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Nader off the Wisconsin ballot.

Madison.com reports:

A Dane County judge Tuesday kicked Ralph Nader off the Wisconsin ballot, prompting an immediate appeal by the independent presidential candidate with the state Supreme Court. While Judge Michael Nowakowski ruled Nader should be left off the ballot, he also prohibited the Elections Board from sending county clerks a certified list of presidential candidates until Wednesday afternoon to give Nader’s backers a chance to appeal. There was no immediate word from the Supreme Court whether it would accept the case. ... State Democrats sued to kick Nader off the ballot, claiming he had failed to comply with state law that requires presidential candidates to list 10 electors on their nomination papers. The statute says the electors shall include one from each congressional district and two at-large. One of Nader’s electors listed as living in one congressional district actually lives in another. Electors cast ballots in the electoral college to decide the presidential race.

Well, what's the excuse for making a mistake like that? I know the Nader people worked hard to get him on the ballot, but what can you do? A rule's a rule! (I'm no expert on this law, and maybe there's a pro-Nader angle I'm missing. Email me info you know.)

UPDATE, OCTOBER 1: For Wisconsin, change "a rule's a rule" to "close enough."

The "Bush volunteered for Vietnam" story.

The Columnist Manifesto has decided that new reports that Bush volunteered to go to Vietnam do not require that he reconsider his take on Bush the "draft dodger." Why? He just doesn't believe it:

Why hasn’t the White House previously offered us the assertion that Bush “volunteered for Vietnam?” I mean, what, did Bush simply forget about that episode? Or has he been silent about it because he realizes it’s kind of lame to say, “Gee, I asked about going to Vietnam once, but they wouldn't let me”? This isn’t like Winston Churchill asking General Eisenhower’s permission to ride out with the Normandy assault troops on D-Day. I’m sure if Bush really wanted to go to Vietnam, he could have pulled some of the very same strings he used to get into the Texas Air National Guard in the first place and gotten himself over there.

Or has the “Bush volunteered” story not come up before because (like the Kerry didn’t deserve his medal’s story) it’s untrue?

But it's never been established that Bush pulled strings to get into the TANG. One could just as well read his failure to get assigned to Vietnam as evidence that he did not rely on string-pulling to get what he wanted. As to why Bush never raised this point before: Perhaps it's because Bush has never used his military service for self-promotion. You might say that's because he has little to brag about, and surely volunteering to go to Vietnam when you don't meet the eligibility requirements is not an especially strong basis for bragging. But generally, those who've served in the military refrain from using their service for self-promotion, don't they? And one reason the Swift Boat Vets came forward when they did was that Kerry began to use his claim of military heroism as the centerpiece of his campaign.

Personally, I'm willing to accept Kerry's medals as the final judgment about what Kerry did in Vietnam and Bush's honorable discharge as the final judgment that Bush fulfilled his duty to the Guard. I'd rather talk about more relevant things. Kerry supporters like The Columnist Manifesto can't let go of this argument that the man who has fought in a war is better prepared to make decisions about war. But you know damn well they'd rather have Bill Clinton.

UPDATE: An emailer sends this link to a 1999 interview with Bush that appeared in the Washington Post. The information about Bush volunteering to go to Vietnam is clearly stated there. If it was untrue, I feel quite sure someone would have skewered him about it by now. The interview is also interesting for its clear statement of Bush's intent to become a pilot:

Why did you do the Guard instead of active duty?

I was guaranteed a pilot slot. I found out – as I'm sure you've researched all this out – they were looking for pilots. I think there were five or six pilot slots available. I was the third slot in the Texas Guard. Had that not worked out no telling where I would have been. I would have ended up in the military somewhere.

You meant to join the Guard when you took the pilot's qualifying test?

Or the regular Air Force. I was just looking for options. I didn't have a strategy. I knew I was going in the military. I wasn't sure what branch I was going into. I took the test with an eye obviously on the Guard slot, but had that not worked out I wouldn't have gotten into pilot training. I remember going to Air Force recruiting station and getting the Air Force recruiting material to be a pilot. Then I went home and I learned there was a pilot slot available.

The emailer notes:

George Bush has a father that served as a Navy pilot during WWII. I also had a father that served in the Navy during WWII. I think that, to a certain extent and at some level, both George Bush and I wanted to be our fathers. If you were a boy during the fifties and early sixties, and loved and respected your father, this was a very normal thing. My father was not in Naval aviation. So the thought of flying, while appealing, was not at the top of my list of things to do. I tried to be a Naval officer, but they wouldn't take me since I wear glasses.

George H.W. Bush was a Naval combat pilot. George W. Bush would have heard stories about that all his life. That, I think, is why wanted to be a pilot. Getting to be a military pilot then was not easy. There were just so many slots. The active duty pilot slots filled up quickly with military academy and ROTC graduates.

Based upon what I remember from the times, I could easily believe that there were no available fixed-wing flight school slots for active duty officers when George Bush was looking for one. The Guard, however, could easily have been another story. Much has been said about George Bush jumping the queue of 150 other people to get a slot in the TANG. This has been used as proof that he used favoritism to get into the Guard. There were 150 people on "the list" (as if there were only one list) and George Bush got into flight school. QED...

What has not been said is that few, if any, of those 150 people would have been applying for pilot slots. A non-flying slot would have meant, at most, about a six months commitment of time. About six to nine weeks in basic training followed by another six to ten weeks in a technical school. Then back to your home unit for some on-the-job training and then release from active duty. For the next four to six years, it's just one weekend a month and two weeks a year. Get your 50 points a year and then get out.

A pilot slot was a much different story. A one and a half to two year commitment to active duty was the norm. That's just about the same time commitment as for those who were drafted. At least the first year to year and a half would have been spent away from your Guard unit. You would spend that time on an Air Force base, wearing an Air Force uniform, and doing Air Force things with Air Force people. You might even think you were in the Air Force during that period.

Much has been made of George Bush's claim (and this is strictly hearsay since I never heard him say it) that he served "in the Air Force" when he was actually "only in the Guard." Well, as someone who was "there" at the time, I think they would have had trouble telling him apart from the "real Air Force" during his time in flight school. "If it looks like [an Air Force officer], and walks like [an Air Force officer]..."

Going orange for the debate.

So John Kerry seems to have gotten one of those dark spray-on tans. He's done this before. Back when he was on "Meet the Press" in April, Chris commented:

He has the Charlize Theron tan. You realize it's like a major Hollywood fad. All the big Hollywood celebrities, especially the female celebrities, are getting an orange tan. Britney Spears got it. ...He's gone way too far. I mean, it's hard to even take him seriously."

Well, he's gone and done it again!

You just know it's his debate look. Whenever presidential debate season comes around, the one thing you can count on pundits to talk about is the 1960 debate when Kennedy looked tanned and rested and Nixon looked pasty white. There are any number of reasons why Kennedy was more appealing on television than Nixon, but the one thing Kennedy had that anyone else can get is a tan.

Other more recent debate memories have faded. Why don't Kerry's people remember how Al Gore was ridiculed for looking way too orange in the first debate in 2000? Here's what Camille Paglia had to say back then (this link and those that follow are to Salon, so prepare for an ad if you click):

As for Al Gore, if I had had any doubt about whether he deserves my vote, he managed to run right over it with his out-of-control, ham-laden 18-wheeler. What a loathsome, smug, preening, juvenile character! The supposedly great debater babbled out of turn; snickered, snorted and sneered; panted and sighed like a bellows; and rocked to and fro and ripped paper like a patient in a mental ward. And Gore looked positively repellent with his dark mat of dyed hair, garish orange makeup and flippantly twisting, strangely female features: I kept on thinking of the bewigged, transvestite Norman Bates as Mother in "Psycho."

Yeah, the part about orange is in there. Here, let me highlight it. Hmmm.... amusing. Paglia had quite a number of problems with Al Gore there, didn't she? I suppose I could have found a quote more focused on the orangeness of Al Gore, but it would not have been have contained as many fascinating words. Like "ham-laden" and "bewigged." Aw,poor Al didn't deserve all that. On the other hand, come back Camille! That was fun to read.

Here's Ben Stein's ridicule of Gore's looks:

Gore was comically overmade-up, I guess because he was so nervous about sweating. I work in show business every day, and I don't think that I've seen that much makeup on anyone besides a Las Vegas showgirl. I kept waiting for his false eyelashes to fall off.

Orangeness aside, Gore's first debate offers many lessons that Kerry might want to learn. Here's Andrew Sullivan summing up the first 2000 debate in a few sentences:

The best way I can think to describe the last hour and a half is assisted suicide. Gore was wooden, condescending, boring, preachy, very liberal. Bush was a human being, good-natured, reasonable, smart, sane. It was a knockout.

I have a feeling those sentences, with the appropriate changes, will probably be reusable after this week's debate.

Murray Mall!

Here's the new campus project:

UW-Madison is unveiling details of its proposed $10 million East Campus Mall that will run from Regent Street to a grand esplanade opening on a view of Lake Mendota.

The seven-block mall will include special pavement; places for public sculptures, fountains and places to sit, study and socialize; ornamental planting beds, signs, lighting and more.

I'm excited about this but one phrase in there scares me: "public sculptures." It's possible to have a great campus sculpture, but in recent decades, extremely unlikely. They just don't make them like this anymore:

"He kind of made it sound like Bush wasn't thinking straight the last four years."

That's a 13-year-old's summary of John Kerry's presentation to a middle school yesterday (as reported in the Wisconsin State Journal). Meanwhile, over at the high school the kids are a bit irked: "I thought it was stupid that they went there - none of them can even vote." The high school talk continues:

"For this hick town, it's a big deal," said senior Parker Gates, 18 ...

"His wife's been seen walking around," said junior Davon Noltner, 17.

"Is she hot?" asked Gates.

Some high school kids did attend the rally at the middle school, like 17-year-old Erin Brander, 17, who wore a button that read "Except for ending slavery, fascism, Nazism and communism, war has never solved anything." Her assessment of Kerry: "He tends to insult Bush a lot."

UPDATE: Emailers tell me the slogan on the button is from protestwarrior.com.

Sex, lies, and psychology studies.

The NYT reports on a study by Gordon G. Gallup Jr., a psychologist at the State University of New York at Albany:

When researchers asked volunteers to listen to recordings of people counting to 10 and rate the attractiveness of the voices, they found that the voices rated highest belonged to people having more active sex lives. Moreover, their physical characteristics (broad shoulders and narrow hips in men, narrow waist and broad hips in women, and symmetry in both) conformed to conventional notions of attractiveness.

The article doesn't detail the results enough to overcome my skepticism about the accuracy of this finding. I do note that it says "the voices rated highest belonged to people having more active sex lives," not the most active sex lives, so I suspect that we might find that some of those with the most active sex lives did not necessarily have highly rated voices. We're just not seeing the overall correlation between good and bad voices and active and inactive sex lives. And we can't tell if good voices are attracting more sexual partners, or if (as the article suggests) the human voice conveys information about a person's sex life. But more importantly, we need to account for lying. Maybe the voices of liars are rated more highly, and of course, a subject people are quite likely to lie about is their sex life.

Former prosecutor: an impressive credential for Kerry?

Beldar has a nice post analyzing the limitations of John Kerry's credentials as a former prosecutor. ("He's always been a prominent member of the subspecies Lawyerus Politico.") I wonder how much people really are thinking of voting for him on the basis of that short period of his life? I suppose that "former prosecutor" image is used like "Vietnam veteran" to make people think he's tough in some areas where people tend to think Democrats are soft.

Unlike Beldar, I don't care at all that Kerry hasn't kept his legal license current. He's not a practicing lawyer anymore, but he's entitled to rely on his earlier experiences as he runs for office. A Senator doesn't need to have an active legal license. I'm a lawprof, and I don't keep my membership in the New York bar active, because I don't practice law. The only possible problem with retiring from the practice of law is the implicit statement that you plan never to return to practice. An elected official might want to disguise the fact that he sees himself as a career office-holder.

The main problem I have with Kerry going on about his prosecutor days (and his Vietnam experience) is that it means he isn't resting on his more recent and relevant experience as a Senator. Other than the talk of his votes about the war, I've heard almost nothing about his accomplishments in the Senate. You'd think the Senate is just a holding chamber for presidential candidates--which is especially pathetic considering that it's been 44 years since a Senator won the presidency.

Horse sense.

John Kerry came to town yesterday, and here's the report of his doings that appeared in the local paper, the Capital Times. It's worth going to the link to see the picture of him raising a beer mug, while sitting next to a local guy who was just hanging out in a Mount Horeb bar, trying to watch the Packers game, when Kerry dropped in to make a photo op out of him. I'd bet Kerry made a point of saying the name of the Packers' stadium a few times as he was waving that beer glass around. Today, the article says, he spoke in a middle school in Spring Green (where he is preparing for the debate):

Kerry said a Madison man told him yesterday that he feared voting for Kerry because he didn't want to change horses in mid-stream.

Kerry told the man, "When your horse is headed down the waterfall, or when your horse is drowning, it's a good time to change."

"May I also suggest we need a taller horse. We can get through deeper waters that way," Kerry said.

We'll never hear the end of this horse in the stream business. It just keeps getting new frills. So we need a "taller horse," because the current horse "drowning" as we go into "deeper waters." And now we've added a waterfall. So I guess we need a special kind of horse that's especially good at surviving a precipitous drop, which you'd really want in a situation where two horse were simultaneously going over a waterfall and you decided your horse was less crashworthy and that it would be a good idea to try to get onto the other horse while you were still in the waterfall. That's quite the metaphor.

How come we don't hear about Kerry's penchant for poetry anymore? (Here's an old post of mine making fun of Maureen Dowd's column about Kerry's interest in poetry. Key line: "Maureen, the man isn't a poet, he's a windbag!") Who even remembers when--or why--there was an argument that Kerry was better than Bush because of his interest in poetry?

What we're not talking about.

It's been a strange election season. Though it's gone on way too long, a huge amount of energy has been wasted on matters unrelated to the next four years, chiefly the sickly obsession with Vietnam. The talk about Vietnam perhaps occupies the space that would otherwise be devoted to more general blather about character. We're also hearing a lot of punditry about what women are doing, often in the form of whether Soccer Moms became Security Moms. (Have you ever noticed that these specialized labels are always about white people? No one ever talks about, say, "Security Blacks" or some such group. Would it seem offensive? If so, maybe you should worry about offending women with such labels. If not, why isn't it done? Is it because people believe racial groups do and/or should vote as one?) And there's always room to talk about things that affect the finances of older people (like medicine). (If young people voted more, maybe the government would bend over backwards to help us pay tuition. Can't we at least get the interest deduction for student loans back?)

But what is not being talked about that you would have thought you'd hear plenty about?

Supreme Court appointments! This was a huge issue in the 2000 election, when we were told the next President was sure to appoint two and maybe even three or four new Justices, and we--especially we women--were encouraged to feel quite alarmed about it. Here's speculation about particular appointments, in the October 4 Newsweek (including the ridiculous notion that President Kerry might appoint Hillary Clinton to the Supreme Court). The Sacramento Bee today asserts that "All Eyes" are "on Aging Justices," which, first of all, is not true (no one seems to be bothering); and second of all, is offensively ghoulish. (Why are we so solicitous of the needs of old voters, but openly take a deathwatch attitude about old Justices?) The Bee article is not based on statements by the candidates and notes that Kerry hasn't made the issue a "centerpiece" of his campaign. It quotes those who would like to see the issue on the front burner. Here's an AP article noting the absence of candidate attention to the issue.

I see there's a Daily Kos piece from Saturday, "Crank up The Supreme Court as an Issue in this Campaign!"

Is there any reason the Kerry campaign isn't making the Supreme Court a HUGE issue? ...

There's been a lot of talk recently about a possible decline in support amongst women for John Kerry. How about ratcheting up the Roe v. Wade/Supreme Court issue in the last few weeks?

As if the Kerry campaign might somehow have just forgotten about abortion and the standard way to make it a big issue. (Those Justices aren't getting any farther from the grave!)

Why don't the reporters delve into the question why the Kerry campaign decided to drop the issue? I could speculate, here in my dining room in Madison, Wisconsin: Some research showed the issue hurt Kerry. But why don't the professional journalists reveal the actual strategies of the campaigns? The AP reporter--prompted by Kos?--just dusts the cobwebs off the old deathwatch warnings heard in the 2000 campaign and calls up the head of a "liberal-leaning" group and a "conservative-leaning" group for some stock verbiage.

UPDATE: The parenthetical at the end of the first paragraph makes it look as though I consider myself a young person. I'm not. But I am quite involved in paying tuition! And sorry about not doing a better job of copy-editing this post earlier. I've touched up some gaffes (like "a AP article").

ANOTHER UPDATE: There is some kind of interest deduction for student loans, as an emailer pointed out. Sorry for the misinformation. Back when I had student loans, you could deduct all the interest (you could deduct your credit card interest too!). Now there is some kind of complicated approach that phases out the deduction as you make a higher income.

How Kerry lost me.

I started this blog in mid-January, and I've devoted a lot of words since then to analyzing the presidential campaign. I've said many times that I'm not going to pick my candidate until October. Yet I find myself expressing an increasing amount of hostility to Kerry, so I thought I'd go back and trace the arc of my antagonism through my various posts.

Here's my first statement about Kerry and the Iraq war, made on April 9th. (It was Good Friday--scroll up [actually, click here] to see the man preaching from a cross.)

I think it makes a lot of sense, after the primary season, to ignore the Presidential campaign as much as possible. There's no reason for a moderate like me, who might end up voting for either candidate, to follow the campaigns right now. For one thing, it's not fair to Kerry, because I find him a boring speaker and I'm really going to get tired of him if I pay any attention to him. For another thing, I can't think about him seriously until I know what he plans to do in Iraq, and he hasn't said what he will do. (Will, meaning, in the future. How the past might have been different is not going to determine my vote. And don't try my patience by telling me that I can infer what he will do in the future from what he asserts he would have done in the past.) He has no motivation to take a position on Iraq until closer to the election: why should he pin himself down when events are in flux?

Six days later, I got irked at him for the first time, for saying "You're not listening" to a man who wanted to know what his position on Iraq was. Back then, Kerry was saying things like "We shouldn't only be tough, we have to be smart. And there's a smarter way to accomplish this mission than this president is pursuing." My question was: "If you still don't know what he would do differently from Bush, do you deserve to be snapped at for 'not listening'?" I've linked back to this old post of mine a number of times, because I never forgot that he got testy and accused a man of not listening, when in fact Kerry had never expressed himself clearly about what he would do in Iraq. I had been willing to wait a long time for a clear answer, yet here he was criticizing us for not having heard his answer yet. All I had heard was "smarter way," which just seemed like a placekeeper for a plan to be submitted later.

On April 19th, Kerry appeared on "Meet the Press," and Tim Russert asked Kerry exactly the question I wanted an answer to: What would you do differently from Bush in Iraq?

Kerry's "response" is to launch into an anecdote with no apparent connection to the question (about a Vietnam vet--of all things) and gradually work his way toward something that will seem to be an answer. The strategy is to put the "answer" as far from the question as possible, in the hope that you'll forget the question and accept the proffered "answer" as an answer (or just hope that he'll stop talking already). Does Kerry ever answer the question about the future of Iraq? He always substitutes assertions about mistakes in the past. The most I'm hearing about the future is that Kerry will pursue all the same goals, but in a "smarter way." I'll just do it better. Trust me! Why? Because Bush hasn't been good enough.

On April 28th, I complained about a Kerry appearance on "Hardball." I'm irritated by meandering non-answers and robotic repetition of lines from his stump speech. I offered Kerry a deal:

It's on and on about the medals and ribbons. This is incredibly irritating. I agree with Kerry that it's pointless to quibble about whatever it was he threw away when he was an young man with an issue to fight for. But let's make a deal then: stop using Vietnam as an argument for why you should be President. The whole issue is a waste of time. I'm willing to accept that both Bush and Kerry are good people with good character. Now, get on with it! Give me some substance!

After the first commercial break, Kerry is smiling--with teeth showing oddly. Someone told him to smile, so he's taking stage directions. Oh, I'm so hopelessly tired of Kerry.

And that was back in April! Little did I know then that he would keep robotically delivering clips from the stump speech and would make Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign! Looking back, I can see that the "Meet the Press" and "Hardball" interviews were crucial in turning me against him. Notably, Kerry thereafter steered clear of serious interviews.

May 1st was an important day, when Kerry responded to the news of Abu Ghraib. I complimented him and expressed a hope:

Kerry may choose to do something more with this issue later, but [his comments today show] complete forbearance from opportunism. I want Kerry to demonstrate that he would never allow his political ambition to override the interest in the successful completion of our efforts in Iraq, and I have worried that he would pursue the strategy of uniting Bush and the war in the public's mind, creating a single entity (BushWar), and then use every opportunity to find fault with something done in the war to attack BushWar. What a disaster that would be.

Perhaps Kerry's statement only represents the astute political understanding that he needs to avoid appearing not to support our soldiers--especially important for him because of his Vietnam era statements--but I hope there is something more to this restraint, that there is a real commitment to the success of the mission. He is in a tough position here. Should he criticize Bush for not acting swiftly and harshly against the accused soldiers? For now he's chosen to refer to gathering the facts and providing "appropriate" process to the accused soldiers and preserving the rule of law. That may be too tame, part of his characteristic dullness, but it may be the surface of what is a competent commitment to the success of the war effort.

Nine days later, I wrote about Abu Ghraib again:

If Bush doesn't find a way to do something comprehensive, he deserves to be replaced. Whatever deficiencies Kerry may have--and I have not been a Kerry supporter--I would like to see him moved into the Presidency to make clear statement of the thing that Bush himself keeps going around saying: this is not what Americans are.

This was the point of my strongest support for Kerry.

On May 29th, I was pretty sympathetic to Kerry and defended him against attacks that he took too many positions:

One can easily portray Kerry as a man who takes so many different positions in such a confounding mix that no one--no one with any real potential to actually vote for him--ever gets too upset. Yet, obviously, Kerry has a careful balancing act to perform, and he seems sensible about trying to hold on to the middle. For the antiwar side, he seems to be offering only a feeling that he's going to wind things down more quickly and effectively than Bush, but Bush is trying to reach the same goals Kerry is stating. (This is why I'm not deciding between the two candidates until October: I'll see what Bush has actually done between now and then.) Kerry is urging ... that we get away from "partisan politics" and "just think common sense about our country, about what it should be doing." I don't argue with that. It's hard for him to get specific about what he would do, since he wouldn't be starting to do anything until over eight months from now. How can he use common sense to figure out what should be done that far in the future when things are changing every day so far out of his control? That's the downside of not being an ideologue.

Ironically, on this day I was dealing with nasty commenters on my blog (right before I turned off the comments function), who couldn't stop telling me what a louse I was for not condemning the war.

In June, two things happened that I wrote a little about: Reagan died and received a lavish funeral, and "Fahrenheit 911" came out and was loved and hated. I watched a bit of the funeral and avoided the movie. Various people used the occasions to stoke extreme partisan feeling. I felt my usual aversion to all of that. On July 1st, I complained about "ugly political imagery."

On July 31, I was very impressed by a Christopher Hitchens article that attacked Kerry for criticizing the war in Iraq for using money that we could be spending on our own people at home. Like Hitchens, I found that argument repugnant. Kerry further alienated me by repeating that argument many times.

Right after the convention, in early August, I questioned the assumption that Kerry is especially smart and call him "a cipher who went to Vietnam":

[M]y questions about Kerry's intelligence do not arise solely from my inference that he had a poor academic record and low standardized test scores. My questions are also based on his exasperatingly convoluted and unclear manner of speaking. This has been excused as a propensity for "nuance" and "complexity," but could also be caused by a lack of mental capacity. It could also be willful evasion. I'd really like to know. ... I've been listening to him talk for a long, long time, and I'm not impressed at all. And I'm sure not impressed by the mere fact of someone managing to hold a Senate seat for a long time!

I realize people who truly despise Bush don't care about any of this. The fact is Kerry's the candidate, so there's nothing more to say. Unite behind him, whoever he is. It's too late now. And please don't say anything bad about him. Shhhh! But that doesn't work for people, like myself, who don't despise Bush. I am actually trying to assess Kerry! Where is the material? It certainly wasn't presented in the convention last week, and Kerry's speeches and interviews are not exactly brimming with information. I've been looking for an answer to what he plans to do in Iraq for a long time ... and I still can't figure him out. It seems to me we're being asked to make a cipher President. A cipher who went to Vietnam. And isn't Bush. Is that enough? If you hate Bush, the answer is a resounding "Yes!" It isn't enough for me.

Next came the Republican Convention, which I watched much more closely than the Democratic Convention. I had TiVo'd the C-Span coverage of all nights of both conventions, but the Democratic Convention bored me and the Republican Convention gripped me. The speakers that made a real impression on me were: Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Ron Silver. These men all spoke well and with conviction. I listened to every word they said. I will admit to feeling deeply struck by Silver's line: "The President is doing exactly the right thing." Silver was open about being a liberal on the social issues--as I am--but passionate and clear that national security trumps other matters. I agree! I even enjoyed Zell Miller's old-style preacher speech.

How did Kerry try to claw his way back into the running after the convention? He was getting a lot of conflicting advice and being told to fight harder and attack. This post, written on September 5th, was pretty sympathetic to 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.

I could still have accepted Kerry at this point. But Kerry decided to go for the hard Howard Dean-style criticism of "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." In these last few weeks, he has battered us with negativity about the war, but still without offering any realistic positive solutions that are different from Bush's, and raising worries that he will simply give up on Iraq. And then he disrespected Prime Minister Allawi when the man was in the country and speaking to Congress. Yesterday, I wrote of Kerry's treatment of Allawi as his final, fatal mistake. I meant only to say that he had sealed his fate with voters for that, but, realistically, thinking about it today, I have to say he sealed his fate with me personally. Rereading this post, I see that the hope about Kerry I expressed on May 1st is completely lost.

UPDATE, MONDAY EVENING: After devoting much of Sunday to tracing the arc of my antagonism, it was nice to get so many visitors today. Thanks to Instapundit for starting the traffic, to Allahpundit for the cool quip ("[A]fter several months of looking at the menu, Ann Althouse decides she's not in the mood for Waffles."), and to lots of other people who linked and emailed.

Untame my hair.

Let's ask the experts about the deep meaning of the presidential candidates' looks. That's sure to be helpful. Caroline F. Keating is, according to the NYT, "a professor of psychology at Colgate University who has studied status cues transmitted by facial features." She worries that Kerry's "droopy brows and hooded eyes send an unwelcome signal of age and lethargy," and that he ought to "show more animation and smile more." You can make up for your tired, old eyes not only with smiling, but also with "exciting hair," which Prof. Keating thinks Kerry has. She says "This wild, untamed hair is something we associate with youthfulness." But what do we associate a sculpted, lacquered helmet of hair with? Because that's what some of us see topping the craggy Kerry face. Maybe it's not that seeing the hair affects what we think of the man, but that what we think of the man affects how we see the hair.

That NYT Magazine article about bloggers.

I suppose the New York Times thinks that by writing about bloggers, it can force all us bloggers to link to it. I already link to them much more than to anyone else (because I begin every day interacting with the paper NYT). I was going to shun the blogger piece, but I won't, because I wanted to comment on this:

[I]n 1999, Mickey Kaus, a veteran magazine journalist and author of a weighty book on welfare reform, began a political blog on Slate. On kausfiles, as he called it, he wrote differently. There were a thousand small ways his voice changed; in print, he had been a full-paragraph guy who carefully backed up his claims, but on his blog he evolved into an exasperated Larry David basket case of self-doubt and indignation, harassed by a fake ''editor'' of his own creation who broke in, midsentence, with parenthetical questions and accusations.

That paragraph makes me realize our culture has indeed changed dramatically--not, because of blogging, but because the NYT could write out an observation like that and not feel compelled to drop in the word "postmodern."

This is interesting too:

The blogs that succeed, like Kaus's, are written in a strong, distinctive, original voice. In January, a serious-minded former editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education named Ana Marie Cox reinvented herself online as the Wonkette, a foulmouthed, hard-drinking, sex-obsessed politics junkie. Joshua Micah Marshall, in his columns for The Hill and articles for The Washington Monthly, writes like every other overeducated journalist. But on his blog, Talking Points Memo, he has become an irate spitter of well-crafted vitriol aimed at the president...

Which persona is the invented persona? Wouldn't it make more sense to conclude that the dry, dignified version of Kaus/Cox/Marshall was the playacting and the vivid personal voice is the real person? Isn't self-expression the incentive to blog? Well, yes, but that self-expression can include escaping from your usual, socialized-to-get-along-well-with-others persona and finding the edited version of yourself that is readable, bloggable. It can't be bland, but it doesn't need to be nasty. The bloggers I've come in contact with--with a rare exception--are decent and fair. I'm struck by how rational and orderly the world of blogging is. You really can't get away with just "spitting vitriol." As the Times writes in its inelegant phrase, it must be "well-crafted vitriol" if you are to hold readers, and then it isn't really spitting at all, is it?

Interesting fact about Josh Marshall: He drinks a very large Coke and a very large iced coffee at the same time. The Times thinks it's interesting that he "sometimes even" writes in bed. Well, who in possession of a laptop doesn't write in bed sometimes? Does he blog naked? That might be interesting. Or not.

Interesting fact about Kos: When he was 17, at 5' 6" tall and weighing 110 pounds, he joined the Army, where he learned to fight back after years of being bullied. Also, Kos cares a lot about bloggers getting respect, and when he talks about it, though he smiles, the New York Times perceives "all the veins ... pulsing in his neck." I like this Kos quote: "If I care about something, I'll write about it. It's the essence of blogging." He displays a very tough attitude, then he expresses a fear of his own high traffic and a guilt about not linking to other bloggers enough. Kos has the most spirit and angst about blogging. If you wanted to make a documentary or a biopic or a fictionalized film about a blogger, Kos would make the best subject.

The Overture celebration.

Last night was another open house at the big glamorous Overture Center here in Madison. Here's how the inside of the dome looks at night:



Here is how our beautiful Capitol dome is framed in the immense windows of the Overture Center:



Here's a glimpse of the complex interior paths of the Center:



Last night, there was a big concert (Dave Brubeck) in the big Overture Hall. We did not have tickets, so we couldn't check out the Hall. It's said to have fabulous acoustics. I hope so. We stopped in to two free concerts that played in two of the smaller performance spaces. Later, a salsa band played in the cavernous lobby area. Lots of townsfolk were there, and plenty of people danced happily.



Even though none of the music I heard was the kind of music I like, I enjoyed seeing the community gathering in a beautiful space. I especially love the grand tradition of everyone coming to a big dance, which is the way human beings have enjoyed the gift of life for millennia.

Hitchens on Iraq.

If you missed Tim Russert's CNBC show tonight, try to catch one of the many repeat showings in the next day or so. The guests are Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens and the subject is, unsurprisingly, the current presidential election. It's hard to imagine a more cogent discussion of the election issues. Let me just set out one great exchange:

RUSSERT: What do we do about Iraq? What's going to happen? When American people are confronted, day in and day out -- a thousand soldiers killed -- 7,000 wounded and injured. There's a sense, obviously, in the world, that the United States will eventually say: Enough! We're getting out!

SULLIVAN: I hope to God not. If we need more troops, put more troops in there. ... You've gotta go through with this. And I think there's still a twenty, thirty percent chance of our succeeding.

HITCHENS: Let's take, I mean, let's put the case ... that the election takes place in a form that's not too contemptible, that people will say, okay, it's a good deal better than nothing, and that election is won by a party or coalition of parties that requests the United States to withdraw. What then? I mean, that would persuade me that you probably couldn't hope to hold on in the face of that. If, instead, we are fighting a war against people who are deliberately trying to sabotage the election, then there's obviously no question but that one must stay and mean that, under no circumstances, will we turn over a country of the importance of Iraq with the responsibilities we've inherited there to the Clockwork Orange fascists, the fundamentalists. They'll never go. The day will never come when they will own Iraq, and there will be no one in the United States who will be able to disagree with that even if every one of their sons has been killed in this war. Because it's self-evident. That's why, I think, there isn't more reaction to this combination of gross administration incompetence and these heartbreaking casualties. People know, in some way, that Iraq cannot be given over to Bin Ladenism. It doesn't need any further explanation. The President, actually, doesn't need to add any more. People have got this point.

Hitchens got that right, I think. Bush opponents who are tearing their hair out wondering why people aren't getting more upset about the conduct of the war in Iraq ought to see that.

Milestone.

The Sitemeter--despite recent undercounting--clicked past 300,000 today. That's pretty cool. Thanks to all you readers, and thanks to all of you who like to see the photographs of Madison. Thanks to Instapundit for linking to me today and sending me over 10,000 visitors on what would otherwise be a slow Saturday.

Approaching football.

So I did go take that walk I was talking about in the last post. The football stadium is six blocks from my house. On the third block of the walk, things could not be more peaceful:



On the fourth block, I take a quiet pause and admire the architecture:



It's not hard to guess the architect of that house (in front). It's even easier to guess the architect of the house next to it:



At the fifth block, I pass two little kids selling parking in their driveway for $20. I see the first signs of red and white:



Finally, I see the crowd converging on the stadium. They arrive from the north:



And they arrive from the south:



Some make their way up into the stadium:



Some loll around on the security barricades:



These two ask me to take their picture:



I ask if it's okay if I put the picture on my website, and they say "You can if you write that we're the coolest people you ever met."

Look, even the stop signs are red and white:



Across from the stadium, there are the parties:



Mothers, did you send your boys to college to drink beer while standing on the edge of a roof?



But no one fell, and the overloaded triple-deck porches seemed to hold up under the weight of all the young kids:



And everyone seemed to be having a mellow, happy time:



I guess it's on ESPN. Why don't you watch, and root for the Badgers?

UPDATE: Congratulations to the Badgers on their victory. Consolation to Penn State, with good wishes for their injured quarterback.

Listening to football.

I've been sitting at my dining table all day, catching up on some reading, blogging intermittently, and enjoying the pleasant breeze and filtered sunlight through the open windows. I'm also enjoying the occasional hearty yell that reaches my house from the football stadium a few blocks away. It's a nice feeling to spend the day reading at home but still to feel that you're hanging out, albeit remotely, with 80,000 people.

I decided to check the score before publishing this and was surprised to see the game won't start for another 45 minutes! I'm just hearing pre-game rowdiness. I ought to go for a little walk--I do need to get out the house--and go see what things look like over there. Maybe I'll have some pictures later.

Attention to detail.

Adam Nagourney and Jodi Wilgoren paint an unflattering picture of John Kerry's management style in tomorrow's NYT. Most telling revelation:

[Kerry] spent four weeks mulling the design of his campaign logo, consulting associates about what font it should use and whether it should include an American flag.

UPDATE: The Times story about Kerry set people thinking: That sounds like what they used so say about ...

Poliblog writes that it sounds like what they said about Al Gore, who took it upon himself to redraw the campaign logos overriding the work of the graphic artists assigned to the task.

An emailer wrote: "[T]the Times description of Kerry called to mind for me Jimmy Carter. My recollection is that many faulted Carter for trying to master all the intricate details of an issue--instead of allowing his aides or other experts to do this--and so was distracted. In this way, he was contrasted w/ Ronald Reagan."

It's hard to find a link to back up that statement about Carter, but I seem to remember that sort of thing being said. Nevertheless, let me add, that I think there is some tendency to overdo the classification of personality types. I don't think we should classify people into the "attention to detail" types and the "big picture" types. Any competent person must be capable of multiple levels of perception as well as good judgment about when it's big picture time and when you have focus on the details. We ought to worry about a candidate who can't or won't adjust his level of attention wisely and in tune with the circumstances. It's easy to make Kerry look foolish for "mulling" over the font for four weeks, and if he did nothing else in those weeks, he'd be frighteningly incompetent, especially if he really became lost in mental dithering. But it's likely that he only spent a total of an hour's time thinking about the font and also that he got some pleasure and recreation out of the project. (Jeez, am I going into Champion-of-the-Underdog mode?)

Elsewhere, Instapundit also singled out the mulling-over-the-fonts story for comment, and he compliments Kerry on the good design.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Poliblogger continues the discussion. Also, an emailer sends a good link for the info about Jimmy Carter, an old article by James Fallows in The Atlantic, but you've got to be a paid subscriber: here's the link. Here's a good passage from the article:

If there is any constant in the literature of presidential performance, it is that the President must husband his time. If he is distracted from the big choices by the torrent of petty details, the big choices will not get made—or will be resolved by their own internal logic, not by the wishes of those who have been elected to lead. Carter came into office determined to set a rational plan for his time, but soon showed in practice that he was still the detail-man used to running his own warehouse, the perfectionist accustomed to thinking that to do a job right you must do it yourself. He would leave for a weekend at Camp David laden with thick briefing books, would pore over budget tables to check the arithmetic, and, during his first six months in office, would personally review all requests to use the White House tennis court. (Although he flatly denied to Bill Moyers in his November 1978 interview that he had ever stooped to such labors, the in-house tennis enthusiasts, of whom I was perhaps the most shameless, dispatched brief notes through his secretary asking to use the court on Tuesday afternoons while he was at a congressional briefing, or a Saturday morning, while he was away. I always provided spaces where he could check Yes or No; Carter would make his decision and send the note back, initialed J.)

After six months had passed, Carter learned that this was ridiculous, as he learned about other details he would have to pass by if he was to use his time well. But his preference was still to try to do it all—to complain that he was receiving too many memos and that they were too long, but to act nonetheless on everything that reached his desk.

Presidential Halloween masks.

"Bizarro Gordon" is offering up political commentary as a guest blogger at Venturpreneur, to compensate for regular blogger Gordon Smith's aversion to talking about politics. BG's first post links to the "buycostumes" site, which claims that the sales of masks representing the presidential candidates predicts the outcome of the election. The winner of the election, we're told, corresponds to which mask sold the most. We're urged to buy a mask and thereby cast our vote. Nice sales pitch. But I have three problems. First, the Bush mask looks more like Nixon than Bush. It's just a crappy mask. Second, people go as negative characters for Halloween. They aren't in favor of devils and pirates and witches. Third, sometimes one candidate just looks scarier, weirder, funnier, or more distinctive than the other candidate, and would make the better mask for that reason. A Kerry mask is just more Halloween-y than a Bush mask. The original President mask that really took off was Nixon--and it sure wasn't because he was popular!

Personally, I think the website is just making up the statistics about mask sales to try to lure visitors into spending money to up the percentage for the candidate they support. BG has a different theory though, so go read that.

The UW's almost-great spam filter.

Recently, the UW installed a new spam filter that has vastly improved reduced the flow of email around here. Yet somehow the Nigerian scam letters still come through. How can that be? I don't even have to open these messages to know they are the classic spam letters.

Those wealthy ideologues, that crazy campaign finance reform.

The NYT examines how the McCain-Feingold law has successfully changed the ways of corporations and labor unions, who used to seek political influence through soft money contributions to the political parties and are not too interested in giving money to the independent advocacy groups that are making the 2004 election season so messy and unpredictable. According to the Times, the 527s are fueled by money from extremely wealthy individuals who are hardcore political true believers.

The fact that these people are not motivated by self-interest like the old corporate donors is both good and bad. It's good because they aren't corrupting the politicians by seeking favors and access. It's bad because they are political extremists so they give money to the groups that appeal to their extremist mentality, and these groups crank out advertising that clashes with and undercuts the candidates' own messages. MoveOn.org received an astounding amount of money, which it pours into overheated advertisements intended to help Kerry. Unfortunately for Kerry, MoveOn.org ads appeal to the people who would already vote for Kerry and are quite offputting to the people he might win over but is now losing. But I suppose, after the election is over, what everyone will remember is the Swift Boat ads, and the conventional wisdom will be that they turned the election, and, consequently, everyone will gear up to run bitter, nasty, uncoordinated ads again next time.

Meanwhile, Kerry has heard the siren call of the pacifist wing of his supporters, and I doubt very much if there is anything he's going to say in the debates to allow me to vote for the Democratic candidate as I have in the last six presidential elections. But I will vote for Russ Feingold. The most recent Wisconsin poll, the Badger poll, had Feingold ahead by 15 points. Badger also showed Bush ahead in Wisconsin by 14 points this week. So Feingold is polling 29 points better than Kerry in Wisconsin. Thirty percent of the Feingold supporters told Badger that they were voting for Bush. So we love the super-virtuous Russ Feingold here in Wisconsin. But he did give us this crazy campaign finance law that has skewed this presidential campaign into the realm of the bizarre.

UPDATE: This article by Telis Demos in TNR Online offers some insight into why Feingold is doing so much better in Wisconsin than Kerry:

[T]he problem for Democrats isn't the disappearance of Wisconsin and Minnesota's quirky brand of progressivism; it's the persistence of that unusual political sensibility--and the fact that it has been co-opted by Republicans. … It's not liberals these states love; it's mavericks. Democrats' problem isn't that they have taken Wisconsin and Minnesota for granted. It's that they have taken their own status as the party of maverick progressivism for granted. And while they were doing so, the GOP moved in on their territory.... As for Russ Feingold, he seems less the product of a liberal culture than of an odd-ball tradition that runs much stronger and deeper.

Kerry's final mistake.

Here's what I'd like to read about the 2004 election: an analysis of what happened written ten years from now. Anything written today is part of the events themselves. Writing today, you're caught up in the event of the moment. I feel I've been remiss in not yet posting a condemnation of the Republican's ban-the-Bible letter. Writing today, you're influenced by a hope or fear of affecting the events. And you also don't know how things will turn out. You don't know who will win the election, whether some dramatic event will occur in October, and how the war in Iraq will play out.

I try to imagine how someone looking back on the election will analyze it. If Kerry loses, one question will be, what was the turning point? Did the Swift Boat ads set the campaign on a track that led to defeat, was it Kerry's own choice to make his Vietnam service the central argument that he should be President, or was it a mass delusion--Kerry is electable--that overtook voters back in the primaries? Another question will be: When could Kerry have done something to salvage his candidacy? And: What was the final, fatal mistake?

I'm writing today, so I have all the deficiencies of a person writing today, but I have a prediction of the answer to that last question. The final, fatal mistake was criticizing and contradicting Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi when he was visiting the U.S. Kerry is in a very difficult position needing to criticize Bush's handling of the war, because the criticism itself seems damaging to the war effort. Bringing Allawi to the U.S. and linking him to the Bush campaign message was a powerful political move by Bush, but it was not a checkmate. Yet it forced Kerry into a terrible blunder. The grisly takedown has begun:

BUSH: This brave man came to our country to talk about how he's risking his life for a free Iraq, which helps America. And Sen. Kerry held a press conference and questioned Mr. Allawi's credibility. You can't lead this country if your ally in Iraq feels like you question his credibility.

CHENEY: I must say I was appalled at the complete lack of respect Sen. Kerry showed for this man of courage. Ayad Allawi is our ally. He stands beside us in the war against terror. John Kerry is trying to tear him down and to trash all the good that has been accomplished, and his words are destructive."

And the Kerry campaign is now wasting a lot of breath pointing out that it is an election year and the President's conduct of the war must be open to criticism, but what can be said of the attack on Allawi? Kerry will never dig himself out of this one, I think. And any time he makes his old favorite argument that he is much better suited for interaction with our allies, his Allawi blunder will be thrown in his face.

A bride and a bridal gown.

The NYT runs a long piece about John Kerry's early political years. I was interested in the material about his first wife, of whom we've heard very little:

Later that spring [in 1970], he married Julia Stimson Thorne in a big Long Island ceremony. The bride wore a gown from a relative's 1786 wedding, at which Alexander Hamilton had been best man and George Washington a guest, and The New York Times's lengthy account declared, "Whether today's wedding becomes a similar footnote to history may depend on the bridegroom."

Ah, but there is nothing more about the elusive Julia. The bridal gown played a more vivid role in the story than the woman who wore it.

UPDATE: Here's a Newsweek article about Thorne from last May. According to Newsweek, she's elusive by choice and she supports Kerry in the race. This is interesting:

Kerry told [biographer Douglas] Brinkley that a big reason he'd volunteered for Swift Boat duty in Vietnam—which is often cited as an example of his heroism—was so he could spend the summer with Thorne before training started. When asked if she'd ever heard that story before, their daughter Vanessa Kerry grew quiet and said, "No, but it wouldn't surprise me."

Why Kerry speaks so incomprehensibly ...

According to Stanley Fish. It's not that he's complex and nuanced:

If you can't explain an idea or a policy plainly in one or two sentences, it's not yours; and if it's not yours, no one you speak to will be persuaded of it, or even know what it is, or (and this is the real point) know what you are. Words are not just the cosmetic clothing of some underlying integrity; they are the operational vehicles of that integrity, the visible manifestation of the character to which others respond. And if the words you use fall apart, ring hollow, trail off and sound as if they came from nowhere or anywhere (these are the same thing), the suspicion will grow that what they lack is what you lack, and no one will follow you.

This implies a deep connection between our language ability and our emotional makeup that gives rise to an amazing practical wisdom in the human animal. If the candidates' speech inherently reveals who is speaking the truth and has a sound moral core, instead of worrying that people vote their feelings and fail to devote enough effort to amassing information and reasoning logically, we should renew our faith in democracy.

UPDATE: Eroding my faith in democracy, John emails "I take it [Fish] thinks that Aristotle and Kant weren't expressing their own ideas."

The fearsome litigation bred by Bush v. Gore.

Jeffrey Rosen, in TNR, describes a nightmare scenario of post-election litigation tapping into that "inexhaustible font of rhetoric and novel lawsuits" that is Bush v. Gore. Rosen resurrects Felix Frankfurter to warn us about courts entering "the political thicket." Wander in there and you'll never get out! Yet Rosen seems mired in the politics of Bush v. Gore itself: He puts a lot of effort into chiding the Supreme Court for getting involved in that particular political controversy. See, now there's hell to pay! Aren't you sorry?

But it wasn't possible for the U.S. Supreme Court to have made a decision to avoid turning the 2000 election into a legal matter. The Florida state courts had already taken hold of the controversy. The decision the U.S. Supreme Court had to make was whether to leave the outcome of the national election in the hands of one state's judges or to take it into their own hands.

Rosen is right that Bush v. Gore is now a precedent that lawyers will use to fight for the goals of their clients, and there is, of course, potential to weigh down American elections with far too much litigation, but it will be the job of the courts to make sensible decisions refraining from excessive involvement in politics. Surely, there are some political matters--such as the gross malapportionment of legislative districts that Frankfurter would have left intact--that deserve judicial scrutiny. The fear that if courts do anything they will have to do everything is alarmist and overstated.

"Security mommery."

Noam Scheiber writes in TNR about the recent news stories about "security moms" going for Bush. (I wrote about the NYT article here.)

Often the stories are larded with a testimonial by a real-live security mom, invariably a pro-choice, pro-gay rights, anti-death penalty former Gore supporter who's convinced only George W. Bush can keep her children safe. All of them conclude that security moms could cost John Kerry the election.

When I read this in The Columnist Manifesto I suspected that I was reading about a fictional character. Urban mythmaking. So I was glad to read Scheiber's piece. Key line:

The stories usually have one other thing in common: They're based on almost no empirical evidence.

Scheiber examines the polls in depth and ends by tweaking Kerry for being "so defensive about it's standing among women."

Note: That's TNR's apostrophe, by the way, left in to entertain my copy-editing-buff readers.

UPDATE: John emails to tweak me about writing "tweaking Kerry" when I was tweaking TNR for writing "it's." "Kerry" is the wrong antecedent for "its," so I should have written "tweaking the Kerry campaign for being 'so defensive about it's standing among women.'" It might be a bad idea to write about grammar or spelling, because inevitably you will make some mistakes yourself. On the other hand, writing about such things gives you an incentive to take some extra care. [LATER: I just corrected two damn little errors that I made as I wrote about the inevitability of errors.]

Kerry's pessimism move.

The NYT reports on Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi's visit to the US:

But on a day when Republicans and Democrats used Dr. Allawi to reinforce starkly opposed campaign messages about Iraq, Mr. Bush and his ally presented, over all, a rosy picture of the country. In contrast, Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, seized on the visit to paint a bleak portrait of Iraq and a Bush administration in disarray.

Remember--around the time of the death of the famously optimistic Reagan--when the candidates used to compete over who was more of an optimist? Now, Kerry seems to have decided that his last hope is to win us over to his dark view of Iraq. It's a desperate move, and it will be hard to get away from it now. I'm "painting a bleak portrait" of Kerry's future in the polls.

Back when optimism was in vogue, Kerry ended his convention speech with the very rosy line:

It is time to reach for the next dream. It is time to look to the next horizon. For America, the hope is there. The sun is rising. Our best days are still to come.

To be fair, he did say "For America, the hope is there." Maybe, once again, we deserve to be chided for not listening. I never said for Iraq, the hope is there. Sometimes these nuances slip right by us.

So maybe it's simpleminded of me to think, Kerry was for optimism and then he was against it. He was always a subtle mix of optimism and pessimism and we were always a little too dense to pick up the message. That's quite possibly true. Yet we simpleminded, unnuanced, unsubtle folk will vote in the end.

Three problems with "The Apprentice."

After last week's "The Apprentice," I wrote, "I bet Stacie J. ends up doing just fine." I could not believe the producers on the show would cast the only black woman for the second season to be a person who would display the same negative characteristics as the only black woman in the first season. My theory was that the first episode of this season was edited to make Stacie J. look strange, to tease us into thinking she's the new Omarosa, but that in the end we'd see how wrong we were. In fact, my belief that a major TV network would not portray black women this way is so strong that I will predict that at some later point in the season, Stacie J. will be vindicated and perhaps even brought back.

Last night, Trump fired Stacie J., not because of anything that happened in the competition we had to watch, but because her teammates once again ganged up on her. They all said she had to go. The teammates were embarrassing and lame. They had all colluded to try to get Stacie J. fired. Lined up in the boardroom, they told the tale of the fateful incident in which Stacie consulted a Magic 8 Ball and then got petulant when the others didn't gather round and enjoy her attempted comic performance. The teammates, all female, asserted that her terrifying behavior that day justified their permanently closing ranks against her. Trump, who ought to have lambasted them, fired Stacie.

So now, unless something else happens later in the season (and assuming viewers don't just leave), the show seems to have a race problem: Stacie J., the only black woman, chosen for a resemblance to last season's only black woman, was ostracized by the group, and then, instead of receiving the benefit of the doubt, like Omarosa, she was fired for being the outsider. That was quite ugly. And it wasn't even funny. Well, maybe you could justify getting her off the show because she didn't make her outsiderhood funny (as Omarosa did). Maybe Stacie J. was a drag, as she chose to get quiet and preserve her dignity. And where's the show in a quiet, dignified outsider? Maybe she needed to be fired because she lacked sufficient entertainment value. But it's racist to assume the black character ought to provide the entertainment, and her presence was making her teammates put on a little show: that sorority-girl-style exclusion routine.

And there lies the second problem: the events this season so far are making us think ill of women. They seem to be irrational, overemotional--that Magic 8 Ball thing was the scariest thing that ever happened!--and cliquish. Stacie J. may be gone, but of those who have avoided getting fired, who is left on the women's team who is any good at all? Who feels like trusting any of them? Maybe women just aren't any good at management. Thanks a lot, Trump!

And here's the third problem: absolutely nothing that happened in the competition part of the show this week had anything to do with why Stacie J. got fired. The same thing happened last week, when Bradford was fired entirely for something he did in the boardroom at the end. So why are we watching the competition and bothering to look for the mistakes the competitors make? Last night's competition was about creating "buzz" for a new flavor of Crest toothpaste: Are we not supposed to notice that the company was in fact using the show to create buzz for the product? We were chumps watching an hour-long commercial.

UPDATE: Miss Alli, at Television Without Pity, puts it really well (as always):

[T]he women -- led by Maria as well as an especially nasty and obnoxious Stacy R., emerging as one of the most distasteful and malicious in a group of extremely classless women -- choose to gang up on Stacie J. in the Boardroom. They begin to ratchet up the accusations from "weird personality" and "hard to get along with" to "mentally ill," and Trump is so flummoxed that he hears from the entire group. And one by one, they claim to have been alarmed, concerned, or -- in Stacy R.'s case, actually frightened -- by Stacie's antics with the Magic 8-Ball. Shockingly, Trump is not smart enough to tell the difference between truth and ass-covering fiction, and in a reminder that this show is just as much about the oddities and limitations of Trump as it is about those of the candidates, he shrugs and fires Stacie. Donald Trump is a weird, weird little man.

On the theory that the show is an exposé of the weirdness of the Donald, Miss Alli gives the episode an A-. By contrast, the TWoP readers give in a C+ and express their contempt in the forums. I guess I was in the readers' camp, disgusted with the show. But maybe I should take Miss Alli's advice and view "The Apprentice" as a horror show about Trump and keep watching. Yet life is short! Maybe I should be watching "Lost." Or just reading TWoP recaps and not watching anything.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's Prof. Yin's take on the episode.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Prof. Yin covers the extended version of the show that aired over the weekend. My TiVo didn't pick it up for some reason, so I can't give my own version. But Prof. Yin explains why Trump was justified in firing Stacie J. This being the case, Trump ought to fire the show's editors. Actually, I wonder how much control over the editing he's given up. He's got a big stake in his own image, and the show has a lot of potential to make him look like a fool or worse. Ah, but to be on a big TV show! Maybe it's all worth it--for a big ego guy like Trump.

Blogger and Sitemeter.

I like the separate post pages that Blogger permits, but the Sitemeter doesn't show up. Is there some way to put it there or is this a flaw in Blogger's post pages function? I tried to find the answer on my own... If you know, please email! I think this problem has only cropped up in the last few days, but I might be wrong.

UPDATE: Blogger reports:

As of last week's build, we've introduced a bug such that the link to a post in an atom feed is now to the archive page rather than the post page. We should have a fix for this shortly.

Does this account for the loss of the Sitemeter?

ANOTHER UPDATE: I now realize that this flaw in Blogger has not only caused Sitemeter to fail to record a good deal of my traffic, but has made me far less aware of links in other blogs, which I would otherwise have read and might have commented on. I just assumed I was in a link drought. How annoying!

Can it be that Bush has a 14 point lead in Wisconsin?

The Capital Times reports today on a new poll that shows Bush 14 points ahead:

The poll, sponsored by The Capital Times and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and conducted by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, shows Bush with 52 percent support among likely voters, Kerry with 38 percent, and independent Ralph Nader with 4 percent.

When Nader is removed from the choices, his four points are evenly split between Kerry and Bush and the 14 point spread remains. A week ago, a poll showed Bush with only a 2 point lead, well within the margin of error. How could so much change have taken place in the last week?

Badger Poll director G. Donald Ferree Jr. noted that the timing coincided with the revelation that CBS News had received fake documents calling into question Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.

"It looked like he was being unfairly attacked," Ferree said, adding that the temporary boost for Bush "could be a bubble" that may burst, particularly after next week's first presidential debate.

Asked about the conduct of the campaign, 29 percent of those in the Badger Poll said they believed Kerry has been "unfairly attacking his opponent," compared to 23 percent who complained Bush had done so.

On the detailed questions Kerry beat Bush only on "protecting the environment." The biggest spread was on what is arguably the most important issue, "protecting the United States from terrorism." Here, Bush had 53 percent, with Kerry at a mere 15 percent--a 38 point spread.

Meanwhile, Kerry is coming here to Wisconsin to do his debate preparation. He's staying in Spring Green at the House on the Rock Resort. The House on the Rock is a great, absurd tourist attraction, a crazy counterpart to the elegant Frank Lloyd Wright attractions that are also in the area. The House on the Rock is an architectural mishmash, patched together, built into the rock in places and teetering way out over it in another. It is conjoined to a maze of a museum that houses a demented collector's overload of junk and minor treasures. It is only too easy to offer up the House on the Rock as a metaphor for the mix of positions and issues and contradictory statements that Kerry has piled together over the long months of striving to make his way to the Presidency.

But welcome to Wisconsin, anyway, Senator Kerry. I hope the people of Wisconsin are nice to you, and that you get a chance to enjoy the beauty of our state, to practice up for your debate, and to recover from your laryngitis, even though--I must say--that lost-voice effect might win some people over by reminding us of our old and well-favored President, Bill Clinton.

UPDATE: Here's a better link for the House on the Rock, from the Roadside American website, which specializes in offbeat attractions. The description begins:

Alex Jordan, Jr. wanted to teach Frank Lloyd Wright a thing or two about architecture. The lesson started years ago.

Jordan's dad, a budding architect, had been dismissed at Wright's Taliesin home, near Spring Green, with the declaration, "I wouldn't hire you to design a cheese crate or a chicken coop." Soon after, the senior Jordan chose a pinnacle rock south of Taliesin to build a parody of Wright's fancy-pants architecture, a strange "Japanese house." The ceilings were dangerously low (padded now to accommodate tourists) and the structure seemed to cling precariously to the odd contours of the rock.

There's much, much more, including the "Infinity Room," which seems as if it goes on forever.



Suffice it to say: the House on the Rock is a metaphor goldmine for people writing about the Kerry campaign.

Take me back to Madison.

By popular request, here's a look back into Madison, especially for all you readers who come here for a window into your past.

What does our beloved hill look like today, in late September? Are the kids lying on the ground amid "Free Tibet" signs? Yes, they are:



Are people debating about politics down on the mall? Yes, they are:



Can I still buy food for an al fresco lunch? Yes, more than ever:



Hey, is that Loose Juice? Is Loose Juice still there after all these years? Yes, it is:



Is that poster store still there? Yeah, come on in:



How about that eyeglasses store with the doll displays in the window? Sure, look:



Hey, give me a closeup on that Bucky thing! Okay:



How about the original State Street coffeehouse, Steep & Brew? It's here and has a nice sidewalk café now (and that's Gino's right next to it):



Do they still have Pipefitter? Yes, here it is:



And here are two closeups:





Maybe this obscure State Street doorstep reminds you of another aspect of your sojourn through Madison:



Well, just stop into Sunshine Daydream and buy some souvenirs of your psychedelic past:

"Serious predicament" or lucky break?

Thanks, a minion.

Not only did Instapundit link to me yesterday, giving further weight to the theory that I blog as one of as minions, but he linked to my update thanking him for the link and commented on the whole "minions" concept:

Minions? It sounds so very Ming the Merciless. "Minions! Sieze him! We'll see if Professor Leiter can maintain his trademark self-regard after a few months of grading exams in the bluebook mines of Kessel!"

Hey, I was going to riff on the word "minions" yesterday, and now I'll only look like more of a minion if I do. Why did I delay? I got as far as Googling the word "minions," and then I got distracted by laughter when the results page came up with this ad:

Minions For Sale
Low Priced Minions.
Huge Selection! (aff)
ebay.com

BONUS: Fans of 1980s kids' TV might see if the can guess the Top Eleven Minions of Skeletor.

Draft dodgers.

Yesterday, in my hallway of the law school, we were talking about the connotations of "draft dodging." The subject came up in connection with calling President Bush a draft dodger for joining the National Guard. One thing you can say here, and I've said it myself, is that calling Bush a draft dodger for joining the National Guard offends all the many people who have served in the National Guard. Another thing one could say is that joining the Navy, as Kerry did, is "draft dodging," by the same token, because it is another option men chose in preference to being drafted.

But I was saying yesterday that every young man I knew back in the Vietnam era sought to avoid the draft, and no one felt the slightest need to feel ashamed of doing so. How to dodge the draft was a frequent subject of conversation, back when I went to college at the University of Michigan in 1969, and I heard endless talk of things like getting letters from psychiatrists and getting one's weight below 120 and, as a last resort, moving to Canada. The chant of the time was "Hell, no, we won't go." Students who participated in ROTC were viewed as aliens: who were these people? Draft dodging was completely socially acceptable, encouraged, and applauded.

The only criticism of draft dodging I ever heard in those days was that the least privileged members of society would fill the draft, because they were the least able to exploit the loopholes. The accepted answer to that criticism was that activists therefore should advise these persons on how to get in on the draft dodging action themselves. In any case, it was argued, it was crucial to keep up the resistance to the draft, to destroy it as a workable policy. (Suffice it to say, I'm not worried Bush has a secret plan to bring back the draft!)

I think there are millions of men out there who know they enthusiastically resisted the draft and even looked down on anyone who didn't. I think it must be the younger folks who perceive it as a harsh criticism of Bush to call him a draft dodger. The truth is, he was the sort of person that the people I knew would have scoffed at because he did serve.

But those of us who remember those days are pretty old, and serving in the military is viewed quite differently now. I asked my younger colleagues if they remembered the song "Alice's Restaurant," and I was actually surprised to find out they hadn't even heard of it. Here's a sample of the circa 1969 zeitgeist:

They got a building down New York City, it's called Whitehall Street, where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected. I went down to get my physical examination one day, and I walked in, I sat down, got good and drunk the night before, so I looked and felt my best when I went in that morning. `Cause I wanted to look like the all-American kid from New York City, man I wanted, I wanted to feel like the all-, I wanted to be the all American kid from New York, and I walked in, sat down, I was hung down, brung down, hung up, and all kinds o' mean nasty ugly things. And I walked in and sat down and they gave me a piece of paper, said, "Kid, see the psychiatrist, room 604."

And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL." And the sargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."

To get the full sense of how people thought about the draft back then, read the whole text of this immensely popular Arlo Guthrie song. No one was outraged by Arlo's paean to draft dodging. Arlo was an icon. Recasting Bush as a draft dodger and not a military guy would in those days, for the people I knew, have taken him out of the category of social outcast and made him one of us!

UPDATE: An emailer sends a link to the well-loved "Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No" poster of the Vietnam era.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Another emailer sends this link to a picture and some discussion of a proposed Canadian monument to American draft dodgers. Here's the FoxNews report about it. Quite apart from the politics of it all--that is one ugly monument! Who knew the Canadians turned out in the nude to welcome our dodgers with outstretched arms?

"All U Can Eat Bacon."

The Madison bar scene, photoblogged by our resident public sociologist. You may think it's frightening and horrible. I was thinking, you can really do the Atkins diet here. Just order a big glass of vodka and help yourself to a free meal of bacon! It's all happening at Wando's.

"To see fake journalism taking off like this."

On tonight's Daily Show, Jon Stewart had this to say (in response to a comment by Bush-Cheney campaign chairman Marc Racicot):

RACICOT: We depend upon journalists. I think that we do depend upon those who observe and commentate and offer searing scrutiny.

STEWART: Now, how has that been? Because there is, obviously, well, what's going on with Dan Rather and CBS News, which, for my taste, by the way ... To see fake journalism taking off like this ... well, to me, it's very refreshing.

Funny. And you can decide for yourself if Racicot's "searing" was a subtle jab at Kerry.

Girl Scout values.

This morning I stopped into the faculty library to fill my coffee cup in the machine that brews one cup of coffee at a time. It was less than five minutes before my 11 o'clock class, so I was feeling a little hurried. But Nina, who also has an 11 o'clock class, was ahead of me with her blue and white striped coffee cup, so I had to go second, with my bright green cup. This gave me a chance to chat with Nina. I said I always have to get to class early because I always need to move the furniture back in place and erase the blackboard. Why don't people put their room in order before they leave? I always erase my own chalkings at the end of class. I'm such a Girl Scout! I believe in that ethic that you should leave the place in better condition than you found it. That's what they taught us about how to treat a campsite in Girl Scouts.

They didn't have Girl Scouts in Poland when you were growing up, did they?

Yes, but they called it Socialist Youth.

Women!

The NYT has an article about Kerry's appeal to women, and I'm having trouble reading it because that picture there with the article is driving me nuts. Why are these women so ecstatic? It strikes me as freakish and scary. I don't even like when people act that way about pop stars. It looks like the way models act horrifyingly happy in ads for credit cards or soda or rental cars. When I see people reacting ecstatically to a politician, I think about terrible things.

The other reason I'm having trouble reading this article is that I detest candidate attempts to appeal to women. You know women, they care about health care. Who knows why? Men don't get sick? It seems to me that it's men, not women who have the problem of a shorter life span caused by illness. Or is it just the word "care" in "health care." Women just care, right? I have a good Kerry slogan to compete with Bush's "W stands for Women": "Kerry stands for Care."

But let's look at the article.

In the last few weeks, Kerry campaign officials have been nervously eyeing polls that show an erosion of the senator's support among women, one of the Democratic Party's most reliable constituencies.

How to explain this development?

Democratic and Republican pollsters say the reason for the change this year is that an issue Mr. Bush had initially pitched as part of an overall message - which candidate would be best able to protect the United States from terrorists - has become particularly compelling for women. Several said that a confluence of two events - a Republican convention that was loaded with provocative scenes of the Sept. 11 tragedy, and a terrorist attack on children in Russia - had helped recast the electoral dynamic among this critical group in a way that created a new challenge for the Kerry camp.

See, you terrorists, what happens when you go after children! It makes women want to vote for Bush. Show me some "provocative scenes" and then some suffering children and, suddenly, I am caught in a estrogen undertow sweeping me to the right.

Help, Mellman! What can be done to save Kerry from the mindless love of children and safety that grips the feminine mind? Don't worry, is the message from Mellman (the Kerry campaign pollster):

"I don't define it as a problem,'' Mr. Mellman said. "I define it as an opportunity.'' He noted that a group of widows of Sept. 11 victims endorsed Mr. Kerry last week and offered that as evidence that the women "thought he was better able to protect the country.''

We'll just get our own grip on that pliable feminine mind! We've already shown our moves on those six 9/11 widows last week!

The campaigns talk about women the way people who thought women shouldn't have the right to vote talked about women.

"Moral cretins and self-important poseurs."

I assume that Rathergate is causing a lot of stray anger and anxiety among Kerry supporters. But you might want to take a deep breath before blogging. Maybe think twice, especially if you're a lawprof, before calling the bloggers who delved into the CBSNews scandal "full of sh*t" (spelled out) in your post title. Check your epithets. For example,"Instaignorance" for "Instapundit" might be instaunreadable without a hyphen--and a bit childish on top of that. And maybe reconsider hitting the publish button if you see that the argument you've written is that other bloggers are "moral cretins and self-important poseurs" because they care about the corruption of mainstream media in a specific current incident affecting the presidential election while at the same time they aren't bothering with a history book about the Japanese internment in World War II. It's a strained comparison--we're not bothering with Kitty Kelley's book either--so maybe you'd want at least to hesitate before writing "Shame on these bloggers ... Shame, indeed, on these moral cretins and self-important poseurs."

And when a fellow lawprof responds and confines himself to pointing out that you've built an argument on a comparison that doesn't hold up well, and he doesn't take you to task for your embarrassing language, why not be gracious? You mischaracterize him as only not understanding that the history book is a real issue and--imperiously misusing "shall"--write: "I shall help him, because I am a nice guy." And when he responds to you, you might want to think about how it makes you look before going to his comments section and beginning with "Alas, this is getting a bit dreary (at least for my readers), so let me just post something here."

So when you wanted people to pay attention to something it was a big outrage and they were moral cretins not to already be talking about your subject, and then when someone engages with you, but not in the way you wanted, suddenly it's all too boring. The criticism "why did you pay attention to one thing and not to another?" is something I've seen before. One of the reasons I turned off my comments function was that the comments pages were cluttered with expressions of outrage at me--moral cretin!--for blogging about whatever I was blogging about instead of expressing outrage at the war in Iraq. As if bloggers are doing something wrong by choosing their topics instead of blogging about things in the order that they are important!

(By the way, I could imagine a blog gleefully naming itself "Moral Cretins and Self-Important Poseurs.")

UPDATE: A clever emailer suggests shortening "Moral Cretins and Self-Important Poseurs" to "McSips." I love that! Also, thanks to Instapundit for linking (and giving more weight to the theory of the original epithet-hurler that I blog as one of Instapundit's minions).

ANOTHER UPDATE: I don't have a comments function, but Gordon does, and he's got got a lot of them over there now (including one from me). So if you've got something to say about this, you can comment over at Gordon's blog.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Does anyone else find it ironic that the professor who started out by shaming others for onesidedness has now updated his post to publish the text of two emails that attack me and to let us know that he's receiving a lot of email that attacks him which he's deleting? Email attacking him has also been sent to me. Should I print a choice one to balance each one he prints about me? Because it's all about balance in the blogosphere, isn't it Professor Leiter?

Kerry on Letterman.

Kerry cranked out a dismal performance on David Letterman's show last night. He alternated between rerunning lines from his stump speech and plodding through scripted jokes. Unlike Nixon on "Laugh-In" and other candidates who've used pop culture shows successfully, Kerry did not use self-deprecating jokes. He attacked Bush and Cheney and used "Halliburton" as a punchline.

Read the abysmal "Top Ten" list written for him to recite, which he did without saying "Number 10 ... Number 9" in the Letterman way, proving that he does not know the show and thus severely limiting the goodwill he might have picked up through association with Dave. The items on the list are nearly all grousing about Bush and Bush people. The only references to Kerry were indirect (#7 referred to his "lustrous, finely groomed hair" and #4 referred to his wife's wealth). Most awkwardly, he caught himself beginning to pontificate about September 11th with a statement to David Letterman telling him to remember how people felt at that time. He then realized that the man sitting next to him had played a prominent role expressing the feelings people had at that time, so he switched to fawning over Letterman. Letterman had a pained wide smile on his face.

I'd love to know what Letterman really thinks of candidates using his show. Is he just wondering if this is good for ratings (because it's such a big deal) or bad for ratings (because the candidate is droning and turning the show into a campaign ad)? Or does he really sympathize with the candidate, who ought to be able to run for office without the indignity of appearing on a late night comedy show and pretending (badly) to be campanionable and funny?

UPDATE: If you'd like to see a good--and self-deprecating--Top 10 list read by a candidate, check out "Top Ten Ways I, Howard Dean, Can Turn Things Around." Number 1 was "Oh, I don't know -- maybe fewer crazy, redfaced rants." Dean read it really well too. Ah ... Dean nostalgia ... How many people have Dean nostalgia?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's how the New Republic summed up the Kerry performance on Letterman: "a long and meandering trip through Hideous Remains of Stump Speech Lane."

"Such proper ideas of doughnuts."

Every week during the semester here at the law school, we have an early session with students and faculty that is officially called "Coffee and Donuts." It's always spelled the "Dunkin' Donuts" way, not the "Krispy Kreme Doughnuts" way. Neither of those companies looks to be oriented toward spelling things properly. Google has "donuts" almost three times as often as "doughnuts," but that may just reflect the prevalence of Dunkin' Donuts. I think the faculty should set a good example about the importance of good spelling. Lawyers must take great pains to avoid misspellings in briefs. Think what a gaffe it is to write "Marberry v. Madison." So I think we ought to spell donuts/doughnuts correctly for official law school purposes. Let's check the literary authorities. Robert Frost (who probably ate frosted doughnuts):

It took my mind off doughnuts and soda biscuit
To step outdoors and take the water dazzle
A sunny morning, or take the rising wind
About my face and body and through my wrapper,
When a storm threatened from the Dragon’s Den,
And a cold chill shivered across the lake.

Willa Cather:

The household slept late on Sunday morning; even Mahailey did not get up until seven. The general signal for breakfast was the smell of doughnuts frying. This morning Ralph rolled out of bed at the last minute and callously put on his clean underwear without taking a bath.

That's a yummy juxtaposition.

Sarah Orne Jewett:

We stopped, and seeing a party of pleasure-seekers in holiday attire, the thin, anxious mistress of the farmhouse came out with wistful sympathy to hear what news we might have to give. Mrs. Blackett first spied her at the half-closed door, and asked with such cheerful directness if we were trespassing that, after a few words, she went back to her kitchen and reappeared with a plateful of doughnuts.

"Entertainment for man and beast," announced Mrs. Todd with satisfaction. "Why, we 've perceived there was new doughnuts all along the road, but you 're the first that has treated us."

Our new acquaintance flushed with pleasure, but said nothing.

"They're very nice; you 've had good luck with 'em," pronounced Mrs. Todd. "Yes, we've observed there was doughnuts all the way along; if one house is frying all the rest is; 't is so with a great many things."

...

"I wonder who she was before she was married?" said Mrs. Todd, who was usually unerring in matters of genealogy. "She must have been one of that remote branch that lived down beyond Thomaston. We can find out this afternoon. I expect that the families'll march together, or be sorted out some way. I'm willing to own a relation that has such proper ideas of doughnuts."

So "doughnuts" it is!

I've been tapped to lead today's session, which begins at 8:30. I meant to set my alarm clock an hour earlier, but somehow I set it two hours earlier. No wonder it was so dark and I felt so bleary. The subject of the session--worked out not by me but by the people who organize the program--is blogging. There are lots of fliers pinned up around the law school that say "BLOGGING" and include my name. Email has been sent to all the students that refers to me as Professor (and prolific blogger) Ann Althouse.

These sessions are casual conversations so I've resisted planning anything to say. It will be interesting to see where the discussion goes. Maybe it will turn to the subject of bloggers versus mainstream media as exemplified by Ra^thergate. Maybe the subject will be more intra-law school: should students blog? Maybe they'll focus on this blog. We'll see. I'll update.

UPDATE: We had a lively discussion. There was a little what is a blog and why do you blog, but the favorite topic turned out to be law student blogs. There was suprisingly little about politics and the impact of blogs on mainstream media. People were more concerned with questions about starting and maintaining their own blogs. A lot of the students who attended already had blogs. Gordon is also blogging about the session this morning, and Gordon has a set of links to the student blogs he likes best and a set of links to Wisconsin Law School blogs which includes student blogs. He added a few new ones today.

Dan Rather on tonight's evening news.

So Burkett gave the documents to CBS News and admits he lied to them about where he got the documents, but still insists he believed they were true. [UPDATE: Transcript.] Rather says Burkett now says he got the documents from "a different source, one we cannot verify." Well, that's very interesting. Let me know when you feel like telling us what the claimed source is. And hurry up, please, because I'm having trouble not assuming it was someone from within the Kerry campaign.

Rather asks Burkett if he's forged or faked anything, and Burkett (whom I can't trust) says no. Burkett could truthfully say that if he were merely used as a conduit for faked documents. The key question remains who Burkett got the documents from (or if Burkett is lying about faking them himself).

After the interview with Burkett, Rather expresses regret while trying to maintain his dignity, but I'm quite bored with that right now. The key question is who is this source behind Burkett? Don't think you got away with any sleight of hand! That's the question now.

AOL Messenger vs. iChat.

I've never IM'd before, but I'm doing a research thing that required it. I figured out how to use iChat, but I couldn't see how to add a new screen name, and I needed a coded screen name, so I switched over to AOL Messenger. I can't believe how ugly AOL Messenger looks compared to iChat! The difference is mind boggling.

UPDATE: Thanks to an emailer for the tip. I didn't realize you could just type over the existing screen name, ignoring the drop down menu. I need to remember that in Mac it is actually easy and to try to do something so obvious that I'm forgetting to see it. The "help" function could be a better. Maybe the assumption is you won't actually resort to it, but when you do, it should be better at perceiving what you're looking for.

Time's take on Rather-dogging bloggers.

Time has a little piece on Rather-related blogging this week, complete with a picture of the Powerline guys, dressed up with matching ties, grinning gleefully while looking at their own website on an iMac that is reflected in one lens of Scott Johnson's wire-rimmed glasses, giving an oddly insane glint to his left eye. Time-style prose is unleashed--"bloggers were waiting to pounce like a pack of hounds behind the butcher shop"--to make the bloggers who cared about the Rather story seem like a bunch of "pugnacious" right-wingers.

Kerry and his advisors.

Newsweek describes John Kerry, "preparing to accuse the president of failing to tell the truth about 'the mess in Iraq'" and seeking the advice of Wesley Clark:

Kerry knew from Vietnam what it felt like to face the bullets without the support of the folks back home. So how, one of his senior staff wanted to know, would Kerry's attacks go down now with the troops in Iraq? "Look, the soldiers are debating it themselves on the ground," Clark reassured Kerry's inner circle. "They're coming back and they're incredibly critical. You have to call it like it is."

Great distinction from Vietnam, General Clark!

At the Newsweek link there is also a handy chart listing Kerry's "Old Guard" and "New Guard" advisors and their strengths and strategies. Newsweek writes of the "Old Guard": "By stubbornly sticking to an 'accentuate the positive' strategy, the Kennedy cadre dug Kerry a hole in the polls." Don't blame the candidate, of course, Newsweek. No reason he'd have an idea about what to accentuate, let alone actual beliefs he might want to express. He was just standing by while those terrible Old Guard advisors were digging a hole for him.

That Old Guard was really bad, so let's click on the "New Guard":

This group of Clinton-era veterans and Kerry loyalists are seasoned fighters who know from experience how to handle Republican attacks. They'll have their hands full, though, with Karl Rove and his take-no-prisoners tactics.

New Guard to the rescue! If they fail, though, we've got the excuse ready to go: Karl Rove is just awful!

Dan Rather's feeble apology.

Here's my read of Dan Rather's "statement on the documents," which I'm going to put in writing before reading what anyone else has to say:

Last week, amid increasing questions about the authenticity of documents used in support of a "60 Minutes Wednesday" story about President Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard, CBS News vowed to re-examine the documents in question-and their source-vigorously. And we promised that we would let the American public know what this examination turned up, whatever the outcome.

Now, after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically.

You could believe they were still authentic and say that! After praising yourself for "extensive additional interviews"--as if you had originally had a decent set of interviews--you're only withdrawing your official "journalistic" seal of approval. Has your research shown that the documents are, to a journalistic standard of proof, fake? If so, say that you now believe them to be fake. If not, say why you've only suffered a loss of "confidence," leading you only to discontinue "vouching." You want to be able to deny that it was wrong to "vouch" in the past. But it was wrong!

I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers.

Oh, what a passive innocent you are. Misled! (Is that anything like John Kerry's repeated "Bush misled us into war," which is meant to keep us from thinking about the fact that he seems to have voted for it?) The bad ones are the misleaders. But why would we ever trust a journalist who isn't on guard against being misled? There will always be sources that mislead, so it must be your responsibility to guard against deceit.

That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where-if I knew then what I know now-I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.

"Leads me to a point"--again, how passive you are. Always being led places. And, again, look at this effort to preserve the claim of having acted properly in the past. You've now reached "a point," but at an earlier point, the evidence was different, and you behaved properly at that time, you'd like to say. If only you "knew then what [you] know now," as if it weren't your responsibility to know things before you ran with the story.

But we did use the documents. We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry.

So here is the shred of an apology. You're only sorry for making "a mistake in judgment." But the only mistake in judgment you've alluded so far is trusting your source, who was the real bad actor here. Who is that source, by the way, and why are you protecting it?

It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of investigative reporting without fear or favoritism.

I haven't the slightest idea why I should believe this. One would have to think CBS has a lamblike faith in to goodness of news sources. How could that possibly be the "CBS News tradition"?

Please know that nothing is more important to us than people's trust in our ability and our commitment to report fairly and truthfully.

"Please know"? Please. You want us to just believe you, and you think perhaps we will because good people do believe what they are told, they way you, you good, good people, believed that source that turned out to be so bad.

I wonder how much effort went into the careful crafting of this laughable apology.

Open house at the Law School.

There is a group of prospective students at the Law School today. They were just listening to a presentation in the faculty library down the hall from my office, so I know it's a huge group. I believe they'll be auditing some classes today, so it will be interesting to see how many extra faces there are in my Civpro2 class that meets in a few minutes. I'm glad we're on the first day of a new topic (diversity jurisdiction), rather than the last day of the previous topic (where we struggled with the most perplexing thing about the Erie Doctrine). Maybe some readers of this blog will sit in on the class, and if so, feel free to drop me an email and let me know if everyone has been suitably nice to you and whether you think Congress should abolish diversity jurisdiction. Just kidding about the diversity jurisdiction. I'll add a funny story about diversity jurisdiction later. I've got to go to class now.

ADDED STORY: Here's an anecdote I tell at the beginning of an article called "Late Night Confessions in the Hart and Wechsler Hotel" (47 Vand. L. Rev. 993 (1994)):

Chief Justice Rehnquist visited my law school last year to deliver a lecture entitled "The Future of Federal Courts." The University Theater filled: overdressed alumni in the front rows, respectful students in the balcony, camouflaged professors here and there. I sat in the middle and hunched over a folded-up sheet of legal paper. I scribbled notes and hoped for some insight into the tangled mass of problems I had made my life's work. Would the Chief Justice perhaps explain the Court's new habeas corpus jurisprudence? I wanted a little accounting for Butler v. McKellar, in which he had denied federal court relief to a man who faced the death penalty after a conviction based on a confession that the Court's own case law would, without question, exclude.

The Chief told some jokes, elaborated on his ties to Wisconsin, and discoursed at length about the workload of the courts. The issues were neutral, administrative, managerial, structural.

"Did he say anything provocative?" asked a colleague who had missed the speech.

"He never got any more provocative than to say he's against diversity."

My friend was shocked. "He's against diversity! ? "

"Diversity jurisdiction," I said, realizing she was not a proceduralist.

That poll.

Wow, pretty striking results on that poll I took over the weekend. (Here.)

A bar, a word about pronunciation, and the whole subject of me and Texas (including the second reason I owe my life to coffee).

Responding to my Saturday post about my middle name (Adair), an emailer writes:

There's an Adair's Saloon in the Deep Ellum area of Dallas. Deep Ellum is a bar/nightclub area east-northeast of downtown Dallas, so named because it's centered along Elm Street (Ellum being a corruption of Elm). Adair's is one block south of Elm on Commerce Street. It's long and narrow like an old-style barber shop, and has black marker graffiti all over the walls and tables. It's a great honky-tonk, with live Texas-style country music most nights of the week. They also serve fantastic hamburgers that come with a whole jalapeno impaled on a toothpick topping the bun.

Adair's is one of the few places in Dallas that reminds you you're still in Texas. ... You should check it out if you ever happen to be down Dallas way.

Incidentally, although I've always pronounced Red Adair's name with the emphasis on the last syllable (red' uh-dare'), I say Adair's bar with the emphasis at the front (ay'-dares). I have no idea why. Maybe it has something to do with the meter.

Here's a link to the page of their website with lots of clickable photos of musicians and customers. And, yes, it does look very appealingly Texan.

Let me add a word about pronunciation and a word about me and Texas.

Pronunciation: I've never heard Adair pronounced the bar's way. Everyone in my family always said Adair the way you'd say "a dare," and that's the way I always heard Red Adair's name pronounced on news shows. The bar's way of saying it seems like a southern/country/cowboy thing, like saying CE-ment instead of ce-MENT (which is an incredibly cheesy insight into pronunciation based on watching "The Beverly Hillbillies"). "Ellum" for "Elm" reminds me of how my paternal grandfather--known to all as Pop--used to pronounce "film"--"fillum." I don't know the geographic range of that kind of speech, but he was from Delaware, which may or may not be considered southern. We certainly didn't think we were in the South when we lived there. Pop also called a gas station a "filling station," which always seemed to me--in kid logic--to be related to calling film "fillum.

Me and Texas: Dallas is probably the largest American city that I'll never set foot in. It's hard to think of a reason for me to go there. In fact, the only place in Texas I've been is Austin, to attend a conferece at the University of Texas Law School. I should say the only place in Texas I've ever been ex utero is Austin, because I spent a good portion of my in utero existence in Texas City, where my parents and sister lived before I was born. Back in the 1950s when I was growing up in Delaware, I always felt sad about missing out on Texas. Delaware seemed so insignificant--no one outside of Delaware seemed to care that we were the first state. And Texas was so magnificent and important--the largest state in those days. Older readers may say, so your parents lived in Texas City right after World War II and before your birth in 1951, then they must have been there when the great Texas City Disaster occurred (in 1947). Yes, indeed they were, and they always taught me not to yield to the temptation to become a spectator at the scene of a disaster. (Read the story at the link if you don't know what happened to people in Texas City who went to watch a spectacular fire that was consuming a ship full of ammonium nitrate.) I have written before that I owe my existence to coffee. (Here's the story of how the smell of coffee caused my parents to meet.) But I owe my existence to coffee a second time. On the day of the Texas City Disaster, my father was working at a desk near a window. He got up to get a cup of coffee, and, while he was away from his desk, the burning ship exploded, sending a shockwave through the city, that drove a huge triangular spear of glass deep into the chair where he would have been impaled had he not gone for that coffee.

ADDED: Rereading this post, I noticed the word "impaled" is used twice. Had I noticed that when I was originally writing this, I would have been sorely tempted to write: "deep into the chair where he would have been impaled like a whole jalapeno on a fantastic hamburger at Adair's Bar in Dallas." And that would have been so wrong!

"I'm voting for Dukakis."

Yes, I did finally get out to see "Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut." That's the highly promising first line of the film, which is set in 1988, and might be a multilayered tribute to the year 1988. There are many references, I think, to the movies of that time, actually, oddly, to these three really cool 1989 movies: "Back to the Future Part II," "Heathers," and "The Abyss." But I'm sure there's plenty of much deeper theorizing about what this movie is about, because this is one of those movies that pesters you to devote lots of time to figuring it out. I was thinking for a while that Donnie Darko is a symbol of America (what with all those American flags, Dukakis, and the National Anthem), or maybe it was all a dream, or all a young film buff's manic throwing of everything he could think of into one wild melange--especially everything rabbit-related. A good rule of thumb is: if you liked "Mulholland Drive," you should see this; if not, don't.

UPDATE: John emails to remind me that I hated "The Abyss" when I saw it back in 1989. So why am I calling it "really cool"? Am I just lying again? Let me clarify. The references to "The Abyss" that I saw in "Donnie Darko" were to the special effects at the end of the movie, which really were really cool.

Is Stacie J. the new Omarosa?

After finally getting around to watching this week's "The Apprentice," Prof. Yin asks:

[W]hat is it with Mark Burnett's casting of African-American women, anyway? I realize that two data points are hardly conclusive, but doesn't it seem suspicious that each season of "The Apprentice" has had exactly one African-American woman, and each time, she's been completely nuts? (You haven't really [forgotten] Omarosa, have you?) Compare that to the one African-American male cast in each season (Kwame in season 1, Kevin in season 2), who seem like normal, likeable guys.

Here's my theory. Remember the show is edited after all the footage has been produced. Like Burnett's MTV show "The Real World," the editors look through all the raw footage and find story lines they can shape into narratives. The editing we're seeing on the show in any given week is part of a longer story arc that extends into other episodes. In the first two episodes, the black woman, Stacie J., has been presented in a way intended to lure us into thinking she's the new Omarosa. Fans of the show got a big kick out of Omarosa, and the editors know they can get us thinking about Omarosa if they show anyone acting strange, and maybe isolated clips of almost any of the contestants could look strange enough to jog us into thinking: Ooh, this looks good ... this might be weirdness of Omarosan proportions. So they do it with Stacie J. and it's especially easy because, like Omarosa, she's the only black woman.

But I will just bet some other contestant else turns out the real New Omarosa. They are just toying with us at this point in the story arc for this set of characters. Everyone ganged up on Stacie J. this week, and that was actually more Omarosan than anything Stacie J. actually did. (And the extended version of the show reveals that she wasn't as weird as she originally seemed. She didn't decide to call for temp help on her own. She asked the team leader and was told to go ahead!)

Like Prof. Yin, I think it would be rotten for the producers to pick "another Omarosa" to be the only black woman in the cast, and that's why I think they didn't do it. They are just generating interest and story line by making you think that they did. I bet Stacie J. ends up doing just fine.

UPDATE: Chris has this observation in support of the theory that Stacie J. is being edited to seem Omarosa-like:

Another thing to note is how in the premier episode they had this whole thing of showing Stacie "freaking out" and accusing people of ignoring her and being against her, without showing any background leading up to it. We were supposed to conclude that she started acting like this for no reason, completely unprovoked, but it looked very suspicious in that the scene began with the point at which she starts acting strange.

''A star is an animal; you control an animal with love and threats.''

That's a line by Arthur Miller, from another one of his plays about his long-dead wife, Marilyn Monroe. Deborah Solomon plies her wily interview skills in the NYT Magazine:

In conversation, Miller seems fully attentive to the present and its preoccupations. He spoke well of Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' and lavished high praise on Philip Roth's about-to-be-published ''Plot Against America: A Novel,'' which he was in the middle of reading. (''Philip and I see each other regularly once every three years,'' he noted humorously.) An unreconstructed leftist, he still subscribes to The Nation. (''How can the polls be neck and neck when I don't know one Bush supporter?'' he asked with apparent earnestness.)

But Miller betrays the biases of his generation when the subject turns to pop culture, linking it to the degradation and marginalization of serious theater and the intellectual life of the nation in general. ''It used to be that a play seemed to resonate into the society a lot more,'' he said, ''and now it's simply one more entertainment. Maybe the competition has ground down moral and social meaning. Publicity and advertising are the major arts today. They shape the consciousness of the people far more than actual art does.

"There was a time when people like Fitzgerald or Hemingway or Dos Passos seemed to represent something in the country,'' he continued. ''It's hard for me to imagine that a writer now could be said to somehow represent America.'' It might seem contradictory for a man who married Monroe to claim a wholesale disdain for ''entertainment,'' but then he is hardly the first literary figure who would rather talk about high art than about seemingly unresolved impulses.

Imagine being such an unreconstructed leftist that you'd subscribe to The Nation? But yeah, I really remember when plays were supposed to shake the complacent audience to its very core and awaken us to a whole new way of living. How grand it must have been in those days to be the guy who got to do the shaking! And what could have been better proof of your grandeur than to marry Marilyn Monroe? And what could be better proof of how times have changed than that no one has the slightest feeling that their worldview will be reshaped if you wring another drop of tragedy out of poor Marilyn's dead body? The great irony is that the fabulous persona Marilyn Monroe created in her short life will "resonate into the society" with "moral and social meaning" long after anyone cares about Arthur Miller. Call it "publicity and advertising" if you want to take the edge off your bitterness, but Marilyn was an artist and she changed the world. Solomon wisely observes: "Time has turned her into precisely what Miller sought to create with Willy Loman and his other middle-class Everymen -- a beloved embodiment of American striving and heartbreak."

Today, Miller is even less willing to speculate on the source of Monroe's enduring mystique, and in fact when the subject was raised, he gazed away and said nothing. As the seconds passed and the silence in his living room thickened, you might have assumed he was formulating an unusually nuanced response. Finally, he spoke. ''I'm hungry,'' he said in his gruff voice.

A nice, concise observation.

From James Bennet, writing in the NYT Week in Review:

Mr. Kerry would like to isolate Iraq from Afghanistan and the larger struggle against terrorism, while Mr. Bush wants to connect them. Mr. Kerry would like to connect the war in Iraq to problems within the United States -"It's wrong to be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them down in the United States of America,'' he says - while Mr. Bush wants to keep them apart.

Should we make our choice for President based on which man makes the more apt connection?

Talk show strategy.

Did you see P.J. O'Rourke, Cornel West, and Julie Delpy panelling together last night on "Real Time With Bill Maher"? There was a lot of inane yammering, especially by Delpy ("My English is not so good"), and, rather than compete for air time, O'Rourke pursued a finely executed minimalist strategy. Take a look at the rerun, and check out his tiny one-liners. O'Rourke got a lot of mileage out of deadpanning the kind of outlandish opinions that everyone else on the panel blithely attributes to conservatives. I especially liked when he had West for a half-second, after a West rant about drug companies that ended with asking whether you would prefer drug companies that looked for more remedies for sexual impotence or a vaccine for AIDS, and O'Rourke said, "It depends on if I had AIDS."

Fried steak and politics.

John Kerry is still pissed at Tom Harkin for endorsing Dean:

Senator Tom Harkin [is] holding his 27th annual Steak Fry this afternoon in Indianola, Iowa. Even though it's a tradition for Democratic presidential contenders to appear, and even though Iowa is a critical battleground state, Mr. Kerry is not scheduled to be there.

The official explanation is "Unfortunately, we just had other commitments." The New York Times reporter quips that maybe he's "just not in the mood for steak." Or maybe he's turning up his nose at steak crudely fried a la Middle America, as is Rick Lyman, the New York Times reporter who's trying to cover Dick Cheney and getting the cold shoulder:

In a little over two weeks since the end of the Republican convention, I have taken 16 flights totaling 10,496 miles and driven more than 1,000 additional miles to and from distant events. I have changed hotels and rental cars almost every day. I ate burritos in New Mexico, barbecue in Memphis and a steak the size of a hubcap in Minneapolis. My expense account will be a splendid thing. ...

The first post-convention campaign event was a rally in Pendleton, Ore. I left the last day of the convention, missing the president's acceptance speech, flew to Portland (2,440 frequent-flier miles, thank you very much), and then drove more than three hours along the Columbia River Gorge, arriving in rural Pendleton just in time for a chicken-fried steak dinner at the Rainbow Cafe, where the female bartender flirted with a shy, stuttering truck driver. At the Pendleton rally, the stage was decorated with pioneer wagons stuffed with hay. ...

Hay! Hay, no less! Damned politics! Forcing a man of lofty position away from the dear, safe comforts of the East Coast!

France stole my idea.

A while back, I said I'd like to see a reality TV show based on a tough, retro, Socratic, law school classroom. Now I see there's this French reality TV show:

Twelve girls and 12 boys ages 14 to 16 have been sequestered in a former seminary in the middle of France and plunged into the rigid, harsh French public school system of the 1950's.

According to the NYT, the French just love this show and they love it because of their "nostalgia ... for a less confusing age."

(More bad news for Kerry, no? Even the French don't like nuance anymore.)

The end of a long relationship with the NYRB.

Here's the first paragraph of the great piece that appeared in The New York Review of Books when Virgina Hamilton Adair's book "Ants on the Melon" came out in 1996. (As I noted yesterday, Adair died this week.) Unless you're a NYRB subscriber, you have to pay $4.00 to get to the whole article.

Ironically, I just let my long-running subscription to the NYRB lapse. They recently sent me a letter, with a post-paid envelope and a request to re-subscribe or at least write back and explain why I'd given up on them. Really, NYRB was by far the subscription I'd kept up for the longest time--more than 20 years. I loved the surprising assemblage of brilliant essays on all sorts of subjects and the incisive pen drawings of David Levine.

The Levine drawings are still there, but they've been used over and over again to demonize President Bush and the people around him; and, while there are still varied essays, ever since 9/11, they have forefronted the pieces that perseverate against Bush and his policies. I'd meant to flip past these things and read the other essays, but I found I'd been leaving many issues unopened, so I let the subscription die. Too bad! For many years, this was my favorite periodical. I didn't write them back and give them this explanation, but here's your answer NYRB.

"How do you intend to resolve problems by allowing half-nude women to mingle and party with men who dress like women?"

Politics, religion, and fashion in Iran, where the hanged 16-year-old Atefeh Rajabi has become a central figure in the women's rights cause. (Rajabi's story was reported a month ago with her name given in the report I read as Ateqeh Sahaleh.)

"I've been shooting people, didn't you know?"

The neurosurgeon/prime minister cracks a joke. NYT reporter John Burns delves into the psychology of leadership in Baghdad. Dr. No is mentioned.

The effect of blogs on the news.

Here's a nice little colloquy about blogging from Tim Russert's CNBC show today:

TIM RUSSERT: You mentioned, Byron, that you think the influence of the internet or the bloggers is a bit overstated, but do you see, in the future of campaign coverage, a role for the internet and for the bloggers and the online writers as opposed to the traditional Washington Post, New York Times, and the major networks?

BYRON YORK: Oh, sure, I think that you're seeing ... first of all, a lot of the blogs are simply rants that just comment on what's in the New York Times or the Washington Post each day, but certainly, in the CBS documents issue, you're seeing people doing their own research or offering up their own personal knowledge about things. That is what makes more of a difference, because we all have opinions and some of them are interesting; most of them aren't. But when you've got facts to offer, which people out there in the blogosphere do have, that's when it begins to affect coverage.

Actually, I could quibble with that. Not all opinions are rants, and at least some bloggers have something to offer in the form of pure opinion. I don't agree that we only become useful if we have otherwise unavailable facts to serve up. And submerged in York's point is the notion that the mainstream news itself is not doing something that ought to be classified in the rant family. I think one thing this CBS episode has taught us is that that is not always the case.

What is Nader's game in Wisconsin?

I just got a computerized telephone call asking me to hit phone buttons in answer to a series of questions: would I vote in the coming election, who did I think I'd vote for, and what chance was there that I'd vote for Nader. When I pressed the button indicating "slight or no" for that last question, I was thanked and the call ended. It seems like a pretty efficient way to identify potential Nader voters. Too bad I didn't think of that and pick a different answer on that question so I could monitor what they planned to do with that information.

Dealing with the NYT poll.

Kausfiles has some good analysis of Adam Nagourney's Kerry-favoring reporting of the NYT/CBS poll that appears on the front page of the NYT today. Thanks to Kaus, I'm paying some attention to the language I'd just skimmed over, and it really is quite comical how every line of the report is couched in terms of Kerry's struggle, which the reader--it seems--is presumed to share ("Senator John Kerry faces substantial obstacles...").

Clicking through some of the extra materials available at the Times website, linked above, I noticed 89% of the people polled said they "will definitely vote," so we know right there that a good bunch of these folks are liars. Or as Nagourney might say, John Kerry can take some solace in the fact that the persons polled where lying at least some of the time.

A dare not taken: the name Adair.

I was tempted to say this when Red Adair died recently, but now that I've written about Virginia Hamilton Adair (see previous post), I'll comment on the name Adair.

My middle name is Adair. I've never used the name or the initial other than to fill out forms or to sign checks written by my mother. Only late in life did I start to think I should have used it, when I first noticed that it has the effect of transforming my first name into Anna, which then isolates the second syllable, a homophone for the excellent word "Dare." That it took me decades to notice that proves that, unlike Virginia Hamilton Adair, I am no poet. Now, when I think about the missed opportunity of using my middle name, I torment myself with thoughts like: "You were not daring, you would not take Adair."

Why did I resist Adair? Because as a young girl I sensed that it meant a lot to my parents, and being contrarian, I didn't want that imposed on me. But I didn't think they were trying to define me as daring, or to offer me the chance to give my ultra-plain first name a slight infusion of fanciness. Strangely, I envied three-syllable girl's names, like Alison, and was annoyed at my parents for leaving me with the stark name Ann, and never noticed that AnnAdair was that three-syllable name. The reason I never perceived the feminity of the Anna-creating name Adair, was that Adair was my father's middle name, and that made the name permanently masculine. The homophone "a dare," which I declined to perceive, also felt masculine in those pre-Women's Movement days. I was jealous of my sister for having my mother's middle name, which was a lovely feminine name: Elaine. Don't you think giving me, the second child, the father's middle name, after the first child had been given the mother's middle name, conveys the message: we wanted you to be a boy? Later, they had that boy and they made his middle name my father's first name, which left me stranded as the inappropriately named child in the bunch. If they had known my brother would be coming along soon enough, they might have been able to give me a prettier middle name.

They used to pressure me to appreciate Adair, but always in the context of rejecting Althouse. I was told "Ann Adair" was a good stage name. Just lop off the Althouse and you can be an actress. When I was very young that made me feel that I was supposed to be an actress, and then when I was older that annoyed me. Maybe that was an elaborate parental scheme to keep me from being an actress. In fact, my father had wanted to be a lawyer. World War II and the subsequent drive to start a family redirected him to take good employment which was available to him based on his undergraduate education as a chemical engineer. So maybe in the end, having his name did lead me into law. If so, it was a clever plot indeed, because if he had ever suggested that I should one day go to law school, I probably never would have done it.

Another reason I never used Adair is that I considered the triple initial A ridiculous once I reached a certain age. As a young child, I thought it was great having all As, as if it were a report card. Later, I found out "AAA" was an awfully boring insurance program. The common practice of dressing up one's name with a middle initial was always out, because A before Althouse sounds to my ear like stuttering. And the use of the middle name in place of the first name--A. Adair Althouse--did not seem suitable, because it was so unfeminine and it also had that stuttering A-A effect.

So the opportunity is long lost. I can never claim my own middle name. I look at it with some longing on the cover of "Ants on the Melon." Ah, well! If I had the chance to make the decision again, I'd use the full name my parents gave me: Ann Adair Althouse.

UPDATE: For blog purposes, I've added Adair. One last opportunity, taken.

FURTHER UPDATE: No, I'm not doing that! It just doesn't look right to me.

"Here end my tracks of passion, reason, rhyme ..."

From "Take My Hand, Anna K.," the last poem in "Ants on the Melon," the book of poetry published by Virginia Hamilton Adair in 1996, when she was 83. The book made a big sensation because it was good and because she'd written poems all her life with almost no publications. Adair died on Thursday.

Here end my tracks of passion, reason, rhyme
Before the terminal rush and roar of light,
All together under the wheels of Time.
Coming to a crossing the train cries in the night.

Here's the NYT obituary.

Remember when Nixon said "Sock it to me"?

Here's Kerry today:

"I've got two words for companies like Halliburton that abuse the American taxpayer and trust, 'you're fired.'"

He didn't do the cobra strike hand gesture though. He did a double karate chop. And he didn't use Trump's inflection. Nixon did do his own inflection of the old catchphrase, making it a question: "Sock it to me?" And saying it like that really was hilarious, because because he seemed to be making fun of himself. Kerry just imposed the usual leaden Kerry cadence "You're ... fired," adopting the pop culture phrase to express the usual indignation.

I wonder if some of Kerry's many advisors are telling him he needs to use pop culture references to make himself likable, the way Nixon used "Laugh-In" in 1968. Here's an article from The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert from last spring about Presidential candidates using pop media. This is interesting:

[The Nixon episode of "Laugh-In"] was broadcast at the height of Nixon’s (ultimately successful) campaign against Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, and was an immediate sensation. George Schlatter, the creator of “Laugh-In” ... told me that Nixon had been extremely reluctant to be on the show; although the producers had repeatedly entreated him to appear, his campaign aides had even more insistently urged him not to. Eventually, the race brought Nixon out to Los Angeles. He gave a press conference, and Schlatter and one of “Laugh-In”’s writers, Paul Keyes, who happened to be a close friend of the former Vice-President’s, went over to watch it, bringing a TV camera with them.

“While his advisers were telling him not to do it, Paul was telling him how much it would mean to his career,” Schlatter recalled. “And we went in, and he said, ‘Sock it to me.’ It took about six takes, because it sounded angry: ‘Sock-it-to-me!’ After that, we grabbed the tape and escaped before his advisers got to him.

“Then, realizing what we had done—because he did come out looking like a nice guy—we pursued Humphrey all over the country, trying to get him to say, ‘I’ll sock it to you, Dick!’” Schlatter went on. “And Humphrey later said that not doing it may have cost him the election. We didn’t realize how effective it was going to be. But there were other factors in the election, too—I can’t take all the blame.”

Nixon on “Laugh-In” is often cited as a watershed moment in the history of television—the unthinking man’s version of Nixon in China.

But Kolbert's theme is that Presidential candidates need to make fun of themselves and be a bit self-deprecating--as Bush was when he went on "Saturday Night Live" to say "offensible" and the “Tonight Show” to say “flammamababable.” The thing about Kerry saying "You're fired" is that it isn't in any way self-deprecating. He just sounds pissed about Halliburton. (Halliburton seems to be the issue of the day for some reason: Paul Begala was fussing about Halliburton today on "Crossfire.")

Feingold speaks.

I'm sitting in a café and the phone rings, it's Chris saying Russ Feingold is speaking right now on Library Mall. Funny, I just walked right through the Mall and saw the signs and even took a photo for later blogging. Here, look, political activity is occurring in Wisconsin:



Somehow, I didn't catch the message that a personal appearance was in the near future. I would have stuck around. With luck, Chris will have some remarks and I'll be able to update this.

UPDATE: Chris reports that Feingold expressed opposition to the war in Iraq and seemed to think John Kerry would do a better job of handling matters. I thought you'd like to know.

Adios to Johnny Ramone.

I have a little hearing loss in my right ear as a permanent memorial to you. Here's the NYT obit. Blog readers may enjoy this political part:

Mr. Ramone was often at odds with the members of his band, over dress, politics and relationships. A staunch Republican, Mr. Ramone clashed with Joey over that singer's liberal causes, and when the band was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Mr. Ramone said, "God bless President Bush, and God bless America."

UPDATE: Let me add two things. First, an emailer called attention to this line of the NYT obit: "Mr. Ramone once described his guitar style as 'pure, white rock 'n' roll, with no blues influence.'" Elsewhere, the obit calls his style "fast, buzz-saw blasts of noise [that] laid the foundation for a school of rock guitar" and quotes him as saying "I wanted our sound to be as original as possible. I stopped listening to everything." I hadn't noticed that "pure, white" line when I first read the obit, and I have to admit that I can't help reading that and finding it racist or at least too racial to be an appropriate thing to want to say, even given the extra latitude given rock musicians. But the emailer notes that we commonly call music black, and I'm sure Eric Clapton's obituary will emphasize that he adopted a black style. So is there something wrong with calling a style "white"? I mean, other than as a put-down.

Second, I wanted to note that one of the long answers in today's NYT crossword puzzle is the name of The Ramones last album ("Adios Amigos"). The clue contains no reference to The Ramones, but I wonder if this was just a coincidence or a deliberate tribute to The Ramones.

Younger voters shift to Bush.

The new Gallup poll shows a huge, recent change in the opinion of voters under age 50:

Kerry had a one-point advantage (48% to 47%) among 18- to 49-year-old voters just before the Republican National Convention, but now Bush enjoys a 13-point lead among this group (54% to 41%). This represents a net increase in Bush's standing of 14 percentage points.

The other two age groups show much smaller changes. Among the middle age group (50 to 64), Kerry gains slightly. Now Bush leads Kerry in this group by 50% to 49%, while he led by 51% to 44% three weeks ago.

Hmmm.... 18-49 is a pretty large group. Why put three decades of age in that group and only 15 years of age in the "middle age" group? I know some people in their 40s chafe at being called middle aged, but that shouldn't affect Gallup. Anyway, I suppose we should conclude that the convention was well crafted to win over the non-old.

News from the horse race.

The new Gallup poll shows Bush pulling way ahead of Kerry, beyond the margin of error. Former Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile puts the best (horse) face on it: "Sen. Kerry is like Seabiscuit: He runs better from behind."

But it is Bush and not Kerry who looks energized by campaigning lately. Kerry seemed to be dragging himself through the motions yesterday. It didn't help that he was speaking to a cold, stone-faced National Guard audience. Bush, on the other hand, seemed charged up, having a grand time skewering Kerry about his most recent statements about Iraq: "The fellow I'm running against has had about eight positions on Iraq. Yesterday, in a radio interview, he tried to clear things up."

Here's the transcript of that radio interview, conducted by Don Imus. Key lines:"Do you think there are any circumstances we should have gone to war in Iraq -- any?" "Not under the current circumstances, no, there are none that I see." This, of course, blatantly contradicted many earlier statements about Iraq.

Today, Imus started off his show talking about that Kerry interview and whining, "I tried to help him." Imus and his assistants then went on about how Kerry needs to start fighting hard, which is the advice everyone offers poor Kerry. But that line about Iraq from the show is an example of trying to fight hard. The problem is to fight hard one has to take specific, strong positions, and Kerry can't do that without contradicting earlier statements and exposing himself to the kind of ridicule George Bush gleefully dished out yesterday.

What Bradford should have said on "The Apprentice" last night.

My resistence to the cultural vortex that is "The Apprentice" is truly pathetic, because I watched last night's episode (on TiVo) even though I came home late from a dinner, the episode itself was bizarrely long (100 minutes), and my 15-year-old TV is entirely bereft of the color red (see previous post). The episode had been promoted as "The Most Shocking Boardroom Scene Ever" or some such thing, but what that really turned out to mean was that the entire competition out on the street selling ice cream had little if anything to do with deciding which contestant to fire. (Why do we love these pick the loser shows like "American Idol," "Survivor," "The Amazing Race," and so forth? Is the process of elimination, the Last Man Standing, really so compelling? Apparently, yes.)

The assigned competition last night was rather boring. Like last season's selling lemonade, the episode entailed a lot of obvious street-corner-picking and getting lost. Getting lost was especially dumb last night, given the self-explanatory grid pattern of midtown New York. Admittedly, the placement of Broadway provides a minor challenge and they managed to get confused, despite the "180 IQ" of all the contestants--according to the not entirely reliable Donald Trump. The real competition on the show is in the boardroom, and the loser last night was a guy who did the gutsy, cocky thing of saying he was willing to give up his immunity. Bradford was the only person with immunity, and I think he was doing something that normally wins respect on the show: stepping up to the plate and taking responsibility for your actions. Trump went wild and couldn't stop saying how stupid it was, and "had to fire him" because of that. I think Trump was testing Bradford and giving him a chance to explain his sacrifice of immunity as a great strategy.

Where Bradford went wrong was not in sacrificing his immunity, but in conceding, repeatedly, that it was indeed a stupid thing to do. Bradford should have said, "Mr. Trump, I do not like sitting back, resting on the immunity I was fortunate enough to receive for my strong play last week. I am so confident about my work for the team this week, in a week when I could have simply taken it easy, that I want to be judged along with the rest of my teammates. I'm here for the long haul, and I want you to see that I don't just take advantage of a chance to slough off. I want you to see that my work is always at the top level, and I am so certain that I am one of the best players, that I am throwing my immunity aside as a way to make a very strong statement that I am one of the best." Had he said something like this, he would not have lost.

Watching television yesterday.

I watched a few of the news shows yesterday, including that Dan Rather "60 Minutes" interview with the feisty octogenarian Marian Carr Knox, whose line "I know that I didn't type them, however, the information in there is correct," makes me think it would be good to collect a lot of quotes under the heading of: Greatest Unintentionally Comic Yet Politically Revealing Quotes. Rathergate, like Watergate in its time, is a goldmine of quotes. My favorite old Nixon quote of this type is "We could do it, but it would be wrong." Anyway, despite the comedy, I found it difficult to watch the Rather show for two reasons.

First, Rather seemed very strange, anaesthetized and zombielike. Well, the poor man has been through a lot. Lost sleep? Who knows? Or was he just talking in that eerie whisper out of kindly deference to the unusually old interviewee? She seemed completely up to the interview, however, so there was no reason not to ask at least one tough question, most obviously, about her political predilections. Knox seemed quite ready to provide just the information Rather wanted, because several times after answering one question, she'd add "But I will say this" and then drop the very nugget Rather might have needed to ask another question to get. I'd love to see the pre-interview for their little session.

Second, my TV decided to start dying a slow death about a week ago. It's more than 15 years old, and it's been a trusty TV all this time. It's seen a lot. And it's a kindly old TV to up and start dying the way it did, slowly, just giving up on the color red, allowing things to drift into the green and purple gradually. It could have just suddenly gone dark or silent and then we would have said, "Damn, we have to go buy a new TV." This way, the realization has grown slowly as the realization that red is really gone sank in. Part of the eerie unwatchability of Dan Rather for me was the purple lips, the gray skin, the cyanotic creepiness of the picture itself.

I can solve part of my problem by buying a new TV. Chances are Dan Rather will still be on the new TV, but at least I will have red back, so if he ever blushes, I'll be able to see it.

Any tips on buying a new TV? I need something for the big room, to replace a 32" TV. Chris and I drove over to Best Buy to look at the TVs, and the array of products is mindboggling. The price range is insane. The store fed a continuous loop of giraffes into its TVs. How can you judge picture quality looking at giraffes? They have a nice sharp reticulated pattern that looks spiffy against zoo greenery, but I'm interested in how the human face will look. How can you tell if you want to pay extra for HDTV when all they show is a high definition loop? I want to know if regular shows are going to look weird on HDTV. The Best Buy guy was ready to explain everything in detail, but a minute into it, I get that high-tech-information-burnout feeling and just wanted him to go away. What is this EDTV? Wasn't that a movie about a guy named Ed who was on TV? Is a plasma screen better in any way other than being thin, or is it actually worse aside from its thinness? I really don't know. Well, I will have to go through at least another day without being able to see the newsmen blush, because I left without buying anything. Maybe I'll just crank the color adjustment down to zero and watch the news in black and white, the way I did back in the Nixon Era, the time today's news keeps getting drawn back into anyway.

UPDATE: Thanks for the TV-buying tips. I ended up ordering this. One solid fact about TVs I think I figured out is that the conventional CRT screen has the best picture. That simplified the search, as did my decision to limit myself to Sony, highly rated on C-Net and in Consumer Reports and a brand I personally like. After that it was largely a matter of size and deciding whether to go for the widescreen and the HDTV, which in the end I did. I bought the thing on the Sony website, and they are supposedly going to hand-deliver it, set it up, and take out the trash, so I'll be reporting back on how well that worked out. I wonder if they'll remove my old TV, the redless hulk.

Under the circumstances ...

I found this paragraph, in a Washington Post report describing an interview Kerry gave on the Don Imus show today, quite perplexing:

When asked whether there were any circumstances under which the United States should have gone to war in Iraq, Kerry responded, "Not under the current circumstances, no. There are none that I see." He voted to authorize the administration to use force against Saddam Hussein but has said Bush used the authorization in the wrong way.

Strange double use of the word "circumstances." There were no circumstances under the current circumstances? The only way to make sense of that is to say he was just not answering the question and was only saying that given the way things turned out, he now thinks it would have been better not to have gone to war. But that reverses what he recently said about going to war. I thought his position was that Bush went to war the wrong way, as the Post indicates, which implies that there was a way--a circumstance--that was justified.

"Slacker"--on DVD at last!

Ah! The new Critierion Collection DVD of "Slacker" just arrived! How exciting! How many times have I watched my deteriorating old VHS copy of this film, which I never saw in the theater. Nice packaging. Lots of extras. Why isn't this on the list of favorite movies on my profile? I'll add it.

Tim Michels vs. Russ Feingold.

After yesterday's primary, we now know it will be Tim Michels challenging Senator Russ Feingold. So no more "the wrong Russ" commercials from Russ Darrow, who came in second. I saw my first Russ Feingold TV ad yesterday, a very charming ad featuring his daughter saying he runs a tight budget within his family and therefore can be trusted on matters financial in the Senate. Actually, it sounds corny described in writing. But it appears that the big issues will be the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, both of which Feingold voted against. Feingold has the additional distinction of being the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act. Michels is described as "a relative unknown who ran largely on his experience as an Army Ranger and who, in his acceptance speech, vowed to renew the Patriot Act."

I heard on the radio this morning that there is a proposal for five debates between the two candidates. It will be interesting to see how much effort is made by the Republicans on behalf of Michels. My sense is that many people in Wisconsin think Feingold is a good man, who deserves to be re-elected, even if they disagree with some or even many of his votes. So maybe Feingold will be so far ahead in the polls that no huge efforts will be made on behalf of Michels. But since the Bush campaign is forced to concentrate on Wisconsin, it seems likely that Michels, who has already been making appearances with Bush, will get some solid assistance.

By contrast, Feingold will not be appearing alongside Kerry as Kerry makes a major appearance in Madison today. The official word from Feingold is that he has business in the Senate to attend to. Feingold is probably the politician whose assertions I am most willing to take at face value, but I cannot help thinking that Feingold perceives no political advantage to be gained by appearing with Kerry. And perhaps Feingold is in no position to help Kerry either, because the two disagreed on what are Feingold's two key issues: Iraq and the Patriot Act. It will be very interesting to see the effect the debates between Feingold and Michels about these two issues will have on the Presidential candidates here in Wisconsin, but people should notice that Feingold will be put in a position of arguing to Wisconsinites that the positions Kerry took were wrong.

Judicial humor.

There's not a whole lot of humor to be found in Supreme Court cases, but sometimes you find a little witticism tucked away somewhere. I like this, in a dissenting opinion by Justice Jackson, in United States v. Ballard, 322 U.S. 78 (1944), discussing what it would take to defraud someone with an assertion of a religious belief:

All schools of religious thought make enormous assumptions, generally on the basis of revelations authenticated by some sign or miracle. The appeal in such matters is to a very different plane of credulity than is invoked by representations of secular fact in commerce. Some who profess belief in the Bible read literally what others read as allegory or metaphor, as they read Aesop's fables. Religious symbolism is even used by some with the same mental reservations one has in teaching of Santa Claus or Uncle Sam or Easter bunnies or dispassionate judges.

New Orleans.

Say a prayer for the great city of New Orleans and for the many people who are trapped there!

The mayor said that he would "aggressively recommend" people evacuate, but that it would difficult to order them to do so, because at least 100,000 in the city rely on public transportation and would have no way to leave. In addition, he said 10,000 people were in town for conventions, and there was nowhere for many of them to go except high floors in their hotels.

By midday Tuesday, traffic on Interstate 10, the major hurricane route out of New Orleans, was at a near standstill, and state police turned the interstate west of the city into a one-way route out. U.S. Highway 61, the old major route between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, also was jammed.

In the French Quarter, businesses put up plywood and closed their shutters. A few people were still hanging out at Cafe du Monde, a favorite spot for French roast coffee and beignets, and a man playing a trombone outside had a box full of tips.

"They said get out, but I can't change my flight, so I figure I might as well enjoy myself," said George Senton, of Newark, N.J., who listened to the music. "At least I'll have had some good coffee and some good music before it gets me." Tourist Dee Barkhart, a court reporter from Baltimore, was drinking Hurricane punches at Pat O'Brien's bar.

"I looked into earlier flights, but they were hundreds of dollars more and I wasn't sure I could switch flights," she said. "I figure I'm happier sitting here drinking hurricanes than sitting at the airport worrying about them."

What does the good writer wear, anyway?

Brit Hume talks about bloggers on Fox News Tonight. He interviews Scott Johnson of Powerline, and asks if it's fair call bloggers "guys in their living room in their pajamas" and "what about the charge that you guys are not subject to verification?" Johnson gives just the right answers: we only have readers because of our track record, the verification to be found by following the links, and we make quick corrections when we go wrong. Johnson is, not surprisingly, wearing a suit for his TV appearance. But let me say a word about writing at home, dressed for sitting around at home: that's nothing unique to blogging. How do you picture the great writers writing their books? Are they sitting in an office in a suit and tie?

UPDATE: A reader with a good memory sends this link about the historian Robert Caro: "Though he spends his days at the office alone, he goes to work in suit and tie. 'To remind me that I'm working,' he said." That's reminiscent of the stories about President Reagan always putting on a jacket to work in the Oval Office. Which always reminded me of those old pictures of Nixon wearing a suit to go for a walk on the beach. Back in the Nixon days (where we like to spend most of our time, this crazy election season), that excessive suit-wearing was considered a mark of deceit, and men wore jeans and a work shirt to demonstrate their seriousness.

Kerry event in Madison tomorrow won't be downtown.

John Kerry was going to have an event up at the Capitol Square tomorrow at noon and I was going to head up there after class and see if I could get some interesting photos or other bloggable tidbits. But I found this announcement:

Due to inclement weather, please note the change in venue for the Madison rally

Join our campaign today! Fill out the form below to print out your complimentary ticket(s).

What:
Rally with John Kerry in Madison with a live performance by Sheryl Crow

When:
Wednesday, September 15
Gates open at 11:00 a.m.

Where:
Exhibition Hall at the Alliant Energy Center
1919 Alliant Energy Center Way
Madison, WI

Details:
Parking is extremely limited. Please use public transportation (Metro Route 5) or carpool.

There is a forecast for thunderstorms later in the day, but it's terrible to miss out on the beautiful Capitol Square backdrop and the vital crowd that will be on the street at lunchtime. And why are they further discouraging attendance by saying "Parking is extremely limited" at the Alliant Center? The Alliant Center is a big concert and sports venue, with a parking lot designed to accommodate the crowds that fit in the buildings. The only reason to have this at Alliant, as opposed to some place in town, like the Kohl Center, is so that people can drive there. Well, I suppose they will get their indoor crowd for the free Sheryl Crow concert, and you wouldn't want Sheryl to get caught in the rain. But I bet the real reason for the move was that the City told the Kerry campaign they'd have to pay for the security. Anyway, I won't attend.

UPDATE, WEDNESDAY MORNING: Actually, the whether does look pretty threatening.

ANOTHER UPDATE: There actually is something of a parking problem today, with some paving being done on part of the lot. But the event is at the Exhibition Center, which seats 7,000, not the much larger arena, so it still wasn't a great idea to discourage people from driving.

"George took a hatchet to the film."

What are we to think about "Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry," a documentary film directed by an old friend of John Kerry's (George Butler), that is being distributed by a Canadian company (ThinkFilm)?

The film is set to open on October 1--a date chosen with the hope of affecting the election and foreclosing effective debate about any new or deceptive material that might be in it. The film has also been re-edited, according to the NYT:

"Going Upriver" has shifted in content and story line almost daily. Three weeks ago, the film was far different, before the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth emerged to attack Senator Kerry's wartime record, the filmmakers said.

"George took a hatchet to the film," said Mark Urman, the head of distribution for ThinkFilm, and the focus was tightened exclusively to the Vietnam era. "The film was suddenly printed in capital letters. He took out anything that didn't address the point: who is this man, and why do we care about him?"

It sounds as though the filmmaker began with a film of some complexity, which might have been a worthy film, but then decided to sacrifice his significance as a documentary film director for the sake of helping his friend get elected. Yet the end result is that he's made something no one will see. Maybe the hope is in the advertisements for the film that will run--presumably free of campaign finance restrictions--and the free coverage the film will get on entertainment and news shows. In any event, Urman is positively giddy about it all:

"This film is being made as history as being made," Mr. Urman said. "I've never been involved with something that is so now. It's film distribution as performance art, and it's very exciting. We're making it up as we go along."

I love the way the film distributor Urman (who is probably Canadian), sees the film's distribution as the work of art, now that he seems to have squelched any potential for art in the original film that has now been edited into a commercial.

"He declined to be prescriptive..."

Catching up with the news shows tonight, I'm struck by the snickering--on "Special Report With Brit Hume"--over that quote characterizing a response by John Kerry, which appeared in today's NYT in an article by David Sanger. Kerry had telephoned Sanger on a Sunday--something Sanger wrote was "highly unusual"--to accuse Bush of allowing "a nuclear nightmare" to develop in North Korea. In Kerry's words:

"I think that this is one of the most serious failures and challenges to the security of the United States, and it really underscores the way in which George Bush talks the game but doesn't deliver."

But will Kerry deliver? Here's Sanger's presentation of the Kerry response:

When Mr. Kerry was pressed about how he would handle the threat of a North Korean nuclear test if he was in the Oval Office, he declined to be prescriptive, other than to say that the issue would probably have to be taken to the United Nations Security Council. "Hypothetical questions are not real," he said, arguing that North Korea was a case for preventive diplomacy, and that Mr. Bush's "ideologically driven" approach had kept him from truly engaging North Korea. "The Chinese are frustrated, the South Koreans, the Japanese are frustrated," he said.

The "Six Feet Under" Finale.

Virginia Heffernan offers her theory of the big finale episode: "the urgent question at the heart of many 'Six Feet Under' relationships" is "Are you insane, or am I?" and the question was answered, nearly always, that the insane one was not the Fisher family member. I note that the original tag line for the Television Without Pity forum about the Fishers was "Nate, David, Claire, and their mother. Not a sane one in the bunch." But now, apparently, per Heffernan, they only looked crazy because absolutely everyone anywhere near them is so damn crazy. In real life, if you find yourself thinking, "Why am I the only sane one around here? Is everyone but me crazy?"--you're crazy.

But, really, what did you think of the finale? Anything seem a little ... abrupt?

UPDATE, August 21, 2005: To bad so many people are Googling here looking for discussion of the 2005 finale. Unfortunately, I haven't seen it yet. I should be blogging about it later in the week. Meanwhile, try Television Without Pity

20 Questions for Chief Justice Abrahamson.

Wisblawg calls attention to the new "20 Questions" from How Appealing, which are directed this month at Chief Justice Shirley S. Abrahamson of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, who was also a lawprof here at Wisconsin. Three things I found interesting:

1. Abrahamson favors elections for judges (along with long terms): "Too much of what goes on in the appointment and confirmation process is kept behind closed doors; the public does not have an opportunity for meaningful participation in the process. Ideally, the elective system can also be an educational experience for both the judges and the electorate."

2. The judge--living or dead--she most admires is Chief Justice William Rehnquist! She appreciates his skill at handling the role of chief justice, plus he's from Wisconsin.

3. She faces up to the challenge of defending the Wisconsin "diploma privilege," which means that law students who graduate from Wisconsin law schools (i.e., Wisconsin and Marquette) do not need to take the Wisconsin bar exam: "For states with only a few accredited law schools, the diploma privilege is a terrific system. In fact, some states are currently considering adopting the diploma privilege. Wisconsin should not be viewed as the last to retain the diploma privilege; I like to think of Wisconsin as the leader on this issue, not the holdout."

Those horrible law school outlines, Part 2.

I've complained before about the class outlines that law students pass on to other students and about the intolerable presence of these outlines on my law school's own website. I want students to engage with the assigned readings during class discussion, not pick a phrase out of some former student's outline. I don't go out of my way to notice such things, but sometimes it's rather obvious, for example, when a student confidently states an answer that would be a plausible answer to a question I plan to ask a half hour later, or when a student gives what might work as a good answer but then has no idea what language in the assigned text supports that answer. But if there is one thing in all of the four courses I teach that most reveals that a student is relying on a former student's outline, it is something that would come up in today's Civil Procedure II class (on the procedure that applies in federal court diversity cases). The dead giveaway is a request for a "flow chart." If--who am I kidding? when--someone asks for a flow chart, it will take some effort not to shriek, "Why are you relying on someone else's crappy outline!"

"W is for ..."

"W Stands for Women" is the theme for Laura Bush as she appears today at the Marriot Madison West:

The visit to Madison is somewhat unusual for the GOP: President Bush has been to Wisconsin more than 20 times since 2000, but the closest he's come to Madison is Waukesha County. The last Republican presidential candidate to campaign in Madison was Bob Dole in 1996.

"Somewhat unusual?" It never happens and it's not happening today either, because the Marriot Madison West is not in Madison, but Middleton, Wisconsin.

Anyway, about this "W is for ..." business. Last week the Kerry campaign was sponsored by the letter W, with much accompanying scorn.

I don't blame the Bush campaign for wanting to restore the good reputation of the President's middle initial--and there are so many good W words to choose from, like "win" and "wonderful." But the childish, "Sesame Street" quality of the "W is for" phrase is quite annoying, and not really what a candidate mocked for reading a children's book too long ought to want to associate himself with. What irks me the most about "W Stands for Women" is the usual idea that women need a specialized campaign, in a different voice, preferably the candidate's wife's, rephrasing every issue to be about family and children, and even selecting language ("W is for") straight out of a children's introductory reader.

UPDATE: I note the double meaning in "W Stands for Women": there's the idea of representing or standing up for women but also the idea of putting up with them!

Rope-a-dope politics.

Prof. Ribstein--who links to me strictly for my interest in memes--comments on the meme "rope-a-dope" in connection with the current election squabbling over Vietnam Era matters. Arguably, either Kerry or Bush could be characterized as playing "rope-a-dope" and intentionally exhausting the opponent by luring him into wasting his energy fighting back with blows that don't cause any harm. But I think most commentary suggesting that one candidate or another is playing rope-a-dope is a characterization after the fact--like saying "I meant to do that" after you trip over something. I'd say if the meme catches on in this election season, it will be because somebody needs an excuse for fighting so poorly.

A third-rate forgery.

Somehow my effort to read the NYT this morning got stalled in the middle of Frank Rich's explication of how Iraq is like Vietnam. It's printed on a page with a big, color illustration of a galloping horse that is kicking up a lot of dirt. The text of Rich's piece looks dusted with brown dirt, and this is heightening my usual aversion to Rich. But I did read enough to start thinking about how no one can seem to stop talking about events from the Nixon Era, and then, that Ra^thergate is a bit like Watergate.

Watergate--a "third-rate burglary" that brought down a President--was not just an outrageous and bold thing to decide to do, it was done so clumsily. Couldn't they have wrapped the fateful tape around the door jamb a little less conspicuously? The idea of forging documents to question Bush's National Guard service is similarly outrageous and bold and clumsy. It's a third-rate forgery. [ADDED: I realize I am assuming it is a forgery and that there is some chance it's not.]

It's one thing to decide to do the forgery, but who would dare to do it and also dare to do is so badly? Kausfiles notes the pro-Kerry conspiracy theory: some Bush operative--who is this "Buckhead"?--intended first to trick "60 Minutes" and then to have the forgery discovered. I find it hard to believe that bizarrely over-clever pro-Bush people generated the documents, because this story reopened actual questions about Bush's Guard service and, more importantly, eclipsed the Swift Boat story that was hurting Kerry so much. It was the Kerry people who were desperate to kill the Swift Boat story. Their man was in decline and that story would not die. Do something, anything! The call went out for dirty tricks. (Bloggers who linked to Susan Estrich's much-blogged "dirty tricks" column may want to check their links: they don't go where you want them to anymore!)

Ra^thergate is a third-rate forgery, but who, if anyone, will it bring down? It may never be traced to anyone of importance within the Kerry campaign. I'd like to think that no one at that level would be so reckless and so stupid. Yet CBS fell for the forgery, so stupidity and recklessness at high levels is surely not impossible. The one person most likely to fall is Ra^ther himself, who must truly have wanted to help Kerry if he fell for this feeble forgery.

Nice design: graphic depiction of links.

Well done!

UPDATE: And speaking of memes, read the comments at that link to see the progress of the great "pajamas" meme.

Kerry submits to an interview!

John Kerry's long avoidance of interviews had gotten to be awfully conspicuous, and he finally submits. Time's Karen Tumulty receives the favor of his responses. Let's see how he does. Much of the time he robotically plugs in the well-worn lines of his stump speech. This is interesting, in response to "How would you go about winning the war of ideas in the Middle East?":

What I intend to do is to put in play the economic power, the values and principles, the public diplomacy, so we're isolating the radical Islamic extremists and not having the radical extremists isolate the United States. It means bringing religious leaders together, including moderate mullahs, clerics, imams—pulling the world together in a dialogue about who these extremists really are and how they are hijacking the legitimacy of Islam itself. That takes leadership, and that leadership has not been put on the table.

You have almost 60% of the populations of Egypt and Saudi Arabia under 30, and 50% under 18. We have to engage in a way that offers them some alternative to the radical madrasahs that are educating them to hate and to go out and strap explosives around themselves.

It would be a bold move indeed for the President of the United States to convene a meeting of Islamic religious leaders--moderates only!--and to attempt to lead them to reshape the meaning and culture of Islam. Time's next question is, let's get back to politics ... how about those Swift Boat ads? What's the point of getting an interview if you don't press with follow-up questions? Kerry is constantly making claims that he will bring leaders together and win cooperation. This is the first I've read of a plan to lead a religious reformation. How would he do this? Why is it more than a pipe dream?

Least believable assertion: "Polls don't mean anything to me right now." Runner-up: "I didn't see one minute of the [Republican] convention." Most hard-to-believe assertions strung together in a single answer (to the question whether he wishes he'd responded more aggressively to the Swift boat ads):

No, I think we did absolutely fine, and I think we are doing absolutely fine. I think this is a close race, and it's going to be a close race. I think we are doing extraordinarily well. If anybody had told me we'd be points apart from the sitting President of the United States, well, would you have believed them?

I feel very confident in where we are and confident about the direction of this race. And the American people are beginning to listen and listen carefully.

I like the last part especially: Kerry has long relied on the assertion that people either haven't started listening yet or are not listening carefully. For example, if you still don't think you know what he will do in Iraq, you're not listening!

Bottom line: a puff interview.

UPDATED: Bad link for the Time interview corrected.

"Wrong direction."

I notice language memes. This morning I was on the trail of "wrong direction," which I know Kerry has been using in his speech this week, but which I've heard in ordinary conversation a lot recently too. Words make me see concrete images, so "This country is moving in the wrong direction" bothers me, because it forces me to picture the country as a car driving on a highway going somewhere and to think of the speaker as having a proper place to drive to that is completely in another place. The speaker--e.g., Kerry--is saying, "Let me drive for a while," and he's planning to turn the car around and go ... where? I don't really know, but it will be in another direction. I know it's just rhetoric, but I find it quite unappealing.

Googling "wrong direction," I run across a website called "Language Monitor," which goes to some trouble to produce a monthly list of political buzzwords. "Swift boats" and "girlie men" are doing well lately. Presumably, "proportional spacing" and "superscript" will make their appearance soon. I'm happy to find this website, but why is the website design so amateurish and annoying? Still, it's worth dropping in over there, if for nothing else than to reinforce what you really already know about the rise and fall of language memes.

UPDATE: The word "across" was left out of the previous paragraph before, making it look as though "I run" the Language Monitor website! Sorry!

ANOTHER UPDATE: According to the L.A. Times, Kerry's recent use of the word "direction" represents a deliberate "compromise" in dealing with conflicting views of advisors about how aggressive Kerry--as opposed to his spokespersons--should be in attacking Bush. Supposedly "new direction" has become preferable to the word "change." It's hard to see why, but apparently they spent some time working that one out.

"It'll be similar to playing with Tiger last year."

The NYT quotes my nephew, Cliff Kresge, who will be paired with Mike Weir for the final round of the Bell Canadian Open tomorrow. Weir, in the lead by three strokes, is a good bet to win, and this is very exciting for Canadians, who have not in 50 years seen a fellow countryman win their big tournament.

New world number one Vijay Singh of Fiji, American Cliff Kresge and Jesper Parnevik of Sweden shared second place behind Weir, who will have a boisterous home crowd behind him in the final round at the Glen Abbey Golf Club.

I know the home crowd is thrilled with Weir, but the least known of these four is Kresge, my nephew, and if you're into rooting for your countryman and you're an American, Cliff Kresge is the American in the top group, so please consider rooting for him.

Kresge ended his round with two birdies to return a four-under 67. Singh rebounded from a triple bogey on the 11th hole to shoot a one-over 72 while Parnevik had a 71.

The 35-year-old Kresge will partner Weir on Sunday but he said he was used to the attention it would bring after he played with Tiger Woods in the final weekend of last year's Western Open.

"It'll be similar to playing with Tiger last year at the Western,'' Kresge said.

"Hopefully I can draw on those experiences and learn from that and do all right."

Go, Cliff! I was there last year, when Cliff played in a threesome with Tiger. I was impressed at how well he stood up to the crazy clamor that surrounds Tiger, and I'm always impressed by the nerves of steel it takes to play professional golf, where everything counts and hundreds of thousands of dollars are won or lost on a single stroke. On their home turf, the Canadians will be there in force cheering for Weir, just as the Tiger fans were all about Tiger last year when Cliff played alongside him. It will be a hard day of playing for himself surrounded by a hoard who loves the other guy. Much as I know the Canadians would rejoice to see their man win, I'm going to go all chauvinistic and say America! America! Let the American win!

September Saturday.

I had Chris drop me off near the Capitol Square this morning because I wanted to look at a model condominium. Sometimes I think of selling my big house in University Heights and moving to a pristine apartment downtown with a glorious view. There is a new project on the Square with units that look straight onto the Capitol building and toward Lake Mendota and Lake Monona on opposite sides of the isthmus. On the way to check out the model unit, I pass through the Farmers' Market. There are sunflowers:



Radishes:



And politics:




The view from the condo is spectacular. What a project it would be to buy the raw space, work with the architect and the contractor to finish the interior, and accomplish the complicated financial transaction that would include paying for all of that and selling the house that I've lived in for nearly twenty years. Daunting but exciting. I'll probably wait a couple years, and maybe buy one of the already-finished units when someone resells. I like the idea of living on the Square, though, and having my walk to work be a walk down the length of State Street, with its shops and cafés and restaurants and lively street life.

I walk towards State Street and stop to take a picture of a merchant's stall that is hung with mobiles made of copper tubing twisted into a spiral with a handblown colored-glass ball set inside the spiral. A woman working in the stall points at me and then a man turns around and starts shaking his head and waving his outstretched arms in the international gesture for "no, no, it is forbidden" as he walks over toward me. I say "I'm sorry," and he makes a move as if he wants to take my camera. He says, "This is my art. You're stealing my art." I say, "I'm not stealing your art. I'm sorry. I'll delete the picture." He says, "I'm trying to make money and you're stealing." I say, "That's not very friendly," then, walking away, I wish I'd said something wittier. This selection of ripostes runs through my head:

Get over yourself! You bent copper tubing into a spiral!

Why would anyone buy new age junk from a man with such bad energy?

Okay, then I won't use my blog to make your mobiles seem to be part of the charm of Madison, Wisconsin, I'll use my blog to make you look like a jackass.

I proceed to walk down State Street. There's a panhandler who tries to show passersby his driver's license and makes the pitch: "I was born on 9-1-1!" There's a nice post-game crowd on the street. Lots of red to celebrate the Badgers:



I can never tell from looking at the people whether we won. I want to ask someone, but I don't. I stop at Fair Trade Coffeehouse for a latte and some bread and cheese. I run into Tonya and I tell her about the condominium model unit and the bad mobile man. We talk about a colleague who is thinking of starting a blog and about naming and renaming blogs, which leads to a discussion of Gene Wilder. She needs to work and I head out to continue in my walk toward home. [ADDED: And Tonya did, later today, rename her blog!] I take the Lake Mendota route and see lots of people having a great time on the swimming pier:



And learning to kayak:



I take the lake path. Some members of the marching band are also taking the path:



I leave the path and walk toward home, taking a stop in Allen Centennial Garden:



I sit down on a quiet bench and do some reading:



Then I walk the rest of the way home, past late after-game tailgating parties. It's very hot now and I'm glad to get home and take a bath. I check the web and see the Badgers won. How is Cliff doing today at the Bell Canadian Open? Ah, quite well! He's in second place! Now, the third round has concluded, and my nephew Cliff Kresge is tied for the second spot with Vijay Singh and Jesper Parnevik. Mike Weir at ten under is three strokes ahead. Excellent!

September 11th.

Three years ago, I was standing on the corner of Brooks Street and University Avenue, collecting my thoughts about my new class on the Constitution's religion clauses that would meet later that day, waiting for the walk sign. It's a long wait to cross the only street between the parking garage and the Law School, and it's not unlikely that a colleague will step up and join me in the wait. It's a nice time for a friendly hello. A colleague appears, I give a cheery hello and mean to go on to comment on the great beauty of the day. He says, "Haven't you seen the news this morning?"

To this day, when I stand on that corner, I remember hearing the news there. Not once since that day would it be that anyone could walk up and ask me if I'd seen the news that morning and the answer would be, as it was that day, "no." Since that day, I always check the television news when I get up in the morning. For a long time after September 11th, 2001, when I woke up in the middle of the night I would turn on the TV and check the news to see if anything had happened. Any time I woke up, I would, within a second, recall the sight of the burning World Trade Center and think "That happened. That really happened." It was the same feeling I had when a close and very young family member died some years ago. Very shortly after waking, my first thought was, "she died, she died." Even when I was awake, I would repeatedly think of the 9/11 attacks, like that death of that family member years ago, and re-experience hearing the news for the first time: "That happened. That really happened!" The length of time between those re-rememberings increased gradually over the weeks and months, but it took a long time before the thought could be experienced without containing an element of feeling as though I was learning the news the first time.

I remember going into the law school building that day three years ago, wanting to find out what happened. My colleague had only told me that planes flew into the World Trade Center towers. I pictured small planes hitting the buildings and falling onto the sidewalk below. Did they fall on people on the ground? He said he believed the planes went into the buildings and stayed inside. That inconceivable image, which I would by the end of the day have seen on television a hundred times, began to form in my head. I hurried to the law school, thinking I could find the news on the internet, but I couldn't get through to any of the sites. My son Chris called from San Francisco to ask if I knew. Unlike me, he had a television, and he described what he saw. He told me people were jumping. People were jumping! I went looking for a television. A colleague had a tiny portable television with a black and white screen. We all crowded around. On that five inch screen, I first saw the unreal sight of a tower collapsing.

I tore myself away from the little screen to make some effort at getting my notes together for my class. I was fretting about my capacity to do my job properly. Five minutes before class time, I went down to the classroom and found it dark and packed with people. A fifteen foot movie screen had been lowered, and everyone stared in shock at the projected television images of the attacks. Suddenly, there were the attacks, over and over, in brilliant color for the first time. Some of the people in the room were my students, sitting in their assigned seats for the class that was to begin in a few minutes. When the clock clicked over to the class time, I stood up and, worrying that it was wrong to project my voice over the events on the screen, I quickly announced that this was my classroom but there would be no class, and the television should stay on. I sat down and watched in shock with the rest of the group. How could it be?

When I finally left the building, to go home and continue to the vigil in front of the television, I remember walking between two large old university buildings on my way back to the street crossing where my colleague had told me the news a few hours ago. I looked at those buildings and thought: I had always assumed these buildings were so solid, but how foolish I was; these buildings are all now going to fall. I really felt, walking between those two buildings, that everything we had built was doomed, and that we had been living under an illusion that the world we had built could stand.

Today, when I go home after work, I still walk between those two buildings, and I often think about how I felt on that day that these buildings could not stand. Yet here they are. I'm amazed at how ready I was on that day to believe that the terrorists had taken our world away, that the will to destruction, now unleashed, would overcome the work of all of the rest of us who wanted to build things and to live our individual lives in the material world. Yet here we are, still building things, still making lives for ourselves. A car horn playing "On Wisconsin!" just roused me from this reverie. It's a beautiful sunny day here Madison. Tens of thousands of people are coming to the enlarged, rebuilt stadium for the game that starts in an hour. I can hear their yells from where I'm sitting in my dining room. Life goes on.

Go Cliff!

My nephew Cliff Kresge is currently sitting in 8th place at the Bell Canadian Open. He hasn't started Round 2 yet.

It's Friday!

It's Madison. Music:



Food:



More food:



"Wearable Archaeology":

What's the forgery, Kenneth?

Looking at this, I realized it was inevitable that someone would write "What's the forgery, Kenneth?" So here it is.

Do you have to stand for the Pledge?

A student cannot be forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, but does a student also have a right to refuse to stand for the Pledge? In this case the student was "called to the principal's office and urged to stand during the pledge even if she chose not to recite it."

UPDATE: I'm thinking that urging the student to "stand to show respect for your country," makes standing during the Pledge more of an expression of belief than it would otherwise be. I can't tell from the article whether the student's objection to the Pledge is to the "Under God" phrase or to the rest of the Pledge.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: Emailers cite a Third Circuit case, Lipp v. Morris, 579 F.2d 834 (3d Cir.1978), for the proposition that you can't be required to stand for the Pledge. We're in the Seventh Circuit, where the most notable case is Sherman v. Community Consolidated School District, 980 F.2d 437 (1992)(which, incidentally, held that "Under God" in the Pledge did not violate the Establishment Clause). In Sherman, the court, citing Lipp, noted that that "no pupil was compelled to recite the Pledge, to stand during the Pledge or place his hand over his heart, or to leave if he would not join in, and that no one was penalized in any way for remaining silent and seated." It then rejected the notion that "peer pressure to conform" amounted to compulsion. It seems to me that being urged by the principal is something more than peer pressure, but not outright compulsion.

Rathergate.

Ah, some typography humor to break up the griminess of the current election season. Thanks Polipundit! I ran across that while looking for commentary about last night's "Nightline," which I TiVo'd because I'd heard they were going to cover the forgery story. I thought it was a bit laughable that instead of covering that breaking story in depth, they just merged it into the general theme of negative campaigning. Oh, everyone's so bad that we all just want to look away. Please look away, now, please! Oh, Nig^htline! At least the Times and the Post are looking straight at this ... which they would do whether bloggers leaned on them or not. Right?

UPDATE: More forgery humor here. Very funny! (Via Instapundit.)

Censoring Spiegelman.

Art Spiegelman, promoting "In the Shadow of No Towers," his new book about September 11th, gave an interview this morning on NPR'S "Morning Edition." I've long been a fan of Spiegelman's, because of Maus and Raw, and I am willing to accept a lot of honest self-revelation from someone who experienced the World Trade Center attacks from within ten blocks of the site, but he struck a bad note when he complained about The New Yorker's rejection of the comic strips that ultimately became his new book. (The audio link at the NPR site is not yet available, so I cannot produce a verbatim quote.) In these comics, he portrayed himself as feeling equally threatened by terrorism and by President Bush after September 11th. Although publishers in what he called "Old Europe" accepted the comic strips, The New Yorker would not. This, he said, was "censorship." What writer feels so important that he can call a rejection from The New Yorker censorship?! There is no more desirable placement for writing or comics in this country! You had to go to "Old Europe" to publish? Was there no other place to publish in all of the United States? Was your work published in the equivalent of The New Yorker in Europe? You equate Bush's policies with terrorism, and then when that overdramatization proves unappealing, you equate a rejection from The New Yorker with censorship, further overdramatizing.

UPDATE: Bad link fixed. Sorry. There is a glitch in Blogger. The audio is available at the link now too.

FURTHER UPDATE: I've corrected the title of Spiegelman's book. It is, I'm afraid, "No Towers," not "Two Towers."

And I watched "Joey" too.

Which was stupid, because I never watched "Friends," except that one time when Brad ("Hey, what am I smelling right now?") Pitt was on. I'm just watching because I miss Adriana. Within the first thirty seconds, I'm put off by the laugh track. I'm used to "Curb Your Enthusiasm," so the over-amused audience from nowhere is annoying me. Eight minutes into it, I can see Matt LeBlanc just isn't a very good actor. And ooh, the writing ("What are you a rocket scientist" "Yes."). It's astoundingly amateurish. Is this what people want? Intolerable.

"It's not good to accessorize an eel."

And therefore "Mosaic" lost, and poor Rob ("you didn't give me a specific task!") got fired. Yeah, yeah, I was sucked into the cultural vortex that is "The Apprentice."

"Stolen Honor."

On a powerful episode of Hardball, former POW James Warner swears that his Vietnamese captors intimidated him and threatened him with execution for war crimes based on John Kerry's testimony at the "Winter Soldiers" hearings. Chris Matthews pushes Warner repeatedly and brings on another POW (who says he was not similarly intimidated) and Ken Campbell (a vet who opposed the war, who says that Kerry only meant to blame the administration), and Warner stares them all down. Also on the show is Carlton Sherwood, the producer of the film "Stolen Honor." Sherwood and Warner clearly have a burning anger against Kerry for testifying that atrocities were committed "on a daily basis" in Vietnam. As the title of the film indicates, they feel Kerry deprived them of the honor they deserved for their service in Vietnam.

The new TV season.

I reached the height of my interest in the new TV season when I was 14. I can get the age exactly right because I remember poring over the new season issue of TV Guide the year "My Mother the Car"--aka "the worst television series of all time"--premiered. Since then, my interest has waned. I leafed through the new season issue of Entertainment Weekly last night, and I could scarcely turn the pages fast enough. I see there's a new season of "The Real World." That's worth checking out if only to see what the new house looks like. I see KenJen is back on "Jeopardy!" and I find I don't care. And "Joey" premieres tonight, but the only reason to care is that we get Adriana back. And "The Apprentice" is back. Do I feel compelled to watch by some horrifying cultural force? I feel compelled to TiVo, and time will tell if I watch the series, watch only until I get tired of it, or leave the recorded show to drift down to the bottom of the "What's On" list and then ignominiously drop off.

UPDATE: The TiVo list, which I've spent a lot of time looking at, is not called "What's On," it's called "Now Playing." How could I make such a mistake? Because "What's On" is what you say about TV. "Now Playing" is what you say about movie theaters. Having a TiVo doesn't turn your TV into a movie theater. (Nor does making your room into a "home theater.") Not only are you still watching the shows on a television, but you have the capacity to pause and rewind--how is that like a movie theater?

Also, I TiVo'd and watched the first episode of "The Real World," where they are in Philadelphia and they are living in a cavernous old bank, which has furniture set up to make it seem vaguely house-like. It's weird to see Philadelphia portrayed as "the big city," especially when one character goes on about how he's from a "small town," encountering "the big city" for the first time, and he's from Nashville! (Check the relative population of American cities here.) One thing about the show this season is that there is a UW-Madison student in the cast. He seems to be there to be officially the most ordinary person (male category--Melanie seems to be holding down that role in the female category). The big idea for the season seems to be having two gay guys in the cast to surprise the roommates who assume once they've found one gay guy there won't be another gay guy, but, oh, there is. Wow, and he's less obviously gay, so that's a big learning experience for them, but they seem to learn it in two seconds, so I wonder if there's much story left, because the narrative potential of this cast match-up seems fulfilled in episode one. Good episode, but what is left--other than the usual getting drunk in clubs and tubs?

Kerry on Iraq.

NYT editorial page calls Kerry's position on Iraq incoherent and his strategy of shifting to domestic issues unacceptable:

Given the political corner Mr. Kerry has painted himself into, it's not surprising that his advisers are urging him to start concentrating on the economy. But Iraq is still the great crisis confronting the United States. While the temptation to dodge it at this point is natural, Mr. Kerry should resist.

But Kerry is too indecisive to go all out with this focus on domestic things that people, like Clinton, are advising him to adopt. Kerry merges things. It's really nuanced. It goes like this: "Two hundred billion for Iraq, but they tell us we can't afford after-school programs for our children." I'm not looking at the whole text of the speech, but what is the point? Are we to think he's going to withdraw spending from Iraq and hand it over to after-school programs? Or just spend on both? I see that later in that speech he said "[Bush] doesn't believe that America can be strong in the world while we also make progress here at home. That's a false choice, and I reject it." So I guess, pinned down, he would have to concede that what he's asking for is massive new spending on domestic programs, but I think the rhetoric was designed to make listeners think he's planning to transfer the spending from Iraq to tangible things that voters can enjoy at home. He's going to make our schools great. That will be so nice for the children. I wonder if the school in Beslan had nice after-school programs. But if you say, don't we need to worry about security for domestic happiness to work? He might snap at you and say "You're not listening."

"We must all raise our voices, disown them."

At last. Thank you.

UW Police 9/11 remembrance banner attacked.

Here's a picture of the banner that has been hung on the UW Police building, which is across from the football stadium here in Madison. The banner includes a quote from President Bush ("We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail") and identifies him as the source of the quote. I received email today urging people to complain that the sign is an inappropriate political sign that needs to be taken down.

ADDED: What tone-deaf politics it is to complain about this banner!

Inside the dome.

I admitted that I lied when I said the dome on the Overture Center was beautiful, but today we got a look from the inside. It wasn't really open, but there was a group of people in there, so we went in and stayed and talked to a man who seemed authorized to show the place and who did not object to my taking photographs. So here is what it's like looking up at the dome:



I think, seen from the inside, the dome is beautiful. Really!



Here are some workers putting on some finishing touches, inside:



And out:



And here's a nice view from under the dome looking out into the street:

About Al Gore.

Sixteen interesting things about Al Gore, from David Remnick's article in The New Yorker.

1. Leon Russell is one of his neighbors—in the Belle Meade section of Nashville.

2. Tipper Gore keeps a drum set in the living room.

3. They keep bugs out of their yard with a "system that sprays a fine mist of ground chrysanthemums from various discreet sources."

4. Gore is “having a blast.”

5. Gore has an eccentric artist friend who is "a crazy kinda guy” who's got a band called Monkey Bowl that's "a cross between the Fugs and Ali G."

6. Gore thinks the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas is "a ve-rrry interesting guy."

7. Gore has a problem with television: “There is just nothing on the dendrite level about watching television."

8. Gore is interested in "flow." Me too!

9. Gore has been avoiding “Fahrenheit 9/11." Me too!

10. Politics was a bad career choice for Gore because as an introvert, he's drained after an event. Clinton, an extrovert, is invigorated.

11. Gore didn't use Clinton in the 2000 campaign because he loves Tipper so much and cares about marital fidelity.

12. Gore thinks Bush is "a very weak man" who let other people push him around. He says Bush "was rolled in the immediate aftermath of 9/11." Gore doesn't think Bush is dumb, just "incurious." (Who started that "incurious" meme? It must have originally been a play on "Curious George.")

13. Gore doesn't seem to like Kerry very much. The two co-senators did not have much of a relationship, even though they had something in common: "aloofness." But, per Gore, Kerry "took the initiative to reach out to me and to identify the fact that he felt the relationship was not what it could be and should be and asked to sit down and talk about it and jointly create a basis for a much better working relationship. " That must have been one hell of a polysyllabic conversation.

14. Gore keeps an Apple G4 on the table when he eats a meal in front of the New Yorker reporter, who peeks at his bookmarks: the Times, the Washington Post, Google News, mediawhoresonline.com, truthout.com.

15. Gore seems a bit obsessed by a memo Lewis F. Powell, Jr. wrote just before he went on the Supreme Court. The memo argues that conservatives should strongly defend free enterprise because it is “'under broad attack' by well-funded leftists, who dominate the media, academia, and even some corners of the political world. " As if Justice Powell is at the root of a vast, right-wing conspiracy.

16. Gore doesn't like Bush's Christian fundamentalism because it doesn't have enough of the Sermon on the Mount in it—not enough about helping the poor. He and Tipper can't even find a church to attend in Nashville: “The influx of fundamentalist preachers have pretty much chased us out with their right-wing politics."

Stuck inside of Tuesday with the Blogger blues again.

Well, Blogger is driving me crazy today. The home page is stuck on Tuesday, even though I've entered posts on Wednesday. If I click on the most recent archive, I can see the new posts. I've tried republishing and every other annoying trial and error thing I can think of, as I sit here in the café, drinking a latte and listening to Bob Dylan music. Let's see if this shows up.

Music, politics, free lunch.

Free Adult Swim is providing music on the Mall. The sidewalk chalkings exhort us to political activity.



A local character is getting ready to serve as an alternate source of music. He's leafing through his songbook of old standards. Madisonians do not need to be informed what instrument he will be playing. For the rest of you: he will be playing the piccolo. Forever.



Elsewhere: free hot lunch!

"The 'Hey, What Am I Smelling Right Now?' school of acting."

What a perfect phrase! I'm going to remember that.

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

On the subject of picking an official rock song for the state of Wisconsin, Hazy Dave (BSEE 78) writes:

I nominate "Rockin' Behind The Iron Curtain" by the Red Ball Jets, a Milwaukee group from the late 70's. An old Huey Piano Smith tune, IIRC, available only on a 7 inch EP they self-released back in the day, so I guess it's a bit obscure. Still, I thought it might strike a resonant chord up there in the People's Republic of Madison...

Group members included guitarist Mark Schneider from the late lamented Dirty Jack's Record Rack, drummer Rob McCuen, (nowadays an Iggy pop disciple - a much kinder word than wannabe - still haunting Milwaukee's club scene), and a singer called Molly Putz (a gym class putdown cut from the same cloth as "Violent Femme")...

I suppose anything of some national recognition by the Bodeans or Violent Femmes would be a better choice, but nothing I can think of has much to do with the state or hometown pride or anything like that. "Gimme the Car" is a bit profane for official recognition, and "Children Of The Revolution" is a cover of a T.Rex song... I'm not entirely sure if the Fendermen were from Wisconsin or across the border in the Twin Cities, but "Muleskinner Blues" was at least a national hit, a good natured novelty rocker in the early 60's or late 50's. I can't quite think of a good rockin' enough near-hit by the Robbs or the Legends, and the Spooner tune I'd choose, "Shut Up", isn't on any of their (out-of-print) albums anyway. "Johnny Stood Up" was another great Spooner song in the same boat...

Maybe the Spanic Boys' "Keep On Walkin'"? I'm not being too helpful here, but I recognize that an officially sanctioned State Rock Song would have to be much more mainstream and/or stupid than I'd prefer in order to be approved in the first place. "It's just the Good Life passing you by..." - Madison's Fire Town.

Hey, it's the "WHEREAS, Sloopy lives in a very bad part of town, and everybody, yeah, tries to put my Sloopy down" bit that really makes it anyway. If it came to a vote, I expect the Budweiser song ("When you say Wisconsin, you've said it all") would handily trounce all comers anyway. This is clearly an unacceptable solution from St. Louis (pun intended), so I recommend we table the motion.

"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