"We have to remember that when we vote for our president, a commander in chief, we're voting for the father of our nation."

When actresses try to play the role of feminist.

Madison politics.

I walked up State Street, partly because I needed to get some food and partly because it's sunny and 60 degrees, but also to see what the political climate is here in the center of Madison. The fall colors on Bascom Hill are quite lovely. Look closely to see our beloved Lincoln statue presiding calmly over the scene:



But other Presidents, current and would-be, are on our mind. Shouldn't campus be buzzing with political energy? But, actually, it is not. Nearly the only politics I see are the plentiful chalkings on the sidewalks. There are some pro-Bush chalkings, but most of the chalkings are pro-Kerry (including a few that say: "Kerry '04/Don't be an idiot and vote straight ticket/Vote Green locally"). Here's one of the pithier pro-Kerry ones:



This one tries the same approach, but with less success:



Well, just don't whimper if your man loses.

Down on Library Mall, we see these "Vote" folks:



That's the Memorial Union in the background. From that location, vans run every hour to City Hall, taking students over for some early (and often?) voting. No ID needed! Note the orange-suited man (a local fixture, he plays the piccolo more than a lot of people want to hear piccolo music)

You can buy a "Run for President" game (along with your Badger-themed merchandise):



Here's some political material, in amongst the jumble of kiosk signage:



A lot of the State Street storefronts have "Bucky for President" pictures, colored by children:



Bottom line: the politics of Madison are looking quite mellow today!

"Luce del mondo e amore!"

"The light of the world is love." So ends "Turandot," beautifully produced in Madison this past weekend, with fantastic sets by the great artist David Hockney. Here's a blur of color, shot in the dark, the glorious curtain call:

"

Self-criticism heightened.

I find myself being much more critical about fussy details of writing for my Instapundit posts. For example, when I described Nina's writing as "discursive, digressive," I not only felt the need to look up "discursive"--is it really a word?--before using it, but I also fretted afterwards that "discursive" and "digressive" were redundant. I see I wrote "who," when I should have written "whom" in this one. Damn! And after I wrote "extra-shamelessly," I thought about and even had a conversation with Gordon about how it doesn't make sense to say "extra-shameless," because once you have no shame at all you're "shameless," so how can you have less than no shame?

UPDATE: And, of course, if I'd written "Where are the supporting players?" over there, I'd be really kicking myself, because of the obvious implied statement that I see myself as the star of the "show." Which I don't really ... but if they don't show up soon ... I'm getting a little nervous!

The Instapundit experience so far.

So what's it like scampering onto the big stage? First, I find myself alone. Where are the supporting players? Where are Megan and Michael? Michael posted at 2 am, so at least I'm not worrying that his boat sank. The last time we'd heard from him, he was "sailing to Gig Harbor." He's out there in the Pacific Time Zone, so my guess is, he's just not up yet.

Finding myself alone in a big, unfamiliar place is like something you might have happen in a dream. In fact, I did have a blog-related dream last night. I was sitting alone at a big table in a nice and crowded restaurant, having nothing but a cup of black coffee. The waiter brought the check, charging me $20: $5 for the coffee and $15 for occupying a table that could have been used for customers who would have ordered dinner. I told him if he didn't take the $15 charge off the check, I was going to write about it in my blog. Oh, what? You have more exciting dreams, I suppose?

"Cow head hurts our image, some Cheeseheads say."

Even as I'm debuting on Instapundit, there's another Wisconsin debut today: the Wisconsin state quarter. And some people are not that happy about it.

Guestblogging on Instapundit.

I've made my debut over on Instapundit, working with MovableType rather than Blogger for the first time, which makes it just that much more nervewracking. Do I put my title up in the title spot? Whoops, I think not. I think the form there is to skip titles altogether and capitalize something in the body for a title-like effect. If so, I did it wrong the first time and edited it. I'm really trying not to mess things up!

Ah, I think it was set up to block me from getting a post with a title through, so I didn't start off by embarrassing myself. And now my big first post is up, so go check it out (assuming you haven't already stopped by there, which would be a sensible thing to do).

The big guestblogging gig.

Yes, it's true! I'm going to be guestblogging--along with Megan McArdle and Michael J. Totten--over at Instapundit for the next few days. I'm told I can go over there right now and post, which seems pretty amazing. I'll have to think up something to say! I suppose if I already feel comfortable speaking off the top of my head to a few thousand people a day, I should feel comfortable speaking to a couple hundred thousand people a day. What's the difference, really, in the grand scheme of things?

UPDATE: But stop by here too. I'll post the things here that seem not to belong there, and won't it be interesting to see what I think doesn't belong there? I feel so free over here all of a sudden. I used to have a second blog that I used for the things I felt didn't go so well here, so I'm used to having a two-track attitude about blogging. (That other blog--which you can see here--was largely an experiment with the software iBlog, but I used it to post very casual stuff. Now that the software expired, I can't do anything with that blog, but the funny thing is, I still get email about the post "The Mystery of the Saucer," which upsets some people.)

A writer admires a writer he identifies with.

Tom Carson has a deft essay on Bob Dylan's "Chronicles," in the NYT Book Review. Carson writes elaborate start-and-stop sentences full of interesting ideas. Here are a few that jumped out at me:

Yet the man only had to grow an emaciated ant colony under his nose to get me regressing into speculation about his motives -- or, at any rate, thinking How strange instead of Wow, we're both geezers.

Even more gnomic and less rewarding was those liner notes' unreadable amplification in his ''novel'' -- ah, remember when the term ''novel'' conferred cachet? -- ''Tarantula,'' published in 1971 but written much earlier.

At once naive and wily, the diction summons up the hobbledehoy eagerness, skeptical wit and odd hardscrabble decorum of a half-remembered, half-concocted native idiom with such verve that you can scarcely tell the genuine colloquialisms from the ones he's just made up.

As self-serving as ''Volume One'' is, not to mention coy -- unless I seriously misremember his marital history, the nameless ''my wife'' of 1971 and her 1987 counterpart are two different people -- the sprays of language, cockeyed aphorisms and good anecdotes win out, with highlights ranging from Dylan's spilling the beans that his boyhood dream was to attend West Point to a charming description of the day he met -- and serenaded -- John Wayne in Hawaii, where the Duke was filming ''In Harm's Way.'

Picturing and dreading a long litigious November.

If you want to demonstrate to yourself how mindbogglingly close the election is, refer to the polls in the battleground states here and test out various possibilities on this interactive electoral college map. My election day prayer is: may whoever wins win by a lot.

Enough about the election! What about art?

Two new movies are currently listed on Rotten Tomatoes with 100% positive reviews: "Ray" and "Sideways." There are only 6 reviews for "Ray," but lots of Oscar talk for Jamie Foxx. "Sideways," though has 42 reviews. Truly amazing. And Oscar buzz for Paul Giamatti! When's the last time they gave a Best Actor/Actress Oscar to someone with no sex appeal whatsoever? (Sorry Paul, but isn't having no sex appeal kind of your speciality?)

Yeah, I finally get around to thinking about something other than the election and I'm still thinking in terms of competition. Yikes! I need to readjust my mind, which I will do very soon, because I'm going to the opera in two hours. But perhaps I'll obsessively relate the plot of "Turandot" to the election. I've been known to do such things.

UPDATE: I can't believe I mistyped "Turandot" both here (now corrected) and on Monday's post (also corrected). Thanks to the emailer that pointed it out. And really, I do know the name of the opera, my fingers just go for preexisting patterns when I type. I mistype my own last name about 20% of the time, for some crazy reason. And I mistype "jurisdiction," one of the main subjects I teach, about 40% of the time. Sigh.

Why a goose?

Kerry decided it was a good campaign move to go hunting. But why a goose? Clearly, the campaign people must have thought about all the opportunities it would give writers to use goose clichés, like "goose is cooked," "silly goose," "sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander," "Mother Goose," "loosey-goosey," and "goosed." I see Maureen Dowd is going with "Cooking His Own Goose."

I'm thinking the reasoning was that geese are overplentiful, like deer, but not the subject of any Disney-induced sentimentality. Many people, especially the suburban women who are most likely to object to hunting, have had to vary their usual walking paths because of the problem of goose excrement. And maybe it seems decently sporting to shoot a goose, because it can fly, but it's still easy enough--they are plentiful, large, and stupid--that you're assured of success. And a goose is also clearly an animal most people can comfortably visualize eating, so we aren't going to think he's only hunting to amuse himself.

Did Kerry impress the locals in Ohio (where he desperately needs to win)? Here's a report from the county where the goose-ridden cornfield was located:

Presidential candidate John Kerry made his fifth visit to the Mahoning Valley, this time however, his campaign claims the trip was more recreational than political.

The Senator and several others, including Congressman Ted Strickland, went goose hunting on a farm in Springfield Twp.

After a couple hours trudging through a cornfield, the group emerged as reporters and photographers watched, all of them carrying a goose, except for Kerry, who claimed he was “too lazy” to bring out the bird himself.

He later told reporters he’ll have the goose shipped to his farm near Pittsburgh.

After the hunting excursion, Kerry went to the regional airport in Vienna to board his campaign jet and fly to Columbus for a speech.

Think the locals bought the imagery? After all that cornfield-trudging, what stood out was that he wouldn't carry his own goose--obviously because he didn't want there to be a photograph of himself holding the neck of a limp, dead animal. The reason he gave, laziness, aside from being an easily detectable lie, undercut the whole effort to make him look like a manly, down-to-earth hunter. And not only won't he carry his own dead goose, he's having his people ship it to his Pittsburgh estate, pointing up just how much real estate he owns and how much money he has to spend on lavish extras, unlike the locals who might hunt geese on their own farms.

Who's better at losing?

Instead of thinking about whether John Kerry or George Bush would do more good (and less harm) as President, let's consider the longterm effects on of each candidate's party that would flow from a loss. Which party will do better if it does not hold the Presidency in the next four years? The NYT Week in Review has Adam Nagourney spin out the effects of a Kerry loss and Elisabeth Bumiller does the same with a Bush loss. Interesting set up, but my suspicions of NYT bias lead me to expect that the conclusion will be that the Republican party will greatly benefit from a power time-out, while the Democrats will only stew in a new round of recriminations if they lose again. Conclusion: please, people, give the Dems a turn!

Now, I've actually read the pieces.

Nagourney sees the Democrats plunging into the sort of struggle for self-definition that we saw during the primary season. He quotes an unnamed Democratic consultant:

"Democrats will go back to 'What does it take to win?' - except this time, it will be, 'Oh my God! What does it take to win?'

"There will be a push from the left saying we weren't left enough. And there will be a push from the center saying we weren't center enough."

The Republicans, on the other hand, will not take their loss as a cue to reexmine what they stand for, according to Bumiller, who quotes David Gergen:

"I don't think [great soul-searching within the party] is going to happen. Conservatives will argue that it's not because of our conservatism that we lost. They'll look for scapegoats on the national security team. They'll say the war was a good idea, it was just poorly executed.''

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld would be blamed, Mr. Gergen said, although a victory on Nov. 2 would just as quickly make him a hero. "It's one of those things that you're only a bum if you lose,'' Mr. Gergen said. "Rather than blaming the ideas, they'll blame the people.''

She also quotes Bill Kristol: "We'll fight back. It'll be fun.''

So there you have it. The Republicans, unlike the Democrats, really know what they stand for and as a result, they will handle the loss much more positively. So vote for the Democrat! But knowing what you stand for could also make you better at shouldering the job that you have to take on if you do win. Where do we really want these handwringing, perennial self-redefiners? In power or out?

More campaigning at the niche level.

The Washington Post collects some good examples of candidates campaigning at the niche level, a phenomenon I wrote about here. Most of us are voting based on big issues like national security, but the difference in any given state, that captures that state's electoral votes, could be made by single-issue voters concerned with a micro-issue that is only an insignificant part of what the President's job is about.

Must Jon Stewart change his interview style, now that Henry Kissinger is doing his show?

Damien Cave, in the NYT Week in Review, argues that Jon Stewart should do tougher interviews on "The Daily Show," because his audience is such a large chunk of an important demographic, because he's getting such important guests, and because it's tiresome and lame to keep excusing himself with the "hey, I'm just a comedian" line. Cave quotes Dan Kennedy's Boston Phoenix blog:

"Stewart needs to be more self-aware ... By offering serious media criticism, and then throwing up his hands and saying, in effect, 'Hey, I'm just a comedian' every time [Crossfire's Tucker] Carlson took him on, Stewart came off as slippery and disingenuous. Sorry, Jon, but you can't interview Bill Clinton, Richard Clarke, Bill O'Reilly, Bob Dole, etc., etc., and still say you're just a comedian."

(Can someone justify the NYT practice of not putting hot links in its on-line text? Here's the missing link.)

Cave's piece is titled, "If You Interview Kissinger, Are You Still a Comedian?" The complaint is with the softball interviews, not the blatant pro-Kerry bias that has undercut the comic value of the rest of the show. So let's talk about the interviews.

The interviews on "The Daily Show" have always been filler. I nearly usually skip the excruciating interviews with celebs pitching their (usually horrible) films. Some comically-gifted guests do well with Stewart and can be the best part of the show. As for the political guests, they come on the show to promote a product too, usually a book. Clinton, remember, was selling a book (and also selling his party's candidate for President). But how is Stewart to adapt his style of managing the self-serving promoters who stop by his show to these inherently unfunny politicians? Stewart relies heavily on his shambling, stuttering, I-am-an-idiot pose, while hoping to spot an opportunity for a wisecrack. If he tried to make these interviews more hard-hitting--to Russertize his style--he would likely drive away the high-level guests Cave and Kennedy are talking about, leaving only the most motivated book promoters.

Stewart can preserve the style of interviewing he's worked out for himself, which gives him a safety zone and avoids pretending his background is not the entertainment business. He just needs to resist getting sycophantic with guests whose politics he's motivated to sell. As to the truly high-level guests who aren't there to sell books--such as John Kerry--he's got to put them at ease and be respectful or they won't come on the show at all.

Congratulations, once again ...

... to our Badgers.

Actresses 'n animals.

Two items from SF Gate:

1. "Emmy-winning actress Drea de Matteo is so concerned about the treatment of animals when they fly, she wants to start up her own airline for pets. ... 'We wanna have an airline called Pet Jet. My boyfriend wants to do that. We looked into it. No one else is doing it. I wanna do it.'" Imagine that! No one else is doing it!

2. "Animal lover Pamela Anderson [is] urging Queen Elizabeth II to banish the bear pelt hats her guards wear. .. PETA pal Stella McCartney has already got active on the back of the new campaign -- she has offered to design new hats for the guards, providing samples of fake fur to the Ministry of Defense, which is considering the switch."

Kerry to return to Madison.

A few days ago, I complained that it looked like John Kerry was not going to make good on his promise to returning to Madison and do an appearance at the Capitol Square. But today we found two tickets for his October 28th appearance on the Square on our doorstep. So get ready, Madison, for the big Kerry appearance in Madison five days before the election. I guess Wisconsin is that important.

Reunited with his Iceman.

Helmut Simon, who found a prehistoric man frozen in the ice of the Alps, has been found dead in a stream in the Alps.

"There's no doubt in my mind that radiation at moderate levels is beneficial."

BBC News talks to a UW-Madison scientist.

Sinclair Broadcasting throws together an embarrassing mismash to replace "Stolen Honor."

I watched the Sinclair Broadcasting reconfiguration of the controversial "Stolen Honor" documentary, clumsily titled "A POW Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media." The poor production values make it hard to take the substance of the show seriously. The set is flimsy and chaotic; stiff, uncomfortable-looking veterans sit side-by-side with no table to relax their arms on; the voice-over announcer sounds amateurish; the host looks like he's doing his first screen test; the camera quality is at a sub-local-news level; the screen is often cluttered with computer graphics that look as if they belong on community access TV. The material from "Stolen Honor" takes up only a few minutes at the beginning, and the rest of the show is a padded mishmash. The JibJab video is thrown in, along with stock footage of bloggers at the convention. We're given a quick refresher on the McCain-Feingold law and a rehash of the Texas Air National Guard material about Bush. There's a segment on political protest demonstrations. The program ends with a Sinclair Broadcasting statement--words that appear on screen and are read to us by a pompous announcer--informing us of complaints have been filed against Sinclair with the FCC and encouraging us to let the FCC know about Sinclair's First Amendment rights.

What a shabbily thrown-together program! Either they should have shown "Stolen Honor" as originally planned or stuck with their regular programming. What an embarrassment! The best part of the whole show was the "No soup for you" commercial for ConsumerFreedom.com -- which aired twice. You can see the commercial at the link. You can see the original "Stolen Honor" documentary (for a price) here.

Checking in with Tommy.

I read the the NYT "Fashion & Style" article about Tommy Lee. Here's a list of things I learned:

Why the spousal abuse that made Pamela Anderson call the police and led him to plead guilty wasn't, per Tommy, really as bad as you might think: he was wearing Ugg slippers when he kicked her.

What jail was like for Tommy: as a celebrity, he was put in "a K-10, a keep-away ... so you're ... in solitary, basically, for months."

What Tommy said to himself while in solitary confinement: "I'm going to take advantage of the silence in prison and just chill and check in with Tommy."

Name of the memoir that emerged from his period of reflection, which is also the name of his house: "Tommyland."

Additional product of his voyage of personal transformation, because a memoir is no longer enough for a celebrity of a certain dimension: a six-part network reality show, in which he goes to college at the University of Nebraska.

How the NYT indicates that the word Tommy Lee just used was not "dating": "the term he used was a bit more brusque."

Crude expression the Times doesn't mind using: "the career is in the toilet."

Person Tommy is considering working with who has toilet problems of his own: Lenny Kravitz.

Quote from a professor: "You lose whatever identity you have and become an appendage of Pam Anderson, or an appendage of all the infinite references to your name. You become the empty center of all those references."

Quote from Tommy: "I was like, dude, I've done it all. There's really nothing else to do. I mean, unless they come out with something new I haven't tried. Which I doubt."

What's with bleak tone this morning?

And 5 posts before 7 a.m.? What's got into you? I don't know, but I will say I got up at 1:30 a.m. this morning. I've been up for 6 hours and it still isn't light out. It's a dark, rainy morning here in Madison, Wisconsin. (Did I mention I'm in Madison?) It's homecoming day. Jubilant Badger fans will descend on my little neighborhood momentarily. The firecrackers that topped off Friday's revelries were heard late into the night. Let's hope the Badgers play well in rain. We're playing the Wildcats. I'm not a sports fan, but I find it aesthetically appealing when the teams are named after animals that you can actually picture fighting. Badgers should be playing Wildcats, not Buckeyes and Boilermakers (whatever those might be).

UPDATE: I was taking a much needed nap at around 9 in the morning when the phone rang. I jumped awake and grabbed the phone and said "hello" a couple times to a dead line. Then a voice barks: "I'm Ann Richards, former Governor of Texas ..." Yeah, I know, you just called me last night. Don't you have anything better to do with George Soros's money? I have been called every damn day to be told to register to vote, to work to register other people to vote, to vote, or to work to get out the vote. Since yesterday, I've been getting the special appeal to women form of the get-out-the-vote nagging. Leave me alone! Don't you know that I'm on the do-not-call list and I would block your call if you bastards hadn't exempted yourselves? Don't you know that I needed that nap?

The final abduction.

Death comes to Betty Hill, who started the alien abduction craze with her 1966 book "The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours 'Aboard a Flying Saucer'" Estelle Parsons played her in the 1975 movie "The UFO Incident."

Thanks, Betty, for your stunning and original contribution to American popular mythology. To your fertile mind, we owe so many cultural manifestations, from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" to that "South Park" episode.

Caroline Kennedy comes to Wisconsin.

The Capital Times reports on Caroline Kennedy's visit to Milwaukee (where she appeared with Kerry):

"My mother always told me, if it weren't for Wisconsin, President Kennedy would never have made it to the White House. And now you're going to do the exact same thing for John Kerry," said Kennedy, daughter of the late president.

If there was one topic Jackie couldn't stop talking about, it was Wisconsin. Are we supposed to be so desperately fixated on the Kennedys that we should want to vote for Kerry on the theory that, in some convoluted way, it will make Jackie happy?

New snake in Wisconsin.

That reptile you think is a garter snake may need a new name and a new layer of governmental protection.

And speaking of bleak ...

Congratulations to Bleecker:

UW scientist at center of fall leaf buzz ... This week, botany professor Tony Bleecker was honored with the 2004 Distinguished Researcher Award from the International Plant Growth Substances Association, primarily for his discovery of the hormone mechanism responsible for everything from helping push seeds out of the soil to causing leaves to separate from their branches and fall.

That reminds me of the long minutes spent in my high school English class, prodded by the same teacher referred to somewhere in here, trying to puzzle out the meaning of this:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Late night DVD ordering.

In an insomniac moment, I bought this. Which I'm going to double feature with this. (On DVD as part of this set.) For those who like the great-actor-alone-in-a-room genre and are in search of a bleak way to fill up the time as the political season stumbles to a close.

Feingold versus Michels.

What, no "Joan of Arcadia"? N0! It's Senator Russ Feingold against Tim Michels, in a big debate. The crawl under their faces tries to appease "Joan" fans (like me!). They'll run the new "Joan" some time late at night over the weekend.

The first question is about the the Patriot Act. The phrase "lone vote against" is inevitable. The format is informal, so both candidates try to take the floor. Michels gets control of the floor. Feingold shrugs and lets Michels run with it. Michels reminds me of Bill Murray. He's an attractive candidate. But Feingold is an institution. When Michels is done, Feingold says: "I took an oath to the Constitution ... and that wasn't an oath of convenience." Oh, now that I've said Michels reminds me of Bill Murray, I've got to be fair. Feingold reminds me of Soupy Sales! Nice debate. Nice debate format. But I'm going to vote to return Feingold to the Senate. Sorry, Tim.

Getting out the vote: the motivation and the pitch.

It is interesting to see how niches of voters within a given battleground state are being targeted and cultivated. Here's a story I heard on on Wisconsin Public Radio this morning about the get-out-the-vote effort on Indian reservations in Wisconsin ("Sovereign Tribes a Maverick in Coming Election"). Note that what the persons conducting the effort say they care about is ending the war quickly--and they support Kerry for this reason--but as they go around to varous potential voters, the pitch they make is about tribal sovereignty. Perhaps Wisconsin's ten electoral votes will determine the outcome of this election, and maybe this niche of voters will make the difference. How many other niches like this are being targeted and cultivated? The problem of low visibility niche targeting in battleground states seems to me to be the strongest argument for abolishing the Electoral College and moving to a national vote.

Is Kerry really the stronger candidate on the issue of tribal sovereignty? In that radio story, the get-out-the-vote people going door-to-door are heard saying, "He's got a 20 year record of working with tribes on a sovereign basis." But is that saying anything of substance? I tried to figure out which candidate has a stronger position on tribal sovereignty, but I couldn't find anything on either candidate's website. I do know Bush has an embarrassing sound bite on the subject. According to the Native American Times:

The Kerry campaign [after Bush's embarrassing sound bite] issued a release criticizing Bush’s comments and touting the endorsement they have received from national tribal officials.

"I am proud to receive the endorsement of tribal and community leaders from around the country," said Kerry. "Our Native Americans for Kerry-Edwards effort continues to grow every day and these leaders will play a critical role in helping to energize, organize and mobilize the Native American community as we head towards November 2nd."

In other words, Kerry sees Native Americans as a rich source of votes. I like the way the Native American Times article ends with this savvy comment from a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe:

"From what I read the Democrats are concerned that Bush left out one or two things that they thought were important. Well, the Democrats also leave one or two words out of their speeches. I don’t think the Democrats know any more about sovereignty than Republicans do,” he said. “ I think both parties are reaching out to include Native Americans-and why wouldn’t they? The Republicans are reaching out just like the Democrats.”

One answer to my fears about niche targeting and cultivation may be that people are actually pretty good at detecting political manipulation.

Walking backwards for 12 blocks for Kerry.

A Madison-style protest. (I need to get down to State Street more often. Sorry I missed photographing this one!)

"What we have found here is very rare."

What they have found is, in fact, a toilet. The most famous toilet in the history of the world!

Coming to terms with the "La Dolce Vita" DVD.

I've complained about subtitles before. I like to fixate on the photography of a movie and constantly moving my eyes to the bottom of the screen is quite irritating. I don't mind reading. I spend much of the day reading. But I go to the movie theater to look at the moving pictures. If the pictures are worth looking at, they are worth feeling resentful about being compelled to look away from. There is a special problem with DVD if you have a widescreen television and a widescreen movie. The subtitles are placed on what would be a black band on an ordinary TV. On a widescreen TV, they are off the screen unless you size the movie image so that it has fairly wide black bands on the sides as well as the top and bottom!

I was trying to watch my new DVD of "La Dolce Vita" yesterday. The photography is very beautiful, and I just wanted to stare at it, so I was already annoyed by having subtitles, but it's also a very widescreen picture, and I was forced to watch it sized way down to be able to read the subtitles. I was losing the beauty of the images. And the subtitles are yellow, which was atrocious under the black and white photography. The DVD has no dubbed English track. The assumption must be that the kind of people who watch Fellini movies are the kind of people with the hostile attitude toward dubbing. The only English track is commentary by film critic and historian Richard Schickel, and I tried putting that on. It's not bad, but it brings you down a bit. Plus, he mostly talks about what we're seeing, not what they are saying, so who needs him?

Maybe the best option is just to keep the subtitles off and listen to the original soundtrack, which includes some English along with the primarily Italian dialogue. I do understand a little Italian. "La Dolce Vita" lines like "Ciao, Marcello!" are easy enough to pick up, and it's a sprawling, episodic story, where the images may contain most of the meaning. The spectacle is the thing here: the grand city of Rome, the wonderful face of Marcello Mastroianni, and the entire physical presence of the human divinity Anita Ekberg. Whether you understand the Italian or not, the sound of the language is beautiful (and, of course, dubbing would deprive us of that) and the music soundtrack, by Nino Rota, is perfect. What will be missed by watching the film without understanding the dialogue? Lines like: "By 1965 there'll be total depravity. How squalid everything will be."

And let me add this, since I've been thinking about Bob Dylan, whose "Chronicles" I just finished. I know Dylan took a lot of inspiration from films, so let me point out the two references to "La Dolce Vita" in Bob Dylan songs. The first is from "I Shall Be Free":

Well, my telephone rang it would not stop,
It's President Kennedy callin' me up.
He said, "My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?"
I said, "My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot,
Anita Ekberg,
Sophia Loren."

The second is from "Motorpsycho Nightmare":

Then in comes his daughter
Whose name was Rita.
She looked like she stepped out of
La Dolce Vita.

I think we can see what kind of inspiration Dylan got from "La Dolce Vita." He thought Anita Ekberg was fabulous. And she was. More subtly fabulous is Marcello Mastroianni, who is reunited with Ekberg, much older, in "Intervista." There is a really nice little documentary about him called "I Remember." He's really quite hilarious. I recommend staring at his face the entire time he's on screen.

Who would Kerry appoint to the Supreme Court?

The NYT includes a strong proportion of nonjudge lawprofs in the potential Kerry nominees. No nonjudge lawprofs in the mix of potential Bush appointments. Lawprofs also play a role in this front-page NYT article about the struggles over Bush's judicial nominees:

Then, at a weekend retreat in April 2001, Democratic senators adopted an aggressive new strategy in dealing with judicial candidates. Under Mr. Bush's Republican predecessors, the Democrats believed they could block only candidates with egregious faults. But that weekend, two prominent law professors and a women's rights lobbyist urged the senators to oppose even nominees with strong credentials and no embarrassing flaws, simply because the White House was trying to push the courts in a conservative direction.

The two lawprofs in question--Harvard's Laurence H. Tribe and Chicago's Cass R. Sunstein--are not, however, among the lawprofs the Times speculates are in the running for a Kerry appointment. The lawprofs in question are all deans or former deans at the most elite law schools: Harold Hongju Koh (Yale), Kathleen M. Sullivan (Stanford), and Elena Kagan (Harvard).

Most gratuitous Bush-bash in today's NYT.

It's this letter to the editor (sent from Cambridge):

If the Boston Red Sox go on to win the World Series, the next big question will be, Will the team be welcomed to the White House like other national champions? After all, according to one of President Bush's favorite simple-minded attack lines, they're "from Massachusetts"!

Enforcing strict secularism in France.

The NYT reports:

To enforce its new law banning religious symbols from public schools, the Ministry of National Education has decided to get tough.

This week it held formal disciplinary hearings and began expelling students who violated the law. The goal was to get rid of those defined as hopeless cases before the 10-day All Saints school vacation that ends with a national holiday honoring all of Catholicism's saints.

The classic problem with secularism is the way the majority doesn't notice or care how much it accommodates itself.

Go to the link to see the photograph of the teenaged girl who is shaving her head bald so that she can stay in school. She "showed up for school in Strasbourg wearing a large beret [and was] barred from class by an administrator who called it a religious symbol." What seems to Americans to be a symbol of France, a beret, was construed by a French petty official to be an Islamic veil. Isn't the shaved head on a young girl a much more conspicuous outward demonstration of religious faith?

"They drove me crazy and tried to brainwash me so much that I got fed up and I did it - I shaved my hair off," she said. "Now I feel alone; I feel like a monster. It's like being naked on the street."

The French are pleased at how many young people they have pressured into compliance. Note that the those who will not yield are essentially forced into home schooling, because there is only one Muslim high school in France.

"Heroes for Bush."

It's a blogburst over there at The Truth Laid Bear.

Sharon Stone! Caroline Kennedy! In Madison!

Phone call of the night goes to a recorded call from a woman general (name forgotten) from some organization not officially connected to the Kerry campaign (name forgotten), inviting me to some sort of rally at the Overture Center here in Madison on Friday, October 22 at 9 a.m. The big draw is Sharon Stone and Caroline Kennedy. Is it some special event for women? Why do they assume women are hot to see Sharon Stone and Caroline Kennedy? Anyway, the Democrats are really rolling the celebrities for Kerry through Madison. Last week it was not only Michael Moore, but Leonardo di Caprio. Come on, Bush campaign: we want Schwarzenegger!

That 60s mindset.

"No More Miss America!" -- first mentioned in the previous post -- really is quite a fascinating screed, a nice window into the 1960s.

On September 7th [1968] in Atlantic City, the Annual Miss America Pageant will again crown "your ideal." But this year, reality will liberate the contest auction-block in the guise of "genyooine" de-plasticized, breathing women. Women's Liberation Groups, black women, high-school and college women, women’s peace groups, women's welfare and social-work groups, women's job-equality groups, pro-birth control and pro-abortion groups- women of every political persuasion- all are invited to join us in a day-long boardwalk-theater event, starting at 1:00 p.m. on the Boardwalk in front of Atlantic City's Convention Hall. We will protest the image of Miss America, an image that oppresses women in every area in which it purports to represent us.

Back in 1968—back before John Lennon came up with the Plastic Ono Band -- one really did worry about being "plastic." The one word everyone remembered from the 1967 film "The Graduate" was "plastics." Everyone understood why it was so ridiculous for an old man to advise a young man to enter the field of plastic. Frank Zappa was singing to us in 1967, "Plastic people! Oh, baby now, you're such a drag!" The idea that the new generation was going to permanently de-plasticize the human race felt quite real and important.

And note that back in 1968, groups that favored abortion rights went ahead and labeled themselves "pro-abortion."

There will be: Picket Lines; Guerrilla Theater; Leafleting; Lobbying Visits to the contestants urging our sisters to reject the Pageant Farce and join us; a huge Freedom Trash Can (into which we will throw bras, girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, wigs, and representative issues of Cosmopolitan, Ladies' Home Journal, Family Circle, etc.- bring any such woman-garbage you have around the house); we will also announce a Boycott of all those commercial products related to the Pageant, and the day will end with a Women's Liberation rally at midnight when Miss America is crowned on live television. Lots of other surprises are being planned (come and add your own!) but we do not plan heavy disruptive tactics and so do not expect a bad police scene. It should be a groovy day on the Boardwalk in the sun with our sisters. In case of arrests, however, we plan to reject all male authority and demand to be busted by policewomen only. (In Atlantic City, women cops are not permitted to make arrests -- dig that!)

So this was all back before the word "Liberation" was excised from the term "Women's Movement." It fell within that short span of time when people used the word "groovy" nonjocosely.

"Bad scene" was a trendy slang expression of the time. And if you were arrested, it was always "busted." And note: "dig that."

Male chauvinist-reactionaries on this issue had best stay away, nor are male liberals welcome in the demonstrations. But sympathetic men can donate money as well as cars and drivers.

Male reporters will be refused interviews. We reject patronizing reportage. Only newswomen will be recognized.

I tend to think that much of this, like the "demand to be busted by policewomen only," was a pretty effective way to send a message about what was very real employment discrimination at the time. I remember reading "Help Wanted—Male"/"Help Wanted—Female" classified ads at the in the newspaper, and I had an English teacher in high school who informed my class that women could not be TV or radio announcers because of their unacceptable voices.

Next comes a list of ten points of protest, including the one that appears in my previous post. I'll just call attention to a couple more:

The Consumer Con-Game. Miss America is a walking commercial for the Pageant's sponsors. Wind her up and she plugs your product on promotion tours and TV--all in an "honest, objective" endorsement. What a shill.

This really displays a sort of hippie mentality that one still finds in the wit and wisdom of Ralph Nader. What exactly was so wrong with—gasp!--products? You were supposed to already understand that was was part of what made you plastic!

Competition Rigged and Unrigged. We deplore the encouragement of an American myth that oppresses men as well as women: the win-or-you’re-worthless competitive disease. The "beauty contest" creates only one winner to be "used" and forty-nine losers who are "useless."

We know how this idea played out in the culture: let's boost everyone's "self-esteem" with games where everybody wins. I think in 1968, it really was possible to think that people, en masse, were going to "drop out" of the evil, competitive world of commerce. Maybe a nice little life of subsistence farming on a commune -- what do you say?

1968 was really happening.

UPDATE: Speaking of 1968, I was just following an Instapundit link to ReasonOnline's "Who's Getting Your Vote? Reason’s revealing presidential poll," and I ran across this, from P.J. O'Rourke:

Most embarrassing vote: A 1968 write-in for "Chairman Meow," my girlfriend’s cat. It seemed very funny at the time. As I mentioned, this was 1968.

Exactly.

Here she isn't.

On Fox News just now, there was some discussion of the supposed problem of excessively sexy broadcast TV, most notably the big hit show "Desperate Housewives." At the very end of the segment the talking head bemoaned the decision not to air "Miss America": what a sad loss of a family-friendly, cleanly show. Remember when "Miss America" was a big target for feminists? It was scarcely considered a positive image of women then. And now, after all those protests--including the one with actual bra-burning--that never got the show off the air, the show is gone for the simple reason that people weren't interested in watching it anymore. Apparently boredom is a stronger force than anger.

UPDATE: Sorry to repeat the bra-burning factoid. I do know better. There was a plan to burn bras at the 1968 protest, but, lacking a fire permit, the protesters merely threw bras in a trashcan. You can read the accurate story of the protest at this website. Also at that website is the historical text "No more Miss America!" which includes some rich prose, such as:

We protest … Miss America as Military Death Mascot. The highlight of her reign each year is a cheerleader-tour of American troops abroad--last year she went to Vietnam to pep-talk our husbands, fathers, sons and boyfriends into dying and killing with a better spirit. She personifies the "unstained patriotic American womanhood our boys are fighting for." The Living Bra and the Dead Soldier. We refuse to be used as Mascots for Murder.

Yikes! That is what 1968 was like, folks.

MORE: "Living Bra" was a Playtex brand name for an ordinary bra, which you can see if you scroll down on this vintage lingerie page.

"Stolen Honor" -- "this ... deeply sad film."

NYT TV critic Alessandra Staley takes a surprisingly positive approach to "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal," the controversial documentary that the Sinclair Broadcast Group has now decided to use only in the form of excerpts in a show it is now calling "A P.O.W. Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media."

This histrionic, often specious and deeply sad film does not do much more damage to Senator John Kerry's reputation than have the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's negative ads, which have flooded television markets in almost every swing state. But it does help viewers better understand the rage fueling the unhappy band of brothers who oppose Mr. Kerry's candidacy and his claim to heroism. ...

This film is payback time, a chance to punish one of the most famous antiwar activists, Mr. Kerry, the one who got credit for serving with distinction in combat, then, through the eyes of the veterans in this film, went home to discredit the men left behind.

Staley gives the web address where the full length documentary may be purchased as a videotape or pay-per-view streaming video.

The inevitability of Justice O'Connor.

Lawprof Charles Fried, in a NYT op-ed, delivers a pithy analysis of what's at stake in Supreme Court appointments:

Democrats fear a court that will embrace the constitutional rigidities of its most conservative members. Republicans fear a court that will once again seek to impose in the name of the Constitution the agenda of a liberal elite. I fear an indefinite and incoherent prolongation of a fin-de-siècle jurisprudence, where the court serves as nothing more than an ad hoc arbiter of issues it finds too difficult to decide in a principled way.

Crude translation: I'm tired of Justice O'Connor.

So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

But there is some force in the Supreme Court microcosm that produces a moderate center. Fried wishes one or the other of the grand visions would prevail. (Though, clearly he prefers the conservative side, about which he says: "I would call [their doctrines] liberal with a small l, the liberalism of classic individualism... not, as their opponents have caricatured them ... extreme or lacking in nuance.")

I tend to think whoever becomes President will find it difficult to appoint a Justice who will give a decisive majority vote to one side or the other. You may find this balance of extremes with a moderate center an unstable condition that must, sooner or later, give way to one or the other of the clear positions. But perhaps not. Perhaps there is something utterly stable about the current balance. Even as Justice Brennan's replacement found himself drawn into the vacated niche, so may Justice O'Connor's replacement feel compelled to play The Moderator.

UPDATE: Lawprofs Stephen Bainbridge and Jack Balkin also take on Fried. They characterize Fried as making a "simple error" in not perceiving the role Justice O'Connor plays. My reading of Fried is that his piece is all about implying that O'Connor is a big problem that needs to be solved. I'm willing to bet Bainbridge and Balkin that Fried has a sharp comprehension of the situation!

Jubilation.

I enjoyed waking up listening to "Morning Edition" covering Bostonians in a bar watching the Red Sox win the final playoff game. I'll link to the segment when it becomes available. I loved all the great curse-is-lifted lines that flowed out of the fans, like "God changed his jersey."

UPDATE: Here's the link.

Flu shots.

Dennis Miller tonight: "Thousands of people are waiting hours in lines [with] hopes of getting ... [a] flu shot. You know, folks, I've had the flu, and if there's one thing worse than getting the flu, it's being in a line with other strangers for hours. Okay? You'd rather have the flu."

Doesn't waiting around in crowds generally increase the chances of passing along all manner of infectious diseases? One benefit I'm seeing to the flu shot shortage is I don't have to listen to a lot of earnest advice that I ought to get a flu shot. I've had the flu once. And it was really bad. It's the sickest I've ever felt in my life. A huge amount of sleeping was involved. But I've only gotten a flu shot once in my life--I know this reveals something about my abject subservience to government--and that was when the President of the United States told me too. So now, the President says, don't get a flu shot, and I'm fine with that. People, just don't touch doorknobs, don't shake hands, and stay out of range of flying nasal fluids. You're going to be okay!

Dylan's "Chronicles": Chapter 5.

Finally, I got around to finishing the last chapter of Dylan's autobiography. I was blogging at the blistering pace of a chapter a day for a while. Chapter 1 is here (and here's the text of Chapter 1 on the publisher's website (via Metafilter)). Chapter 2 is here, and Chapter 3 is here. I kept up at a post a day but not a chapter a day with the first part of Chapter 4 here, and the second part of Chapter 4 here. Now, I've let four days go by, only reading a few pages a day. But this post covers all of Chapter 5.

Why Dylan liked Neil Sedaka more than other big New York songwriters: he performed his own songs. P. 227.

Dylan seems to have gotten some ideas from Harry Truman, whom his parents took him to see when he was a kid: "Truman was gray hatted, a slight figure, spoke in the same kind of nasal twang and tone like a country singer. I was mesmerized by his slow drawl and sense of seriousness and how people hung on every word he was saying." Pp. 230-231.

Dylan and guns: "As kids, we shot air guns, BB guns and the real thing--.22s--shot at tin cans, bottles or overfed rats in the town garbage dump." P. 232. He explains "rubberguns" and how the introduction of synthetic rubber ruined all the fun. Pp. 232-233.

Description of folk music: "It was life magnified." P. 236.

What Woody Guthrie's voice was like: "a stiletto." P. 244.

How Woody Guthrie writes: "like the whirlwind." P. 245.

Goal Dylan set: "to be Guthrie's greatest disciple." 246.

How the goal was thwarted: he found out Jack Elliot had already done it. P. 250.

What Dylan thought of asking John Wayne when he met him, but didn't because it "would have been crazy": "why some of his cowboy films were better than others." P. 250.

Description of Joan Baez: "Both Scot and Mex, she looked like a religious icon, like somebody you'd sacrifice yourself for and she sang in a voice straight to God ..." P. 255.

Interesting talent possessed by Noel Stookey: "He could imitate just about anything--clogged water pipes and toilets flushing, steamships and sawmills, traffic, violins and trombones. He could imitate singers imitating other singers ... [for example] Dean Martin imitating Little Richard." P. 259.

How Wavy Gravy dressed when he was still Hugh Romney: "he was the straightest looking cat you'd ever seen--always smartly dressed, usually in Brooks Brothers light gray suits." P. 259.

What Dave Van Ronk's wife Terri talked about: "highfalutin' theological ideas behind political systems. Nietzschean politics. Politics with a hanging heaviness." P. 263.

What Terri couldn't believe anyone would be stupid enough to buy: an electric can opener. P. 263.

What Dylan drank between sets in his early days in New York City: "shooters of Wild Turkey and iced Schlitz." P. 264.

How Dylan felt when he met Suze Rotolo: "The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves." P. 265.

Why Suze was just his type: "She reminded me of a libertine heroine." P. 265.

Movies Dylan went to see to try to get Suze off his mind for a while: "Atlantis, Lost Continent" and "King of Kings." P. 265.

Song name I wrote in the margin of page 266, where Dylan describes Suze's mother and sister: "Ballad in Plain D."

What Suze's mother said to Dylan: "Do me a favor, don't think when I'm around." P. 267.

Suze's age: 17.

How Dylan furnished his first apartment in NY: he borrowed tools and built furniture. He even made his own mirrors with plate glass, mercury and tin foil. P. 267-268.

What Suze taught Dylan about: artists! Pp. 268-269.

Favorite artist that seemed to express what folk music expresses: Red Grooms. P. 269-270.

Anti-fallout shelter song he wrote early on at his handmade table: "Let Me Die in My Footsteps." P. 270-272. That reminds me, obvious as it is now, when I was an adolescent in the early 60s, I couldn't understand why my parents weren't building a fallout shelter.

How people felt about Communists in northern Minnesota: "People weren't scared of them, seemed to be a big to-do over nothing." P. 271.

Kurt Weill/Bertholt Brecht song that made Dylan think of Duluth: "Pirate Jenny." P. 273-276.

Dylan's description of himself as a child in Duluth, listening to foghorns: "slight, introverted and asthma stricken." P. 274.

Dylan song I'm reminded of by his description of trying to learn a lot about songwriting from "Pirate Jenny": "When the Ship Comes In."

Singer Dylan thought was great--he was right--but couldn't get other folksingers--like Dave Van Ronk--to care about: Robert Johnson. Pp. 282-283.

Dylan's favorite politician: Barry Goldwater. P. 283.

Why: "[he] reminded me of Tom Mix."

Bob Dylan song that mentions Goldwater: "I Shall Be Free, No. 10."

Now, I'm liberal, but to a degree
I want ev'rybody to be free
But if you think that I'll let Barry Goldwater
Move in next door and marry my daughter
You must think I'm crazy!
I wouldn't let him do it for all the farms in Cuba.

A Bob Dylan political opinion: "I wasn't that comfortable with all the psycho polemic babble. It wasn't my particular feast of food. Even the current news made me nervous. I liked the old news better." P. 283.

Description of Robert Johnson's lyrics that shows what Dylan learned about songwriting from him: "old style lines and ... free-association ... sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction." P. 285.

What the second to the last paragraph of the book is devoted to: Minnesotans.

"The Motorcycle Diaries."

Chris saw "The Motorcycle Diaries." How was it?

"It was boring."

"Anything else you'd like to say?"

"It was pointless. It was just a pointless road trip. There was no character development. It wasn't even visually interesting. And the only reason people think it isn't pointless is just that it happened to be about the young version of Che Guevara."

"I could have told you that."

"Well, it got good reviews."

"Yeah, because it was reviewed by people who were impressed that it happened to be about the young version of Che Guevara."

"I think they are just trying to help out foreign movies."

"Yeah, they do overpraise foreign movies."

Intrusive phone call of the day.

The phone rings and it's a young woman with a very chipper Valley-Girl voice:

"Hi, I'm calling from the Human Rights Campaign and I would like to know if you think it's right for employers to discriminate based on sexual preference?"

"I'm not interested in answering questions like that. Sorry."

Aren't you supposed to inquire whether a person who has just answered the phone would be willing to answer some questions before you just lob one at her?

Another poll, of sorts.

I pooh-poohed using presidential halloween mask sales as an indicator of who will win the election. But in case you're wondering: Bush won.

"I love guitar. Oh, God. I mean, you know -- Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Buffett . . ."

That's John Kerry talking to Rolling Stone. I just don't know what to say about that juxtaposition. Many years ago--in the 1970s--I went to a concert and Jimmy Buffett was the opening act. I tried to sit it out, but I couldn't. I got up and walked out into the fluorescent-lit, concrete lobby and paced around with nothing to do. I can't remember what it was about Buffett that was so distinctly intolerable to me. The attitude? The patter? In any case, I've never listened to the man since then. (I go to his restaurant.)

Notes on Wisconsin.

Things are getting awfully tight in my little 10 electoral votes state, so maybe you readers not in Wisconsin are thinking about us and would like a few notes on Wisconsin. Here goes.

1. They've built some squat posts as a barrier to terrorists outside the sports area named after our senator who is not running for reelection.

2. Other barriers will be erected to stave off the destruction that tends to come with our usual Halloween marauders. There is special concern about the vast windowed expanses of the new Overture Center. This weekend the big show there will be the opera "Turandot," with fabulous David Hockney sets. (Pause taken to buy a ticket over the phone). A play examining the morality of nuclear weapons is playing in one of the smaller theaters at the Overture Center for the next few weeks, and the article about it in the Capital Times--which calls itself "Wisconsin's Progressive Newspaper"--doesn't mention Bush, Kerry, or Iraq. It does note that the UW physics department is collaborating with the Rep company, and the emphasis seems to be on intellectual Madison and not political Madison.

3. The Kerry-Edwards campaign brought former Senator Max Cleland to Madison yesterday to talk to a group of veterans. He told them: "[Bush] is driving more and more veterans away from the health-care system in the VA ... John Kerry has an answer: mandatory funding for the VA health-care system, and if you have a need, you get it covered." According to the linked article, this offer of full health coverage applies to 26 million persons (the number of civilian veterans in the U.S.). What's the price tag on that?

4. Something a UW-Eau Claire student said after listening to John Edwards give a speech: "I agree with everything he said ... The difference (between Bush and Cheney and Kerry and Edwards) is like night and day … Kerry and Edwards are focused on the people at home, the middle class." Thanks for reminding me of one of the reasons I'm voting for Bush. And let me link to this Christopher Hitchens article again. Remember when lefties talked about "the middle class" with a sneer? Now, apparently, they deserve all the benefits. How did that happen?

5. Why burrito-seeking students may switch to the new Moe's Southwest Grill: "When I opened the front door to Moe’s my friends and I received a warming greeting shouted in unison from the entire line of burrito chefs: 'Welcome to Moe’s!' Have you ever been personally welcomed to Qdoba or Chipotle?" Now they'll never be able to stop welcoming customers.

6. We love our football.

7. A little boy was saved from a big fire. The journalist, who lacks an eye for language, writes that the boy is "in stable condition after a barn fire."

8. A St. Norbert College poll, according to the Capital Times, shows: "So-called wedge issues such as stem-cell research, immigration and gay marriage were cited as 'very important' by only one-third or less of Wisconsin respondents, while abortion was named as 'very important' by 36 percent of voters." Is 36 percent supposed to sound like way more than one-third?

9. John Kerry said "I will be back - to the center of town" when rain moved him from the State Capitol square to an out-of-the-way arena last month, "[b]ut he, like Republican President George W. Bush, will be going where his campaign believes the undecided voters are: Green Bay, the Fox Valley, Milwaukee and the Mississippi River communities between Prairie du Chien and La Crosse." Hey, Bush campaign: send Arnold Schwarzenegger to appear at the Capitol on your behalf. He could build a nice speech around mocking Kerry's "I'll be back" and you could get some cool news coverage. [UPDATE: He's already going to Ohio, so stop over here on the way back!]

10. We have five newborn lions at the zoo here in Madison.

Infinitesimally naughty.

Martha Stewart in prison.

"He ... used an epithet for the male reproductive organ to describe Mr. Carlson."

The NYT takes on the "Daily Show"/"Crossfire" controversy. Because how could the NYT ever miss an opportunity to fawn over Jon Stewart? The angle here--by TV critic Alessandra Staley--is that "real anger" is a wondrous rarity in television. So even though "there is nothing more painful than watching a comedian turn self-righteous"--as the piece begins--Jon Stewart was just "lashing out at great smug and self-serving television-news personalities."

If Stewart was great because he displayed real anger at "smug and self-serving television-news personalities," then surely you'll also love the way Zell Miller told Chris Matthews to "get out of my face"?

Uh, no, let's see, I'll go with: "Mr. Stewart's frankness was a cool, startling, rational version of Senator Zell Miller's loony excoriation ("Get out of my face") to Chris Matthews of MSNBC during the Republican convention." Yes, that's the ticket! Stewart is really angry but he's still cool, he's rational! And Miller's crazy!

Hah! Miller isn't crazy. Miller was just damn mad at the exasperating and rude Matthews. And Miller was way more entertaining in his display of real anger than Stewart was. I'm sorry. I'm going to have to call political bias on the NYT. I mean, look at this:

[T]he Comedy Central star mocks the entire political process, boring in tightly on the lockstep thinking and complacency of the parties and the media as well as the candidates. More than other television analysts and commentators, he and his writers put a spotlight on the inanities and bland hypocrisies that go mostly unnoticed in the average news cycle.

Mr. Stewart is very funny, but it is the vein of "a plague on both your houses" indignation that has made his show a cult favorite: many younger voters are turning to the "The Daily Show" for their news analysis, and are better served there than on much of what purports to be real news on cable.

Do you even watch this show you love so much, or are you so blinded by partisanship that you don't see that the show has become practically an arm of the Kerry campaign?

That cross-dressing reality show.

Stephen Bainbridge wants to know what Tung Yin and I think of the new reality show "She's a Lady," a cross-dressing competition for men. Prof. Yin characterizes it as a dumb makeover show. It looks as though they are trying to get some (lame) excitement out of fooling the men:

They thought they were competing for the title of "All-American Man." They couldn't have been more wrong.

This fall, eleven manly men will compete to become...the ultimate lady. And the winner will take home a quarter of a million dollars!

Thanks for informing us that the men are "manly." That reminded me of this Virginia Heffernan critique (in the NYT) of Bravo's "Manhunt: The Search for America's Most Gorgeous Male Model":

When the guys, who have manly names like Tate and Blake, talk, their conversation is about how definitely not gay they are. When induced to strip to their underwear and skydive, each with a male instructor strapped to his back, they get very serious in their complaining that everyone would rather be skydiving with a girl. Got it?

So let's have a reality show about cross-dressing, but let's structure a competition to assure the home viewer that no one is gay. Having a very masculine man dress as a woman is an old comedy theme, though. The oldest example that springs to mind is Cary Grant in "I Was a Male War Bride." It was Milton Berle's game. And everyone remembers Gene Hackman in "The Birdcage." Cross-dressing actually is a field of endeavor that lends itself to humorous competition, and by using contestants who (we are assured) aren't otherwise interested in cross-dressing, the audience can stay in its comfort zone.

Another harmless TV confection. I'm not offended, really. But I certainly won't watch.

"28 Days Later."

I watched about half of the movie "28 Days Later," partly just to check out how my new widescreen HDTV looked with HDHBO. I thought the film had a great chimpanzee-filled beginning, which was followed by the title, cleverly setting up the next scene, the mystery of a naked man waking up in a hospital bed. The man yanks out various medical tubes, puts on some clothes, and begins to try to figure out what has happened to him. The hospital and the city around it (London) are deserted. This part, which I quite enjoyed, was very much like a "Twilight Zone" episode (especially the first episode, "Where is Everybody?"). After a while, the man finds some people and figures out some of what has happened and the movie becomes more of a survivalist/road trip story. It was getting late, so I turned it off. But I checked out the DVD on Amazon just now, and saw that the extra features include:

Alternative theatrical ending with optional commentary
Alternative ending with optional commentary
Radical alternative ending with optional commentary

Of course, I didn't see the original ending, so that's four endings left for me to see. And one ending is radical.

Hmmmm .... so you didn't care enough to keep watching to see one ending, and now you're thinking of spending $25 to see four endings. What's the logic in that?

It makes a lot of sense! If there is one ending, then you watch thinking the ending better be worth slogging through all the padding in the middle. But if there are four possible endings, the investment of watching the middle section pays off fourfold, and at least one ending is likely to satisfy. Plus, there's the fun of deciding which ending you prefer, arguing with others about which ending is best, and checking out the "optional commentary" to see what the director and the writer thought were the comparative pros and cons of the four endings. Ending x 8. For people who really like to experience endings. But maybe I'm only into beginnings ... as evidenced by my loss of interest when the middle section got under way.

UPDATE: Thanks to About Last Night for linking to this post. ALN liked "28 Days Later" and calls it a "flesh-eating-zombie flick." Were those zombies? As noted, I didn't stick around for the ending, but I thought they were pre-dead "infecteds." They did have the way of the zombie about them though--except that they could move quite fast.

How many ways is this not a Nirvana reunion?

Entertainment Weekly reports:

John Kerry is touting his diplomatic skills as a reason to vote for him for president; for example, he's managed to reunite the surviving members of Nirvana for their first public appearance in more than a decade. Dave Grohl announced that he and Krist Novoselic will both attend a rally on Tuesday in Las Vegas, in the parking lot of the Stardust casino, to kick off a Kerry campaign bus tour aimed at motivating college students in the last couple weeks before the election. Bassist-turned-activist Novoselic, who has a new book out, Of Grunge And Government, will speak, and Foo Fighters frontman Grohl will perform; alas, they're not expected to perform together.

Celebrity corsets.

Check out the celebrity-designed corsets. (It's an auction to benefit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.) Not that I'm bidding, but may I recommend the Julianne Moore? And note the Eve Ensler. It's really Eve Ensler-y.

UPDATE: Chris emailed me that link, by the way, which he found at The Dent, a Tori Amos news site. Tori has a corset in the show. It's bee-themed.

ADDED: Chris adds: "The corset benefit is for an organization that Tori Amos runs. Also,the bee theme is a double reference that her fans would get--one of her best B-sides is called Honey."

"Why is it it's only liberals that boo?"

Former New York mayor (and Democrat) Ed Koch asked last night on "The Daily Show," where the audience booed him when he said he was supporting Bush. Jon Stewart nicely chided the audience: "Don't make me come out there." (By the way, Stewart, who began the show explaining the big "Crossfire" incident, seems to be trying harder to make fun of both sides. Keep it up, Jon. I'll notice.)[UPDATE: He's right about "Crossfire"--the partisan yelling is horrible. I would add though that Paul Begala is at least as annoying as Tucker Carlson.]

Here's some news coverage of Koch's announcement:

"While I don't agree with Bush on a single domestic issue, they are all trumped by the issue of terrorism, where he has enunciated the Bush Doctrine and proven his ability to fight this war," said Koch. "The Democratic Party just doesn't have the stomach to go after terrorists." ...

"I saw Kerry [at the Democratic National Convention] surrounded by radical politicians like [former President Jimmy] Carter and [Sen. Ted] Kennedy. ... I know Kerry will succumb to their pressure if elected. They are with Kerry not because they like him, but because their true candidate Howard Dean couldn't get elected, and they wanted someone who they can have elected and dominate," charged Koch.

"As long as Kennedy and Robert Byrd are considered major leaders of the Democratic Party, and while we're seeing radical candidates like Howard Dean, whose radical-left supporters have been described by the press as 'Deaniacs,' the Democratic Party will be limited in its ability to serve the country well in times of crisis and war like we face now."

Well put.

UPDATE: Brian O'Connell thinks I'm being too kind to "The Daily Show." He notes--and I don't disagree--that Stewart is still far from treating both sides equally.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Stewart certainly has his defenders. Look how Jim Treacher's comments went wild after he offered a sound criticism.

What will you blog about when the election is over?

I've been asked that more than once, as if this election is my lifeblood--my blogblood. But I think the best thing about blogging is starting off the day secure in the knowledge that you will blog, but not knowing what you will blog about. I like the daily discovery of what it is that I'm interested in. There's less of that when there's one ongoing matter that always pushes to the front of the line.

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 Alexa