Need a job?

But want to live somewhere kind of cool? Did you know the unemployment rate in Madison, Wisconsin is 2.3% (the sixth lowest of the nation's largest metropolitan areas). The problem here is trying to fill all the jobs we have. Consider moving!

UPDATE: And for everyone who's emailed me to ask when I'm going to get around to blogging the last chapter of Dylan's "Chronicles," let me just say that this post made me want to quote you this Dylan quote:

Well, there's fist fights in the kitchen
They're enough to make me cry
The mailman comes in
Even he's gotta take a side
Even the butler
He's got something to prove
Then you ask why I don't live here
Honey, how come you don't move?

Vanilla Swiss Almond.

If you're looking for an easy and delicious dinner, may I recommend a pint of Vanilla Swiss Almond Haagen-Dazs?

Google ads versus Blogads.

I've had Blogads for a few weeks, and I'm really happy with the way they look. Today I added Google ads, a bit further down in the sidebar. Google has some fancy but automatic way to decide what ads to place, and I can't help but notice that I'm getting pro-Kerry ads, presumably because I mention his name so much. Maybe my epithet-free mode of expression keeps Google's sophisticated methods from detecting my dissaffection for the man, but maybe its methods just aren't that sophisticated. In any case, my new Blogad (the one with that forlorn young woman who is pining for a date from a blogging "news junkie") also seems to see me as a blog of the left. I guess they aren't reading Jeremy enough.

UPDATE: Wow! This post changed the pro-Kerry ads to pro-Bush ads. I guess Google really is brilliant!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Or maybe not so brilliant. The ads seem to change back and forth. Like a certain candidate ...

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: I clicked on one of the ads myself, and it checked out as a lefty blog, but I just want to say I love the design. Really pretty! Nice name too (and I get the reference).

POSSIBLY THE FINAL UPDATE: Two days after adding Google ads, I have removed them. I think the Blogads are much better. They are much better looking, and I can reject what I don't like. Google ads pay based on click-throughs, yet Google kept giving me ads that my readers were quite unlikely to click on. So enough! I'm for Blogads.

Disrespecting the W.

The Badger Herald (one of the student papers here at UW-Madison) reports on Michael Moore's "Slacker Uprising Tour," which hit the Union Terrace on Saturday night:

Wearing a red Badger hat, with the “W” in back to prevent sending mixed signals, Moore urged students to represent what he sees as the majority viewpoint in the country — liberalism.

I speculated the other day that the nonvoters he was trying to reach would probably be out celebrating the big football victory but 4,000 persons attended.

Some Bush-supporting students did show up, however. Moore reached out to them with "a profane tirade against the Bush sympathizers, blaming them for sending 'poor kids from Milwaukee' to fight in Iraq, ... [and calling them] 'pathetic assholes,' among other expletives."

UPDATE: The article in the other student newspaper, The Daily Cardinal, is much nicer to Moore.

"Dream team" of lawyers.

Is it really such a good idea for a political candidate to brag about his "dream team" of lawyers when he's campaigning--especially when the candidate and his running mate are lawyers and he's taken pains on other occasion to deflect the criticism that he's too closely allied with the interests of lawyers? I realize Kerry is trying to encourage people to vote and there may be some sense that people don't vote because they don't believe their vote will be counted, but really--I am a lawyer and I cringe when someone conspicuously assembles a crowd of lawyers in advance of an event that is not itself litigation.

My take on the new gender gap.

Kausfiles writes:

[S]omething more than Security Momming would seem to be required to explain the 10 point reverse gender gap. (The poll followed a debate on domestic policy, after all.) Maybe something about how Kerry reminds women .... not of their first husband so much as of a guy who never got to be their first husband because he bored them on their first date so he never got a second one. Meanwhile, for men, Kerry actually out-machos Bush in debate if you turn off the sound (and maybe even if you don't). ...

Speaking as one person on the female side of the gap, I'll say that I've never forgotten this exchange, which occurred on September 13, 2001:

QUESTION: Could you give us a sense as to what kind of prayers you are thinking and where your heart is for yourself, as you work on that?

BUSH: Well, I don't think about myself right now. I think about the families, the children. I'm a loving guy. And I am also someone, however, who's got a job to do, and I intend to do it. And this is a terrible moment. But this country will not relent until we have saved ourselves and others from the terrible tragedy that came upon America.

I still remember how he said "I'm a loving guy." I just came out of him--pure expression. It's insulting to women to say that we are evaluating the two men as potential husbands, but it may be that women are responding in some way to their love--that presidential sort of love that is a deep feeling of love for humanity, solidly connected to a commitment to do what one perceives as necessary. I have never heard Kerry express anything like that kind of love. Even if I don't like every component of Bush's moral core and even if I don't agree with everything Bush thought was needed and the way he went about doing what he thought was needed, I feel a strong connection to this man and what we've been through together. Seeing the two men side by side in the debate, Bush still seems to me to be the "loving guy" who did what he said he would do. Who is this Kerry who would unseat him? He looks like a cold, deliberate power-seeker to me. And if that's the feeling you have, that "daughter who is ... a lesbian" remark--along with the heartless insistence that he was actually being quite nice--is really rather repellent. It's hard to generalize, but maybe my response says something about the new polls and the new gender gap.

UPDATE: This post reminded an emailer of this news story. Quite apt.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Another emailer sent in this link, also apt.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's a very well put observation from one of my wonderful emailers:

John Kerry is a very measured speaker who speaks each word distinctly and leaves a space between each word in that NPR style that drives me crazy. Even after his commas, Kerry leaves a distinct gap that most people would use between paragraphs. With one exception.

When Kerry referred to Mary Cheney being a lesbian he broke his normal speaking rhythm, paused, and then said "daughter who is ... a lesbian." Without even a slight pause he then immediately rushed into the next sentence. I got the impression that he felt as if he'd managed to accomplish the dirty deed and now just wanted to get out of the cesspool he'd created.

Those scary conservative Supreme Court Justices.

Adam Cohen rants, as an "editorial observer" on the NYT editorial page, about the horrible, frightening Supreme Court that might result if Bush is reelected:

Abortion might be a crime in most states. Gay people could be thrown in prison for having sex in their homes. States might be free to become mini-theocracies, endorsing Christianity and using tax money to help spread the gospel. The Constitution might no longer protect inmates from being brutalized by prison guards. Family and medical leave and environmental protections could disappear.

What's that about family and medical leave?

Justices Scalia and Thomas are judicial activists, eager to use the fast-expanding federalism doctrine to strike down laws that protect people's rights. Last year, they dissented from a decision upholding the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guarantees most workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a loved one. They said Congress did not have that power.

Excuse me a minute while I go into full lawprof mode. The dissenters in the Hibbs case did not say that Congress lacked the power to pass the Family and Medical Leave Act. In fact, they assume Congress has that power under the Commerce Clause. The case was only about whether Congress also had the power to subject the states to lawsuits for retrospective relief if they violate the FMLA. To be able to do this, the act had fit into the legislative power given by the Fourteenth Amendment. That is, it needed to be portrayed as a remedy for the violation of the constitutional right of Equal Protection.

The majority--in an opinion written by Chief Justice Rehnquist--had to stretch quite a bit to fit the FMLA into the Court's Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence. What violation of Equal Protection by the states was remedied by a family and medical leave entitlement? I've written an article on the subject, and I am quite convinced that the majority dismantled its own established doctrine as it stretched to uphold the right to sue the state in this case. Justice Kennedy--one of the moderate conservatives--certainly thought so and dissented.

UPDATE: My article is “Vanguard States, Laggard States: Federalism and Constitutional Rights,” 152 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 1745 (2004). The Law Review is only up to issue 5 on their website, and my article is in issue 6, so presumably it will be up soon. If Lexis links work, this is the Lexis link.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I just focused on "which guarantees most workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a loved one." A loved one? Spare me the sentimentality! The feds have mandated a leave entitlement to care for family members even if you hate them, and if they aren't in your family, there's no benefit even if that person is the love of your life (which, I note, embeds discrimination against gay persons in federal law).

Reporting from Kerry's mind.

Adam Nagourney, of the NYT, reporting--that is, political memo-ing--on the daughter-who-is-a-lesbian story:

In Mr. Kerry's mind, he was stating a well-known fact. Ms. Cheney is openly gay, and her father mentioned it at one of his rallies before the Republican convention. More significant, calling someone a lesbian in this era is hardly an insult in Mr. Kerry's mind, his advisers said.

Bush's bulge "has become what literary critics call an objective correlative."

Elisabeth Bumiller, in the NYT, gets rather intellectual about the bulge under Bush's jacket.

Draft training.

I don't know if this is going on elsewhere, but in Madison, two draft training sessions were held over the weekend. (The October 15th session, by the way, took place at what is the most architecturally significant building in Madison.) Wisconsin Public Radio had did a long piece on one of these meetings in their morning news. (No clip on their site yet.) [UPDATE: The audio clip of the story is there now.]

I was a bit disturbed that WPR stoked the opinion that the draft would come back, but its story did include a clip of Bush saying clearly that he wasn't going to have a draft, and the explanation of why some think the draft is returning was that the military was "stretched so thin" that either candidate would need to move to a draft. Still, covering the story at all would seem to help Kerry who is trying to leverage his candidacy with fear of a draft. Wisconsin is, as we all know, a battleground state, efforts are being made to encourage voting by the large numbers of students in our state, and the draft is the issue designed to scare otherwise apathetic students into voting.

What might not have been a justifiable story for WPR may have become one simply because groups were willing to hold these sessions. One of the many reasons why I think there will never be another draft (unless there is a cataclysmic war) is that resistance to the draft would make it far less effective than the alternative of vigorous recruitment (with improved pay and benefits). That resistance gets under way with an unfounded rumor is only a hint of what would be to come. On the other hand, maybe these sessions were merely held to procure media coverage for the issue, in order to affect the election. Only fifteen persons attended the meeting WPR covered.

"The Daily Show" is dropping in the ratings.

Drudge has the story that the ratings for "The Daily Show" have dropped, despite "jumbo hype from media writers and a bestselling book." I would add that the presidential campaign should also be heightening interest in the show. But it does not surprise me at all that Jon Stewart is losing some of his audience, because he has become a one-sided partisan. Not only does he miss opportunities for humor that might be had at the expense of the side he favors, but his live audience is now packed with lefty overlaughers--people who laugh uproariously at anti-Bush snipes that are hardly jokes at all. If you don't hate Bush, it really cuts into the fun.

Bill Maher's HBO show "Real Time" has the same problem, along with the usual Bill Maher show problem of having celebrities talk about political subjects in ways that make you instinctively change the channel, like last night when Alanis Morissette started to rail about the situation in Iraq. In a contrast to that, I really rather liked Sean Astin on Bill O'Reilly's show the other night. O'Reilly wanted to needle Astin about celebrities doing politics when they don't really know what they're talking about, and Astin was so modest and unopinionated that O'Reilly was reduced to saying "Come on! Have at me!"

By the way, that Drudge link also includes the transcript for the notorious Stewart appearance on "Crossfire" the other day. I've watched the streaming audio of it that is available elsewhere. I think Stewart is kind of funny, but also peevish--not as nimble at turning things into fun as he used to be. He becomes a bit of a plodding scold as it goes along, and I get the impression that he has decided he needs to demonstrate how serious and important the political situation is by sacrificing comedy. But Jon, we need you to be funny. That actually is the most important thing for you. Otherwise you're just Alanis Morissette blabbing about Iraq and I'm going to have to change the channel.

UPDATE: An emailer makes some good points about the ratings:

On August 9, Stewart had Bill Clinton as a guest on the Daily Show and drew 1.9 million viewers. Later that month, he had John Kerry and got 1.5 million viewers. With only 12-16 or so new episodes a month, the disproportionately high ratings for those two episodes are more than enough to account for the entire difference between August and September.

Lots of emailers are agreeing with me that the show has gotten a lot less funny as it has gotten more partisan. Personally, I had watched ever show for years, but now watch only occasionally and often turn it off before the end. I especially dislike the sycophantic interviews.

An October drive.

I took a drive into the country today, out to Highway J, which the Law School faculty survey indicated was a good place to see the fall foliage. After the strong winds yesterday, I wasn't expecting the height of color. The music on the radio seemed to go with the winding, rollercoaster road; and I said to myself, whatever music this is, this is the kind of music I love. Later, I heard that it was the Lawrence Chamber Players--live at the Elvehjem Museum in Madison--playing Prokofiev: Quintet, op. 39. Then, as the Players took a break before playing Puccini: Crisantemi, there was an interview about a show at the Elvehjem: Xu Bing's paintings "The Glassy Surface of a Lake." An expert was talking about the importance of black ink in Chinese paintings and tolerating the interviewer's incapacity to stop calling paintings drawings. I pulled the car over and took this picture from my car window.



At first, I had my digital camera on the wrong setting, and I accidentally took two tiny movies of that view, complete with a snippet of the radio voice talking about black ink. A little further on, horses:



Then, fall foliage along with the beginnings of a new crop of Christmas trees:



I passed a yard full of metal sculpture that had this Tin Man mailbox:



Soon enough I found myself in the Wisconsin town with my favorite town name: Black Earth. Often people drive out to Black Earth just to go to the Shoe Box, which has a sign that says it's the largest shoe store in the Midwest. Inside, in addition to a lot of shoes, there are TVs showing the Packer game, fish tanks, and birdcages with noisy birds. I look at some shoes but I don't buy anything. I'm intrigued by all the stickers on the door and the shadows they cast on the doormat, so I take a lot of pictures.



I finally tear myself away from the spectacle that is the Shoe Box vestibule, and I take some pictures outside, where there is not only this lovely cow but there is also that brat sale going on over there. (It is a common occurrence in Wisconsin for retailers to enhance the shopping experience by setting up some grills outside and selling brats nice and cheap.)



When I get home and get out of my car, I look around and see new beauty in the trees in my own yard:

Shrum versus Mehlman.

Once again, neither candidate is on "Meet the Press." I suppose they just can't risk it. So I resign myself to watching Ken Mehlman (Bush's campaign manager) and Bob Shrum (Kerry's chief campaign strategist) wielding their powers, getting the message across. Tim Russert is my favorite TV news interviewer. (I also really like Chris Matthews, whose "Fox News Sunday," I may TiVo-blog later.) [UPDATE: I mean Chris Wallace! Sorry.]

Russert puts up his first graphic: all the recent polls showing Bush pulling back ahead. (This was before the devastating new Gallup poll.)

Shrum? Oh, he says just what you'd expect: there are actually other polls showing Kerry ahead, and then there are the internals. Roll out the conventional wisdom: a President can't get reelected if his approval rating is below 50%. Yawn! Of course, Shrum has to say that.

Mehlman? Well, what do you expect him to say? The polls show how much people like Bush and don't like Kerry!

Next question: what are the key issues in the campaign? Shrum reels out a bunch of things (like health care coverage) and then slows down to deliver this big shock: "this extraordinary statement in the New York Times Magazine this morning, that as soon as he's inaugurated, the President wants to rush to--and this is his word--privatize Social Security." (Interestingly enough, Joe Lockhart, on "Fox News Sunday," expressed shock at this proposal, which he portrayed as some sort of invidious secret plan.)

Shrum and Mehlman go back and forth about Social Security policy, and Shrum annoyingly tries to dominate by interrupting and talking over Mehlman, and even resorting to chanting "finish! finish! finish!" while Mehlman is trying to make his point (even though Shrum had already talked longer than Mehlman). Shrum was bright red when this discussion began and now he seems to have entirely lost his cool. He keeps banging his hands--and his giant round cufflinks--on the table. Mehlman's smiling. He's got the polls, why shouldn't he be calm and collected? Shrum speaks again, uninterrupted, then as soon as Mehlman begins his response, he's back to interrupting. One thing I love about Mehlman is that he never wastes any time saying "let me finish" and "I didn't interrupt you, now don't interrupt me"; he just gets his points in and lets Shrum look like a jackass.

Russert asks about Iraq, and here Shrum's whole response is about how Osama bin Laden attacked us and Iraq is a distraction. Mehlman, who has just emphasized the importance of seeing the Iraq conflict through to success, now takes the opportunity to say "Tim, you heard something here: it's called a pre-9/11 worldview, the notion that America should just respond when we're attacked." If Kerry cares at all about Iraq, Shrum disserved him terribly here. This is the determinative issue for me, and Shrum gave me absolutely zero.

New video clip: "We're all God's children, Bob." Yes, it's Kerry smarmily allying himself with God as he gratuitously drags the Vice President's daughter's private life into the policy debate. I'm struck, as I was when I first heard the third debate, by the way Kerry pauses and lowers his voice before he says "a lesbian" (in the sentence, "I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter ... who is ... a lesbian"). I called that "creepy" when I simulblogged the debate. Was Kerry ashamed of himself for saying it? Was he trying to make some listeners feel that being a lesbian is a bad thing, even though, of course, he wasn't saying it was? I get the feeling Kerry was deciding to go for some perceived political advantage here, even though it's not the sort of thing he would normally bring up. He doesn't even talk about his own private feelings. How weird for him to talk about someone else's sexual feelings!

Should Kerry apologize? Shrum: no ... and Kerry won all three debates. And people have attacked Kerry's war record! And Kerry wants to do something about health care!

Next clip: Cheney, asked by a citizen to say what he personally thinks of gay marriage, talks about his gay daughter. Question to Mehlman: if Cheney himself talks about his daughter's sexuality, why can't Kerry? Mehlman: it's wrong to use the Vice President's daughter to make a political point. Shrum, heated up, knocking a cufflink onto the desk repeatedly, re-asks Russert's question, then asserts that because Bush lost the debate so badly, the Republican spinners picked this bogus issue because it was all they could come up with.

Amazing how easy it was to use that one thing--quite successfully--to overshadow Kerry's big (supposed) victory in that debate, isn't it? Look at those poll numbers! Kerry used the debates to pull himself back into the running, and now the debates are over, and precious days are being lost over Kerry's foolish misstep, which his people have decided to dig in and defend as just something really kind and sympathetic that Kerry was nice enough to say. (I'm sure Mary Cheney is sitting around thinking: isn't he a lovely man for caring so much about me?)

Mehlman uses Kerry's minor misstep to paint a big picture:

Remember the famous Dean scream? The famous Dean scream was seen as relevant because it was a window into something that people thought was bigger. And I think what you saw with John Kerry, when he brought that point up in the debate: it was part of a larger pattern here, a pattern of someone who is literally willing to say anything in order to win."

Mehlman then connects the remark about Cheney's daughter to Edwards's statement that if Kerry is elected people like Christopher Reeve will walk again and Kerry's warning that Bush will bring back the draft. The point is: these people will say anything to get elected. Shrum, ever ready to interrupt, grumbles "he has to finish his prepared speech"--as if Shrum's remarks are all off the cuff. (Did I mention Shrum is wearing the largest cufflinks in the history of the world?)

A few questions later, Russert shows the clip from the debate in which Bush says "Gosh, I don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden" and then the two embarrassing clips from 2002 of Bush saying that he's "not that concerned" about Osama bin Laden. Mehlman just emphasizes the successes against al Qaeda. Shrum complains about various failures in Afghanistan--how could Bush have failed to wipe out opium!--and ends with what he thinks is a big kicker: "Bush keeps talking about the schools he's opened and the fact that women voted in Afghanistan. Well, I think that's good, but I wish the President would care about women's rights and education in this country as much as he does in Afghanistan."

Finally, Russert asks Mehlman to explain the bulge in Bush's jacket. Mehlman makes a couple jokes, and still doesn't explain it. Why don't they just explain it? Is it some kind of trick to get Bush's opponents to waste their time on something that has no significance?

All in all, an excellent confrontation. I think Mehlman clearly got the better of Shrum, in both style and substance. But maybe people who really want Kerry to win will find a way to convince themselves that Shrum and his cufflinks really mopped the floor with Mehlman.

A big game and a big windbag.

Here's the local newspaper's coverage of the big game last night, when the Badgers beat the Boilermakers. But not all Madisonians were home watching the game on TV and out celebrating afterwards. Michael Moore came to town for an 8 pm show aimed at getting out the vote--the "Slacker Uprising Tour." Great timing, Michael. I could be wrong, but I think anyone who would go to a Michael Moore show at 8 pm on the night of the big game would probably already be planning to vote. And--I'm sorry but I haven't been paying much attention to Michael Moore's logic--but what's the connection between being a slacker and wanting to vote for Kerry? Is it just that slackers don't vote, and we'd really like more people to vote? I don't believe that. I think you've got to be thinking that if only these nonvoters would vote, they'd vote for Kerry. But why, really?

Kerry's "sort of" and Bush's "you know."

Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg (in the NYT) observes that John Kerry says "sort of" a lot:

Mr. Kerry's fondness for "sort of" may contribute to the perception that he's reluctant to commit himself or fearful of being held to his exact words. But it's also the mark of someone who's aware of how imperfect the fit is between words and things, and of how hard it is to do verbal justice to the corrugations of experience.

So even inarticulate verbal clutter counts for nuance now? I've known some prominent academics who've thrown "sort of" into almost every sentence. To me, "sort of" is exactly the same thing as "like." Take that educated person who is trying to impress you with the subtlety of their thinking, and translate, to yourself, every "sort of" into the teenager's "like," and you'll be even more irritated by his lazy verbal meanderings than you were before.

Nunberg notes that Bush's verbal filler is "you know." I thought Nunberg was going to say that each man's verbal tic represents his fundamental outlook on the world. Kerry has his nuanced vision, while Bush has his certainty. But Nunberg's observation about Bush's "you know" is that it either reaches out to the audience with an acknowledgement of shared knowledge or pushes the audience away by imposing on it the burden of figuring out what it is we all know.

I wish both candidates--and all public speakers--would break their dependence on verbal filler by developing the capacity to pause when they need to think a bit to get to the next useful phrase.

See, I told you we're attacked from both the left and the right!

The NYT public editor, Daniel Okrent, repeats his position, stated last week, that the NYT is not biased because it is criticized for bias from both the right and the left. The restatement of the position comes in the guise of opening his column to his critics, as he splits his column into a response from a critic on the left and a critic on the right.

UPDATE: An emailer makes very clear a point that I meant to imply:

On Okrent being attacked from the left and the right, it seems to
me that Todd Gitlin's is not an attack on the bias of the NYT but an
angry screed about them not being even tougher on Bush. He really
offers no evidence that I can see about bias, just a position that they
aren't bashing Bush as much as he would like in the way he would like.
That sounds to me like a plaint that they may be biased, but not enough.

Women in Afghanistan.

Amy Waldman, in the NYT, interviews two Afghan women who are devoted to finding ways to advance the interests of women in the aftermath of the Taliban: "The restrictions on women now come from the men in their families, some of whom seem to have internalized the Taliban's dictates, many of whom are simply following the practices of generations."

Nice milestone reached.

The Sitemeter just recorded the half-millionth visitor. That's pretty cool. Thanks for reading, everyone ... and go Badgers!

UPDATE: What an exciting game! Congratulations to the Badgers.

Kerry actually did mispronounce "brat"!

I wrote yesterday morning, as soon as I heard on the radio that Kerry was coming to Wisconsin to go to a brat fry, that he'd better pronounce "brat" correctly. After "Lambert Field," he could not afford another Wisconsin pronunciation mistake.

Now, I see in Chris Sullentrop's report in Slate, that Kerry actually did mispronounce brat:

Here in Sheboygan, during a "Kerry-Edwards '04 Brat Fry," Kerry adds to the litany [of regional mistakes] Friday by referring to the local food as a short-A "brat," the way you would refer to a spoiled child. "Brot!" yell members of the crowd. For good measure, Kerry makes the mistake at the end of his speech, too. "Before I get a chance to have some braaats ..." "Brots!!" some women near me shout in frustration.

For crying out loud! How inept do your people have to be, when taking you to a brat fry not to tell you "remember it's brot"? You know, I wouldn't mind if the candidates didn't do any of this traveling around to colorful, small-town events. I'd rather see Kerry sit across the table from Tim Russert on "Meet the Press." But, good Lord, if you're going to use the hokey Americana method of campaigning, the whole point is to look as though you belong there when you're there.

UPDATE: An emailer quips: "So you're telling us that Kerry's staff failed to prepare him for the wurst?"

Drugs and politics.

The NYT demonstrates clearly why all the talk about dealing with high drug prices by allowing imports from Canada has been a complete waste of time.

It may make political sense to point to Canada as a solution to high prescription drug prices in the United States. But many economists and health care experts say that importing drugs from countries that control their prices would do little to solve the problem of expensive drugs in the United States, where companies are free to set their own prices.

To begin with, there are not enough Canadians, or drugs in Canada, to make much of a dent in the United States. There are 16 million American patients on Lipitor, for instance - more than half the entire Canadian population.

Exporting and reimporting the drugs costs money; the role of Canada is simply to pick up Canadian price controls. If price controls are a good idea, impose them directly, and save the money that is wasted shuffling the drugs across the border and back. If the candidates don't have the nerve to propose direct price controls here, they ought to shut up about Canada. Kerry seems more culpable for this political sham, because he's made drug importation from Canada a campaign pledge, but Bush didn't have the nerve to point out that this is a sham. He acted as though the only thing holding him back was that we'd need some way to ensure the drugs are safe.

Canadian-style price controls aren't just politically unpopular though:

Efforts to force down American prices to Canadian or European levels could radically change the economics of the pharmaceutical industry - which effectively depends on United States profits for all of its activities, including a substantial portion of its spending on research and development. ... John Vernon, an economist at the University of Connecticut, estimated that dropping drug prices in the United States to the levels in the rest of the world would cut drug companies' investment in research and development by 25 to 30 percent.

Drug pricing is full of complexity that the candidates never talk about. Complexity? Wasn't Kerry supposed to be the candidate with a mind for complexity? Oh, but that isn't the point. I'm sure both Kerry and Bush understand the basic complexity of the drug cost problem, they've just decided to set the matter of trying to solve the problem to the side, so they can use the problem itself to toy with the emotions of people who need drugs.

UPDATE: I hope people notice that Canada is not exactly interested in accommodating our drug reimportation schemes. The Financial Times reports (seen first on Drudge):

[G]rowing concern in Canada that growing exports to the US could lead to rising prices and shortages north of the border has prompted the Canadian International Pharmacy Association (Cipa), whose members include several of the biggest internet and mail-order drugstores, to act. “We don't want to give Americans the impression that we have unlimited supply for them to tap into on a commercial basis,” said David Mackay, the association's executive director. Americans, he added, “can't get everything from Canada. We can't be your complete drugstore”.

Kerry refuels my mistrust.

If there is one thing I have spent the entire campaign season trying to understand, it is: what would Kerry do in Iraq that is different from what Bush would do? Some Kerry supporters I know have tried to convince me that Kerry would be forced, just like Bush, to carry the effort in Iraq through to success, that he has made numerous statements indicating that he recognizes this to be so, and therefore that I should give up the mistrust I have had about him all this time. Today, the AP reports:

There is a "great potential of a draft" to replenish U.S. forces in Iraq if President Bush wins a second term, Democratic challenger John Kerry said on a campaign stop in Iowa.

Bush said in the second presidential debate that there would be no revival of the military draft under any circumstances if he is re-elected. "We're not going to have a draft, period," the president said.

However, Kerry told The Des Moines Register, "With George Bush, the plan for Iraq is more of the same and the great potential of a draft."

Quite aside from Kerry's attempts to scare people into voting for him with a trumped-up threat that Bush will revive the draft, this statement refuels my mistrust for Kerry. His argument about the draft implicitly asserts that he plans to withdraw from Iraq without adequately providing for a successful resolution of the conflict.

By the way, this morning as I was getting ready for work, I had the TV on, and within the space of 15 minutes I heard two different commercials, each with dark, pounding music and an ominous-sounding voiceover warning me of some dire consequence of Bush remaining in office. When I heard the first commercial, I thought, oh, some extreme group is trying to help Kerry but is only making him sound like a fearmonger with no real substantive issues. I started to feel sorry for Kerry, because he cannot control these groups, and then I heard, "I'm John Kerry, and I approved of this message." When I heard the second commercial, I thought, well, this one is really awful, and once again I was again surprised to hear, "I'm John Kerry, and I approved of this message."

UPDATE: Thanks to Instapundit for linking. Thanks to the emailer who sent this link to a relevant cartoon. I've gotten some email from Kerry defenders who question the logic of my inference, but the only other alternatives are things like: Kerry is just flat out lying about his draft threat, or Kerry is weirdly unrealistic enough to think the French and the Germans are going to supply the replacement troops. These options do not restore my trust. Kerry's would-be defenders are just advocating an alternative fuel source for my mistrust.

Maybe we shouldn't have registered all those young people to vote ...

"Team America" premieres and the NYT is disturbed to discover that the "South Park" guys are ... gasp! ... conservative! Reviewer A.O. Scott writes:

The obscene patriotic ditty that is the Team America theme song might be hyperbolic (and impossible to stop singing), but it is not sarcastic. Nor is a speech, delivered twice in the course of the action, most powerfully at the climactic moment, that is meant as an answer both to the Hollywood peaceniks and to the wishy-washy world community, whose representatives have gathered in North Korea for a peace conference.

Because of its graphic (though metaphorical) discussion of human anatomy, I can't quote any of the speech here, but it is one of the more cogent — and, dare I say it, more nuanced — defenses of American military power that I have heard recently.

Scott begins his review by saying we're in "a golden age of satire" (replete with the Times's obligatory praise for Jon Stewart), but he ends the review expressing frustration that he can't find a way to argue against it. But he does try. He says that as a big "South Park" fan he expected "a wholesale demolition of everything pious, hypocritical and dumb in American culture and society," but "Maybe I expected too much." Yes, that's the way I feel every time I watch "The Daily Show." I keep expecting them to satirize both sides. I even expect NYT articles that refer to "The Daily Show"--and there are so many--to admit it falls short because it doesn't attack "everything pious, hypocritical and dumb" in American politics. But maybe I expect too much.

UPDATE: This is interesting, from Entertainment Weekly (subscription needed):

After Parker and Stone received a letter from the Oscar winner [Sean Penn]— in which he condemned them for recent comments in Rolling Stone urging uninformed voters to stay away from the ballot booths — the duo had a laugh at the actor's expense. ''It was like he missed the point,'' says Stone. Adds Parker: ''It's obvious what he's really pissed off about is that we made him into a puppet and had him eaten by a panther [in the movie].... It's hysterical, because nothing could make us happier. It's like, Spicoli's pissed at you. What does he think, we're going to be like, 'Dude, Sean Penn's pissed at us! What should we do?''' One thing they briefly considered doing was taking Penn up on his offer to escort them around Iraq: ''We were going to take him over there and kick his ass,'' laughs Stone.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Llama Butchers laughs at the wishful thinking of the WaPo movie critic, whose cluelessness can be read in the review's subtitle, "'South Park' Creators' Left Jab at Jingoism May Backfire."

Someday, my prince will bop over.

Did you notice, in the debate the other night, that Bush used the word "bopped"? When a man offered to introduce him to the woman he ended up marrying "I said all right. Bopped over there."

I didn't pick up the word on first listening, but Maureen Dowd has it in her column today. Dowd is "just not that into" Kerry. Though she obviously detests Bush, she doesn't mind letting us see that she thinks, as she once said to David Letterman, that she thinks John Kerry is "Lame ... very, very lame."

UPDATE: Miswritten title corrected. Thanks to an emailer.

Early morning radio.

I'm about to go on Wisconsin Public Radio to talk about the Ten Commandments and the Establishment Clause. (The Supreme Court took cert in two cases on the subject this week.) It's strange to be sitting at home, before dawn, trying to feel awake, and using the telephone to talk on the radio. It's a call-in show too, so there's no telling what someone might ask. Are people up and ready to talk about God and government at 6 am? Are local separation-of-church-and-state types fired up to get all legalistic and ideological? Will there be people with religious conviction who are offended by impositions from the legal realm? Will callers draw the conversation far afield into other matters, like the Pledge of Allegiance? I like to feel ready for anything, but it is very early in the morning. The station has called, and I'm on hold, hearing the news over the phone, waiting for the show to begin. Hmmm... both presidential candidates will be in Wisconsin today ... Kerry, at a fish fry in Sheboygan.

UPDATE: We're halfway through the show, on an 8-minute news break. So far, the callers have been people who are opposed to religious displays, speaking from a political, not a legalistic, perspective. One caller expressed antagonism to President Bush for exploiting religion to his political benefit.

ANOTHER UPDATE: On the news break, the news of Kerry's appearance in Sheboygan is repeated, causing me to look back at my original post and see that I wrote "fish fry"--Friday fish fries are big in these parts--but that it is in fact a brat fry. I laugh to hear one announcer said to another: "Do you think someone told John Kerry it's a brat fry not a brat fry?" The reference is to Kerry's disastrous pronunciation of "Lambert" Field a few weeks ago. ... And now the show is over, and it's just starting to get light out. It was fun doing the show. The callers for the most part wanted to concentrate on why separating church and state is considered bad or good. That's getting to the heart of things.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's the WPR site, where there is streaming audio of the show (look for my name on the page, or if it's no longer the day of the show, search the archive). I'm listening to it now and hear that at one point I say "Tenth Amendment" instead of "Ten Commandments."

AND YET ANOTHER: So did anyone see whether Kerry named the name of our beloved sausage with appropriate Wisconsin vowelage?

AND EVEN MORE: I'm watching some news coverage of his Wisconsin visit--not the brat-fry part--and I'm hearing: "The bottom line is this: this economy has a bad case of the flu and we need a new medicine, ladies and gentleman"--stop, you're killing me!--"... The problem is, this President EYE-ther didn't understand what's happening to this economy and to the average family of America or ..." You (middle class Americans) say either, and I say EYE-ther.

But I don't care that he's really got an upper class accent. I've heard it in full force in the old tapes of his appearance on "The Dick Cavett Show" back in the early 70s, and I find it quite charming. It's who he authentically is, but he's got to mask that noblesse oblige stuff to run for President. But then he lets it slip and says "EYE-ther." If he would just be his authentic self, an upper class guy, trying to serve, being thoughtful and adult, I would probably love him. But he's been twisted and wrung out by the process. If he does win in the end, I hope he recovers that authentic self and governs well. But he shows us every day that he doesn't believe we want that man. It's really quite sad!

EXTRA, BONUS UPDATE: I concede that "EYE-ther" isn't just an upper class thing, and that it actually is the way all sorts of people say "either" in some regions. It sounds upper class to me. I grew up in Delaware and New Jersey. I'm assuming it sounds upper class to people in Wisconsin, but I'm not really an expert in Wisconsin pronunciation preferences. I'm still breaking the first syllable in "Wisconsin" after the "s" instead of after the "i"--that's how much of an outsider to Wisconsin-talk I remain after living here for 20 years.

Speaking of spittle-spotting.

As noted two posts down, the Washington Post and the NYT are paying attention to my paying attention to a glob of foam that formed in the corner of President Bush's mouth last night.

Me and presidential bodily fluids, talked about in the big newspapers! I feel like the new Monica Lewinsky!

Fascinating though this high-level MSM attention is, it's the Belmont Club that is linking to my spittle-spotting and saying something interesting about it. Is it "vacuous," as one of the commenters on that post says, to judge people from their faces or are we tapping into some deep, subconscious skill that evolution has built into our eyes and our brains?

You've come a long way, baby.

In the third 1992 debate, CNN correspondent Susan Rook asked a pointed question about the role of women in government: "when we look at the circle of the key people closest to you, your inner circle of advisers, we see white men only. Why? And when will that change?" Ross Perot's answer was this:

Well, I come from the computer business, and everybody knows the women are more talented than the men. So we have a long history of having a lot of talented women. One of our first officers was a woman, the chief financial officer. She was a director. And it was so far back, it was considered so odd, and even though we were a tiny, little company at the time, it made all the national magazines.

But in terms of being influenced by women and being a minority, there they are right out there, my wife and my 4 beautiful daughters, and I just have 1 son, so he and I are surrounded by women, giving -- telling us what to do all the time. …

If I remember correctly, Perot was considered ridiculously out of touch for thinking the women in his family had any relevance to the question asked.

Twelve years later, moderator Bob Shieffer ended a debate with this question:

We've come, gentlemen, to our last question. And it occurred to me as I came to this debate tonight that the three of us share something. All three of us are surrounded by very strong women. We're all married to strong women. Each of us have two daughters that make us very proud.

I'd like to ask each of you, what is the most important thing you've learned from these strong women?

What was embarrassingly clueless to bring up twelve years ago has become the substance of an entire question, the finale question of the night!

And where was the question about the role of women in government? We heard many questions about health care and education, which for some idiotic reason are considered to be questions relating to women. And of course, there's always Roe v. Wade to bandy about. But where was the Susan Rook question? Is it just that Bush really does have close women advisors, so why bring up a question that's hard on Kerry? Is it that women have actually made so much progress it's not an issue anymore? Or has feminism just drifted out of the mainstream, so that appealing to women voters is now mostly about promising to help them carry out their traditional role as caretakers of the young and the ailing?

The New York Times notices "Althouse.com."

I noticed from my Sitemeter that I'm getting referrals from the Washington Post, so I check over there and see:

Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times watched television commentators and "livebloggers" last night. ...

"Just after 10 p.m., the Democratic Web blogger Ann Althouse wrote . . . : 'A glob of foam forms on the right side of his mouth! Yikes! That's really going to lose the women's vote.' "

Oh, I'm blogging as a Democrat? Well, I read it in the New York Times, so it's probably true. Did Rutenberg read enough of my blog to see that I'm voting for Bush, or is he just concluding from the fact that I don't mind saying that I observed spittle in the corner of Bush's mouth that I must be opposed to him? Maybe Rutenberg is assuming that these bloggers are all so partisan that if they say one thing against a candidate, they must say everything against that candidate.

Why no referrals from the New York Times on Sitemeter? WaPo made my name into a link, but the Times doesn't do links. In fact, where WaPo has the ellipsis above, the Times has "on Althouse.com," which is neither the name of this blog nor the URL. And why two b's in "Web blogger"?

For all the thousands of things I've written about the election, the big recognition I get is for seeing spit in the corner of Bush's mouth? Ah, I suppose I deserve to get picked on for something small since I was picking on Bush for something small, which of course, for MSM, symbolizes what small, small, pajama-wearing, ankle-biters these bloggers--b-bloggers!--are.

What the candidates didn't say about judicial appointments.

I had the impression that Bush was asked whether he had a "litmus test" about Roe v. Wade for judicial appointments--in fact, in my live-blogging, I faulted Kerry for not answering the question whether he had a litmus test---but I see that it was Bush who took the question "would you like to [overturn Roe v. Wade]?" and rephrased it: "What he's asking me is, will I have a litmus test for my judges?" Bush answered his own question so quickly that Kerry, asked to respond got confused about how much time he had to answer.

Bush could easily give a negative answer the question as he rephrased it into "litmus test" form: "I will pick judges who will interpret the Constitution, but I'll have no litmus test." This hides the ball (very much the way judicial candidates themselves hide the ball). Decent judicial candidates that are opposed to Roe v. Wade have their opposition integrated into a coherent theory of constitutional interpretation. Bush must pick good judges, not one-issue anti-abortion types, so anyone with a chance at confirmation would be someone who would be presented as a well-qualified constitution interpreter. The antagonism to Roe would exist within a theory of constitutional interpretation. I presume Bush would pick judges with the sort of approach to interpretation that excludes Roe v. Wade.

Kerry gave more of an answer about judicial appointments than I gave him credit for last night. he said:

I'll answer it straight to America. I'm not going to appoint a judge to the court who's going to undo a constitutional right, whether it's the First Amendment, or the Fifth Amendment, or some other right that's given under our courts today -- under the Constitution. And I believe that the right of choice is a constitutional right.

So I don't intend to see it undone.

Clearly, Kerry wanted to send voters the message that his judicial appointees will uphold the abotion rights and Bush's will not. Like Bush, though, he presents his position in terms of wanting to appoint solidly qualified interpreters of the Constitution. But, of course, his appointees will be ones who follow a different approach to constitutional interpretation. Kerry expresses an interest in preserving the rights that have already been found in the Constitution. He says he doesn't want any rights "undone" and he states his own commitment to abortion rights. But Kerry still doesn't answer the "litmus test" question: he says he does not want judges to erode rights, but that elides the question of how a judge determines what rights are. Kerry says that he himself believes in the right to choose, but he doesn't say whether he would need to be assured that a judicial candidate shares his belief that that right is part of the Constitution. What if there were a judicial candidate committed to the enforcement of the rights that really inhere in the Constitution? Would that be enough for Kerry? I can't imagine that it would.

What might skew the polls on the third debate.

I've read a number of reports on the polling about who won last night's debate, and I have yet to see one point made that seems important to me: many people planning to vote for Bush--especially Democrats and independents who have decided to vote for him--have based their decision on Iraq and the war on terrorism and therefore felt little need to watch a debate that focused on domestic policy. I watched the debate because I wanted to blog about it and because I'm enough of a politics buff that I wanted to see how the candidates performed, but I was not very interested in the policy wonkery that filled most of the debate. I did not need to hear a debate about domestic policy to help me decide.

When asked who won the debate, as we've seen, people overwhelmingly choose the candidate that they support. That might make you look at a poll that shows Kerry over Bush by 53 percent to 37 percent and think, wow, Kerry is gaining a lot of supporters, but another way to look at that is: a lot more people who are or might become Kerry supporters were interested in watching a debate about domestic policy. I'd like to think the professional pollsters have already taken this into account and done some methodology tweaking. Maybe ABC did something different, which would explain why its poll shows the candidates tied.

The last debate live-blog of the presidential campaign.

Okay, I'm getting set up now for the big live-blog of the last debate. I've been pre-linked by Instapundit (thanks and best wishes for his dad) and I've already seen the day's traffic level shoot up, even though I can't be live-blogging yet. It hasn't started. Keeping to my standard form, I'll number the paragraphs to indicate the updates, starting a new number after each upload. I'm going au naturel tonight--i.e., no TiVo pausing--just straight live blogging--and not just so N.Z. Bear won't call me a sissy. I'm doing it because I'm weary--weary I tell you!--of all this ersatz debating. If I eschew TiVo, the ordeal will necessarily end in ninety minutes. You start TiVo-pausing and you can find yourself still struggling to get to the finish line three hours later. I'm not so interested in recording the details of the domestic policy disputes anyway, for reasons blogged about earlier today. So I'll just observe what I observe as the real-time minutes click by. I am not looking to find fault and run anybody down or plump anybody up. I'll honestly or humorously pass along the observations I happen to make.

1. Back to the clunky, oak-grained lecterns. Bush winks. Kerry's looking happy. Will our children live in a secure world? Kerry: Yes. Bush looks bright red on a broadcast channel and I switch to CNN and he isn't bright red anymore. Kerry is blaming Bush for any existing unsafeness (the ports and the cargo hold again). Bush also says we can be safe, unsurprisingly, and he's got a strategy for making us safe. Bush seems a bit jazzed up.

2. A question about the flu vaccine shortage gets Bush talking about tort reform and Kerry talking about health care reform. Bush is smiling a lot, and the left side of his mouth nevertheless turns down oddly. A glob of foam forms on the right side of his mouth! Yikes! That's really going to lose the women's vote. [UPDATE: the NYT and the WaPo take note of this, and only this, observation and I react to that attention here. Belmont Club also links to this observation, and I discuss that here.]

3. Taxes. Didn't listen, sorry. Jobs. Kerry doesn't like that Bush talked about education when asked about jobs. He makes an analogy between Bush and Tony Soprano, but he's speaking quickly and I don't quite pick it up. Another jobs question: maybe the President doesn't have that much control over jobs. Kerry says it's not all the President's fault, but Bush, of course, nevertheless has many faults that have resulted in the loss of jobs. Kerry's left eyelid is sagging. There's a lot of policy spewing right now. Bush: "wooo!" That's kind of how I felt. Bush slowly spells out the tax advantages he's given people. When you have more money in your pocket, you're able to buy things you want--I agree! I really doubt if many people would stick around to watch this.

4. Homosexuality: do you think it's a choice? Bush: I don't know. Tolerance is important, he says carefully, then launches into an explanation of why he's doesn't want courts to impose gay marriage on the country. Kerry firmly states that homosexuality is not a choice and spends a creepy amount of time re-informing us that Cheney's daughter is a lesbian (so what?) and that it's not a choice for her. He expresses trust in the restraint of the courts.

5. Abortion. Kerry repeats his position that he opposes abortion as an "article of faith" but can't impose it on others. He also says "faith without works is dead." He asserts that his public service is God's work, but he also supports the right to choose. A hard set of beliefs to fit together, but I think decent people do fit them together, though it's hard for abortion opponents to accept. Bush repeats his "culture of life" way of speaking about abortion. Unlike Kerry, Bush does not bring in religion, except to the extent that it is implied by the concept of "a culture of life."

6. Health care costs. Bush does a lively presentation of his proposals here. Kerry blames Bush for higher health care costs because a bill in Congress was blocked (but earlier he complained that Bush has never used his veto). Bush: Kerry has no record of leadership on health care--after so many years in the Senate. Kerry is able to cite an example of a health care bill of his, so Bush is misleading us again, he says.

7. Still with the health care costs. Kerry is reeling out a lot of proposals that sound pretty good, but that I am in no position to evaluate right now. Bush starts to insult the news media, then stops himself. That was sloppy. Bush points out the fundamental difference between him and Kerry: Kerry will move us to a government-run health care system and urges us to reject that. It will leave us with poor quality health care. Kerry responds that he isn't proposing a government run program. It's hard to tell if he is or not. Again, we're hearing a torrent of policy, and I think this is off-putting to most people. They're talking about insurance really. Don't you want to run when someone starts talking insurance at you? Not that it isn't important....

8. Saving social security. Bush says he will and explains various plans. Kerry objects to the part about letting young people set up separate accounts. He warns us of a two trillion dollar hole in social security. Somehow this makes Bush laugh. Kerry claims to be the fiscal responsibility candidate. And he won't cut benefits. Lots of promises. The key question is which candidate is inspiring more trust, because we really can't evaluate the proposals themselves. In this effort, Kerry presents himself as a competent problem solver, and Bush tries to warn us that Kerry will do those things liberals do.

9. Illegal immigration. Bush is vigorous and passionate here. He was a border governor. He expresses real empathy for those who are seeking employment. Kerry goes back to the subject of tax cuts from the previous question. I dislike going back to an earlier question, especially, as here, where it is done to repeat standard lines about taxes. It makes it seem as though he's not interested enough in the issue that is on the table. "It's against the law to hire people illegally." Gee, thanks, but isn't everything that is illegal against the law? "We have thumb-print technology," Kerry says wiggling all of his fingers.

10. I hope there aren't too many typos and glitches in these posts. I'm sure I'll cringe over them later. Back to the live-blogging: does Kerry want to raise the minimum wage? Of course! Raise away! If we pay people more, they will have more money and will buy more things! Okay. Bush: the key thing is education! No Child Left Behind.

11. Will Bush look for judges who will overturn Roe v. Wade? Bush: I won't have a litmus test. Both candidates rely on the idea that they will pick good judges. Kerry uses his time to go back to the subject of No Child Left Behind. He doesn't seem too interested at all in talking about what kind of judges he wants. Bush rebuts, saying Kerry clearly has a pro-Roe litmus test for judges. Bush adds some material about No Child Left Behind and Kerry uses his rebuttal to talk about that. Kerry never denies that he has a litmus test for judges.

12. The problem of overuse of the National Guard. Kerry uses this as an opportunity to repeat his points about Iraq (we went to war the wrong way, we need to work with the rest of the world, etc.). This is Bush's big final chance to defend his Iraq policy. Let's see what he does. "The best way to take the pressure off our troops is to succeed in Iraq." He has talked to the troops, and "their spirits are high." Speaking slowly, he brings up Kerry's "global test," and becomes emphatic saying that he won't give up our security decisions to other nations. Bush wins this exchange, I think.

13. Guns! Bush: go after the criminals, not the guns. (Not surprising.) Kerry: he's a hunter, you know. But we need to control assault weapons. Terrorists will come here and go to gun shows and buy assault weapons.

14. Do we still need affirmative action? Kerry: sadly, yes, and Bush is actually doing things that are making affirmative action more needed. Kerry's for affirmative action for women and for other groups as well as for racial minorities. But he is opposed to quotas. Bush: he doesn't like quotas either, but the key here is (again) education. He speaks about the affordability of education. (Pell grants are mentioned a lot tonight.) He wants to encourage entrepreneurship: "That's hopeful, and that's positive."

15. What part does faith play in making presidential decisions? Bush: he speaks well here. Faith is important in his life, he prays a lot, and he feels the prayers that are offered for him. He speaks of the importance of inclusion. "I believe God wants everybody to be free" and that belief has driven his foreign policy. He says he thinks God made it possible to bring freedom to Iraq, which I'm sure he'll catch hell for. Kerry: "Everything is a gift from the Almighty." Kerry does not chide Bush for what he's said about melding religious belief and governmental decisionmaking, which is a wise choice on his part. But I think his supporters will jump all over Bush for this.

16. Bringing the nation together. Kerry: Bush has squandered the goodwill that existed right after 9/11. Bush has been divisive and ideological. Kerry is going to work with "my friend John McCain" to bring more campaign finance reform. Bush expresses disappointment at how partisan Washington is. But it was nice how they got No Child Left Behind passed (that law is getting a lot of mentions tonight). He makes a big point of saying McCain is for him ... because of Iraq. The lectern is pounded.

17. Talk about the strong women in your life. Bush gets some laughs from the audience who aren't supposed to make a peep. He can't say how much he loves Laura, and he sounds really sweet and warm. Kerry laughs saying both men "married up," and it seems to be too much a reference to how incredibly rich Teresa is. Without saying that he loves his wife, he switches over to talking about his mother!

18. Kerry's closing statement: something about "ideers" and reaching higher and grabbing dreams. "Embark on that journey with me." Pretty platitudinous. Bush: there's painting in the Oval Office that has something to do with seeing the sunrise and hence with the way things are getting better in the U.S.

19. Tim Russert is saying Kerry went all out trying to appeal to women, but Kerry's biggest mistake was snickering over his economically beneficial marriage and forgetting to say a thing about loving his wife right after Bush seemed almost overcome with emotion saying how much he loved Laura!

20. Rudy Giuliani is saying that Bush did a great job expressing his love for his wife--I agree--and his deep feeling about religion, while Kerry was just spewing statistics. I think both candidates spend a lot of time blabbing about policy details that you couldn't really follow competently, but that at those two key points, as Giuliani said, Bush revealed the deep personal side of himself, while Kerry was always cool and businesslike. Dukakis-like.

Dylan's "Chronicles": Chapter 4 (Part 2).

I continue with my reading of the Dylan autobiography. Scroll down to find four earlier posts.

Man whose politics are described, surprisingly uncritically, and who is said to look like a movie star: David Duke. P. 184.

Movie with a title that was the title of a Bob Dylan song, which Dylan drops in to see and concludes has a lead character just like the guy in the song: "The Mighty Quinn." P. 187.

What Dylan orders at Antoine's in New Orleans when he needs to go record later and doesn't want anything to "bog [him] down": turtle soup. P.193.

Why you need to see Tennessee Williams's plays live: "to get the full freak effect." P.196.

One thing Dylan always loved about his wife: "She's always had her own built-in happiness." P. 201. (You figure out the implication there!)

What Dylan liked about the Beatles: "They offered intimacy and companionship like no other group." P. 204.

Dylan's prayer: "I pray that I can be a kinder person." P. 206.

Actor "nobody could hold a candle to": Mickey Rourke. P. 213.

Hardship Dylan endured while recording "Oh, Mercy" in New Orleans: no air conditioning. P. 213. Why?? He doesn't like air conditioning.

Adjective describing all records not recorded by Sam Phillips: "fruity." P. 214. (Chilling discovery made on finding that Sam Phillips link: "Originally Phillips wanted to study law, but because of circumstances decided to go into radio." Thank God for circumstances.)

Description of bad records: "padded and schmaltzy odes to flunky-ism." P. 220.

Quote: "Sometimes you say things in songs even if there's a small chance of them being true." P. 220.

Debate weary.

Yes, I'm going to live-blog/simulblog the debate tonight, but it will be from a position of debate weariness. Since national security issues are determining my vote, I am much less interested in what the candidates might say about domestic policy, which is the subject of tonight's debate. And most of the plans and promises we hear about domestic policy entail congressional activity, so nothing specific the candidates say really counts much. We already know their general tendencies. I expect a dreary round of incantations of the sort you could build a drinking game on. But the truth is you could get drunk playing a drinking game with one rule: take a drink whenever anyone says "health care."

I did read Adam Nagourney's front page piece about the debate in today's NYT, which started out, to my irritation, reading like a Kerry campaign press release. But it got interesting a few paragraphs in (maybe the editors only lean on the early paragraphs). I was surprised at this from Donna Brazile, referring to the news that "Kerry is going to turn up his efforts to portray the president as a tool of special interests":

"The reason you're hearing this tough populism is because he's underperforming with some of these groups, and this is a way of bringing it home."

I would expect Brazile to frame everything she says to try to advance Kerry's case, yet this statement plays right into the suspicion that he lacks a moral core and will say whatever is needed to get elected.

"Guess the bulge."

The bulge under President Bush's suit jacket is now permanently enshrined in the annals of pop culture after David Letterman, on last night's show, introduced the "Guess the Bulge" game, complete with oft-played "Guess the Bulge" theme song. Rupert Jee played the Bush role with a T-Bone steak taped to his back under his jacket, and the contestant, an NYU musical comedy major dragged in off the street, managed to guess the bulge (extensive palpating helped) and win an electric fondue pot.

Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my lawsuit.

I see that yesterday I said I was going to read the Court of Appeals cases about the Ten Commandments and have something to say here, but in fact I never got around to reading them carefully. I got sidetracked into reading Dylan's "Chronicles" again last night, and I don't have anything interesting to say about the Ten Commandments Court of Appeals cases yet. Maybe later. This is not to say that I don't find the legal issues interesting, I just sometimes get tired--especially during my casual, off-hours reading--of one-sided perseverations of the legalistic kind. The subheading of my blog up there begins "Politics and the aversion to politics" and it might well continue "law and the aversion to law." Pop culture is one of my other big topics here, and I also have a love/hate relationship with pop culture. And let me come at this Ten Commandments topic from the pop culture angle. Because how did so many of those Ten Commandments monuments find their way onto public grounds, leading to so many of today's lawsuits? Was it a purely spiritual matter? Was it an improper mixing of religion and politics? Slate has a good collection of images of various Ten Commandments displays (linked by the Slate piece yesterday noting the cert grants). Check out image number 11. Here's the caption:

About half the pending Decalogue cases involve ACLU contests over one of 4,000 identical 6-foot granite monuments donated in the 1950s to communities around the country by Cecil DeMille and the Fraternal Order of Eagles. Here's synergy at work: DeMille wanted to promote his movie The Ten Commandments, and the Eagles wanted to fight delinquency and inspire people "with a renewed respect for the law of God."

One feels a certain temptation to say what could be more a part of our shared American culture than the promotion of a big Hollywood movie? Salon had an article last April, arguing against the notion that the commercial, movie-related origin of the monuments should make us see them as any less religious:

A great many articles written about the contested Eagle monoliths implied or stated outright that DeMille's involvement was strictly promotional. As proof, they noted that actor Yul Brynner (Pharoah Ramses in the film) had spoken at the very first monolith's dedication ceremony, in Milwaukee in 1955. Charlton Heston dedicated another in North Dakota.

"They've got it all wrong," Sue Hoffman told me, exasperated. Hoffman has spent the last two years researching a book on the history of the Eagle monoliths. She has tracked 160 of them and is confident the figure 4,000 is exaggerated. She also says she confirmed that the actors who appeared at dedications -- there were only three -- donated their time. The program was decentralized and grass-roots-based. Local Eagle aeries raised the money for each monolith, and their exact locations were agreed upon with local governments. Furthermore, Ten Commandments monoliths continued to be placed through the 1960s, well after the film's release. Though the dedications coincided with local openings of the film in some cases, and the Eagles endorsed the movie in a mailing to their members, she says the DeMille-Eagles partnership was hardly the publicity juggernaut alluded to in the media.
DeMille, though, was smart enough to reach out to the Eagles while his film was still in production. ...

DeMille heard about the Eagles printing keepsakes of the Ten Commandments for juvenile courts and schools around the country. (Hoffman suspects these earlier versions are partly responsible for the figure 4,000.) In a letter written at the foot of Sinai and published in the Eagles' magazine, DeMille, with his typical melodrama -- the fervor that feels like artifice, but might be fervor -- endorsed the program:

"To guide young people in today's complex world," he wrote, "we need all the light that expert knowledge and advanced scientific techniques can give. But most of all we need the Divine Code of Guidance which was given to the world ... the Ten Commandments. They are older than Moses, older than this mountain, because they are not laws: they are the law."

He telephoned the program's conceiver, Minnesota Juvenile Court Judge E.J. Ruegemer. Ruegemer, who is now 102, could not be reached for this article, but has recounted elsewhere that DeMille sought to expand the program. He proposed brass plaques. Ruegemer suggested full-blown sculptures, hewn from Minnesota granite. ...

If the constitutionality of the monuments depends on the original motive for putting them there--and there is some legal argument that the original motive counts--then we could get bogged down debating just how commercial this monument-erecting project really was. But religion was surely mixed with commerce, as it often is. If underlying economic motives could justify the inclusion of religion in government ... well, we could have some even testier arguments about religion, couldn't we? Which would be ironic, considering that one of the main reasons for having the Establishment Clause in the first place is to spare us from nasty divisions based on religion.

What's interesting to me about Cecil B. DeMille's role in putting up the monuments is that it calls attention to a high culture/low culture distinction many of us make when we think about the depiction of the Ten Commandments in public spaces. Look back to photographs 2 and 3 in the Slate slide show: these are depictions of the Ten Commandments in the Supreme Court's own building. What is usually pointed out about these depictions is that they are part of a larger context, showing the history of lawgiving. That secularizing context, the argument usually goes, is what saves the display from a constitutional challenge. But quite aside from that, you know very well that the Supreme Court would never have beautiful, valuable sculpture chiseled out of a historical structure. We're dealing not just with the problem of mixing religion and government, but with elite attitudes about high and low culture. The elegant friezes on the Supreme Court building are high culture, and the chunky, small-town, granite monuments are kitsch, and, as such, subject to attack.

Dylan's "Chronicles": Chapter 4 (part 1).

Continuing with my reading of Dylan's autobiography. (I do Chapter 1 here and Chapter 2 here, and Chapter 3 here.)

How Dylan felt in 1987, coming off a tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers:

I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck. ... Wherever I am, I'm a 60's troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows. [P. 147.]

How he felt about his old songs then:

It was like carrying a package of rotting meat. [P. 148.]

Line on p. 147 that foreshadows the role the Grateful Dead would play in his revival:

It's nice to be known as a legend, and people will pay to see one, but for most people, once is enough.

Obviously, the Grateful Dead, who show up on p.149, knew how to do live shows that stoked a hunger to see multiple shows. The Dead challenge him to do much more with his old songs than Tom Petty ever had, and he runs off, has a drink in a bar, and feels transformed by the singer of a jazz combo in the bar. Then he's able to go back and sing again with the Dead. He seems to enjoy giving credit to the unnamed jazz combo in the bar and unwilling to credit the Dead. Somehow, I suspect it was the Dead that shocked him out of his complacency, that their ability to inspire people to come back to see them over and over made him jealous, and that the drink and the mellow music only allowed him to calm down and meet the challenge the Dead had laid in front of him.

Most grandiose statement in the book so far:

If I didn't exist, someone would have to have invented me. [P. 153.]

Dylan's attitude toward his fans from the 60s (like me):

[T]his audience was past its prime and its reflexes were shot. [P. 155.]

Secret to a system of playing the guitar taught by aging blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson:

[T]he number 3 is more metaphysically powerful than the number 2. [P. 159]

Second reference in the chapter to songs as meat:

I had been leaving a lot of my songs on the floor like shot rabbits for a long time. [P. 162.]

Thing on TV that bums Dylan out: Johnny Carson does not ask soul singer Joe Tex to come sit on the couch after his song. P. 163. He seems to view this as a specific rejection of Joe Tex--did Johnny invite the singers over generally?--and he identifies with Joe Tex. Outsider.

Great play that just seemed like a big drag: "A Long Day's Journey Into Night." P. 167.

What spending time with Bono is like: "eating dinner on a train." [P. 174.]

"That thump-thump-thump sound that he's going to hear above his grave when he's dead is me doing the hokey-pokey."

So said playwright Tony Kushner to a class today at the University of Wisconsin-Madison--as reported by my son. The subject was how mad he gets at critics who give him bad reviews.

Cert grants!

My previous post refers to the Supreme Court's grant of certiorari in two cases involving public Ten Commandments monuments. I'm quite interested in these cases--I teach a Religion & the Constitution class. I'm about to read the two Court of Appeals cases carefully, and I'll write something up about them later today. Friday, I'm going to talk about the cases on Joy Cardin's Wisconsin Public Radio show (on the "Ideas Network" stations, here). So if you're up between 6 and 7 am...

There is a second cert grant related to religion, Cutter v. Wilkinson. Here the question is the constitutionality of a federal statute--the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act--requiring accommodations for prisoners whose practice of religion is substantially burdened. Among the prisoners bringing the lawsuit are "a Wiccan witch, a Satanist, [and] a racial separatist who is an ordained minister of the Christian Identity Church." The law resembles to some extent the broader Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which the Court held could not be applied to the states because Congress lacked power to pass that law under the enforcement clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The newer law relies on Congress's spending power: state institutions must accept the requirement to accommodate religion as a condition if they want to receive federal funding. The challenge to this law is based on the Establishment Clause. In City of Boerne v. Flores, the 1997 case that struck down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Justice Stevens wrote a concurring opinion to say that that statute violated the Establishment Clause. But Stevens is the strongest separationist on today's Court, so it is hard to predict how well an argument about separation of church and state will work on the other Justices, but I note that recent Establishment Clause cases--such as Zelman and Locke--have reflected federalism values. I think in this new case, the majority may find it appealing to free the states from prisoner litigation and rely on their own judgment about how much to accommodate religion.

Then there were a couple of cert grants of the kind that only procedure types--and here I include myself as well--get excited about. The Court is finally going to deal with an oft-noted problem with the Supplemental Jurisdiction statute (28 U.S.C. § 1367), and, after all these years, it's going to talk about the Rooker-Feldman doctrine. At last! How long we have waited!

Christopher Reeve and politics, the Ten Commandments and politics.

Is the death of Christopher Reeve a gift to Kerry and Edwards? Watch them weave Reeve into their usual material about embryonic stem cell research.

Is the Supreme Court's grant of certiorari in two cases about the constitutionality of public Ten Commandments monuments a gift to Bush? Expect the Ten Commandments to take its place next to the usual material in his speeches about "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.

UPDATE: That first link is just to the main Drudge page, which was featuring remarks by Edwards taking advantage of Reeve's death to push the stem cell research issue. That story has now dropped down and still doesn't have a specific link. Here's a story today, in the Boston Globe about Senator Frist criticizing Edwards for the use of Reeve's death this way. What is interesting is that mainstream news did not run the story that Edwards was doing this. Only when Frist criticized him did the story break. The linked Globe article has the Edwards quote: "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."

ANOTHER UPDATE: According to the WaPo, which notes that Frist called Edwards's use of Reeve's death "crass, opportunist" and "shameful," Edwards's press secretary, Mark Kornblau, said "What's crass and shameful is that Bill Frist is doing the dirty work of right-wing blogs and Rush Limbaugh." Hmmm ... so maybe now whenever a political figure criticizes another, he can be attacked for not only sounding like a blog, but behaving like some sort of puppet of the blogs. There really is an absurd fear of blogs setting in, isn't there?

"Diary of a Political Tourist."

Having thoroughly enjoyed "Journeys with George," I was looking forward to seeing Alexandra Pelosi's new HBO documentary, "Diary of a Political Tourist." Alessandra Staley's review of it in yesterday's NYT succeeded in lowering my expectations:

Once again she wields her hand-held camera throughout the Democratic primary with the cheeky presumption of an heiress who thinks people laugh at her jokes because they find her funny. As Joe Lieberman and other candidates make fools of themselves dancing to her tune, Mr. Kerry remains unfailingly courteous and in control. Like William Powell in the 30's screwball comedy "Our Man Godfrey," he is the butler who outwits and outclasses his employers at every turn.

Oh, I think somebody's for Kerry. Staley goes on to devote most of her column to pushing an alternative to the Pelosi film:

"Frontline" presents side-by-side résumés of Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry, which is, of course, hideously unfair to Mr. Bush. ... "Frontline" does not cut the president any breaks. ... "The Choice 2004" makes the case that a cynical ruthlessness lies beneath Mr. Bush's piety and campaign trail bonhomie. ... [The director Nicholas] Lemann concludes that for all Mr. Kerry's hard work and determination, it is actually Mr. Bush who is the most ambitious of the two.

Thanks, Alessandra, but I watched Alexandra. Pelosi followed the Democratic candidates around during the primaries, and it was fun and nostalgic to see them all again. I would have voted for Joe Lieberman if he had stayed in the race until the Wisconsin primary--I voted for John Edwards--and it was nice seeing him again. He'd go right up to the camera and fool around with Pelosi in a relaxed way. So would Howard Dean, though Dean never really seems relaxed. A Kerry supporter like Alessandra Staley might have a problem with the film--though Lord knows Pelosi is a Democrat--because Kerry is very stiff in front of the camera. The man is an introvert: it just doesn't work as well in Alexandra's home video style. Pelosi doesn't really present any political issues and arguments. She just shows what it's like behind the scenes, eating bad food and traveling around to obscure places. Kerry is a man who likes to preserve a dignified space around himself, and you can see that in Pelosi's film. Lieberman is a guy who will let Pelosi get right up next to him while he wolfs down a fried Twinkie and who will just go ahead and burst into singing "My Way" on camera. It has virtually nothing to do with which man would make the better President, but it's funny on camera. It's funny to see most of the candidates fooling around, and it's funny--perhaps painfully--to see Kerry trying to stay out of the film. At one point, he tries to go for a walk by himself, but he has nowhere he can walk to and Pelosi shows us the people with cameras who are hanging back, but still filming the Senator's awkward meditative walk.

P.S. Bush fans will find things in the beginning of the film to enjoy, as Pelosi sneaks her video camera into the White House Christmas party, then has to aim it at the floor when she's near the President. We hear him talking as Pelosi tries to get him to let her film him again. "I already made you famous once," he says, with charming good humor.

Least needed New Republic article.

"Why Jimmy Fallon Isn't Funny.

Dylan's "Chronicles": Chapter 3.

Continuing with my reading of Dylan's autobiography. (I do Chapter 1 here and Chapter 2 here.)

Poet Dylan is excited to meet who turns out to be (a) a windbag and (b) depressing as hell: Archibald MacLeish.

What MacLeish says about Michelangelo that sounds more like he was talking about himself: he "had no friends of any kind and didn't want any, spoke to no one." P. 112.

Dylan's "deepest dream" at the time the counterculture was exploding and looking to him to lead the way: "a nine-to five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard." P. 117.

Dylan's favorite of all the strange labels applied to him during the period when he was trying to stay out of the public eye: "Buddha in European Clothes." P. 124.

Adjective used to describe the NYT's interpretation of his songs: "quacky." P. 119.

Reason, in addition to the fact that he didn't want to go places where people might bug him, that he went to see Frank Sinatra, Jr. perform at the Rainbow Room: he really likes show tunes. P. 126.
How David Crosby, who accompanied Dylan to Princeton to accept his honorary degree, described the people who handed out the degree: "Bunch of dickheads on auto-stroke." P. 134.

Dylan's advice to Al Kooper, which was not taken, leaving Kooper "in eternal musical limbo": "All he needed was a dynamo chick singer." P. 137.

Album that I listened to a lot when I was in college that the end of this chapter is about recording: "New Morning."

Sweet song on that album I love: "Winterlude."

How to stop entertaining excrescences.

Which of Andrew Sullivan's reasons for supporting Kerry is the most tortured? I think it's this:

[A Kerry presidency] would deny the Deaniac-Mooreish wing a perpetual chance to whine and pretend that we are not threatened, or to entertain such excrescences as the notion that president Bush is as big a threat as al Qaeda or Saddam.

Because you never heard a peep out of the left during the Clinton presidency, did you?

But this line surprised me more:

One of the central questions in this election is simply: can John Kerry be trusted to fight the war on terror? Worrying about this is what keeps me from making the jump to supporting him.

Sullivan hasn't declared his support for Kerry yet? I guess I don't read him enough anymore to have noticed he hasn't literally declared his support. I do read him enough to know he's "excitable." He used to idolize Bush so much. Maybe in the end, he's going to find his way back to Bush!

UPDATE: An emailer notes this exchange on Tim Russert's show from September 25th:

TR: If you had a ballot in front of you right now, for president, what would you do?

AS: I'd probably write in McCain-Lieberman.

Would Kerry reconceive the insurgency in Iraq as a problem of organized crime too?

There is a lot of focus today on Senator Kerry's statement, which appeared in the NYT Magazine yesterday:

"We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance ... As a former law enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life."

CNN.com reports that the Bush campaign is building an ad around that quote. Much of the commentary, quite understandably, focuses on the question whether Kerry would fight the war on terrorism forcibly enough. That was my initial take on the article when I read it Saturday night. But let me raise another question, coming at Kerry's mindset from a different direction. Kerry's defeatism about the war in Iraq has long troubled me. He makes statements indicating that he thinks we've become mired in an unwinnable mess. But if he is willing to perceive the war on terrorism as a chronic crime problem that must be dealt with but also accepted as part of everyday life, why not reconceive the insurgency in Iraq the same way? Iraq has a serious organized crime problem, which should not be overdramatized as a war, but lived with and dealt with through persistent and effective law enforcement. I realize he's unlikely to say this now, because it is in his political interest to spread woe about the mess--to use his word--in Iraq, but if his prosecutor's mind really does think in terms of organized crime for the war on terror, why not for Iraq?

Where I lost confidence in the Washington Post article about the jurisprudence of Justice Thomas.

"His rethinking of legal doctrine extends to more obscure areas such as the Constitution's commerce clause .... "

The Commerce Clause is obscure?

UPDATED to correct the title: I had L.A. Times, but it was the Washington Post. Sorry. Yes, yes, I know: how can I criticize them when I'm getting something wrong? But, really, what is less obscure in the Constitution than the Commerce Clause? One gets the sense that people think nothing in the original Constitution is supposed to matter, that all the good stuff is in the amendments.

"Let me embrace you, O millions! This kiss is for the whole world!"

We finally got to see the inside of the glamorous Overture Hall, as the Madison Symphony Orchestra performed its first concert in its new home. Why shouldn't the orchestra play the single greatest piece of music in the history of the world? It looked like this today as the orchestra prepared to play Beethoven's Ninth Symphony:



We were lucky to get tickets, two of the last available in this audience of 2,251.

Even to the worm ecstasy is given,
and the cherub stands before God.

Where to see fall foliage in the Madison area.

Here is some great foliage-viewing advice just sent to the Law School email list by a colleague who polled the law school staff for suggestions (and gave me permission to copy this):

Devil's Lake. When you first enter the park, and you look at the lake, the trail on the right side of the lake is actually easier to hike -- more family and "out of shape people" friendly. The trail on the left side of the lake is more challenging, so it depends on what level of work out you want.

On the way, check out Ski Hi Apple Orchard, just south of Baraboo on Ski Hi Road (turn right going north on Highway 12, shortly after the end of the 4-lanes). Grab a bag of apples and a couple caramel apples, then take Ski Hi Road over to Devil's Lake State Park.

Parfrey's Glen, on the way to Devil's Lake, if you take the Merrimac Ferry. From the north side of the ferry, take Bluff Rd. north to DL, turn left. The parking lot for Parfrey's Glen is 1-2 miles from the intersection on the right. It is marked and a State Park fee area. There is a 1 or 1.5 mile walk from the parking lot to the Glen. Very well maintained trail and beautiful.

Baraboo Bluffs

Indian Lake County Park, on Hwy 19 west of Hwy 12. [closeby and a popular choice]

Gibralter's Rock, near Lodi. The drive up through Lodi or along the Wisconsin River from Sauk City is nice in itself. Both towns have nice eating places. But the real star is the Rock. There is a parking place near the bottom, then a stiff climb up about 400'. There is a sheer 200'cliff to the south, looking back toward Madison. Especially beautiful at sunset. Gibralter's Rock is just south of the ferry. Take 113 towards Lodi, turn west of V, and then the second left on VA. The rest will be self-explanatory. You have to park and walk the last half mile or so to the top of Gibralter's Rock.

Blue Mounds, west of Mt. Horeb. Also the adjoining Brigham County Park The north facing slope of Brigham is predominantly maple and therefore colorful in the fall.

Kettle Moraine. There is a path you can walk completely around Lake Geneva, It's beautiful anytime, but especially in fall. Fewer tourists as well. If you walk it completely it's 28 miles. You could park at Fontana, Williams Bay or Lake Geneva, walk awhile and come back. I'd take 90 down to Hwy11, through Delavan and then head east on Hwy 50 to Lake Geneva. On 50 look for Snake Road, take that, it's a pretty winding road, the Wrigley's estate is on it (Green Gables), it will hook back up to 50, take that into Lake Geneva. Park near the library (on 50) and walk west towards Williams Bay, that section has the oldest, and I think, prettiest homes. Lots of trees and colors. Walk until you feel like turning around and come back and eat in Lake Geneva.

For a drive, Hwy J west of Hwy 78 (just north of Mt. Horeb).

UPDATED to fix some bad links. Blogger has been acting up today. I'm really glad to get this info because yesterday, on a foliage drive, I just used the old method of driving out into the country, getting lost, then trying to find my way home again. If people email me with more advice--e.g., where to eat in Lake Geneva--I'll update this post.

ADDED: When I hear "Indian Lake," I think of this. Don't you?

ANOTHER UPDATE: An emailer offers this:

There is an eatery called Popeye's (NOT to be confused with the chicken chain!) across the street from the pier in downtown Lake Geneva that has some pretty good eats. On the west shore, Chuck's in Fontana has both an upstairs formal dining area with decent food and a downstairs bar where the racing sailors hang out. (I understand that one night the America's Cup served as the tip jar. I missed that party, unfortunately.)

Something else for people headed that way to consider might be the Elegant Farmer outside Mukwonago. It's a country store with lots of the usual stuff but they sell these apple pies baked in a bag that are excellent.

UPDATE ADDED IN OCTOBER 2005: I came back to this post to figure out where to drive and figured other people would too, so I'm going to add an email that I just got:

I grew up in Lake Geneva and your recent post about the fall colors made me downright nostalgic. I agree that the walk between LG and Williams Bay is the best stretch. One of the spots on that walk, Swedish Covenant Church bible camp Covenant Harbor, was run by the father of one of my best friends growing up.

Anyway, to supplement your eatery list, I would add Scuttlebutts. I don't think much of Popeyes, feeling it to be a little too much of a factory for true Lake Geneva. Scuttlebutts, where my brother toiled in the kitchen for two summers some years ago, is just down the street from Popeyes and a much more pleasant experience. Every seat in the (admittedly) small house gets a view of the lake.

Dylan's "Chronicles": Chapter 2.

Continuing my reading of the new Dylan autobiography from yesterday.

Dylan describes the characters he met in New York and the books that he read in the well-stocked library in one of the places where he crashed in those early days. You sense the material is being gathered for songs like "Desolation Row," where arty New Yorkers mingle with historical and literary figures. He seems to learn to do the mingling from Chloe Kiel (pp. 26-27) who wore black fingernail polish and said wild things like "Dracula ruled the world and he's the son of Gutenberg."

He tells of growing up during and just after WWII. I cringe at the passage that clumps "Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt" together and describes them in undifferentiated language. I write "Masters of War" in the margin. Yet at one point he pictured himself going to West Point: "I wanted to be a general with my own battalion." P. 41. His father said he lacked the connections to get in, and his uncle told him "A soldier is a housewife, a guinea pig. Go to work in the mines." P. 42. Later, he became very engrossed in studying the Civil War. Pp. 84-86.

His only childhood confidante was his grandmother, p. 42, a one-legged seamstress who had immigrated from Turkey, p. 93. She had darker skin than the rest of his family, and she smoked a pipe. P. 92.

Cliché that should have been edited out, p. 100: "March was coming in like a lion ..."

Musical artists he writes about admiringly:

• Roy Orbison. Pp. 32-33. "Next to Roy the [radio] playlist was strictly dullsville ... gutless and flabby."

• Johnny Rivers. Pp. 60-61. "Of all the versions of my recorded songs, the Johnny Rivers one was my favorite." Rivers, in his version of "Positively 4th Street," understood the attitude, Dylan writes. Immediately after reading this, I go to Amazon and find and order "Rewind/Realization." The double album not only has "Positively 4th Street," it begins with "The Tracks of My Tears," the song that inspired Dylan to call Smokey Robinson "the greatest American living poet."

• Bobby Vee. Pp. 79-81. "I'd always thought of him as a brother."

• Hank Williams. Pp. 95-96. "When I hear Hank sing, all movement ceases. The slightest whisper seems a sacrilege." He tried to follow rules for songwriting that he perceived in Williams's songs.

An author he loved: Balzac! P. 46:

You can learn a lot from Mr. B. It's funny to have him as a companion. He wears a monk's robe and drinks endless cups of coffee. Too much sleep clogs up his mind. One of his teeth falls out, and he says, "What does this mean?" He questions everything. His clothes catch fire on a candle. He wonders if fire is a good sign. Balzac is hilarious.

He makes Balzac sound like a guy in a Dylan song: "And you say, 'What does this mean?'"

Dylan repeatedly expresses the instinctive feeling he had that music was about to change and that he knew where to take it:

The On the Road, Howl and Gasoline street ideologies that were signaling a new type of human existence weren't there [on the radio]. P. 34.

I just thought mainstream culture was lame as hell and a big trick. P. 35.

I knew what I was doing ... and wasn't going to take a step back or retreat for anybody. P. 67.

I had a vivid idea of where everything was. The future was nothing to worry about. It was awfully close. P. 104.

"Strangelove wouldn't have lasted three weeks in the Pentagon. He was too creative."

So says the real-life model for the character in the movie that inspired Daniel Ellsberg to say "That was a documentary!"

Something I don't think belongs in John Kerry's bedroom.

Here's an interesting NYT article about Kerry's great wealth and what he does with it. Kerry and his wife own a lot of amazing stuff, but apparently it's in great taste and not ostentatious. The most notable fact in the article might be that he likes to crank his $500,000 powerboat up to full speed and blast the stereo with "The Ride of the Valkyries" (which the Times points out is "the same sequence played by Robert Duvall's character in the Vietnam movie 'Apocalypse Now.'") But I found this the most notable thing:

On the wall in the master bedroom [in his Boston house] is a framed original letter written by Abigail Adams, the wife of the second president, about the influence women can exert in politics, Mr. Barbiero recalled.

Shouldn't this letter be in the National Archive and not--oh the irony!--in a male politician's bedroom?

NYT not biased, says NYT ombudsman.

Daniel Okrent says it's all in your head. You notice what bothers you and ignore what bothers supporters of the other candidate. And it's partly that we're just so deep:

Those readers who long for the days of absolutely untinted, nothing-but-the-facts newspapering ought to have an Associated Press ticker installed on the breakfast table. Newspapers today and especially this newspaper are asking their reporters and editors to go deep into a story, and when and where you go deep is itself a matter of judgment. And every judgment, it appears, offends someone.

And quit sending such nasty email to reporters:

I do want you to know just how debased the level of discourse has become. When a reporter receives an e-mail message that says, "I hope your kid gets his head blown off in a Republican war," a limit has been passed.... As nasty as critics on the right can get (plenty nasty), the left seems to be winning the vileness derby this year. Maybe the bloggers who encourage their readers to send this sort of thing to The Times might want to ask them instead to say it in public. I don't think they'd dare.

Oh, so it's the bloggers again somehow? Or do you just mean the lefty bloggers?

"Australians Re-Elect Howard as Economy Trumps War."

The on-line NYT headline for the Richard Bonner piece on the Australian election is "Australians Re-elect Howard as Prime Minister," but the title above is the headline for the paper-copy version of this article. How does the Times know the Australians weren't actually supporting the war effort?

Voting is mandatory in Australia, and George Harris, 44, wearing only his bathing suit and tennis shoes, walked into the Bondi surf club to cast his ballot for the Liberals.

"It's purely a matter of economic management," he said.

NYT to Americans: Don't take the Australian vote to mean anything encouraging about the war. Those people only vote because the government makes them and they show up to vote in bathing suits.

"Eat Chocolate, Live Longer?"

That's the title of an article in the NYT Magazine about research indicating that chocolate makes you live longer. What is this scientific reason? Oh, I don't know. I didn't read the article. The title alone convinced me to eat chocolate. What if the text raised doubts about the value of eating chocolate? If it was a title about eating brussels sprouts, I would examine the text quite carefully.

I did notice this big pull-out quote:

If the flavanol research holds up, do you applaud a mammoth multinational corporation that probably spent tens of millions in an effort to ''capitalize'' (as Jim Cass put it) on a product that may help confront a leading cause of mortality in America?

Is it too much to ask that writers drop this medical jargon use of the word "mortality"? Life itself is the cause of mortality. The cause of this usage of "mortality" (the word) is, in my view, the fear of "death" (the word).

Most unnoticed muffed line of Friday night's debate.

From President Bush: "The truth of the matter is if you listen carefully Saddam would still be in power if he were the president of the United States. And the world would be a lot better off."

UPDATE: But really, it may be that people are noticing this mistake but just deciding not to point it out. Bush supporters don't want to point out one of Bush's mistakes. And Kerry supporters calling attention to the mistake would necessarily call attention to the sentence before it. And that sentence is devastating.

Yay, Badgers!

UW 24, Ohio State 13. "The Badgers won for the third straight time in Columbus for the first time in history. "

John Lennon.

I've written about John Lennon a couple times in the last week, but today is his birthday--I don't care that it would have been his 64th--and I'd just like to take note of that. I've loved John Lennon ever since The Beatles arrived on the scene. I vividly remember one day in the fall of 1975 listening to his wonderful album "Mind Games" all day, then going out to eat that night with two young men--old acquaintances--at our favorite hidden away little East Side restaurant Residence. We were seated at a little table in a niche next to a large round table set in the window alcove.

Don't look now, but John Lennon and Yoko Ono are sitting at the next table.

And yes, they were. I can figure out that it was the fall of 1975, because Yoko Ono was very pregnant (Sean Lennon was born in October 1975). Did we go over and talk to them? No! Maybe if they were passing on the street you could say something to them, but here they were in the middle of eating dinner. It just didn't seem possible. But shouldn't the fact that I was listening to "Mind Games" all that day give me a special dispensation? It seemed that it should, but still it felt quite wrong to intrude, and we did not. Nevertheless, it was a huge thrill just to sit so near him for so long.

The postscript to this anecdote is that I sat at the very same table on another occasion, around the same time, with my brother and a friend of my brother's (whose name I can't remember). Midway through the meal a young woman rushed up to my brother's friend in a state of ecstasy and began hugging him, gushing about how much she loved him and had all his records. We were kind of drunk and didn't know what the hell was going on. Later, in a state of sober reflection, I realized that my brother's friend did look quite a bit like Bruce Springsteen.

So did I or the ecstatic young woman have the more intense personal engagement with her musical idol?

"Kerry's Undeclared War."

A fascinating article by Matt Bai in the Sunday NYT Magazine:

Kerry seems to find presidential politics in the era of Karl Rove as treacherous as riverine warfare, and he has run for the presidency in much the same way. From the beginning, Kerry's advisers said that the election would be principally a referendum on Bush, whose approval ratings, reflecting public anxiety over Iraq and a sluggish economy, were consistently low for a president seeking re-election. All Kerry had to do to win, the thinking went, was to meet a basic threshold of acceptability with voters and avoid doing or saying anything that might be fatally stupid. The riverbanks were lined with hostile Republicans and reporters, lying in wait for him, and Kerry's goal as he sailed upriver was simple: Stay down. Exercise caution. Get to November in one piece.

Which is exactly what it's like to interview Kerry as he runs for the presidency; he acts as if you've been sent to destroy him, and he can't quite figure out why in the world he should be sitting across from you. When I met him for our first conversation, in his cabin aboard the 757 that shuttles his campaign around the country, Kerry didn't extend his hand or even look up to greet me when I entered, and he grew so quickly and obviously exasperated with my questions about his thoughts and votes on Iraq that he cut the interview short. ...

Kerry's guardedness has contributed to the impression that he does not think clearly or boldly about foreign policy. ... Kerry's adversaries have found it easy to ridicule his views on foreign policy, suggesting that his idea of counterterrorism is simply to go around arresting all the terrorists.

In this light, consider the quote, also in the NYT article, from Richard Holbrooke, who seems to be the most likely candidate for Kerry's secretary of state:

"We're not in a war on terror, in the literal sense. The war on terror is like saying 'the war on poverty.' It's just a metaphor. What we're really talking about is winning the ideological struggle so that people stop turning themselves into suicide bombers.''

Bai confronts Kerry about this, and Kerry does not directly agree with the Holbrooke statement, but ultimately, Bai concludes:

One can infer ... that if Kerry were able to speak less guardedly, in a less treacherous atmosphere than a political campaign, he might say, as some of his advisers do, that we are not in an actual war on terror. ... If Kerry's foreign-policy frame is correct, then law enforcement probably is the most important, though not the only, strategy you can employ against such forces, who need passports and bank accounts and weapons in order to survive and flourish. ... [Kerry] may well be right, despite the ridicule from Cheney and others, when he says that a multinational, law-enforcement-like approach can be more effective in fighting terrorists. But his less lofty vision might have seemed more satisfying -- and would have been easier to talk about in a political campaign -- in a world where the twin towers still stood.

UPDATE: I'm looking at the paper version of the NYT Magazine now. The cover photograph is quite striking. Possibly the picture is completely neutral and you just project your own opinion of the candidate onto it, but if so, the opinion I'm projecting is: blankness. A willfully blank facial expression fits with the thesis of the article: Kerry is withholding his real plan for how to deal with the war on terror. This thesis, I note, would account for his continued use of the phrase "I have a plan," which is frustrating to some people, who perhaps find themselves yelling at the TV screen: Yeah, what is it? Maybe Kerry really does have many plans, wants to be seen as a man who plans things quite carefully, but is also trying very hard to avoid revealing what his plans are. It may well be that our uneasiness with him is that we sense that he's doing this. Interesting that the NYT, who I assume strongly supports Kerry, is printing this article. Maybe the NYT thinks that most of its readers really would like to see terrorism reconceptualized as organized crime.

Derrida dead.

Jack Balkin has a tribute: "Although accused of undermining liberal and Enlightenment values he was actually deeply devoted to them."

UPDATE: I liked this quote, from the BBC report, taken from a film (could they name the film?) about Derrida:

At one point, wandering through Derrida's library, one of the filmmakers asks him: "Have you read all the books in here?"

"No," he replies impishly, "only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully."

That's a nice lesson about reading, comprehensible to anyone.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The NYT gives Derrida a long and very negative obituary, with plenty of attention to the Paul de Man scandal.

Poll shows Bush won the debate by a stunning two-to-one margin!

"Almost no one on either side gave the win to the candidate they opposed," reports ABC News about its post-debate polling. Here's the relevant ABC chart, highlighted at Volokh Conspiracy, where the take is: "When asked to name the debate winner, participants from each side remained true to their team." But don't give up on the search for the spin so quickly, Bush supporters. I offer this:

Despite an overwhelming tendency to declare one's preferred candidate the winner of last night's debate, there were twice as many Kerry supporters who thought Bush won as Bush supporters who thought Kerry won. If you exclude those who chose their own candidate as the winner, along with those who saw the debate as a draw, the poll declares Bush the winner by a stunning two-to-one margin!

Dylan's "Chronicles"--Chapter 1.

Bob Dylan begins his story with a scene where he meets Jack Dempsey, who, assuming this happened at all, thinks or acts like he thinks Bob Dylan is another boxer, and that scene sets the tone for the rest of the first chapter, where we see Dylan arrive in New York, interested in music, but even more interested in fighting his way to success. The first action we see him take is signing a contract with a music publishing company.

First song mentioned in the book: "Rock Around the Clock."

Most distinctive good friend in his early days in New York: Tiny Tim. "I gave the rest of my French fries to Tiny Tim."

Reason given for being outraged that Pete Seeger was blacklisted during the McCarthy Era: his ancestors came over on the Mayflower. Page 6.

Indication that the book could have been better edited: "What I did was come across the country from the Midwest ... straight out of Chicago ... eastbound through the state lines, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania ..." Page 8.

First long passage of praise for a fellow music artist: pages 13-14. The artist is Ricky Nelson. "I felt we had a lot in common." But Ricky's days were numbered--unlike Dylan's.

UPDATED to put in the links.

Rules for simulblogging ... or are we calling it "liveblogging"?

Last night's debate inspired a lot of simulblogging. That's what I call it, based on the word "simulcast," but if everybody is going to say "liveblogging," I guess I'll cave eventually. But what are the conventions of simulblogging/liveblogging? Are we supposed to watch live and reject TiVo pausing as an illegal performance enhancement? N.Z. Bear has this:

- So is TiVo the liveblogger's equivalent of performance-enhancing drugs for athletes? It seems somehow...unsporting. I've got TiVo too, but I shall endeavor to do true realtime... pausing is for sissies.

- Someday I'll figure out how to do a competitive liveblogging competition...

Should we make each point in a separate post, or string all the comments into one long, oft-updated post? If the latter, I guess starting each paragraph with a time-stamp makes more sense than my numbering approach, although my numbering approach is more oriented to my TiVo-assisted, out-of-real-time approach.

Do female bloggers even have to worry about the whole don't-be-a-girlie-man angle?

Should we not only reject TiVo and blog in real time, but also read other real-time bloggers and link to them profusely as we go? Instapundit seems to be able to do that--while fighting a migraine, no less! But really, I think what he does is link a lot of people before he starts, and then again at the end, not within the actual simulblogging posts. (He also has something to say about blogging and the debates available on his MSNBC blog, but "MSN Video does not support your computer’s operating system.")

At the other end of the spectrum from N.Z. Bear and the blogging as sport crowd, Vodkapundit just went out for the night and plans to simulblog from his tape the morning after. It really is a lot cooler to reveal the existence of a social life, wait for the crowd to clear, and then weigh in the next day, with a more world-weary, distanced attitude.

Other elections.

Another email received today is: "Good news from Australia." This one is not about a new drug, but a note that "Prime Minister John Howard and the conservatives have been returned with an increased majority." In America, last night, we were absorbed in a mere preliminary to our own election and, in typical fashion, ignored the Australian election. I did go over to Tim Blair's blog to try to get a feeling for the Australian election, but I got distracted immediately by a blogpoll he has there: "Teresa Heinz Kerry calls her private plane the Flying Squirrel. What might she re-name Air Force One if her husband is elected?"

Meanwhile, the Afghan election is taking place today, and there is controversy over the ink used to mark voters' thumbs. The NYT reports that all of Karzai's challengers are "vowing to boycott the results." Supposedly, at one point the wrong ink was applied to voters' thumbs, making it possible for them to clean it off and revote. Why assume revoters are for Karzai and not his challengers? The answer would seem to be that the challengers already expect to lose to Karzai, and they are setting up their basis for challenging the results even before they hear them. But isn't this part of American-style democracy? I expect to hear all sorts of claims of fraud made while our election next month is in process. Who can simply accept the results anymore? These days, there must be an elaborate, contentious post-election phase to magnify the losers' discontent. The only hope to avoid that is a wide margin of victory. That hope seems better in Afghanistan than in the U.S.

"See what comes of your jokes!"

That's the subject line of email I assumed was from one of my blogreaders and opened that turned out to be a spam message for Cialis.

Simulblogging the debate.

Time for debate simulblogging. I'll use TiVo to keep from getting mixed up, but I'll also try not to get too severely time-lagged. I'll keep all my comments in this one post and number the paragraphs to indicate the updates. Chris, my 21-year-old son, is here watching with me and may contribute some comments. He's for Kerry, by the way.

1. The ground rules are delivered sternly, as if we were being told to follow them. Bush has a blue tie; Kerry has a red. They are positioned on the opposite sides of the stage from the positions they took last week. The first question, to Kerry: are you wishy-washy? Kerry begins his answer with various thanks, then addresses Cheryl by name. He uses the question as an opportunity to state positions on assorted issues, inserting the phrase "that's not wishy-washy" here and there. Bush starts with thanks too, then states some examples of Kerry changing positions. He never uses the term "wishy-washy" (or "flip flopping"); he says Kerry "changes his mind ... because of politics."

2. The second question is about invading Iraq, addressed to Bush. He's speaking much more quickly and confidently than he did last week. He moves around on the stage well. He's saying many of the things he's said before about Iraq, and notably says Kerry would have left Saddam Hussein in power. Somehow Kerry's rebuttal refers to "health care" and "No Child Left Behind." He does that puppy-tongue lick of his lower lip that someone should tell him to stop doing. Give this man some ChapStick. Then he gets to Iraq, speaking really quickly: "I've never changed my mind that Saddam Hussein was a threat." Bush didn't go to war with Iraq the right way, he "took his eye off the ball," and now Iran is more dangerous. That's saying a lot very quickly, and it was a bit strange the way Iran popped in at the end. Chris says, "Everything he just said was perfect and the whole thing was great. He just did that so well."

3. Bush gets some extra rebuttal time and he talks about Kerry's "global test" language from the previous debate. Kerry gets some more time and says that the goal of the sanctions was not to remove Saddam Hussein but to get rid of WMD, and that the sanctions were working. He's facing Bush as he says this and Bush is laughing in his face! Bush raises a finger to indicate he wants to respond and he looks raring to go. But Bush is not given another chance to respond.

4. Kerry is answering another Iraq question. He sounds strong and emphatic. Bush is tapping his foot. Bush slowly rises to answer and talks about meeting with Allawi in the Oval Office. [UPDATE: The reference here wasn't to Allawi but to the Iraqi finance minister. Here's the transcript.] He mocks Kerry's summit proposal (made last week). "Nobody is going to follow somebody who doesn't believe we can succeed ... who says follow me into a mistake." Kerry follows up: "the right war was Osama bin Laden." Both men are quite vigorous tonight.

5. Bush defends his decisions against the accusation that he's lost support around the world. He's made "unpopular decisions" but he's done "what's right." You don't want a President who just tries to be popular. Chris: "He did that really well. I think they're both doing really well." Me: "I do too." Kerry: Bush is promising you more of the same for the new four years. The Security Council would have been with us, he says, if only we'd taken more time. Bush's answer is about relying on generals to fight the war. Bush missed a chance here to come back and say that the Security Council would never have come along with us. Kerry's response is to brush aside the matter of the generals and to say: "The President's job is to win the peace."

6. A question to Kerry about Iran. Kerry says Iran is a threat but Iraq wasn't, so our attention to Iraq missed a chance to engage with Iran. But what would Kerry have done about Iran? Join with allies and lead the world to crack down on nuclear proliferation. Bush: "That answer almost made me want to scowl." A reference to last week's bad face-making.

7. The bugaboo of a draft. Bush: we're not going to have a draft. Kerry: "I don't support a draft." Then he names a bunch of generals who support him and who think the military is overextended. His military won't be overextended because he will build alliances with world leader. Bush jumps up and talks over the moderator. He's really fired up, talking about the members of the existing coalition and how offended they would be by Kerry's attitude. A bit too hot-headed, I think, and we've heard this standard comeback before.

8. A questioner points out that we have not had further terrorist attacks. Kerry: "It's not a question of when ... excuse me ... it's not a question of if, it's a question of when." He claims he'd be better at fighting terrorism, without giving any regard to the cited fact, that Bush seems to have done something to have staved off terrorist attacks. Of course, Kerry doesn't credit Bush for that. Bush jabs Kerry for voting to cut the intelligence budget. Kerry has a bit of a simpering expression on his face here, and now he's smirking and jotting something down. Bush repeats the point that you can't win in Iraq if you don't believe it was the right thing to do, blending the topics of terrorism here and the war on Iraq.

9. Importing drugs from Canada. Bush just wants to make sure the drugs are safe. Now it's domestic policy time, issues that will need to be hammered out in Congress. I'm much less interested in what the Presidential candidates have to say about issues like this. Kerry lumbers off his stool and seems a bit slowed down. He seems to be stumbling around the stage. He's droppin' his "g's" now and saying "'em" for "them." "Ahm fightin' for the middle class." Both candidates are doing the "I care about you" routine now. Bush finishes his answers early, it seems. He winks at the end of one answer.

10. Tort reform. Kerry: Blah blah blah I have a plan blah blah. Oh, and the tax cut is bad. Bush: Senator "Kennedy" is the most liberal Senator. D'oh!

11. Spending. Bush defends both his spending and his tax cuts, unsurprisingly. That "earpiece" lump Salon wrote about today is visible on Bush's back. Oh, I'm losing my focus as the candidates spew the usual statistics about economics. Kerry: "The only people affected my plan"--he seems bored with this part too as he reels out stock phrases and drops the word "by."

12. Taxes. Senator Kerry, will you look into the camera and pledge not to raise taxes on those making less than $200,000? Well, what can he do? He gets right up in the camera and pledges. Tax cuts will be rolled back, though, for the over $200,000 crowd. "Lookin' around here at this group here, I suspect there are only three people here who are going to be affected." Himself, Bush, and the moderator. Hey, he just kind of insulted the audience! There's not one successful businessperson in the audience? Chris: "Looking around at you people, I can see you're all poor."

13. Significant difference appears on environment. Kerry is more oriented toward working with the rest of the world, improving the Kyoto treaty and so forth. Bush is oriented toward research and development and solving problems through technology.

14. Stem cells. Kerry "respects the feeling" in the question about refraining from using embryonic stem cells. He argues that it "is respecting life" to pursue cures and give people hope. Bush: "balance science and ethics."

15. Supreme Court nominees. Bush won't tell who he'd pick, but he'd pick a "strict constructionist." And he wouldn't pick someone who'd say you can't have "under God" in the Pledge. He brings up the Dred Scott decision, a bit strangely. Kerry quotes Bush saying Scalia and Thomas are his favorite judges. Kerry doesn't want conservative or liberal judges, but just a good judge.

16. Kerry is asked about not spending tax money on abortion: he's Catholic--former altar boy--but he can't impose his "article of faith" on others. There's a right to abortion, and he has to respect that. Bush: "I'm trying to decipher that." The audience laughs. He speaks of "the culture of life" with some feeling. Kerry: "It's not that simple."

17. Bush is asked to name three mistakes. He admits he's made bad decisions. He takes responsibility. But he stands by his big decisions: Afghanistan, Iraq. He defends these decisions and does not, as asked, enumerate any bad decisions. He indicates the mistakes he would name would be appointments, but he won't say who. Kerry now gets to point out Bush's mistakes, rather than his own, and naturally we hear about how Bush rushed to war, without a plan .... Bush, on rebuttal, slots in the criticism of Kerry that he "voted for the war before voting against it."

18. Both candidates get their closing statements out about as they'd planned them, it seems. Bush strikes me as more natural and impassioned, Kerry more robotic. [Who was better?] Chris? "I wasn't paying attention. ... Probably Kerry."

19. Generally, overall: I think both men performed well in terms of style and getting their statements across. There is little basis for going on about who performed better tonight. People will have to pick between the two based on substance this time.

20. Ah, wait. One key style point. After it's all over, Bush plunges into the audience and interacts warmly and enthusiastically with the people, while Kerry goes over and hangs around with the moderator and then hugs his wife. Bush is posing for pictures with people. Where's Kerry now? He's milling about with people now, but in a more restrained way than Bush has been doing.

An espresso at Borders.

I went to Borders to get a double espresso (to insure wakefulness through tonight's big debate) and to take advantage of the 25% discount they're offering teachers this weekend. It turned out that the two books I bought were already 30% off and they don't "stack discounts" they told me. Okay. I did get half off on the espresso though, just for saying I was a teacher when they asked me. Free cookies too. The books I bought were Bob Dylan's "Chronicles: Volume One" and Augusten Burrough's "Magical Thinking: True Stories." Not horribly original choices, but both books look pretty amusing, though the Dylan book is printed in an inexplicably weird typeface. I got the espresso "for here" and went to sit down with my books (I had a third book, too, Nicholson Baker's "Checkpoint"), and I saw two colleagues and sat down with them. We talked about any number of things and at one point I revealed that I was planning to vote for Bush. A request was made to shake my hand: "You're the first person I've ever met who is voting for Bush." Asked to explain myself, I said I didn't want to get into any fights, but I reluctantly said a couple things. The phrase "national security" was used, and my tablemates did not really seem to disagree with what I said. Yet the idea of voting for Bush! How could you?

"The Apprentice."

Entertainment Weekly has this:

I'd like to say that my friend Al and I were all shocked 'n' stuff when Pamela got booted off for not being an efficient enough price gouger — I mean, we both made the obligatory sucking-in-of-air noises and placed our hands over our mouths . . . but then we both sort of went, ''Eh,'' and got up to get some pudding from the kitchen. We didn't even sing along with the dun-dun, Dun-dun, DUN-dun, duhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuh music. And we always sing along. Sometimes we sing it during Survivor, we find it so compelling.

Prof. Yin is doing some "Apprentice"/"Survivor" comparison. Television Without Pity has a recaplet up, making this point:

The men sell a panini grill for more than $70, while the women sell a cleaning sponge for about $30. Despite the fact that the women sell many more units, no thanks to Maria's insane television presence that makes everyone feel like they're watching someone have a rapid-fire nervous breakdown, the difference in price ultimately allows the men to earn the higher gross amount, which, for no particular reason, is the standard by which the task is being judged.

Yes, the men had access to a product that was worth much more. What was to stop them from pricing it at $1 and racking up a huge number of sales? The women were stuck with a much lower value product, yet they somehow sold a lot of them at a pretty inflated price. So didn't they really do the better job? The men made a mess of demonstrating the product on camera, and they picked a goofy price, $71.25, rather than something normal like $69.99. The show got all didactic about how pricing is everything in business, but what kind of pricing takes no account of the cost? I didn't quite catch who made the decision to sell such a low-value product, but if they knew at the time that only the gross sales figure would determine the winner, that's the person who should have been fired.

Black soap.

Kausfiles writes:

If a man says he has a gun, acts like he has a gun, and convinces everyone around him he has a gun, and starts waving it around and behaving recklessly, the police are justified in shooting him (even if it turns out later he just had a black bar of soap). Similarly, according to the Duelfer report, Saddam seems to have intentionally convinced other countries, and his own generals, that he had WMDs. He also convinced much of the U.S. government. If we reacted accordingly and he turns out not to have had WMDs, whose fault is that? Why doesn't Bush make that argument--talking about Saddam's actions in the years before the U.S. invasion instead of Saddam's "intent" to have WMDs at some point in the future?

I wouldn't be surprised to hear Bush pick up this neat form for an argument he is already making. And in case you're thinking the image is inelegant--because who has a black bar of soap?--there is a legendary black soap. It's Erno Laszlo's Sea Mud Soap. Remember Woody Allen/Alvy Singer obsessing over Annie Hall's black soap in "Annie Hall"?

OLD WOMAN
Don't tell me you're jealous?

ALVY
Yeah, jealous. A little bit like Medea.
Lemme, lemme-can I show you something,
lady?

(He takes a small item from his
pocket to show the woman)

What I have here ... I found this in the
apartment. Black soap. She used to wash
her face eight hundred times a day with
black soap. Don't ask me why.

OLD WOMAN
Well, why don't you go out with other
women?

ALVY
Well, I-I tried, but it's, uh, you know,
it's very depressing.

That was Erno Laszlo soap. And by the way, you ought to be grateful you're even allowed to buy this soap:

Among his clients were the Duchess of Windsor, Gloria Vanderbilt, Doris Duke, Greta Garbo, Lilian Gish and Paulette Goddard. As the 1940s turned into the 1950s, the Erno Laszlo Institute had over 3,000 clients. Mrs. Vincent Astor, Mrs. Stavros Niarchos, Mrs. Gianni Agnelli, Mr. Truman Capote, The Begum Aga Khan and, in 1954, the Duke of Windsor, were numbered among its members. In the 1960s, the list was enlarged by Audrey Hepburn, Yul Brynner, Hubert de Givenchy, Mrs. John Fitzgerald Kennedy and many more. In the pictures of Marilyn Monroe's death bed in August 1962, her Laszlo preparations could be seen on her bedside table.

The Erno Laszlo Institute was a closed society of the rich, famous and powerful. One needed to be recommended to gain admittance, and a single reference alone was often not good enough. In 1954 (?), each consultation visit cost $75, an unheard-of sum at the time. The Doctor's time was limited. He could only see a limited circle of persons.

In the 1970s, Barbra Streisand, Diane Keaton, Yoko Ono, Madonna, Woody Allen, Sting, Val Kilmer and James Spader joined. Later, Erno Laszlo products could be seen in films like Bonfire of the Vanities, Working Girl, Annie Hall and Final Analysis.

Erno Laszlo remained severe even with his most famous clients. In June 1963, the doctor cautioned the President's wife, Mrs. Kennedy not to put more oil or cream on her face. As she admitted having made changes to his instructions, he firmly replied: "You cannot make changes!" He also refused to remove Katherine Hepburn's freckles, when she asked him to remove them. He declined, saying they were an integral part of the Hepburn beauty.

When Ava Gardner insisted that she had followed his instructions, he told her: "Excuse me, but you are lying". - "How would you know?" - "Your skin tells me. You have not been doing your ritual. When you do, then you may come back, but not before." As the fiery brunette refused to leave, he came as close as he ever had to actually throwing a patient out the door. When she finally realized that she could not get away with any ruse, she calmed down and agreed to follow the Doctor's instructions.

But if you don't have $32 black soap to carve into a gun, you can use white soap and use black shoe polish to make it look like a gun, as Woody Allen--him again--did in "Take the Money and Run."

Mystery voice of the day.

When I drive to work in the morning, I usually listen to WHA-AM 970, which is the all-talk Wisconsin Public Radio station. Today, I joined the program in time to hear a man ranting against Bush. The tone was that of the typical impassioned call-in. Oh, these hard-left Madison callers--they are so exasperating, I thought. I waited to hear who the show's guest would be and how he would rein in the comments and make something useful out of them. Then Kathleen Dunn, the show's host, came on and thanked Terry McAuliffe for coming on the show.

Questions for Kerry, questions for Bush.

Terrific illustration by Peter Hoey for this NYT op-ed--here and here--that collects questions for the big town hall debate tonight. The drawing--of a United States-shaped boxing arena--looks especially sharp and striking on the computer screen, but the layout is cleverer in the print version because the illustration is under the text and the cord extended up from the light divides the piece into two columns--questions for Bush and questions for Kerry. Some of those who contributed questions for this piece used it--predictably--as an opportunity to express their concern about a particular issue, without really framing a question that could extract an answer worth hearing ("What steps would you take to protect consumers from deliberately or inadvertently tainted food?"). And we all know what the candidates do with questions like that: they brush them aside and say something else they wanted to say. Of course, tonight, the questioners won't be the kind of experts that contributed to this op-ed, but regular folks, so the candidates will have to be especially careful to be graceful as they brush the question aside.

And, yes, I plan to simulblog the debate (with a bit of TiVo delay).

You've heard of the Department of Silly Walks.

Denmark has the Department of Silly Names. Well, shouldn't the government prevent parents from engaging in the psychological child abuse that comes in the form of burdening a child with an odd or misspelled name? And while they are at it, the government really ought to intervene when your mother dresses you funny.

"I loved Dick Gephardt because every time I saw him he would sit down and eat a pie."

That's a quote from Alexandra Pelosi, whose documentary about the Democratic primaries premieres on HBO Monday. That and similar nuggets appear in Cathy Siepp's article about the film. I greatly enjoyed Pelosi's "Journey's With George"--about Bush's 2000 campaign--and eagerly await the new film. In 2004, Pelosi liked pie-eating Gephardt the best, and I get the impression--from her film diary at the HBO site--that she did not get much good material about John Kerry, because he just wasn't the type to goof around in front of the camera. I don't think HBO is planning to reshow "Journeys With George" to go along with the new Pelosi movie, but it is available on DVD and highly recommended. Quite sweet and funny, with a lot of material about what people ate while traveling around on the campaign. Seems like the new one has a lot about food too. Food is Pelosi's idiosyncratic humor theme.

Things Mimi wouldn't understand.

Yoko Ono (in today's NYT) explains why John Lennon's early drawings were surrealistic, but his later ones realistically depicted domestic life:

"In the beginning, when he was doing the exaggerated stuff - the monster-looking people, and all that - those come from a time when he felt that Mimi was always looking over his shoulder," she said, referring to Mimi Smith, Lennon's aunt, who raised him. "He said that was how he came to surrealism. He would write things in his diary that he wouldn't want Mimi to understand, and the drawings were an extension of that. He was getting into an unreal, illusory world.

"Then when he met me, he felt that reality wasn't that scary anymore, so he began drawing us. And eventually, because he was learning Japanese, his drawings were a reflection of that experience too, but the more prominent change was that he began doing a lot of animals, and that was for Sean."

Oh, I think there is a lot more to surrealism than hiding from Aunt Mimi. Ono also says that in the early days of their relationship, talking about art, Lennon said "I think of myself as Magritte." The fact is, the early surrealistic line drawings are much more interesting. If his surrealism was about hiding from the female authority figure of his early life (Mimi), why should we not view the later realistic domestic scenes as mollifying the female authority figure of his later life (Ono)?

The Times article relates to the "When I'm Sixty-Four" gallery show, the title of which I complained about at some length here. There's a slide show of Lennon's drawings at the first link above.

UPDATE: Here's a link for Magritte, whose work really isn't very much like Lennon's surrealist line drawings. Lennon's work is far more similar to Jean Cocteau's drawings.

"The president and I have the same position, fundamentally, on gay marriage. We do. Same position."

From a NYT piece on Kerry and Religion:

Careful not to question the sincerity of Mr. Bush's faith or to criticize the mobilization of conservative religious forces on his behalf, Mr. Kerry nonetheless suggested his opponent's campaign had gone over the line with the way it frames some issues.

"I think you have to draw that line, so the answer is yes, they reached beyond that line, and in my judgment they're trying to exploit certain issues," he said. "The president and I have the same position, fundamentally, on gay marriage. We do. Same position. But they're out there misleading people and exploiting it."

Isn't the gay marriage issue also exploited, in different quarters, by Kerry supporters who--if the positions really are the same--also mislead people?

The NYT piece is also interesting for a quote by Kerry in what the Times calls "the left-leaning Catholic tradition of helping the poor and criticizing the war":

"If you look at Catholic teaching, ... it teaches about the environment, our responsibilities to the next generation. It teaches about poverty, our responsibility to the poor. It teaches about fairness. It teaches about peace and brotherhood and a whole series of things which I think this administration is failing on."

How different the campaign would feel if Kerry openly embraced a deeply principled, committed dedication to helping the poor. It's considered such a political liability to be a liberal, that the liberalism that does appear is desiccated and devoid of passion.

UPDATE: Both Instapundit and Kausfiles link to the Times article via this blog (thanks!) and call for Andrew Sullivan to pay attention to it [the article, not this blog], which he does here:

I have never trusted Kerry on gay civil rights, still don't, and wrote a piece earlier this year for the Advocate, warning gay voters not to trust him. So, yes, Mickey, I am aware of his slippery, unprincipled and vacuous stand on civil rights for gay couples. (This, of course, is indistinguishable from his slippery, unprincipled and vacuous stand on almost every other issue as well).

But Sullivan's for Kerry, remember. To be fair to Sullivan, let me acknowledge that he goes on to talk about a key difference between Kerry and Bush: Bush has spoken in support of amending the U.S. Constitution with respect to gay marriage. It's fine to make that distinction, but if you want to rely on that, how can you read Kerry's statement above as anything but shameless opportunism?

Air Madison.

Al Franken's Air America broadcast live from the Great Hall of the UW Memorial Union yesterday. With him on stage were "Gov. Jim Doyle, The Capital Times Associate Editor John Nichols and Alta Charo, a UW-Madison professor of law and bioethics. U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D- Madison, and U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Middleton, joined the show by telephone from Washington, D.C." (Note the Wisconsin lawprof in the group.) He had this to say in an interview:

"We do a different kind of show. I'm not the mirror image of Rush Limbaugh. I do a totally different kind of show. I don't bloviate for three hours and pull stuff out of my butt and mislead and lie. We're very scrupulous about our facts. I'm proud of that."

He did go for three hours though. I didn't attend (or listen on the radio). If you did and you have any information on whether he did in fact bloviate or anything else bloggable, email me.

"You're our Michael Jordan, you're everything."

So said Sirius to Howard Stern. Stern says: "Sirius — the future of radio — will take this dream to a whole new level as I bring my fans my show my way. It will be the best radio they will ever hear." He also said this on air: "The FCC ... has stopped me from doing business. Clear Channel, you (expletives), I will bury you."

Well, why shouldn't satellite radio be the equivalent of HBO? Get rid of the commercials, free the speech, and run with it. I'll subscribe. Good for Stern for drawing attention to this new technology. Broadcast radio has its place, and I'm not criticizing the FCC for keeping it decent, but I love the alternative!

Swastikas in Madison.

A few days ago, the Capital Times reported:

A west side backer of President Bush found a large swastika in his yard Thursday, right next to a Bush-Cheney sign. ...

[A police spokesperson] said the 8-foot-by-8-foot swastika was probably made by pouring some chemical over the green grass, causing it to turn brown.

The resident also reported other political vandalism in the area, but police haven't confirmed any other cases, Samson said.

And here's the Wisconsin State Journal, reporting on last night's Vote for Change concert (featuring the Dave Matthews Band) at the Kohl Center. The band was promoting Kerry, and one concertgoer, a 48-year-old man, wore a T-shirt with an "image of the president and a swastika." Another concertgoer said he had been planning to vote for Kerry but would now vote for Bush to counter the guy with the shirt.

Kerry seems to have a good number of supporters who are not helping his cause at all.

UPDATE: That this sort of thing hurts Kerry makes me wonder if it's an anti-Kerry dirty trick. Maybe neither swastika-wielder in these stories was a Kerry supporter. I note that the vandal in the first story seems to have used herbicide to burn the swastika into the grass. I would expect hard left anti-Bush types to be more environmentalist in their choice of hate-speech writing tool. [ADDED: In that last sentence, I had "anti-Kerry" when I meant "anti-Bush" and I've corrected it. Sorry.]

Madison politics.

Here are a few signs seen in and around the UW campus this week. In Madison, there's a vivid dialogue:



There are those who put up "Liar" stickers and those who respond by scratching out Bush's face. It's a little ambiguous. Are the sticker defacers Bush supporters?

Then there's the forthright bumper sticker:



Here's another:



Sunshine Daydream is selling "Psychedelic Republicans" cards, like this one of Laura Bush:



Kiosks provide space to tape up fliers. The secret plan for a draft is a big topic today. Someone has written "false" on all these fliers with a light blue marker:



There's a chalking announcing a meeting of Feingold supporters:



And the Catholic student center is offering an alternative take on current issues:

The morning after the debate.

Lots of visitors in the last 24 hours! Thanks for stopping by. It took me more than three hours to get through that debate, with my "simulblogging" operating on a TiVo delay. It was strange but cool to see that I was getting over 4,000 visitors an hour as I was setting my reactions to Cheney and Edwards in writing. I watched some debate analysis shows, talked to Chris, called up John, reproofread my debate posts, and found it was well after midnight. I had to get up a 6:30 the next day, because I'd made one of those early morning dentist appointments. I hate waiting in the waiting room, so I take the earliest appointment, even though I also hate an early morning appointment. Getting to sleep at 2 meant that my middle of the night wake-up took place at 5, so I just got up. That gave me time to half-read the paper and check out some of the blog reactions to the debate. Vodkapundit has a lot of good observations. I liked:

7:10. Know who Edwards reminds me of? Bush on a good debate night. Repeat your points, stay unruffled, sound folksy.

He was drunkblogging. I started out with my glass of wine with dinner. A bit later, I could feel my energy flagging and, what with 4,000 visitors an hour and the domestic policy section of the debate coming up, I figured I'd better drink a big Diet Pepsi--one of the reasons I was up until 2 and then back up at 5. Ah, now for the tedious trip to the dentist. I'm sure the hygienist will be perky and talkative, which is hard enough in any case--how can you converse when she's got all those instruments in your mouth?--but it's sure to be pretty irritating this morning.

UPDATE: The hygienist was pleasantly less chatty than hygienists of past visits. She did ask me if I watched the debate. Why yes I did. How about you? Who did you think won? She didn't know. In fact, she hasn't really been following the election and doesn't know much about the candidates yet. Well, you still have plenty of time. Cheney and Edwards really have very different images, though, don't they? "Yes," she said, "And so do Bush and Kerry. Both of those ... couples ... are very different."

And let me just say, in case you're planning to take me to task for asking her who won or for saying at the end of last night's long post that Cheney clearly won, that I'm not disqualified from discussing who won by my "Who won?" post from last week. I won't annoy you with a lawyerly style parsing of that post to demonstrate why. Suffice it to say that I could. And that it would be annoying.

May the best man of the best man win.

I'm going to simulblog the Vice Presidential Debate , so I'll number my posts, with each new number representing an update.

1. Bremer's not-enough-troops statement leads off, in a question to VP Cheney. Cheney plugs in his prepared statement about Iraq: Iraq was "the most likely nexus between terrorists and weapons of mass destruction." The war in Iraq was "exactly the right thing to do," and he'd recommend it all over again if he had the chance. Pay no attention to that Bremer behind the curtain! Cheney had nothing to say about Bremer at all.

2. Edwards, similarly, plugs in his prepared material about Iraq. (Poor Bremer is not getting the attention he might have wanted ... or not.) Edwards says lines I think I remember Kerry saying last week. "We lost more troops in September than we lost in August, we lost more troops in August than ..." The litany of defeatism. People have died, people have died. When I turn on NPR in the morning, the first thing I hear is nearly always the number of persons who just died in Iraq, almost never in a context connecting those deaths to what they fought for, just dismal, hopeless death. Edwards takes that tack. "Iraq is a mess"--the grand simplification. A mess! And McCain agrees with me--Edwards asserts. McCain's not there to protest, but Cheney will do it for him most likely. [He never does.] Edwards does have a line in there about Bremer. But most of it (as with Cheney) is the phoned-in prepared Iraq material.

3. Cheney rebuts, and the split-screen shows Edwards blinking furiously. Nervous? Or just contact lenses? Edwards then gets rebuttal time and he seems all charged up as he says there's no connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, which is, again, totally phoned-in, because Cheney said nothing about the connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. Cheney spoke only about progress in Iraq (the refutation of "Iraq is a mess.")

4. Gwen Ifill--who's wearing a terrific blue jacket with dramatically curved lapels--asks Edwards--who's wearing a standard dark gray suit, red tie, and, for originality, light blue shirt--whether, if he and Kerry had been in office, Saddam Hussein would still be in power. Good question, but of course he has to say no. The only interest here is in how artfully he frames his no. Like Bush last week he mixes up the names of the nemeses: "Saddam ... I mean ... uh ... Osama bin Laden ..." How did bin Laden get into the answer? He plugged in his material about botching the war in Afghanistan, which is tangentially related to refocusing attention on Iraq. But allowing the Northern Alliance to take the lead in Tora Bora was not done because of Iraq. It was simply the preferred strategy for Tora Bora (even if, in hindsight, it was bad). Edwards characterizes Iraq as a diversion, as if that is why we failed to capture bin Laden in Tora Bora. This seems to say that we shouldn't have gone into Iraq, finally approaching Ifill's question. Now, he's getting all harsh on the no connection between Saddam Hussein and September 11th point, but he's the one who dragged Osama bin Laden into the answer to a question that was only about Iraq. And, most importantly, he never answered Ifill's question! He never said whether he and Kerry would have left Saddam Hussein in power. He never even got in that "no" I assumed he'd have to say. He just wandered over to something else he wanted to talk about and hoped we wouldn't notice.

5. Cheney: "They are not prepared to deal with states that sponsor terror. ... A little tough talk in the midst of a campaign or as part of a Presidential debate cannot obscure a record of 30 years of being on the wrong side of defense issues. And they give absolutely no indication, based on that record, of being willing to go forward and agressively pursue the war on terror ..." This is the first blow that lands in this fight, I think.

6. Ifill, showing her scripting, raises the question of Afghanistan, which Edwards just pre-answered. But this question is to Cheney, who points out that Afghanistan is four days from an election, and that two and a half years ago, Edwards announced that the situation in Afghanistan was deteriorating and chaotic. So: Edwards was defeatist, calling Afghanistan a mess too soon, and (we may infer) he's prematurely giving up on Iraq. Edwards cocks his head to the side and gives a quick smile. He needs a comeback. But Edwards merely repeats the accusation that Tora Bora was handled wrong and that Iraq was a diversion. He then consumes the rest of his time defending John Kerry over the "global test" proposal made in last week's election. But I want a response that has something to do with the GOOD Dick Cheney just claimed we achieved in Afghanistan. It's as if Edwards is programmed to keep telling us that everything went bad. But is nothing good? Is it not good that there will be an election in Afghanistan and that women will vote and so forth as Cheney just said? Ah--Edwards pooh-poohs the "rosy scenario" that Cheney paints about Afghanistan (and Iraq): Afghanistan is growing 75% of the world's opium! There are warlords! Not every place is secure! Cheney slams back, comparing Afghanistan to El Salvador: we succeeded against terrorists there because people aspire to democratic self rule. Edwards responds to this by suddenly switching to the topic of Iran, and I'm thinking that Ifill is cursing Edwards to herself, as he introduces another topic that she had planned in her questions.

7. Ifill's next question, to John Edwards, is about Kerry's "global test" proposal, which Edwards has already addressed out of place in two previous questions. There really is a clear answer on the "global test" point, but Edwards is not making it crisply. Cheney is gathering steam now. His arms are crossed on the desk and his head is down and wagging from side to side as he makes each point. Some of his points are preplanned (voting for the war and against the war; wrong war, wrong place, wrong time). Now he's marking out his points, patting with his palm in spots along the surface of the desk. "There's no indication at all that John Kerry has the conviction to successfully carry through on the war on terror." Edwards rebuts: this is a "complete distortion." The proof? "The American people saw John Kerry on Thursday night." So, yes, Kerry did a good job in the debate last week, and he said strong things, which, if that was all we knew, would make us think he was going to be tough on the war on terrorism. But Cheney's point is that if you look at Kerry's long record, it doesn't back up that tough stance. Edwards is saying: ignore that record, remember how Kerry won the debate last week?

8. Would it be dangerous to have Kerry as President? Ifill asks. Cheney: he's not aggressive enough! He was against fighting Saddam Hussein in 1991. He voted against funding of the current Iraq war because he was caving in to pressure from the Dean anti-war candidacy in the primaries. If he couldn't stand up even to Dean, how can we trust him to be tough enough?

9. Is it believable that Kerry can bring together a coalition of foreign nations at this late point in the war? Ifill asks Edwards. His answer is scattered. How can it not be? Who believes there is anything that Kerry could do beginning in January that would bring in more allies? Edwards--using the politician's pointing thumb--switches to another topic. Lack of body armor! Cheney: "It's hard, after John Kerry referred to our allies as 'a coalition of the coerced and the bribed' to go out and persuade them to send troops and participate in the process." You can't say "wrong place, wrong war, wrong time" and "oh, by the way, send troops." Of course, this is exactly what Bush said last week, but Cheney's solidity here is impressive. Now, he plays what I consider his ace: our most important ally is Allawi, and when he was here, speaking to the Congress, Kerry "demeaned him, challenged his credibility." Edwards answer is, first, about money. The first Gulf War cost five billion dollars, he says, holding up five fingers. The current war, "200 billion and counting." Second, 90 percent of the casualities are American. Cheney's answer: "He won't count the sacrifice and the contribution of our Iraqi allies." This fits with the point about Allawi: you want allies, the Iraqis are our allies! John Edwards looks upset by this response, but he does not get a rebuttal.

10. Edwards uses the next question for rebuttal of the previous question, but it is an unmemorable mix of previous points about how badly things are going in Iraq. The question on the table is about intelligence. The next question is about sanctions on Iran. I'm beginning to feel a bit sorry for Edwards. Cheney is an intimidating presence, and, frankly, he's kicking Edwards's butt. Ah, the first mention of Halliburton. Cheney: Halliburton is a smokescreen. Go to Factcheck.com for the facts! [ADDED: That should be Factcheck.org.]

11. In answer to a question about Israel, Edwards tries to tell what he characterizes as a personal anecdote. It's the story of Israelis killed by a suicide bomber. Children are killed. Cheney goes back to Halliburton, but then he doesn't really. He just says Halliburton is a smokescreen (again) and Edwards has an undistinguished record as a Senator. Just forget about Ifill, why don't you? She wanted to talk about Israel, but screw it! Let's just plug in the material about all the votes Edwards missed as Senator! Cheney is in the Senate, as the President of the Senate, almost every Tuesday, and the first time he ever met Edwards is tonight! Ouch! Edwards successfully stifles any reaction. Cheney deigns to answer Ifill's question about Israel: Saddam Hussein paid Palestinian suicide bombers' families. Edwards rebuts: Cheney voted against Headstart back when he was in the House! Against Meals on Wheels! Against the Martin Luther King holiday!

12. Finally, the foreign policy section is over. And the question is: what are you going to do about Cleveland? (They are in Cleveland.) Cheney cites No Child Left Behind; education is key. Edwards subtly scoffs at Cheney for talking about education when the question was really jobs and poverty. Of course, Cheney probably really does think education is the right approach to the problem, but Edwards is somewhat successful at making the education strategy seem cold and heartless. Edwards asserts that the administration is "for outsourcing jobs." They think it's good! Cheney's rebuttal praises tax cuts. Edwards rebuts bringing Iraq back into the picture to fit with a planned punchline: "I don't think the country can take four more years." He leans over toward Cheney with an insouciant smile on his face. Cheney glances back and gives him the stink eye.

13. Taxes. The usual positions are taken.

14. Same sex "unions." Cheney: traditionally it's been an issue for the states, but Massachusetts has acted, and the President thinks it's the "wrong way to go, and I support the President." Edwards has a great opening here, but he loses momentum by going back to tax policy, which was (I think) dully batted around on the last question. Now, Edwards goes on about Cheney loving his gay daughter and Cheney looks like he might lean over and take a bite out of Edwards. Finally, Edwards gets to the best point: we shouldn't amend the Constitution to exclude people from equal treatment! Ifill wisely comes in with the next question challenging Edwards (and Kerry) about their opposition to gay marriage. Edwards now has to say "marriage is between a man and a woman," and the distance between him and Cheney dwindles into a technicality. Now, the constitutional amendment is no longer actively offensive, it's just "unnecessary" (the theory being that one state's recognition of gay marriage is not going to exert any pressure on the other states and that there is no concern that courts might force other states to recognize that first state's marriages). And let's talk about health care and Iraq!! Cheney's "rebuttal" is just to thank Edwards for his kind words about his daughter.

15. Medical malpractice. Cheney tries to shock us with the fact that a doctor in Wyoming must pay $100,000 a year for malpractice insurance. Somehow, I don't find that number shocking. Edwards agrees that there should be fewer lawsuits and recommends an independent review of malpractice cases before they can be filed. He's against frivolous lawsuits too. This is an area where Edwards might be attacked or might also do well, but it comes off as a fairly technical issue and I don't think either man makes any headway over the other.

16. AIDS. This is a subject that does not allow either man to make much headway. Both express concern; Edwards tries to broaden the question to be more generally about the need for healthcare.

17. Ifill asks Edwards how, given his inexperience, he has the qualifications to handle the Presidency. What can Edwards do here but babble about good judgment? When it's Cheney's turn, he says, do you want me to talk about his qualifications, and he can barely suppress a grin. It's the happiest we see Cheney all night. He says, I know I was chosen because of my experience and my ability and that it had nothing to do with political ambition.

18. Why is Dick Cheney like John Edwards? That's the question now. Cheney refers to his humble beginnings. Edwards is writing a lot during this answer. At one point, he noisily rips a sheet of paper off his pad. This question seems a bit weird and pointless. A ground rule of the question is don't say the name of your running mate: Edwards breaks the rule twice. But who cares? The question seems nonexistent. Cheney doesn't even want his rebuttal time!

19. What's wrong with "a little flip-flop now and then"? This is another bad question that Edwards uses to throw out a variety of statements that he might have said at any point. Cheney, naturally, uses it to list all the inconsistent things Kerry has said and done that he can think of. Edwards might have talked about the importance of nuance and adjustment to changed conditions and new information, but he utterly ignores that opportunity, perhaps wisely.

20. How to "bridge that divide" and bring the country together? I'm getting pretty tired at this point and don't like the abstraction of this question. Nevertheless, I'm a bit irritated when Edwards says a word or two in answer to the question and then just plugs in a lot of material about health care. I've noticed Edwards has looked for as many opportunities as possible to say the words "health care."

21. Finally, closing statements! Edwards says "I have grown up in the bright light of America, but that light is flickering today" and expresses a hope of bringing that light to us all. Cheney rattles off a pre-planned speech with many references to the war on terrorism.

22. Conclusion: a clear win for Cheney.

UPDATE: Here's the full transcript of the debate.

ANOTHER UPDATE: As has been widely noted, Cheney was wrong about not having met Edwards before. Why would he say that? Even assuming for the sake of argument he's willing to lie, it's so easily shown wrong that it utterly backfires. My guess is that it wasn't a preplanned zinger, at least not a carefully preplanned zinger, and that Cheney just didn't remember meeting Edwards. Even that doesn't make that much sense. Normally, you don't assert you haven't met someone, you ask if you've ever met him or you act as though maybe you have met. This is a very common social situation: people know to be careful about assuming they haven't met someone.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Looking at this clip again (via "The Daily Show"), I get the impression that Cheney could be seen as saying that he never met Edwards in the context of the Senate. That is, "met" could mean "run into" as opposed to "be introduced to for the first time." Still pretty lame, but possibly defensible on a very technical level.

Goodbye to Rodney Dangerfield.

Thanks for all the laughs for so many years. I remember looking out my office window and seeing you standing in the middle of Bascom Hill, surrounded by cast and crew and a hoard of onlookers as you filmed "Back to School." I remember when we first became aware of you back in the 60s, when you were on "The Tonight Show." We all imitated you and laughed. And you were pretty damned terrifying in "Natural Born Killers." Nice work!

On not subscribing to Wired.

The Wired that just arrived (see previous post) is not the newest issue, but the September issue. Wired does that annoying thing that magazines do when you subscribe, which is to send you an older issue, even though you might very well have bought that issue on the newstand. This practice makes subscribing to magazines less of a bargain than the card in that copy you just bought makes it seem.

Yet, in fact, I did not subscribe to Wired. I did something even more foolish. I paid for the premium subscription to Salon.com, because I figured I'd go there often enough that it was worth buying off the commercial they make you watch to get through to the content. But Salon turns out to be less enticing when it isn't walled off with a commercial. Anyway, the subscription to Salon included free subscriptions to Wired and U.S. News & World Report, magazines I now feel that I must at least flip though. Wired and U.S. News & World Report each sent me a postcard offering to cancel my subscription for a $12 (or so) payoff, but I missed my chance. Now I receive these rather silly publications in the mail and waste time looking at them.

I knew it was dumb to say "awesome," but Wired helps me stay hip by advising me to replace "amazing" with "audacious." That's asinine. And Wired's coverage of politics is fatuous. Little sidebars in the September issue identify problems with American politics. Problem #2 is: "The electoral college is broken." A checked box appears next to "SOLUTION." There is a half column explanation of the amazing, audacious solution Wired's genuises have hit upon:

Move to a popular vote. And make it count with instant runoffs. In this system, voters rank the candidates in order of preference. If the first "winner" doesn't get 50 percent of the vote, the least favorite candidate is dropped, and those votes go to the voters' next favorite candidate. You do a new count, and repeat the process until someone gets 50 percent. This way votes aren't wasted: If voters don't get their first choice, they get something close - their second or third choice. It also allows third parties to emerge without "spoiling it" for like-minded candidates. In 1992, for example, many votes for Perot would have transferred to George Bush Sr., and Clinton might never have triumphed. (The reverse applies to Gore and Nader.) The system hasn't been tried partly because the big parties selfishly don't want to encourage competition, and partly because all that recounting is logistically tricky. But now that we're moving to electronic voting, "the technological barrier vanishes. Computers can do those recounts in an instant," says Rob Richie, executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy. Digital tech could usher in an age where your vote finally matters.

Do you think you might come down for a moment from your high-tech high and apply some of your intelligence to thinking through the ramifications of how this system would play out? Without the Electoral College system, we would have completely different candidates and many more of them, including many strange niche candidates and extremists who would have unpredictable clout. You want to give a chance to a third party candidate? Your solution gives a chance to a tenth party candidate! You think the "big parties" are just being selfish? Have you ever tried to understand the beneficial moderating effect of the two party system?

I recommend Alexander M. Bickel's book Reform and Continuity: The Electoral College, the Convention, and the Party System, published in 1971, which I reviewed, a propos of the 2000 election, in "Electoral College Reform Déja Vu, 95 Northwestern University Law Review 993 (2001). People spent a lot of time considering abolishing the Electoral College in the decade that followed the very close 1960 election and discovered important safeguards it provides that would be lost with a switch to the superficially appealing popular vote. In any case, given the difficulty of amending the Constitution, especially when shifting the states' power is concerned, it isn't going to happen.

Tom Waits: "Real Gone."

The new Tom Waits album came out today. I'm enjoying the tactile cover design, which you can see at the link, but you need to feel to fully appreciate. I want more tactile graphic design! No sooner do I write that than the afternoon mail drops through the slot and onto the floor. It's the new issue of Wired, the one with Arnold Schwarzenegger on the cover, and it's nicely tactile too. Mmmmm!

"I just don't want to die on the street."

The NYT reports on Afghan women's reluctance to vote, based on a distinctive fear of dying outside of the home:

There is a saying in the culture, [one woman] said. For a woman, a death in the home - with purdah, which literally means curtain - is a death of honor. A death outside the home is a death with dishonor. ...

Roshana, about 30 and the mother of a 14-year-old son, agreed. She envisioned lying in the street missing a head or a limb, being viewed by strange men. It would be an insoluble stain on her family's reputation.

"Law porn."

Gordon explains why he's getting so much of it lately.

Most interesting fact about Bob Dylan

revealed in the NYT review of his autobiography: "he now owns a bumper sticker reading 'World's Greatest Grandpa'"--or so he says.

Mysterious personal reaction to Dick Cheney.

With the big vice presidential debate tonight, let me say something about the vice presidential debate four years ago. In 2000, I supported Al Gore from the beginning, I voted for him, I stayed up late into the night on election night waiting to hear that he had won, and I monitored each phase of the post election legal battle hoping for Al Gore to find a way to victory. On the Friday when the Florida Supreme Court ordered the full-state recount, I felt stunned by joy. I remember going to see a performance of Handel's oratorio "Israel in Egypt" at the Music School that night and thinking about Al Gore throughout the performance. The whole time I was listening to the story of Exodus, I was also thinking about Al Gore. Lines like "He spake the word, and there came all manner of flies and lice in all quarters" blended in my mind with images of hanging chads and Floridians eyeing punchcards. When the oratorio was over--"Sing ye to the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously"--and we got up to leave, the first thing I said was: "Al Gore!"

In short, I was for Al Gore.

But there was one point when I was surprised by the anomalous thought: maybe I should vote for George Bush. Within the long period of commitment to Al Gore, the contrary thought that Bush might be the right choice flared up briefly, shortly after Dick Cheney began to speak at the vice presidential debate. (Transcript.) Astounding! Why would that be? Lieberman made the first opening statement. It was warm and folksy, thanking "wonderful people," naming his wife, saying that his 85-year-old mom had called him that day to tell him to be positive. How could the charmless Cheney compare? Cheney began with a quick thanks, an agreement about being positive, and an ad lib about Lieberman's singing, then said, in that flat, warmth-free Cheney manner:

I think this is an extraordinarily important decision we're going to make on November 7. We're really going to choose between what I consider to be an old way of governing ourselves of high levels of spending, high taxes, an ever more intrusive bureaucracy, or a new course, a new era, if you will. And Governor Bush and I want to offer that new course of action.

Well, what is the great appeal in that? It's a bit of a mystery to me. Did I find the very flatness refreshing? He was saying: look, there are two ways of doing things, and you people are just going to have to choose. Not: I'm charismatic, love me. Just: here's the deal; decide.

UPDATE: Gerry Daly of Daly Thoughts tries to solve the mystery:

Obviously, I do not know your mind beyond your writing on the blog, so the possibility I am floating here would be offered to anyone saying that the reaction was a mysterious one.

As you probably have guessed from my blog, I am a bit of a poll junkie. Over the years, I have learned a few things following the polls. One thing is that people lie (or maybe it would be better stated that people often answer in ways that cannot be reconciled with reality). An example is this is how often polls show that people are disgusted with the way politics are conducted. They hate the negativity. They hate the pandering. They hate the money. They hate the disingenuousness. Yet time and again, it is proven that the negativity works, that the pandering works, that the money works, that the disingenuousness works, and the way politics are conducted works. The public does not like it, yet the public acts as if they do like it; they are persuaded by it, and when it is not there they complain about how boring and uninspiring the candidates are.

A second thing I have learned is that even when the public lies, there is some truth involved. And I believe that people really do not like the negativity, the pandering, the money, the whole kit and kaboodle. Time and again, the reformist mindset shows polling appeal when it is properly tapped by an aspiring politician. The public just hates when the views they hold lose, more than they hate the crud that goes on. They believe that both sides do it, so why punish the guy they agree with for doing it?

Now, read Lieberman's offering. It was nothing like what Al Gore has become, what Howard Dean is like, or anything of the sort. As you put it, it was "was warm and folksy", and positive. It was prepared. It was political. Not that there is anything wrong with that; the world would be a better place if politics were conducted more like Senator Lieberman approached it that night.

But Cheney's was a little different. It offered a glimpse beyond politics. It provided a glimpse of the world if, instead of us making political decisions, we made decisions on how we wished to be governed.

Sadly, I think that Cheney is gone. I have not seen him since 9/11. It is almost like since then, he has decided that it is just too important to lose, and that he must play the politics game. I am not sure that is what has happened. If it is, I am not sure he is wrong.

But I wish that Cheney was back, and I wish that mindset was the predominant one. Here's how it is. Choose. And then get back to living life rather than playing these silly games.

Well put. We'll see soon enough which Cheney we will get in this year's debate. My new TV is being set up with HDTV reception today, and I will be testing it out tonight with the wonderfully contrasting mugs of Edwards and Cheney. I'm hoping for some high definition in their substantive positions as well.

ADDED: I've got the title ready for my simulblog of the debate: HDVP.

ANOTHER UPDATE: First, thanks to Instapundit for linking to this. Second, I'm told the debates are not shown in HDTV, so that dashes my hope of getting the chance to inspect every well-shampooed strand of John Edwards's hair and to use my planned title. Third, more than one emailer has observed that two out of three of the components of the "old way" have survived in the Bush Administration.

City with the best abs.

San Francisco! Worst abs: St. Louis! According to Men's Health, based on what methodology I don't know.

Phone call just now.

"Hello?" I say, assuming a human being is on the line.

"Hi," says a woman who sounds nice and friendly. But she goes on: "Twenty-two thousand single women didn't vote in two-thousand ..." I slam the receiver down. Who listens to these calls? I've even gotten some where I say hello and I get: "I'm John Kerry ..." and I hang up on him.

When John Lennon is 64.

I see from an ad on page D2 of the paper NYT, that a gallery in New York is having a show of John Lennon's artwork titled "When I'm Sixty-Four," "in honor of" John Lennon's 64th birthday. We don't really need a special occasion to get interested in John Lennon, but even if we did, this one would rub me the wrong way. Is there a more McCartneyish Beatles song than "When I'm 64"? Did John even like it?

UPDATE: My son John emails:

One of the Beatles books that's in the house---probably either Tell Me Why or Revolution in the Head--points out that near the end of When I'm 64, John plays some very idiomatic guitar, which seems to cause Paul to laugh audibly. So maybe John did like it.

And doesn't John do some nice harmony singing?

On the other hand, this is emailed by a reader:

Oddly enough, if my random-trivia books serve me as well as I hope they do, John wasn't a big fan of the song. It was, in fact, written by Paul when he was just a teenager, and was put on the album to honor is father (who, oddly enough, was indeed sixty-four years old at the time). The story goes that Paul's father never did like John, and this didn't make him like the song much more.

So, a mystery emerges. Email me if you have some answers.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I'm checking out the home library of Beatles books, and I see John's memory is right. "Revolution in the Head," footnote on page 176, has this to say about "When I'm 64":

Apart from backing vocals, Lennon contributes some anomalous folk-blues guitar picking to the final verse/chorus (2:17-2:29)--a style joke that provokes an audible grin from McCartney (2:23).

The same page of the book also says that "When I'm 64" was one of Paul's earliest songs and that it ended up on "Sgt. Pepper" because his father's turning 64 made him remember it.

Another emailer sends this link to a Playboy interview, with this quote from John, who was asked who wrote "When I'm 64":

Paul completely. I would never even dream of writing a song like that. There are some areas I never think about and that is one of them.

He may nevertheless have liked the song, but as indicated, it wasn't his sort of thing at all. I stick by my original opinion that "When I'm 64" should not be the name of a John Lennon art show.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Yet another emailer provides this:

Some years ago, I read a short story by sci-fi author Spider Robinson wherein, after Lennon was shot, his body was (secretly) put into (cryogenic?) storage of some kind. The punch line being [spoiler alert!] that, upon successful resuscitation / reanimation, he and Paul realize that they are both, indeed, sixty-four...

I like Spider's writing in general, and though this was a slight story, I guess it was sort of memorable! After brief Googling, it seems to have been "Rubber Soul" published in Omni magazine in 1984. It seems to have been reprinted in at least two short story collections, "Melancholy Elephants" and "By Any Other Name"... Check the sci-fi ghetto of your neighborhood library.

"Kerry's hard-line, right-wing, unilateral, pre-election policy epiphany."

William Safire on Kerry's new hawkishness, as seen in the debate. Safire notes that Bush supporters have opted to ignore it:

Instead, the president focused on the Democrat's sugar-coating of his first-strike pill of prevention: his assurance that his pre-emption had to be one that "passes the global test" to make it legitimate. By ridiculing Kerry's notion that such a surprise attack had to have prior world-public approval, Bush was able to prevent his opponent from out-hawkishing him.

Sims 2.

Conversation at Cheeseburger in Paradise:

I'm very involved with Sims 2.

Do you love the characters?

Kind of ... yes ...

Do you feel that Sims is more like life than life itself?

No.

When they die ... do you ... cry?

... no ...

UPDATE: Here's a much nicer Sims 2 link. I'm told the prime improvement of Sims 2 over Sims 1 is that the characters go through all the stages of life (from babyhood to death--before, they were frozen in time). Another innovation is that each character has an overarching aspiration in life (popularity, romance, money, knowledge, or family). And "there are a lot of random weird things that can happen," for example, you can be abducted by aliens, your house can be haunted by Sims who have died, if you aren't very good at cooking, you can set the kitchen on fire and die, and if you get lonely, a large imaginary bunny may come and socialize with you.

Sounds like Donnie Darko.

But it's a friendly bunny. It's not a mean bunny.

ALSO: I'm told all Sims are bi-sexual.

"A T-bone moment."

Fooling around with my new TV, I turned on the closed captioning (which my old TV didn't have). I was watching the tail-end of my TiVo'd "Fox News Sunday," where they had just shown the clip from the debate with Bush snapping that he knows that Osama Bin Laden attacked us. Juan Williams comments:

Well, I think, if you look for a TiVo moment ...

Closed captioning had:

Well, I think, if you look for a T-bone moment ...

"A T-bone moment"--I guess that's when a candidate gives us some of that "red meat" we keep hearing about.

A minute later, Brit Hume, refers Bush's demeanor as "peevishness," and the caption is "peacefulness." Two minutes later "neutralize" is rendered as if it were a guy's name: "Newt Ramize."

On the other hand, there are times when the closed captioning is more accurate than the spoken word. In the first episode of this season's "Joan of Arcadia," Joan's boyfriend Adam is telling her about his summer spent working full-time in a hotel and the caption reads: "What do you want to know about plaster, grout, or unclogging toilets? And don't get me started on caulk 'cause that's my passion." But the actor clearly mispronounces the screenplay's word "caulk" in the most hilarious way possible. I mean, look at that line. It's hard to believe the whole thing wasn't set up as a joke. With the help of the TiVo, we got many laughs from that T-bone moment.

The Sunday shows: rechewing the debate.

I'm reviewing what the TiVo dragged in this morning: the Sunday news analysis shows. The old "who won the debate?" question is provoking predictable talking points. The Republican favorite: whether Kerry won or not, he made some statements that can be used against him ... and now let me use the rest of my time to use those statements against him.

The real reason Bush will win Wisconsin.

Bizarro Gordon has made a discovery.

Our new Islamic law scholar.

The Wisconsin State Journal has a nice piece on our new lawprof Asifa Quraishi (who has the office next to mine):

The California-born scholar of Islamic law, who also worked as a death penalty law clerk for the U.S. appellate court covering the West Coast, was a sought-after prospect in her first crack at a post in academia this fall.

Too often, though, prospective colleges and universities seemed to see her as either an oddity or a token, she said. Many interviewers found it hard to get past her personal background - questioning how she could be a Muslim, an educated woman and an American - while other places seemed attracted to her expertise in a flavor-of-the-day way, driven by the notoriety surrounding recent world violence wrought by radical Islamic movements.

But at UW-Madison, she said, her future colleagues were more interested from the start in exploring the specific ideas in her specialty, which involves comparing the American and Islamic legal systems.

"I felt like I was coming home ideologically," she said.

"It wasn't one-sided," she added. "They critiqued me and I had to work. But I was really into the meat of my ideas. It was right there."

There's much more on Asifa in the article, including her Iraqi-born actor husband and her brief on behalf of a Nigerian woman, an unwed mother sentenced to flogging (she lost, but there was at least some willingness [ADDED: on the part of the Nigerian courts] to listen to the arguments, because they were based on Islamic law).

UPDATE: I've had to deactivate the link because the WSJ took the article down. Too bad!

"The chronic vice of blogs."

The NYT Book Review takes literary websites--the kind without a print counterpart--seriously. Actual links provided. This jumped out at me: "the chronic vice of the blogs -- has she mentioned her fellow bloggers? And how clever they are? And how much she really, really likes them?"

Hmmm.... Well, I'm just sitting here in my dining room trying to make my way through the Sunday Times. For some reason, I'm starting with the Book Review, which I usually toss onto the far corner of the table and mean to read last. The truth is, last week's Book Review is still on the table, unread. So I can't explain my choice of entry point this morning. But I'm thinking, is that the chronic vice of "the blogs"? Surely, there must be other chronic vices capable of challenging that vice's entitlement to the honor of "the chronic vice." Maybe there should be The Seven Chronic Vices of the Blogs. If enough people email me with good candidates for Blog Vices, I'll add a list here later.

UPDATE: I see a complexity in the analysis of blog vices. There are the secret vices and the vices on display to the reader, like the fawning over other bloggers that annoyed the NYT. An emailer suggests two related vices, which are secret vices:

•constantly checking to see who visited your blog via NedStat, Sitemeter, etc. AND whether they are linking to you.

•feverishly tracking/commenting on how well "connected" your blog is through services such as the Blog Ecosystem and Technorati.

Perhaps in these private vices we see the root of the public vice observed by the Times.

A SECOND UPDATE: Another emailer offers two more vices:

•Sneering. A really juvenile, off-putting form of discourse. The blogosphere is slathered with it.

•Opinion incest -- only reading or linking to those who agree with you (or to the "other side" only for purposes of sneering). Has the effect of digging everyone deeper into their ideological ruts/trenches.

Irritating best-seller formula.

Joe Queenan hilariously slams A. J. Jacobs' "The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World." Queenan seems perhaps jealous that he didn't think up this formula for cranking out a $25 Simon & Schuster product: "drift through the encyclopedia [Britannica, which you claim to have read cover-to-cover], yank out an entry, tear open his Industrial-Strength Comedy Handbook and jerry-build a lame wisecrack." Queenan is particularly annoyed by the way Jacobs reports amazing facts seemingly unaware that "educated people" have heard it before (e.g., Marat was killed in his bathtub): "Jacobs constantly seeks to bedazzle the reader with his latest shocking discoveries, unaware that things he perceives as riveting arcana are common knowledge in many quarters."

In Jacobs' defense, let me say, there is always someone who hasn't heard history's fascinating facts yet. This might be a great book for a young reader, assuming they can stomach the cornball humor.

UPDATE: Dan Drezner also flags this review, noting Queenan's strange aversion to Entertainment Weekly and the reformatting of the print version of the NYT Book review to drop the line about the reviewer's background (which he finds interesting in Queenan's particular case).

"The Opposite Direction."

Faisal al-Kasim talks about his Al-Jazeera talk show, "The Opposite Direction," in the November issue of The Atlantic.

His goal? "To change the status quo, which is horrible politically, religiously, economically, in every way."

Al-Kasim's first show, he says, "dissected" the Gulf Cooperation Council (the league of oil-rich monarchies and emirates that are responsible for some of the most closed regimes in the Middle East) "like a corpse," and since then The Opposite Direction has addressed an array of previously unmentionable questions in the Arab world, in terms ranging from the contrarian to the outlandish. Is Arab unity an unattainable myth? When was life better, under colonial or Arab rule? ("Eighty-six percent of our viewers who called in said they'd rather be re-colonized," al-Kasim told me. "The Algerians would welcome Chirac, if he decided to return.") Was King Hassan II of Morocco an agent of the Mossad? Should polygamy have a place in the modern Arab world?

On one show, viewers were asked "Are Arab regimes refraining from condemning the abuse in Abu Ghraib because they're committing far worse atrocities in their own prisons?" 84% of the viewers said yes. A guest on that show, Khaled Chouket, director of the Center for the Support of Democracy in the Arab World, spoke of:

"standard daily practices" in all Arab prisons, which he depicted as "man-made hells" where prisoners hang by their ankles and are skinned alive; where savage dogs "rip chunks of living flesh from inmates' bodies"; where torturers tear out their subjects' fingernails and hair, administer electric shocks, hack off body parts, deprive prisoners of food and sleep, and submerge them in dungeons filled with icy water.

Terrific article.

"Lest we forget, while you're writing, you're not living."

Bob Dylan talks to Newsweek about his autobiography, which he did not enjoy writing, because he had to tell the truth straight, unlike in his songs, where he told everything through "symbolism and metaphors."

He says one thing that is very much the way I feel: "I don't think music is ever going to be the same as what it meant to us. You hear it, but you don't hear it." Maybe that's what everyone says when they get old. It's what my parents--thinking back to the Swing Era--said to me in the 1960s when I devoted any stray moment to thinking about what Bob Dylan was saying to me.

By the way, I can't agree with the statement, "while you're writing, you're not living," though I can see how it expresses something about how Bob Dylan felt that writing out the truthful story of his life was dragging him away from his real writing, his songs, thus stealing time out of his life. I think one may quite likely feel most alive while writing, and I would guess that that is true of Bob Dylan when he is writing his songs.

"She travels with her own sommelier."

So says the chef de cuisine of L'Etoile Restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin, who was called out to Spring Green to cook dinner for John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry. He cooked them some tenderloin, medium, and brought some wine to go with it, but, he reports, "she travels with her own sommelier and so they drank their own." Nina, UW's lawprof and L'Etoile's wiry forager, has the whole story here.

UPDATE: Nina's taken down the quote I linked, which makes my blog the end of the line for this nugget of information. Nina emails that the chef was only joking. Think what you will, dear readers.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's a local newspaper article about the local chefs who cooked for John Kerry and his wife during their recent stay in Spring Green, Wisconsin. This article includes a lot of quotes from Patrick O’Halloran, the owner of Lombardino's, a restaurant that is a few blocks from where I'm blogging: "After a Secret Service background check, the campaign put O’Halloran up at the House on the Rock Resort, while Kerry stayed in a condominium up the road." O’Halloran, not the chef quoted in the title of this post, prepared most of the meals for the candidate. Foods the article indicates the Senator likes: lamb, roasted chicken, rabbit, duck, beef barley soup, and chicken noodle soup, and, generally, "straightforward food ... nothing too fancy." O'Halloran says that Kerry made a point of meeting with him and “He was really, really nice, a sweet guy. He said he really enjoyed everything and shook my hand.” By contrast, the L'Etoile chef, who is mentioned, does not serve up dishy quotes. Nice detail: Kerry was barefoot during the meeting.

ALSO: That article says Kerry's favorite food is mashed potatoes. Not potatoes Lyonnaise anything French, now, you hear? So just forget that part about the sommelier! He likes straightforward food--mashed potatoes and plain roast meat. He goes barefoot indoors. He's not French! Nothing French here! Now, move along.

BUT YET: Rabbit???

Overhearing the Kerry/Bush debate again.

Chris is rewatching the presidential debate, and I'm just overhearing it. Hearing and not seeing can be instructive, especially if you pay attention. One often hears it said that those who listened to the Nixon/Kennedy debates on the radio in 1960 thought Nixon won. I remember listening to the Iran Contra hearings on the radio when Oliver North began his testimony and finding it not very impressive. Then I sat down to watch the testimony on TV for a few minutes, and I immediately saw how compelling the man was.

But I'm not really paying much attention to the debate right now. Nothing stands out in the difference between the two candidates in the sound-only mode. I did notice that Kerry pronounces Colin Powell's name wrong. Is that out of ignorance or disrespect?

On not watching the Feingold-Michels debate last night.

I was planning to serve up some juicy observations on the second biggest political debate of the week (as seen from Wisconsin): the big Tim Michels/Russ Feingold debate that aired last night. But I got a late start watching the TiVo'd debate, and I fell asleep somewhere in the first few minutes. I was very impressed by Michels' opening statement. The man is a good speaker, very smart and confident, and he knows what he stands for. I'm committed to Russ Feingold out of sheer respect for the virtue of the man. I think he deserves to keep his place in the Senate. I disagree with a lot of his positions (a lot!) but I want his voice in the mix. Still, I will watch the whole debate and give Michels a shot at winning me over. I didn't follow the primary, and I had just assumed the Republican candidate would not be able to compare to Feingold, but Michels looked pretty impressive, right before I lost consciousness.

So why did I wait until so late to start watching? Well, first I called my sister and had a long talk with her about the after-effects of the hurricanes. She lives in Apopka, Florida, near Orlando. Nothing major happened to her property, but there are a lot of branches on the ground and in the pool. Hey, it takes a long time to talk about that. And her son, Cliff Kresge, was playing the last few rounds of golf at the Southern Farm Bureau Classic. He needed to make up one stroke to make the cut, then he got an eagle, and we were thrilled. With an extra stroke cushion inside the cut, he had two more holes to play. He made par on the second to the last hole. Then on the final hole, he had a nine-foot putt to make par. And I said, "But he doesn't have to make par to make the cut." She responds, "Oh nooo! They moved the cut! The cut is four under now!" She was watching on PGA Tourcast, an internet service that lets you follow each stroke of any player as it occurs, well before it shows up on the scorecard that I watch. Oh! He misses the putt and thus misses the cut. Damn! Remember how great we felt when he got the eagle?

Then, I wanted to watch the newly TiVo'd episode of "Joan of Arcadia." I love "Joan of Arcadia" and have since the first episode last fall. Amber Tamblyn is a fascinating actress. Sometimes I see Sally Field in her, especially in the sound of her voice. One story line this fall that's driving me up the wall and ought to be driving any lawyer up the wall (if lawyers are watching), is the lawsuit brought by the driver of the car that crashed and left Joan's brother Kevin paralyzed. The driver, Kevin's former best friend, is trying to hold Kevin liable for not stopping him from driving that night. The friend's only injuries are emotional. The family is forever going on about how bad it is for the ex-friend to sue them when they refrained from suing him. Quite aside from what theory would allow suit against Kevin's parents in addition to Kevin, why doesn't anyone ever talk about a counterclaim! If you refrain from suing someone, but then they go ahead and sue you, that's the end of your restraint and time to assert the counterclaim. That's the reason, aside from the ethics the show likes to agonize over, that the ex-friend should have refrained from suing Kevin. Kevin hadn't sued him yet, but if you sue, he will bring his counterclaim, and his damages are far, far greater. And what jury will feel moved to make Kevin pay the physically uninjured ex-friend? Bringing the lawsuit was not just an ethical lapse by the ex-friend, it is also a financially disastrous attempt at selfishness. Oh, okay, I know ... when lawyers watch television ... I'll pretend not to notice such things and enjoy the rest of the show.

I also watched a few minutes of "Lost," which I'd TiVo'd largely based on Television Without Pity's high grade last week. The actors seemed to have all been chosen for their good looks. Not only was the acting bad, but it was also impossible to believe these people just happened to get on a plane together. I know plane crashes are very unlikely, but it seems far more unlikely that a plane would happen to have nothing but good looking people on board.

So "Lost," didn't detain me long, but nevertheless, I did not get very far into the big Senatorial debate. I will update here later with a better report.

"The right-wing blogs apparently went nuts with disappointment."

On "The Daily Show" last night after the debate, Jon Stewart interviewed Wesley Clark, who was speaking from the spin room in Coral Gables. Stewart asked Clark whether he sensed "a certain disappointment" among Bush's people. Clark came out with this:

Well, first of all the right-wing blogs apparently went nuts with disappointment about Bush's performance early on in the debate. And now there's all kinds of efforts to find ways in which John Kerry might have misstated something...

Was Clark reading blogs during the debate? Were Bush's people monitoring blogs to try to figure out how to do their spin?

You had to hear the contemptuous tone in Clark's voice when he said the word "blogs." But if he were a blog, he'd have links for that statement. Which blogs is he talking about? The simulblogging at The Corner seems happy enough a half hour into the debate.

UPDATE: An emailer writes:

Being a right-wing crank, myself, I read a lot of weblogs that I think fall into the right-wing camp, and I don't/didn't see that - Heck, Hugh Hewitt (I mean, Hugh's blog just has to be right-wing) was calling it a Bush victory in the early innings. The Northern Alliance and the Corner (NRO) were seeing it as either even or slightly pro-Bush. On the other hand, General Clark is usually speaking from an alternate reality, so maybe. ...

IMPORTANT CORRECTION UPDATE: I had the title to this post as "all the right-wing blogs apparently went nuts with disappointment," which was an incorrect way to pull out a segment of the quote, which began: "first of all the right-wing blogs apparently went nuts with disappointment..." Obviously, the "all" is part of the phrase "first of all," so I've deleted "all" from the title. I don't think the meaning is really changed, but it is somewhat less emphatic done correctly. Sorry.

Now you're really fired.

A couple days ago, I wrote about the incident on this week's "The Apprentice," in which the contestant who was fired expressed hostility to two restaurant customers, whom she referred to more than once as "two old Jewish women." Now, WNBC News reports:

An official with the Manhattan firm where [Jennifer] Crisafulli was a real estate agent told the Times-Union of Albany that she would not be welcomed back because of comments she made on Wednesday night's episode of "The Apprentice."

Crisafulli -- an Albany native living in Manhattan -- made remarks that were perceived by some as anti-Semitic. She has said she did not mean to offend.

That is a real danger of appearing on a reality show. Not to excuse Jennifer's remarks, but I feel a bit sorry for her. She lost control over how she would be edited and used to advance the story, and this version of her, crafted for entertainment value, was seen by millions of people. And there's little she can do to fix her reputation.

"I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged."

Justice Scalia is quite good at getting press coverage, isn't he? I was going to complain the other day that he keeps getting press write-ups for saying things that he always says, but I've got to hand it to him: he came up with a new one this time. I don't have the text of the whole speech, but I see from the article that he was "challenged about his views on sexual morality," after giving a talk at Harvard, and I assume his talk said the usual things about how judges need to follow the Constitution as it is written and not turn it into a vehicle for imposing their own values on everyone. That position naturally leads to the question he was asked at Harvard, which is, don't you really have that conservative morality that your opinions, limiting the scope of constitutional rights, allow states to impose on people? Don't your constitutional opinions thus work for you as a vehicle to get what you want because, by finding no constitutional rights in a particular area (such as gay rights or abortion rights), you are leaving in place state laws that do things that you like? His response, which I take to be somewhat jocose, essentially says: I may very well approve of all sorts of things things that would shock you. You don't know me, because I don't reveal what I personally think through my constitutional law opinions.

UPDATE: The AP version of the story sledgehammers that Scalia was, as indicated above, being jocose.

Debate style.

Go somewhere else if you want substance. This post is about style.

Both candidates were different from their usual selves at the debate last night. Kerry had his skin-tone properly readjusted for the TV cameras, and his hair was less obtrusive than usual, less bulbous, leaving his long, lean face looking razor-sharp. He often laughed when Bush was speaking, which was just one of a number of things that made him seem well-rested and completely up for the debate. His voice sounded better than usual, crisper in a way that makes me less likely to write "intoned" or "oratorical" and words like that.

I think the time restrictions helped Kerry a lot, even if he's the one who didn't like them. And those three little lights on the front of the lectern helped too: you knew they would come on, and when the first one came on, your heart lifted, you knew he would stop, and that made it much less likely that you'd start thinking "When is he ever going to stop?"

(By the way, that lectern was awfully ugly. It's fine to use wood, but pick something other than oak, with its offensively loud grain pattern. And did the lectern need to be so bulky? The candidates looked like they were packed into big boxes. And speaking of the set: who picked out that garish old-fashioned eagle with the banner in its beak? Ridiculous patriotism kitsch! I wonder if the 32-page debate agreement provided that the eagle would face Kerry rather than Bush.)

Bush was different from his usual self in that he lacked much if any of the impishness and humor that he displays at campaign stops. He seemed irritated and annoyed, as I wrote last night, and others have written. Yet if he had displayed his usual light-hearted facial expressions, people would have accused him of smirking, of not taking a sober enough attitude toward the deadly serious matters of war and security. Chimp analogies would have been made. So even as Kerry seemed lighter than normal, Bush seemed heavier than normal. And he looked tired, as some have noted.

Why was Bush so much more tired than Kerry? Maybe because his regular job is far more taxing than Kerry's. How much effort does Kerry put in at his Senator post these days? Bush is and should be preoccupied with his duties as President, and if he looked too well-rested we might say he's just trotting around campaigning and not taking his role as President appropriately seriously. He let it show last night that he didn't like having to stop by and share the stage with the Senator, and he'll have to forfeit a few style points for that.

UPDATE: An emailer writes:

[Y]our comments about Bush seeming more tired and maybe having a harder job got me thinking about something else I'd read today: There was a pretty big assault on Samarra last night that probably was happening during the debate. Could that have been on Bush's mind? Could the reality of what he had probably authorized (that was happening right then) vs. the theater of the debate been weighing on him? Some wouldn't want to give him the credit, but personally I think that's silly. Anyway, it seems plausible. I kind of liked the anger and the passion he showed. Seemed more like the way a real person would behave - like how I would be if I was defending my family from something deadly and someone came along and told me I didn't know what I was doing.

ADDED: At some point, a President would have to cancel the debate. At some point a President shouldn't be out campaigning at all. But if the demands of office are invoked, the opponent will respond with predictable criticisms. The derisive phrase "Rose Garden strategy" will be deployed, and the strategy itself has a bad track record:

Jimmy Carter complained President Ford was using [a "Rose Garden strategy"] in 1976. That year, Ford basked in the glory of the White House, signing bills, making pronouncements, getting free publicity, while Carter had to fight for attention. Carter used the same Rose Garden tactic four years later; They both lost.

"Wrong war, wrong time, wrong place."

"Wrong" was the key word in last night's debate.
President Bush threw Kerry's phrase "wrong war, wrong time, wrong place" in Kerry's face six times. Bush was intent on saying that this recent Kerry campaign mantra is the wrong message for a President to send to the troops and to the world. This was, in fact, Bush's most prominent point, and he, characteristically, stayed doggedly on message throughout the night. Harping on Kerry's recent, heavyhanded anti-war message, rather than on the usual "Kerry's a flip-flopper" was an effective strategy.

At one point, Kerry came out with a line I suspect was preplanned: "I've had one position, one consistent position: that Saddam Hussein was a threat, there was a right way to disarm him and a wrong way. And the president chose the wrong way."

"Wrong way"? Yes, I remember when "wrong way" was Kerry's catchphrase, but for most people focusing on the debate last night, what would be echoing in our heads is "wrong war, wrong time, wrong place," and that is far different from merely the "wrong way," the phrase Kerry uses to explain his various conflicting votes and statements about the war. "Wrong way" is the defense against the inconsistency charge, but Kerry's own words "wrong war, wrong time, wrong place" destroy the sense of the old "wrong way" explanation.

My first Blogad ... Hawaii.

One of my blogging specialties has always been, as my subtitle above says, "the way things look from Madison, Wisconsin." Now, I seem to be all about Hawaii! Well, what a pretty little ad. Welcome, sponsor.

Myself, I've never been to Hawaii, but, to continue the theme of my previous post--me in 1960 at the age of nine: like a lot of people, I loved Hawaii, back then, when it was getting so much attention for becoming a state. I had a distorted perception of the United States, back then when Alaska and Hawaii entered the union. For one thing, a few years before Hawaii became a state, I heard someone talking about prospective statehood say, "I hear Hawaii is coming in." I thought the islands were literally moving toward the west coast and would attach themselves to the mainland! I added this knowledge to my unreliable knowledge bank. And I contemplated the knowledge and analyzed things, I came up with the notion that year by year, new places would become states. Every place, I assumed, was lining up to join the United States. One year, Alaska, next year, Hawaii. I thought it was too bad it would take so long, what with only one new state per year. Why, it would take fifty years to add fifty more states. Too bad we couldn't go faster.

In third grade, I had a teacher we all adored, Mrs. Lynam, and she had recently taught school in Hawaii. So she was always talking about Hawaii, having us make Kleenex into flowers to string into leis, teaching us the hula, and generally giving us the impression that fulfillment in life had to do with getting to Hawaii. Yet, after all these years, I remain unfulfilled. Nevertheless, I'm gratified to get such a pleasing image for the first ad.

Who won?

When I was nine years old, I watched Nixon and Kennedy debate. I barely had any understanding of what anything was at that time in my life. I remember reading newspaper headlines and puzzling over who this Krushchev was. Somehow I thought Tchaikovsky was the same person. Basically, nothing political made any sense to me. But I got the feeling that the debate was important. My parents--who almost never watched television--watched it intently. So I watched too. Somehow I thought I understood it enough to see that it was a competition, and when it was over, I asked my parents, "Who won?" With their usual amusement at the inadequate comprehension of children, they informed me--making me embarrassed for thinking in such childish terms--that it wasn't the sort of thing that anyone actually won. I hated feeling embarrassed and resolved to try to figure out what the hell the world was all about. Politics was something these adults had a handle on, and I had better get up to speed if I wanted to avoid the dreaded, humiliating condition of embarrassment. Forty-four years later, I hear other people going on and on about who won the presidential debate, and I wish I could send a message back to my nine-year-old self, that lots of people, plenty of whom are adults, think it is a game to be won or lost. I can't do that, but I can turn off the horrible spinning that follows the debate, the embarrassing assertions of partisans hoping to to affect the minds of those who might somehow find themselves in the condition that I found myself in when I was nine years old and looked to the nearest authority figures to tell me who won.

UPDATE; Rereading this post Friday morning miraculously revived an old memory. "Somehow I thought I understood it enough to see that it was a competition," I wrote. But now I remember why I thought that. It wasn't that I was able to perceive that the two men were in a winnable competition, it was that I had heard the commentators speaking over and over about who would win, just as commentators spoke about last night's debate. I aspired to grown-up understanding when I was nine, and I especially wanted my parents to give me credit for it. So I thought I was pretty precocious when I said "Who won?" I was saying what the people on TV were saying, feeling certain that I was speaking like an adult. My parents' instant rejection of my attempt at adulthood was crushing, and I realized that this adulthood business was going to be hard: there was some discrepancy between what the people on TV were saying and what the adults I depended on understood to be true. Embarrassed and bewildered as I was at the time, I can see now that they were teaching a lesson about consuming media that remains useful to this day.

My take on the big debate.

I watched the big debate live, without benefit of TiVo pausing, and that means I can't give the impression of simulblogging here. I will admit that I nodded off at one point, somewhere right before the closing statements. I will say that I was watching along with one of my sons, who wanted to watch the post-show on MSNBC with Chris Matthews, and that when I saw Ron Reagan Jr. was one of the commentators, I grabbed my laptop and ran out of the room. I put on FoxNews in my bedroom, and I ran a hot bath. I listened to a bit of Brit Hume's post-show as I took that hot bath and tried to think if I had anything helpful to add to the whirlpool of post-debate spin.

I thought both men held their ground. Senator Kerry put on a more polished show, while Bush seemed to struggle to contain his passion. At times, when Kerry spoke and the camera showed President Bush, I thought Bush looked truly incensed. I said, more than once, "Bush looks like he hates Kerry." I didn't listen to enough of the post-debate spin to hear how much people may have said that Kerry threw Bush off; but to me, Bush seemed to be overwhelmed with feeling, maybe even haunted by knowledge of what he had been through and resentful that Kerry would challenge him. Bush often paused for a disturbingly long time while speaking. Kerry misspoke and bumbled at times, but never, I think, because of any real feeling that gripped him. Kerry seemed aware that this was his big chance to make a move toward victory, and he did what he needed to do. Bush seemed put upon, genuinely irritated that he should be asked to account for himself. Kerry seemed to engage with the opportunity presented by the debate, while Bush seemed more annoyed that his hard work these last four years had not been understood and appreciated.

The nerd's brain.

A nice, nerdy girl is tested for coolness by brain-mapping scientists, told she's somehow especially cool, but later they call her back and say, no, really she's not. Though the heading of the article gushes about brain studies--"why brain mapping is the new trend spotting (and the hottest trend in brain science)"--the author's conclusion feels quite different:

Even in carefully focused studies, however, there's still the problem of what is actually being seen. For example, no one really knows what it means when the amygdala - the brain's emotion processor and one of its most studied regions - lights up. Is it recognizing fear, anger, or happiness? Or deciding how to respond to it? Or is it merely deciding whether to respond? Despite the new fMRI technology, cognitive function remains a black box. At this point, researchers can't even say for certain whether the amygdala is activated primarily by aggression or equally by emotions like despair and joy.

The sentimentalists among us may rejoice that the human mind is still a mystery.

Side point: If you cover yourself with enough tattoos, you may not be able to have an MRI, because "tattoo ink contains trace amounts of metal, which can act like tiny lightning rods in the strong magnetic field of an MRI machine."

Surprising student email of the day.

I have an album coming out in the Spring, and I sampled part of your Fed Jur lectures.

Would you like to hear? The album will be released in both Europe and the US. A few majors have approached us, but we have declined.

Permission to quote the email was granted, along with the request to plug the group's name: Cougar.

Restaurants and WiFi.

There's a restaurant I like on State Street where sometimes I've picked up a WiFi signal and sometimes not. Today, I opened my laptop and checked for the signal before ordering. If I had not picked up a signal, I would have gone to the place next door, which always has WiFi.

The rule is: casual restaurants need to have WiFi.

Justices' names to appear in the oral argument transcripts.

It's about time. Since we're already listening to recordings of the arguments, the identity of the Justices is hardly disguised. It was sometimes diverting to try to recognize the voices. I could always tell O'Connor, Ginsburg, Rehnquist, Breyer, and (if only he ever spoke) Thomas. But Scalia, Souter, and Stevens were a little hard to tell apart from the voice alone.

Kerry fades out of Wisconsin.

Slate's "Election Scorecard" map shows Wisconsin in solid red now. And here's the local paper's coverage of Kerry taking his leave of Wisconsin yesterday:

His mid-afternoon departure Wednesday drew fans and detractors along the 50-plus mile motorcade route from the resort to the airport. About 100 people cheered him at an intersection in Dodgeville, and supporters near a farm implement dealer along Highway 18-151 in Iowa County held up three large signs that said "DeBate," "DeBunk" and "duh- Bush."

Elsewhere, a farmer gave the motorcade a double-fisted middle-finger salute, and on Stoughton Road in Madison, the motorcade passed the local headquarters of the Bush campaign, where a Bush supporter was dressed like a giant flip- flop. Kerry has been accused of changing his positions on issues.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Gordon Smith stopped in at Shubert's, the folksy Mount Horeb restaurant where Kerry did a photo op on Sunday. Gordon is struck by the framed photograph, dating back to 1960, of John Kennedy [visiting Shubert's], which is hanging just inside the front entrance:

Conspicuously absent from the restaurant was any evidence of Kerry's recent visit. Not even a photo from Monday's newspaper. As I paid my bill, I prompted the owner for some thoughts on Kerry's visit. He responded with obvious disdain, "Lots of television cameras."

When a local business owner who's maintained a shrine to Kennedy for 44 years feels no glow from your visit there two days ago, you've got a problem.

The death of a voice.

How many, many hours we spent listening to the voice of Scott Muni. He was there in the early and mid 1960s, alongside Cousin Brucie, on WABC-AM, playing the Top 40 singles of that era, pop songs that can never be equaled. Looking back, I feel lucky to have been an adolescent in those days and to have those songs playing in my head for a lifetime. In 1966, he was the voice of the new FM radio on WOR-FM and then WNEW-FM, back when terms like "progressive radio" and "underground radio" were in vogue.

From the NYT obituary:

"Scott was the heart and soul of the place," said Dennis Elsas, who was hired by Mr. Muni and became WNEW-FM's music director; he is now a disc jockey at WFUV. "We were all kind of making it up as we went along."

Musicians were constant guests at the station. During one interview, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin collapsed in mid-sentence; Mr. Muni played an album, revived the guitarist and finished the interview with Mr. Page lying on the floor. In another interview, Mr. Muni played cards on the air with members of the Grateful Dead.

Thanks for everything, Scott!

Race, anti-Semitism, and sex on "The Apprentice."

"The Apprentice" last night began with a gesture at solving what some perceive as the show's race problem, by running a long clip of Kevin (the only remaining black contestant) mildly ranting at the women when they return from the boardroom, where last week they achieved the end of their conspiracy to oust Stacie J. (the other black contestant this season). Kevin does not mention race, but since he's black, it quite clearly seems intended that we should read his scolding as criticizing the women's team for racism. But, neatly, the show does not have to take any responsibility for actually calling anyone racist.

Later in the show, Jennifer is fired, after doing any number of stupid and irritating things. Because Jennifer has made herself such an obvious target for firing, Trump fires her without ever calling on Stacy R. to tell the tale of how Jennifer detested two elderly women customers at the team's restaurant and repeatedly called them "two old Jewish women." Stacy R., who identifies herself as Jewish, is righteously irked, and when Jennifer, this week's team leader, picks Stacy R. as one of the two women who will join her in the boardroom in the end, we see Stacy R. reacting with a knowing smile and a little nod. During the commercial, we anticipate Stacy R. accusing Jennifer of anti-Semitism, but we never do hear it. I'm sure it was said, but edited out. Maybe we'll hear it if there's an extended boardroom show over the weekend, but I'm thinking the show's producers think they must walk a fine line, showing the antagonism among the contestants, including some behavior we may easily interpret as racist or anti-Semitic and allowing us to see the offenders punished in some way, but editing out the inflammatory labels.

Meanwhile, the show's woman problem rages on. Here's Prof. Yin's take. Miss Alli shows no pity as she scoffs that the women are "sure to have an easy time ... now that the bothersome troublemaker has been banished." The women are an awful group who seem to beg us to think all sorts of bad things about women. The men are a much more appealing group. On the positive side, at least it was the men this week, not the women, who decided to use their sexuality to win. Well, maybe the women did it a bit too, by wearing little black dresses as they milled around in the restaurant, looking like extras in a Robert Palmer video on a break. (I love the way the men all agreed who among them was the best looking. Would women ever do that?)

Oh, the poor clueless women! They are trying to use their prettiness the way the women last season did quite successfully. And they all dressed alike this time, and that worked so well for the boys the time they all put on bow ties and sold ice cream. Their real problem is a complete failure ever to come up with a single creative idea or even to notice that they should. Then they resort to the short-term strategy of attacking each other to get someone fired, which only makes things uglier when they go back to their rooms. Next week, Pamela, the woman who early on was sent to the men's team, is reunited with the women. Hopefully, she'll change the dynamic in some exciting new way--maybe by pointing out exactly how awful they all are.

A new TV arrives, DVDs are deployed to test its quality, and, a propos of Kerry's new tan, the subject of disease perceived as health is discussed.

As noted a while back, my old television gave up on the color red, and I ordered a Sony HDTV. Waiting for it to be delivered, I kept watching my old TV, where everything was green and yellow and blue and gray and black. When I wrote about Kerry's new orange spray-on tan yesterday, an emailer reminded me that I wouldn't be seeing it on my TV. That would have been true, except that my new TV arrived today, via Sony's free premium delivery service, which entailed two nice young men taking the set out of the box outside, bringing just the set in, and putting it in its place in the big room. They did a great job delivering the TV, even introducing themselves and shaking my hand after I answered the door. They didn't have to, but they did take out my big old broken TV, which became a topic of conversation:

Does it work?

It just doesn't have any red. It might be good for someone who only likes very old things, things in black and white.

Or colorblind. My uncle is colorblind.

I think the TV could help noncolorblind people see what it's like to be colorblind.

I can test that on my uncle -- if he's the right kind of colorblind.

Assuming there is a form of colorblindness where you just can't see red, my TV would let a normally sighted person see what that was like. And I assume for that colorblind person, my TV would be the same as a color TV. But it's hard to think what kind of an impression my bad TV would have on someone with the more common sort of red-green colorblindness, where red and green look the same. I think if I were partially colorblind, I might prefer to turn the color off altogether and watch in black and white. Yet I did not do that with my bad TV. For some strange reason I preferred the wrong color, even though a black and white picture was more aesthetic.

When I got all the stray cords hooked up into reasonable places in the back of the new TV--ignoring for now the weird new things like card slots--I wanted to test the picture with a DVD. I picked "Apocalypse Now" and got all mesmerized. Chris took over and tested the TV with DVDs of:

"The Birds"
"8 1/2"
"Moulin Rouge"
"Titanic"
"Ghost World"
"The Two Towers"
"Mulholland Drive"
"Tori Amos: Welcome to Sunny Florida"
"The Sopranos"
"Labyrinth"
"The Cranes Are Flying"
"Spirited Away"
"Blue Velvet"

The picture was pronounced spectacular. The built-in sound--carefully checked in the engine room scene in "Titanic," right after the iceberg is hit--was declared superior to the separate speakers we used with the old TV.

So--in short--I will be monitoring the debate tomorrow night in thoroughly beautiful color and excellent sound.

And on that subject of Kerry's getting overtanned for debate purposes: Kerry, like Gore before him, seems to think it's good to be tan for a debate, a belief can be traced to Kennedy's appearance in the 1960 debate. But we know now that Kennedy's tan appearance was in fact a symptom of his Addison's Disease.

The subject of disease perceived as health is an interesting one. Here are three other examples:

1. I remember reading an essay some years ago written by a woman who had been suffering from cancer, who heard many people tell her how great she looked. They were only seeing that she had lost a lot of weight. (Send a link to this essay if you know it.)

2. There is a terrific essay by Oliver Sacks in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" (one of my favorite books), about a 90-year-old woman with syphillis, which she called Cupid's Disease, who enjoyed the lively, tipsy way it made her feel and did not want to be cured: "I know it's an illness but it's made me feel well."

3. In the Tennessee Williams play "The Glass Menagerie," the character Amanda makes having malaria sound fun: "I had malaria fever all that Spring ... just enough to make me restless and giddy."

NYT pronounces UW lawprof "wiry."

It's R.W. Apple writing about the Wisconsin Farmers' Market. The wiry lawprof in question comments on the appellation here.

The last time the NYT called anybody "wiry," it was the cinematographer of film director Wong Kar-wai:

Christopher Doyle, a wiry 50-year-old with bright blue eyes and a shock of mad-scientist hair, simultaneously zoomed out and moved the camera for a kind of reverse corkscrew effect, from closer in to a stopping-point near the ceiling.

That's how wiry cinematographers behave. Nina writes compellingly--here--about why Poles blog so much (twice as much as Americans). Go read that and find out what drives wiry Polish, female, lawprof bloggers.

Links in high places, where readers don't seem to be the click-through type.

Even though I check Sitemeter a lot and see who's linking to this blog and sending traffic this way, I very well might not have noticed that the official Bush campaign blog linked to my "How Kerry lost me" post yesterday. It just didn't produce much traffic. Links yesterday from Volokh and Allahpundit brought more. The most recent link from Instapundit brought much more. Just being the top link on Vodkapundit's "top shelf" brings seems to bring more on a given day. So what's going on? Either few people read the official campaign blog, or the people who do just aren't the click-through type.

Let's assume the people who read the official Bush campaign blog just aren't the type who click through to read the original. My anti-Bush editor snipes: Of course they're not the click-through type! They like their big-picture, incurious George because they too want to be reassured in thinking what they already think and don't want to be troubled by disturbing details!

In fact, the Bush blog chose two paragraphs of my long post and set these out in full. The intro to the first paragraph quoted is:

For months, blogger Ann Althouse was an undecided Wisconsin voter. In this post carefully weighing her decision in November, she reaches the conclusion that John Kerry is simply the wrong choice. First, she remembers being impressed with the Republican National Convention, which offered substance and an agenda for winning the war on terror ...

So the Bush blog reader knows I'm a woman, previously undecided, and from Wisconsin. They don't know I'm a law professor. I just seem to be one of those women voters in a swing state everyone has been talking about. Maybe a soccer mom turned security mom. Later, the Bush blog refers to me as "Ann," not Ms. Althouse or, properly, Professor Althouse.

Was my post "carefully weighing [my] decision ... [and] reach[ing] the conclusion that John Kerry is simply the wrong choice"? No! My post was conceding I'd been expressing a lot of hostility to Kerry lately, then going back over old posts to trace the origin and history of my discontent. I wasn't weighing my decision like a generic voter, I was trying to understand myself and using the resource of my own old blog posts.

Was the first thing I wrote about the Republican National Convention? No, it was the twelfth thing I wrote about!

Did the convention impress me because it "offered substance and an agenda for winning the war on terror"? I never said that. I wrote about being impressed by the passion and conviction about national security as expressed by Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Ron Silver.

The Bush blog quotes only one other paragraph of my post, which was over 25 paragraphs long. I don't mind linkers picking out the paragraphs they like, but if people don't click through and read, they aren't going to see whether those quotes were taken out of context.

UPDATE: Thanks to all who emailed to say they didn't click through from the Bush blog because they had already seen the post as regular readers of this blog. Regularly returning readers are ideal, I think all bloggers would agree.

Blogads!

I've signed up for Blogads. So here's your big chance to be the first to advertise on Althouse!

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 in