. There is a separate point Kerry has made that Bush should openly denounce the ads and that his failure to do so signifies a willingness to reap the advantages they bring him. That's the clean point, but it has been made, and it apparently hasn't done well enough, because we now see the campaign boat steering over the border into right-wing-conspiracy land.

But what is the solution for Kerry? I'm sure his people are racking their brains now. But they should have thought this through earlier, back when they were so sure that if the candidate stood up at the convention as a war hero that he would be greeted with candy and flowers. They convinced each other that what they wanted to believe was true, and, as a consequence they never had a plan for how to deal with the attacks that they should have known were there.

"Next blog."

I love the new Blogger tool bar, especially the "next blog" feature. It's like channel surfing on TV. There's a certain pleasure to switching to the next blog and the next blog aimlessly. It's more fun than channel surfing really, because it is so unpredictable and most of the places you go are so tiny. Yet each place is a person somewhere, someone sweet or smart or nutty or ordinary. It could be anywhere in the world, especially Brazil, and it might not even say where it is, but you might be able to tell from a picture that it's right in your own home town. Often you encounter a blog with only one post, the very germ of a blog. I'm struck by how charming everyone seems: Today was a lot of fun at church. .... I inked a drawing! ... Met Steph's new kitties and they are absolutely adorable...

Kerry at the VFW Convention.

Right now, C-Span is showing John Kerry's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention from Wednesday. The lack of response from the group is quite pronounced. There is polite applause at a few key places, but dead silence at many of the applause lines. Kerry realizes what is happening early on and at many points eliminates the natural pause at the end of a sentence to make the unresponsiveness less noticeable. At the end of the speech, he makes his way off the stage, past three rows of veterans, looking for hands to shake. Many decline to reach out their hand for a shake. How awkward.

The return of Bob Dole.

No sooner does the Boston Globe invoke the name of Bob Dole in a carefully constructed editorial against the Swift Boat Veterans than the old man himself rises up and speaks for himself--in a few short devastating words:

"One day he's saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons," Dole said. "The next day he's standing there, 'I want to be president because I'm a Vietnam veteran.

"Maybe he should apologize to all the other 2.5 million veterans who served. He wasn't the only one in Vietnam," said Dole, whose World War II wounds left him without the use of his right arm.

Dole added: "And here's, you know, a good guy, a good friend. I respect his record. But three Purple Hearts and never bled that I know of. I mean, they're all superficial wounds. Three Purple Hearts and you're out."

What is to stop this story from being the central story of the Presidential campaign? The Kerry camp has relied heavily on expressing indignation and outrage that the issue ever was raised, on pointing to old questions about Bush's military record, and on fussing over who connected to the ad is connected to someone with a connection to Bush, but this hardly seems capable of pulling the candidate out of the quicksand. It's distressing that the candidate did not take this foreseeable problem seriously. Dole's remarks today (on "Late Edition") included the fact that he warned Kerry that he was going "too far" with his use of Vietnam. How could the Kerry people have blinded themselves to the risks they were taking?

UPDATE: Thanks to Instapundit and Lucianne.com for linking. They both answer that last question of mine the same way ("Groupthink"/"Koolaid will do that"). I have some additional comments on Kerry's response to the ads here.

"The most dark, dank, sad, drunken, cheese-riddled, depressing thing in the world."

That wacky Vincent Gallo is describing things again. And he likes the President: "I relate to him in that he has become easily unlikable. In a perfect world, John Kerry would own a restaurant in Connecticut." He responds to NYT Magazine interviewer Deborah Solomon in a way that reminds me of Racter. Remember Racter?

Why are you a Republican?

If we were going to see a show of Dennis Hopper's photographs, do you think Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton would be more sensitive to the work? I see Nixon as an intellectual. I consider Bill Clinton a huckster.

Interrotronning for Kerry.

Errol Morris is turning his brilliantly effective Interrotron camera to making some pro-Kerry commercials, according to The New Yorker, and he's got an idea for the commercials that seems quite likely to reach swing voters: have ordinary Americans, speaking spontaneously about why they've switched from voting Republican to voting for Kerry. Interestingly, Morris's first idea was to aim his interrotronist techniques--seen in "The Fog of War"--on John Kerry himself--just as he'd used them on Robert S. McNamara in the movie.

“I thought that I could humanize him,” he said. “To solve the problem of Bush being seen as a man of the people and Kerry as an aristocrat, I’d film Kerry exactly the way all the other people were filmed. I’d put him in the mix, and, by being one with all the rest, he would become a man of the people, speaking out with other Americans.”

At first the Kerry campaign seemed interested, but in the end they didn't want Morris. Why not? The article suggests that the official campaigns are really attached to the conventions of the political commercial genre. How could they possibly take a chance with something stylistically striking? (Remember Morris's great Apple "Switch" ads?) So Morris ended up working with MoveOn.

"See—part of what I like is that this is not traditional political advertising,” Morris said. “They’re not involved in making a hard sell. The people potentially are likable."

Good point (though you just implied what people all too often say: that Kerry is unlikable). I'd watch Morris's commercials even with the TiVo remote in my hand. I think Morris is a wonderful artist. (One of the most re-watchable movies I've ever seen is "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.") But maybe the Kerry campaign is right not to want innovative, artistic ads directly associated with it. Maybe arty seems lefty. Or arty seems flaky. Or maybe it isn't a fear of art at all but a fear of making a connection with a specific public figure like Morris, who made a very high profile statement against the Iraq war when he accepted his Oscar for "The Fog of War."

***

Now, having written all of that, I realized I could look at the ads on the MoveOnpac website. So what do I think?

Well, the ads do give you the feeling of being on the receiving end of a conversation with a real person, but that's not necessarily a good thing. If my local car mechanic or barrista were to just start mouthing off about what's wrong with George Bush, I would be thinking: here we go, get me out of here. Watch the Rhonda Nix one, for example, or the Deborah Wood. The Nix one made me want to reread this classic Christopher Hitchens article.

MoveOn.org had its visitors vote on the most effective ad, but the point of the campaign is to reach people who do not traditionally vote for the Democrat, who are not likely to be the people who go to that website and watch a lot of ads and then vote. The one that won is especially irritating to me because of the "Bush lied" theme, though I can see why it appealed the website's habituées.

Bottom line for me: I love Errol Morris, but art and politics are a bad mix.

Maureen Dowd slams Kerry: "one of the lamest things I've ever seen a politician do."

Maureen Dowd appeared on Tim Russert's CNBC show and gave quite an interesting interview. I was especially struck by this statement of hers, responding to Russert's inquiry about the lack of vigorous debate about the Iraq war:

Kerry totally muffed it up by falling for this ridiculous trap that Bush set up. Bush taunted him, in essence, saying if you ... knew then what we knew now that there was no evidence and no weapons, are you man enough to say you'd still go to war? I mean, that, in essence, was what he said and Kerry fell for it and said Kerry didn't want to be a wimp and he didn't want to be a flip-flopper, so he fell for it and said, yeah, I would still authorize you to go to war, even if there was no threat to us, no weapons, you know, no evidence. And at that moment, not only did he show that Bush had outfoxed him--Bush and Cheney immediately began chortling--but it also completely castrated his ability to make the case against war.

RUSSERT: So what does that mean for his candidacy?

DOWD: I think it was a devastating week for him. I just think it was one of the lamest things I've ever seen a politician do.

Dowd never tires of conceptualizing things in terms of a man's struggle to salvage his masculinity, does she? That conceit works quite nicely when the slam is: in your struggle to prove your manhood, you showed not power, but weakness. I'm surprised she hit Kerry though, because her hostility to Bush is so evident. And has the "flop" in "flip-flop" ever seemed so clearly to refer to the male anatomy as in that quote of hers?

UPDATE: Striking personal revelation by Dowd: "I was so paralytically shy."

ALSO, of special interest to bloggers: Dowd talks about learning to Google, and how it is now necessary for a NYT columnist to Google: "You have to go on Google, you know, for a column so now because there's so much opinion, and this Tower of Babel and bloggers and cable. You have to kind of check and make sure that someone hasn't made a joke or used a line or image before you have a chance to put it in the paper, because it's not like the days of Reston where everyone was waiting days to hear Olympian pronouncements."

Star-ratings for "Unfit for Command."

"Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry" is currently enjoying a 4 1/2 star rating at Barnes & Noble.com. "Tony, political junkie," who gives the book one star, observes: "Yawn! Alrighty, those of you that give this more than 2 stars are buying into the typical right wing (BS) campaign." Actually, not one of the 56 reviewers gives the book 2 stars. Nearly everyone gives the book either one or five stars--not surprisingly. But since the average is 4 1/2, Bush supporters seem to be more web savvy.

Amazon, which for some reason only has seven reviews, has the book at 4 out of 5 stars (and only one hostile review). Hmmm ... it provides a link to "Conservative Book Service" where the price is a dollar less, and the Amazon page itself displays that lower price. But that can't account for the dearth of reviews, because the book is Number 1 in sales at Amazon. Either Amazon or some hacker is deleting reviews: here's a blog that notes that there were 20 reviews a few days ago.

And both sides are surely willing to push their agenda through website reviews: Here's the Amazon page for "Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man." There are 569 reviews, most of which are one or five star reviews. The Bush side is winning there too, with the average at 3 1/2 stars.

Possible inference: Bush supporters are more likely to vote.

"In a restless world like this is."

What a very touching appearance by Brian Wilson on The Larry King Show last night:

KING: When you say you heard voices can you describe what that's like? Because we read stories like that about people who -- what happens?

B. WILSON: Well, a voice is saying: "I'm going to hurt you, I'm going to kill you." And I'd say: "Please don't kill me."

KING: It's an actual voice.

B. WILSON: Actual voice in my head. Yes.

KING: Not your voice?

B. WILSON: No. No.

[Brian's wife Melinda] WILSON: That's called auditory hallucinations and if somebody's depression is deep enough that's what happens to them.

KING: And at the same time you're still writing songs?

B. WILSON: Yes, I could still write songs, yes, during that period.

KING: [Write] hit songs.

B. WILSON: Yes.

M. WILSON: That's the thing that's amazing. Right now when he goes out on tour I can look at him and I say to myself: "Oh my God, I can tell just by his face he's hearing voices."

KING: You still hear them.

B. WILSON: Oh yes. I still hear them. ...

KING: Do they ever tell you to do things?

B. WILSON: No.

KING: Just, "I'm going to kill you," or...

B. WILSON: Yeah, right.

KING: That's all they -- it ever says?

B. WILSON: Yeah.

A moment later he contradicts himself and says that sometimes the voices say nice things like "We love you, we love you, we can't do without you." He says several times that he doesn't hear the voices when he is singing and that he can work despite his illness. He says that he doesn't listen to the old Beach Boys records.

B. WILSON: No, we don't wallow in the mire over the Beach Boys. I used to listen to Andy Williams and Kenny Rogers and stuff like that. Perry Como and Nat King Cole, of course, that was our song, "When I Fall in Love" was our song. "When I fall in love, it will be forever" -- you know, that song.

KING: "Or I'll never fall in love/In a restless world like this is ...

B. WILSON: Yeah.

KING: I know that.

B. WILSON: Yeah, it's a beautiful tune.

KING: You're a beautiful guy.

NYT offers huge chunk of Gawker bait.

Too bad Gawker doesn't post on weekends, because this Michael (thick as a) Brick article is just begging--begging--for attention.

UPDATE: Bait duly consumed.

On the pain of not living in a swing state.

When I was in Ithaca a few days ago, I noticed a lot of yard signs that said:

Bush must go!
Bush lied, thousands died.

Of course, I can't stand this sort of hostility and bitterness in general, but, really, what's the point of trying to stir up negative passion when you live in New York? New York's electoral votes are all going to go to Kerry whether New Yorkers have steam coming out of their ears or are lounging around watching sports and laughing and drinking. I support the Electoral College approach to picking the President (and wrote an article about it--Electoral College Reform: Deja Vu, 95 Northwestern University Law Review 993 (2000)), but I really do feel a little sorry for people in the states that are so solidly in the hands of one party. The ones who get all mad about the election remind me of drivers who honk their horns a lot in the middle of completely gridlocked traffic. Except in this case, the people who are all mad are going to get what they want from everyone who's in range to experience their expression of anger. They are like people driving 80 miles per hour through Indiana on Route 90, honking their horn the whole time because of the traffic up ahead in Chicago.

"I think nobody is truly qualified to be president of the United States."

So said Teresa Heinz Kerry in an interview in Reader's Digest. Since I said the same thing in this post yesterday, I was struck to hear the "friends" on "Fox and Friends" this morning laughing about the remark. I didn't keep my "friends" straight--they were talking over each other and I wasn't looking at the TV--but at least one of them thought it was an utterly harebrained thing to say, chiefly because it was a blunt admission that her husband was not qualified. There was a good deal of exultant laughing before one of the "friends" conceded that he could understand what she meant, which launched phase two of the attack: Heinz Kerry is not appropriate First Lady material. That no human being is big enough for the job that the Presidency has become may be a crushingly obvious fact to most people, but the "Fox and Friends" attitude is: What kind of a crazy nut do you have to be to say it when you're running for First Lady? I suppose there are people at Fox (and elsewhere) who comb over ever word Heinz Kerry says looking for anything that can justify a teaser: She's at it again, making trouble for the Kerry campaign ... we'll tell you what she said ... after the break.

Blogads nostalgia.

Remember Blogads? They were an endless source of humor and commentary. But no, don't bring them back. The look of the Blogspot blog is vastly improved.

UPDATE: I've adjusted the color of the new strip that replaced Blogads. The "navigation bar." You can search this blog for words using the tool at the left. For example, type in "Blogads" and see all the times I carped about them. And I feel free to write "gay marriage" again, without worrying about having gay-marriage-related Blogads for the next month. I wonder what the thinking was that led to removing the ads. Maybe it was that the political ads were getting to be a problem. The last ads I had before the end of the Blogads Era were ads promoting Bill Clinton, but the ad-generating mechanism had no way to know whether I liked Bill Clinton or not. I might have hated him, and then complained bitterly to Blogger. I assume plenty of people did.

Champion of the beleaguered incumbent.

Ah! I see our resident public sociologist Jeremy Freese has devised a theory of me--the political me at least. Let's check this out:

toward a unified theory of ann althouse

While I was off in San Francisco, another blogger was examining Ann's voting record and announcing that, despite her professed undecidedness, she was likely to be voting for Kerry. This person is wrong; their error is paying too much attention to the party of the candidate Ann supports. If you look at Ann's electoral-biography, it would seem more reasonable to predict that--and quite apart from whatever eventual rationale she might provide for doing so--she's likely to vote for Bush. Consider her lifetime history of support in incumbent elections:

Supports incumbent: Ford, Carter, Clinton
Against incumbent: Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I

Plain as day: Ann is more likely to support an incumbent the more unpopular the incumbent has been upon the time of their re-election campaign. She's a contrarian independent. The only instance that doesn't really fit the pattern well is her vote for Clinton over Bush in 1992. One explanation for this would be, if one looks back to Ann's various posts about Clinton, it's clear she thinks he's a hottie. Apart from the "hottie" theory, however, one might suggest that Ann is more likely to support an incumbent the more she feels like the political discourse is unfairly maligning the incumbent (a discourse-contrarian independent, then). ...

So it seems I'm the champion of people who are holding power, but beleaguered! (That, and I think Clinton is hot.) It is true that I have a thing about incumbent Presidents. It's connected with a life-long, unshakable feeling that no one is good enough to be President, especially no one who has the ambition and the nerve to say he should run. I really don't like anyone having the distinction of being President. The incumbent already has the distinction, so keeping the incumbent always involves denying the distinction to one more unworthy mortal. As for the beleaguered incumbent, perhaps it is true that regard for the office of the Presidency causes me to react to disrespectful criticism of whatever poor human being happens to occupy it. The man is doing the best he can at an impossible task: can't you at least make constructive criticism!

I remember truly despising Lyndon Johnson in 1968, then being caught off-guard the night he announced that he would not run for reelection. At the end of a speech about Vietnam, he said:

With American sons in the fields far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world's hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office -- the Presidency of your country.

Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President. But let men everywhere know, however, that a strong and a confident and a vigilant America stands ready tonight to seek an honorable peace; and stands ready tonight to defend an honored cause, whatever the price, whatever the burden, whatever the sacrifice that duty may require.

I was seventeen years old, and I burst into tears. That poor man! That man I had hated. How old and worn out he looked. It still brings tears to my eyes today. It made quite an impression. Johnson's words resonate today. You call upon the President to address "personal partisan causes" that take him away from the "awesome duties of this office," and, yes, I do feel very protective of that beleagured incumbent. To say there are failings, that a more perfect Presidency could exist, is not enough. Everyone will fall short. I hear John Kerry assert time and time again that he would do better, that he has a "better way," and the way George Bush has gone about doing things is defective for one niggling reason after another. But Bush is the one who has actually had to do things. It's easy to look on and say I would have done better. Maybe when you were watching Paul Hamm the other night, all you talked about was how he fell on his ass after the vault. And, of course, you wouldn't have fallen.

UPDATE: Rereading this, I realize that I have similar feelings about Supreme Court Justices: harsh and bitter criticism, especially personal criticism of individual Justices, inclines me to see the legitimate and professional reasons for the arguments they have made and the outcomes they have reached.

Ah, to be back in Madison.

So I did leave Madison, but I came right back. That trip was mostly a big push of a drive there and back, but it was nice to be able to take my son to law school and to see the town for a day. Yesterday, I drove the 835 miles straight through, from 7 a.m., eastern time, to 8:30 p.m., central time. It was hard driving into rainstorms much of the way. The visibility was so poor that I didn't even see the sign for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame off ramp in Cleveland. Approaching Cleveland, I was thinking: so am I going to go? It seemed much like my attitude toward the Presidential Election--if Maureen Dowd can make everything that happens about the election, then so can I--I knew there would be I point where I would make one choice or the other, and perhaps the choice was already in my head, but the answer was not lit up in my conscious mind. I was listening to the radio for most of the drive, hitting the scan button often to try to get a station, and as I neared Cleveland, the rock and roll spirit of the city reached out to me as a hit to the scan button pulled in "Manic Depression." If Jimi wants me to visit the Hall, then surely I'm going. But at some point, squinting through the pounding rain, I was seeing too many trees and I had to admit I wasn't in Cleveland anymore.

With that chance for a significant break lost in the rain, I formed a new aspiration: beat the Chicago rush hour. I tried to calculate whether that was at all possible. Probably not, but at least get into the front end of the massive clog of cars that makes it crashingly obvious every day that Route 90 in Chicago is nowhere near what it ought to be. Newly inspired to make good time, I abandoned the thought of stopping for a mid-trip meal. I drove straight through, subsisting on a woeful Atkins diet of Diet Pepsi and cashew nuts. I reached Chicago at 5:30 p.m. and spent an hour--only an hour--making my way through America's biggest bottleneck. Finally, I broke free of the Chicago snarl to the Wisconsin leg of the trip. I was entertained by a beautiful sunset the whole way.

And now, here I am back in Madison, with three issues of the NYT to peruse and three crossword puzzles to polish off. I'll go in to my office and tie up the various loose ends: recommendation letters to sign, class materials to deliver to the copy shop, etc. I still haven't looked to see what day the first day of class is. Oh, September 2d. Thirteen more days. Half a month is left to vacation! That's an odd realization. I just dropped off my son to begin law school orientation, which gave the distinct impression that classes are about to begin, but thirteen days: that is rather a substantial chunk of vacation time. Which I am happy to spend in Madison, Wisconsin.

Leaving Ithaca.

It's dawn as I sit in the Statler Hotel looking out into the misty city of Ithaca. Time for me to make my way home. Having driven out here with the trusty Beetle packed with things for a law school dorm room, I'm about to toss my little bag into the tiny trunk and head back west. I intend to make it back the whole way today. I plan to see a lot of Route 90. The only real question is whether I'll take the off ramp to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when I hit Cleveland.

The National Anthem at the Olympics.

Maureen Dowd writes (in a column about how our foreign policy has toned down athlete exuberance at the Olympics): "Even our warlike national anthem has been transformed, from blaring horns to peaceful, soothing strings."

I wonder who provided that strange arrangement. I don't have the musical knowledge to express what has been changed about the anthem as played at the Olympics medal ceremonies, but it's beyond "peaceful" and "soothing." It's mournful, even regretful, reproachful, like the reprise of a once-joyful song at the end of a tragic play. Did the U.S. submit the music played like that, or is it a product of Greece or the Olympic Committee? I'd like to know.

And speaking of plays, Dowd uses the Greek Olympics to work in the old Greek play concept of hubris and to lash out against Bush over Iraq, because everything these days has to be turned into an occasion to talk about Bush and Iraq. Good thing she got her column done before Paul Hamm's victory yesterday, because it would have messed up the theme of American defeat she's burbling over. Our basketball players can't win because they aren't allowed to swagger because Bush .... etc., etc.

UPDATE: Geitner Simmons is looking for some answers. One theory is that the mournful sound just happens if your play the anthem without brass instruments. He also has some good material about the words of the anthem: it's not as "warlike" as Dowd assumes. And let me add a few words. Sometimes people say we need a different anthem, one without the word "bombs" in it. But the bombs in the anthem are lighting, making it possible to see the flag from time to time during the night. Dawn, light, twilight, gleaming, stars, red glare, bombs bursting: these words are all about light. Without the words, we have a melody that predates the War of 1812, and isn't even about battles. Here are the original words of the song, which is an ode to drinking. Interestingly enough, for present Olympics purposes, Olympus is mentioned, along with a lot of Greek gods. If Dowd or anyone else hears war in the melody alone, it is the mind calling up a (mis)interpretation of Key's words. I'm sure Dowd could extract a column from the original words. Anacreon, with his sons, is clearly George H.W. Bush. Wisecracks about the younger Bush's drinking are within easy reach. And I can just imagine what she'd do with the line: "So my sons from your Crackers no mischief shall dread."

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Washington Post gets to the bottom of the Olympics rendition of the anthem here.

Wisconsin celebrates.

Hotels with "High-speed Internet Access."

So let's say you want a hotel with internet access, and you find a hotel with a website that says "High-speed Internet Access." What's the least you would expect? I mean, if you followed a sign for drinking fountains, you'd expect more than a hose, right? If the sign said "restrooms," you'd expect more than, oh, a tree, right? I made a point of reserving a room that assured me "High-speed Internet Access," and what was there? A phone jack dangling at the end of a phone cord! Insane hotel dialogue:

How is a phone line internet access? Every hotel has a phone that you could disconnect the jack from and plug it into your computer and use the modem.

Well, you see, some hotels have "high-speed internet access" and some, like ours, require you to use a dial-in connection.

But every hotel has a phone, so every hotel lets you use dial-in, and your website said "high-speed internet access." You mean, just because there's a dangling phone wire that doesn't need to be disconnected from the phone that there's internet access?

You need to understand that there is "high-speed internet access," which some hotels have, and regular internet access.

A phone line? You mean, I need to pay for a phone call to connect?"

It's a local phone call. Here. Just use your AOL account ....

I need to be an AOL customer?

What is your dial-up service provider?

The University of Wisconsin. That would be a long distance call. You expect me to use the phone line, with long distance charges?

I won't dramatize how many times the swarm of desk personnel professed ignorance about the website that you can check for yourself at the link. I'll just proceed to the next subject:

Well, is there somewhere nearby with WiFi? A restaurant or a café?

There's an internet café ....

I mean, a regular café where they have WiFi ... [pause] ... a wireless connection to use with my laptop?

There's the public library ....

Isn't there a Starbucks or ...

[Proudly] We don't have Starbucks ...

Or any café with wireless?

They knew of no such thing or didn't even know what I was talking about. But they were obliging to call the Cornell Statler (which previously hadn't had vacancies) and get me a room with real high-speed internet access. They cancelled my reservation for me and lost my business. Good work, Holiday Inn Ithaca. Wandering around for a place to eat lunch, I passed several cafés within three blocks of the hotel that had WiFi. If the Holiday Inn could have just pointed me toward one, I would not have moved to a different hotel. How deceptive to advertise on the website that you have high-speed internet access when you have nothing but a phone line, and how abysmally lame not to know how to point out the places nearby that have WiFi!

Greetings from Ithaca.

We made it most of the way to Ithaca yesterday, ending up at the northern tip of one of the westernmost Fingerlakes. So yesterday was a day of dogged driving:



Though when we hit New York (the state), we got off the interstate (90) and took a more leisurely drive, with the sun setting in the rearview mirror, along Route 20, where it was fun to slow down and see the tiny towns, like Brockton:



This morning, we had breakfast at the Two Sisters Homestead Café in Waterloo, somewhere on Route 20 between Lake Seneca and Lake Cayuga:



We drove down Route 89, the length of Lake Cayuga, stopping to see Taughannock Falls:



And now, we're in Ithaca, where moving John into the dorm at Cornell Law School was accomplished, and we sat down for some oversized salad at the cookbook-famous Moosewood Café:

Art and the Audi TT Coupe.

Peter Bagge has a cool new comic that goes on at some length about the foibles of the world of fine art but ends up in an interesting place: in love with the beauty of the Audi TT Coupe and Japanese candy wrappers.

Which party can a moderate choose?

A question raised by yesterday's last post is: If I were registering to vote today, would I register as a Democrat? The answer is no. I would have to register as an independent. What I regret, and I think many people regret, is the polarization of the two parties. There used to be liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Of course, I have no interest in the retrograde conservative Democrats of years ago, but find the old-style liberal Republicans quite attractive. Bring them back, convincingly, and I would feel at home. Now, I know the Republican Convention is planning to present a liberal face. The face of Arnold? I find that attractive, but I suspect it will be no more convincing than the Democrats tough-on-security convention.

"Althouse Independents."

Much as I like to see my name in print, I don't know if I'm to feel flattered by that term, coined over at Daly Thoughts to refer to people who call themselves independent and even feel independent, but are really predictably Republican or a Democrat when it comes to voting. Daly has read this post of mine, in which I recount my presidential preferences going back to 1960 and reveal that I've only voted for one Republican (Gerald Ford)(and that I also supported Nixon in 1960 and Goldwater in 1964, before I was old enough to vote). (Yes, I'm quite old, readers--older than John Edwards.) Daly writes:

She may be undecided right now, but when push comes to shove the overwhelming majority of those just like her are going to end up going for Kerry. And those who are like her except for that they usually vote Republican will overwhelmingly end up going for Bush.

First, a modest point. I've actually never labelled myself an "independent." Everywhere I've ever registered to vote, I've registered as a Democrat. It has, however, been almost 20 years since I've needed to register, but I've never felt the call to go declare myself something other than that. I vote in the Democratic primaries. (I voted for Edwards, in case you're interested.) I do frequently call myself a "moderate" or a "centrist." But this is the much more important point: this is the first election since 9/11. In every other election, I was presumptively for the Democratic candidate all along. When I voted for Ford, I was for Carter until I was halfway to the voting booth. In none of those years--save for the 24-hour period before I voted for Ford--would I ever have called myself undecided. During the 2000 campaign, I was mocking the late undecideds just as many of you are now: What's wrong with these people? Why can't they decide? Why do they keep interviewing these losers on TV? Or are they just posing as undecided to get on TV?

I'm really not one of those people. I'm one of the people whose politics were changed by 9/11. Prior to 9/11, my disagreement with the social conservatives kept me from having much of any interest in Republican presidential candidates. After 9/11, I became quite bonded to George Bush. If I had to vote today, I would vote for Bush, because at this point, I cannot trust Kerry on security matters. Kerry has allowed himself to stand for so many different things, according to what is expedient at the moment. I didn't buy the strong-on-security pitch of the convention, which I know was aimed at shoring up support from centrists like me. The problem there is that I just don't believe them. (And I note that I've just written "them" and not Kerry. I was going to edit that out, but I'm going to leave it in, because it signifies my queasy feeling that Kerry is a device for returning to power a party that doesn't stand for much of any of the things that were promoted at the convention.) What would appeal to me from the Republican side, along with a convincing case that they really are competent about the security issues we assume they care more about, would be a more libertarian approach to social issues.

Unfortunately, both parties have to attend their "base," and, whenever they do, I don't like them. Because of that, I keep my distance. I don't love any of these people, and I don't have to vote today. So I will wait and see what happens in the world between now and November, and I'll watch all the debates (and blog about it). And, given my kiss-of-death history of voting, I'll probably vote for the loser.

Finally, let me just comment on my two recent blogpolls. First, I did not sign the petition to get Nader on the Wisconsin ballot. At the time of this post, 69.6% percent of you thought I did. Why didn't I? One reason is that I don't like to sign any petitions. But another reason is, as a general rule, I don't want to see an overloaded ballot, so a place on the ballot should be reserved only if there are enough people who actually want to vote for Nader. I don't want to vote for him. And I'm not so devoted to Bush that I would sign just to try to help him. What makes all you readers think I would? On this other poll, the votes make more sense. Nearly everyone either believes me when I say I'm undecided or thinks I'm taking an objective perspective as a way to write a better blog. Only twenty percent think I'm posing as an undecided voter as a strategy to influence people to support a particular candidate, and I'm heartened to see that the twenty percent split right down the middle about whether my secret preference is Kerry or Bush.

Iraq TV.

Television is transformed in Iraq, reports the NYT. It's not all propaganda or even all war and politics anymore. "We have no agenda," says the founder of a new Baghdad station, "We just want to inform and entertain and basically to help people to cope with their daily lives." Ah, he wants an Oprah.

What surprises me about the return of the preppy look.

I'm not surprised that the preppy look is replacing the grunge or goth or bondage look or whatever what we've been subjected to lately should be called. The fashion pendulum always swings. Each look provides the reason why the opposite look will seem fresh and new. And I'm not surpised that the NYT is running a front page story to tell us the news that grunge has given way to the preppy. What surprises me is that the NYT has run a front-page article telling us this news without calling upon a single political analyst, popular sociologist, or culture studies guru to tell us what it means. Surely, at the very least, some political expert could have told us this is the leading edge of the Bush landslide victory. Or some academic feminist could have cautioned us about encroaching patriarchy. Or some obscure lawprof blogger could opine that the lack of interest in the quotes of pop-culture-monitoring academics is part of the aftermath of 9/11.

"Warner's Tryst With Bloggers Hits Sour Note."

And the NYT's seduction of bloggers with headlines hits a sweet note. So let's see what the situation is here. Warner music, which is naturally against free MP3 files on the web, wanted to take advantage of blogs that offer music files along with music criticism. The blogs are popular, presumably based on the quality of the music writing. Irresistible marketing opportunity for the big music company? No one familiar with sites that allow comments should be surprised if industry people are posting anonymously defending their product. Outing these people is an old game, isn't it?

But a Warner employee, Ian Cripps, had a new idea. He emailed music files to some bloggers with the message:

"We are very interested in blogs and I was wondering if you could post this mp3," he wrote. "It's by one of our new bands - The Secret Machines. They are an indie rock band and we would love for people to hear the band's music from your site. Here it is, listen to it and let me know if you will post it. Thanks!!"

Those two exclamation points just beg for love and trust, don't they?

Some bloggers saw the message from Warner as a sign that the major labels might spare their sites while cracking on illegal file sharing.

"We didn't know if there was a wink that came along with it that said, 'We don't have a problem with what you're doing,' " said Mark Willett, a contributor to Music for Robots a popular MP3 blog that attracts about 2,400 visitors a day.

Music for Robots--which uses authorized downloads and links to online stores--looks good. The top post right now, which has a cool Peter Kuper drawing, analyzes four anti-war songs.

In an almost apologetic blog entry titled "Music for Robots Sells Out," Mr. Willett wrote that the song was appearing there not because the band needed the exposure, but to establish a relationship with Warner and to let readers know what was going on.

(Would it kill the Times to link to the post?) Most of the blogs snubbed Warners, though, for the reason implied by Robots' post title.

The Robots' comment section drew some suspicious comments like:

"I never heard these guys before, but theyre awesome ... I went to their website and you can listen to a lot of ther other stuff, very cool and very good!"

And it turns out, it was supremely easy for Willett to trace these commenters back to Warners. Warners makes exactly the excuse you'd think they would make: must just be some fans of the band that happen to work in the company. Blog mockery ensued. How pathetic to fall back on the old anonymous fan comment right when you're trying to do something new and blog-friendly! And to write lame, inarticulate, "awesome!" comments with misspellings is a gratuitous insult to teenage music lovers everywhere.

Digression: Remember when Warner was called "Warner Brothers"? I remember an old Jerry Garcia quote, when he was complaining about big record companies: "There isn't even a Warner brother."

My scotoma.

This afternoon, I was reading something on the computer screen, when I realized I could not see a spot about the size of one letter in the center of the screen. Instead of the letter I was trying to read I saw a spot of roiling light. I stopped reading and looked around and the roiling light spot was getting larger and opening up into an arc, a backwards c, that glittered and took on a zigzag shape and moved gradually off to the right. It looked the same if I closed one eye or another, signifying that nothing was wrong with an eye, but that my brain had to be the problem. I did not, however become alarmed. I had read Oliver Sacks's book "Migraine" and knew about the pre-migraine visual disturbance called "scotoma." I googled "scotoma," went to the second item Google retrieved, and found this, an animation of "a classic migrainous scintillating scotoma from a small paracentral bright spot to an enlarging bright, curved, zig-zag line (the scintillation)." The animation was precisely what I saw--save that mine exited stage right instead of stage left. The website predicted it would last 10 to 20 minutes, and in fact that was exactly so: the arc slipped out through my peripheral vision.

That was, for me, the all-time best performance by the internet. But yes, I did still call the doctor, mostly because it happened again a half hour later. I got sent to the emergency room, where I told the story of my scotoma to five different people, with the final verdict coming from the neurologist who said, given that I never did get a migraine headache out of all of this, that it was a "migraine equivalent."

Scintillating!

Two cricket things.

One:

Hong Kong police arrested 115 men for illegally gambling on insect fights on Sunday in the same building that housed a cricket lovers' association, a police spokesman said.

Police seized about 300 crickets and $1,025 in cash during the bust, said police spokesman T.K. Ng. ...

Two:

A rabbit set alight by a bonfire at a British cricket club got its revenge when it ran burning into a hut and set it ablaze destroying costly equipment, the club said on Friday.

Members of Devizes cricket club in Wiltshire, western England, were burning dead branches when a rabbit caught up in the waste sped burning from the flames spreading a fire which destroyed lawnmowers and tools worth $110,000.

"After it had been going 5 minutes, the rabbit shot out of the bonfire on fire and went into the hut which is our equipment store," club chairman John Bedbrook told Reuters.

Two fire engines were called to extinguish the blaze. The rabbit's skeleton was discovered in the charred hut.

"The firemen were certainly concerned about the rabbit. They felt sorry for it," said Bedbrook.

Two blue things.

1. I love this! Click on the "slideshow" for Claude Cormier's "Blue Tree," the first slide.

2. I've only gone to the theater for two movies this year ("Kill Bill, Vol. 2" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), but unless this gets terrible reviews, I'm going. Click on the "slideshow" and go to the second slide for the beautiful blue. [UPDATE: Rotten Tomatoes is showing 100% freshness for this one, so I will certainly go.]

Ask an econometrician if he's a Republican. Go ahead! Ask!

Pithy NYT Magazine interviewer Deborah Solomon asks Ray C. Fair (who sees fair and is racy):

Are you a Republican?

FAIR: I can't credibly answer that question. Using game theory in economics, you are not going to believe me when I tell you my political affiliation because I know that you know that I could be behaving strategically. If I tell you I am a Kerry supporter, how do you know that I am not lying or behaving strategically to try to put more weight on the predictions and help the Republicans?

Great answer! These econometricians are such cards! Fair is saying Bush will win by a landslide--which is what I've been saying, close associates will confirm--and he's for Kerry, he admits (though apparently, on his own terms, we shouldn't believe him). Personally, I'm undecided.

Leaving Madison.

I'm the only Madison profblogger in town. Nina's in Venice (drinking a Bellini), Gordon's in New Orleans (eating at Bayona), Jeremy's in San Francisco (being recognized by sociologists for looking like his cartoon), and Tonya's in Booth Lake, Wisconsin (having a thoroughly family-style vacation). Don't I ever leave Madison (where I see, from the front page of the NYT, I live next to a nuclear reactor, which I never knew before)? But I will be leaving town soon enough. I'm going to give my son a ride to Ithaca. He's going to Cornell Law School, so it's a big adventure (vicariously, for me). We're going to load up the little Beetle with whatever we can and head out into the wilds of New York. Email me if you have any advice about what to do in Ithaca and where you would stop if you were driving in from the west and wanted to stay for the night someplace that was almost but not all the way to Ithaca.

Redefining sex appeal.

Diana Nyad writes--with approval--in today's NYT about the Olympians posing in Playboy. She likes that they are redefining female beauty:

The definition of sex appeal seems to have gone under the knife, and it is athletes — not just plastic surgeons — who are carving out the new look. Back in the 1960's, when I was a swimmer in high school with sizable shoulders and triceps, wearing a sleeveless blouse inspired unconcealed shock and dismay. Today, the running-back physique of Serena Williams may be setting the standard for a new femininity.

Of course, this new standard of beauty is much harder to achieve than the old one! But at least it's a powerful model to aspire to and you'll get some exercise trying.

UPDATE: Best letter to the NYT on the subject, from Keith Emmer:

It would be fitting if this year's Olympic Games in Athens marked the end of an era of denigrating athletes who choose to pose nude. After all, in the original Olympic Games in Greece, the athletes competed nude.

Not to be a killjoy, but one of the reasons the ancient Greeks thought women could not compete was that they could not compete in the nude, and women were barred from even viewing the Olympics, with the nudity of the men cited as the reason. And then there's this--from the sfgate article just linked--making a point about the politics of nudity that makes an interesting contrast to the more familiar feminist point about "objectifying" women:

So embedded was competing in the nude that our word gymnasium comes from the Greek gymnos for "naked," [UC Berkeley archaeologist Stephen] Miller notes in the book ["Ancient Greek Athletics"], an in-depth account of a culture that loved to watch the well-proportioned bodies of young men, their skin glistening with olive oil, compete not for medals but for a sprig of olive or bunch of wild celery.

On a deeper level, Miller said, nude competition helped foster one of ancient Greece's best-known contributions to posterity -- democracy. Nudity, he said, erases marks of rank and privilege.

"It came to me that the locker room is inherently one of the most democratic places in human experience," he said, "and that -- at the very least -- Greek athletics provided an environment in which democracy could, and did, prosper."

"We do not know the origins of competition in the nude," he writes in the book, but we do know the custom helped doom the Olympics to disfavor when Rome took over the Mediterranean world.

"Athletics were less successfully received in the West because the Romans were highly suspicious of nudity," writes Miller.

Mmmm .... celery.

Kerry--substance and style.

Substance: I'm glad to see John Kerry is taking a strong position on Darfur (as far as I can tell). Not much press coverage about it.

Style: Why does the official Kerry-Edwards blog display text so wide that I'm forced to scroll horizontally over and back to read each line? Is it to give a person who is merely reading Kerry's words the feeling of tedium and exasperation that you could otherwise only get from listening to him?

This display problem occurs using a small-screened iBook, using Safari and Mozilla. Let me try Explorer, which I'm trying to avoid, given various security problems I've heard about. Okay, now it looks right. Don't they test out their page with different browsers?

Fall movie preview.

The big Fall movie preview issue of Entertainment Weekly arrived in the mail today, and on the cover is my personal favorite actor, Johnny Depp. Not only is he clean shaven now, but he's got his hair combed back quite elegantly and he's wearing a suit. He looks quite like my father in the pencil drawing that I keep on the mantel. I'm having a bit of trouble getting past the cover! Hmm… the cover folds out and there are sixteen small pictures of various Fall movie stars. One of them is Maggie Gyllenhall, who looks uncannily like my own mother as a young girl. Okay, I'm finished with the cover. On to the magazine. Here's what caught my eye:

1. "Seinfeld" is coming out on DVD with "deleted scenes, blooper reels, an alternate version of the pilot, and cast commentaries."

2. Ereka Vetrini, Omarosa's nemesis from "The Apprentice," will be Tony Danza's sidekick on the new "Tony Danza Show." It's a talk show. Yeah, Ereka can talk.

3. Jamie Foxx, playing the role of Ray Charles in the biopic "Ray, " "wore prosthetics (modeled on Charles' actual eyes) to simulate the singer's blindness." He asserts that this was needed to avoid "cheating" as he moved around. It would be unaesthetic without prosthetics. But acting is faking it in all sorts of ways. Among the great actors who played blind sans eye prosthetics are: Audrey Hepburn and Bette Davis and Gabrielle Anwar and Patty Duke and Virginia Cherrill. The movies seem to prefer blind women to blind men, but I note the great Mr. Muckle in my all-time favorite comedy "It's a Gift." And the guy in "Butterflies Are Free." Ah! The best performance by a male actor as a blind character was Al Pacino. Hmm… and there was good old Gabrielle Anwar as his love interest. What has become of of Gabrielle anyway? Oh, and another fine performance by a male as a blind character was Gene Hackman. It seems blind men are funny and blind women are dramatic. You can think about why, and think about whether Foxx's film will be a hit. He sure looks like Ray Charles in the photograph. He's also, according to EW, a fine pianist--he went to college on a piano scholarship. So he'll be doing all the piano playing as Ray. Nice fact to know: Ray Charles, who died in June, was able to witness the final cut of the film.

4. John Travolta and Joaquin Phoenix play firefighters in "Ladder 49," which is supposed to be better than "Backdraft," which real firefighters hate (because it's unrealistic). The filmmakers want you to think "Black Hawk Down."

5. They remade "Alfie," with Jude Law as Michael Caine. I've never bothered to watch the Michael Caine one, so why should I care? Well, Law is much cuter than Caine.

6. So what's the Christian Bale diet? "I just didn't eat." He got down to 120 pounds (he's 6'2"). He also only slept 2 hours a night. What role required all that? Some paranoid guy in "The Machinist." He's bulked back up for "Batman."

7. New Alexander Payne movie. "Sideways." I loved "Election" and "After Schmidt" was pretty good. Good lord, this new film is set in a wine-tasting milieu!

8. "The Grudge"—they've hired the director of the original Japanese film ("Ju-on") to do the Hollywood version. Takashi Shimizu. It stars Sarah Michelle Gellar, who looks just like Gwyneth Paltrow in this picture.

9. Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet together at last! "Finding Neverland." A biopic of J.M. Barrie. I hope it's good, because this is one I'd like to see.

10. Kevin Spacey directs himself in a biopic of Bobby Darin. "Beyond the Sea." How could that possibly be good? Spacey is eight years older than Darin was when he died. And who is interested in the life of Bobby Darin? That's just crazy! It seems the only reason for this is that Spacey has always looked a bit like Bobby Darin. What's next for Kevin? A biopic of Lee Harvey Oswald?

11. It's biopic year for the Oscar-craving actors as Leonardo DiCaprio plays Howard Hughes (with Martin Scorsese directing) in "The Aviator." There really is some fascination in seeing Cate Blanchett impersonate Katharine Hepburn and Kate Beckinsale impersonate Ava Gardner.

12. Jim Carey as Lemony Snickett. He rides a Segway. Okay.

13. "Proof," "Closer" … I guess I'm supposed to care about these Oscar-y productions. I'll wait for the reviews. And even if they are good, I'll probably resist, because I still remember getting hoodwinked into seeing "The Hours." Prestige movies for women: leave me alone!

14. Then there's the question: What Don Cheadle movies can I see in December? There's "Hotel Rwanda," in which Cheadle plays the role of Paul Rusesabagina, who saved the lives of 1200 Tutsis in 1994 (a great story). And there's "The Assassination of Richard Nixon," a political thriller that also stars Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.

15. They're making a film of "Get Smart," with perfect casting: Steve Carell.

16. A current film I'd buy right now if it were on DVD: "Los Angeles Plays Itself." It's a documentary about L.A. as it appears in the movies.

17. Ah! Finally, a decent DVD of "Purple Rain." Make sure you get the 20th Anniversary version. Don't buy this one.

Shady grove.

A walk this morning in the UW Arboretum ...



called to mind an old favorite album cover ...



and made me imagine Impressionist figures running around in nineteenth century white dresses like these ...



but there was no one around.

Instructions for a Peavey Rage 158.

John bought a new practice amp for his guitar. It came with "IMPORTANT SAFETY INSTRUCTIONS," a list of 16 separate items, the first four of which are especially important:

1. Read these instructions.

2. Keep these instructions.

3. Heed all warnings.

4. Follow all instructions.

After the 16 items, there's this extra: "SAVE THESE INSTRUCTIONS!"

Okay, silly instructions. I guess they assume a guitar player is an idiot. But it's a nice little practice amp, at a good price. The clean tone is especially appreciated. And it has a nice modern/vintage toggle switch, valuable if you like a 60s-style sound, and not always the maximum distortion.

Answer revealed: the Republican Presidential candidate I voted for.

Here's the final count in the blogpoll asking which Republican Presidential candidate I voted for. I had said that I've been voting in presidential elections since 1972 and have only once voted for the Republican candidate. Seventy-seven people voted and the clear favorite was Reagan:

Ronald Reagan--48.1%--37

Bob Dole--18.2%--14

Gerald Ford--13%--10

George H.W. Bush--13%--10

Richard Nixon--7.8%--6

Now what was the thinking there? Why did Reagan come out on top by such a wide margin? Reagan ran twice, and I could only have voted for him one of those times, so the fact that he's the only one who ran twice in the stated time period should not have caused you to pick him. I guess there was a trend of Democrats switching over to Reagan, and just on sheer numbers, the chances of a Democrat voting for Reagan in 1984 are high, given the abysmal numbers