Cocoliquot.

A cool new restaurant in Madison, specializing in small plates. A tiny coq au vin in a crepe. A little risotto. A cold (!) omelette. A trio of tiny soups. It's very dark in here, and very stylish:





Your humble blogger:

The oral argument in the abortion case.

David Stout reports:

Justice Souter challenged [New Hampshire attorney general, Kelly Ayotte's] assertion that a doctor who performed an emergency abortion would be "constitutionally protected" from prosecution or civil liability. "What do you mean when you say it would be constitutionally protected?" asked Justice Souter, who is from New Hampshire....

Ms. Ayotte did not budge, asserting at one point that even in the most dire emergencies, and when a judge might not be available to authorize an abortion in the absence of a parent, the doctor would be protected. When a parent is not available to give permission, the state law at issue empowers a judge to grant emergency approval.

Solicitor General Paul Clement, arguing for the Bush administration on behalf of the New Hampshire law, said critics of the New Hampshire statute had focused on "a one in a thousand" circumstance in which a teen-ager might need an abortion quickly, and that the entire statute should not be undone.

"And the real question for you is, faced with that kind of case, do you invalidate one thousand applications of the statute, noting that 999 of them are constitutional?" Mr. Clement asked rhetorically.

But Jennifer Dalven, a lawyer for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, which challenged the law, said that even a minor delay can be disastrous. "As the nation's leading medical authorities have explained, delaying appropriate care for even a very short period can be catastrophic and puts the teen at risk of liver damage, kidney damage, stroke and infertility," she said.

Ms. Dalven met with some skepticism when she said that the provision for a judge's order can be a dangerous obstacle. "Once a minor arrives in the emergency room, it is too late for her to go to court," she said.

Justice Antonin Scalia wondered what would happen if the state created "a special office, open 24 hours a day" to field just such emergencies: " 'This is the abortion judge.' It takes 30 seconds to place a phone call."...

The New Hampshire bill's sponsors successfully fought against a health exception on the grounds that it would give doctors too big a loophole to avoid parental involvement in decisions about ending pregnancies. Justice Breyer acknowledged that point in passing, noting that "lots of people think 'health exception' is a way of getting abortion on demand."

Scalia's hypothetical may be interesting, but the state hasn't set things up like that, and the doctor is obviously in a better position to make the call. Even if we were assured there would always be an "abortion judge" by the phone, you'd still have to explain the condition which would presumably take some time. Why should someone have to endure the "risk of liver damage, kidney damage, stroke and infertility" for the time it takes to do that, especially considering that the doctor is the one with the medical understanding of the situation?

And what does Ayotte's assertion about 1000 applications of the statute mean? That every 1000 times it's imposed, one unfortunate woman suffers a serious injury? Why is that acceptable?

UPDATE: Listen to the whole oral argument here or download here.

Do you buy Christmas presents for yourself?

I'd heard some women do that. (Maybe men do it too.) Now, advertisers are openly encouraging the behavior with copy like this:

"Because I've been an exceptionally good girl, I deserve sweet nothings from Dolce & Gabbana Intimates to make my husband forget he's an accountant... and a tartine from SnAKS to fuel my shopping spree, a dress that's the height of chic from Elie Tahari and some flat boots from Jimmy Choo to keep me grounded, anything Marni and something Versace and divine peau de soie pumps from Roger Vivier that I can't get anywhere else."

That might seem laughably over-the-top, but it's beautifully written to reach out and grab a woman's deep longing. It's a nice touch that the ad-character has a husband, but he's such a nonentity -- an accountant! -- that women with no men (to buy them presents) can fully identify.

And have you heard of the Right-Hand Ring campaign?

The marketing campaign has successfully appealed to women with female-empowerment pitches like: "Your left hand says you're taken. Your right hand says you can take over."

Buy yourself a diamond ring. (I Freudian-slip-typed "diamond wring.") How do you palm that off as not pathetic? Well, have you seen the ads? They're mesmerizing.

"Poppy isn't getting Junior back, Vice vowed, muttering: 'He's my son. It's my war. It's my country.'"

Sad that you can't get to Maureen Dowd's column? She's Dowding it up big time today. (TimesSelect link.)

By the way, in the paper version of the Times, the word "my" is italicized all three times in the quote. In the online version, there are no italics. That's bugging me.

"Finish" is an exquisite word choice.

"Finish the war" means something different from "end the war," right? Or will it mean whatever you need it to mean, later?

Just a thought about a very carefully crafted quote from Hillary Clinton:

"We must set reasonable goals to finish what we started and successfully turn over Iraqi security to Iraqis."

UPDATE: "Complete" is the word choice of President Bush, in today's speech on the war. Speaking of the troops fighting in Iraq, he says we must "complete their mission." "Mission" is a much stronger expression than Senator Clinton's "what we started." Do you think we should complete our mission or finish what we started? Or do you think they're the same thing? I don't.

Unintended comedy, economic news reporting division.

The NYT just needs to bring us down, for some reason. All the economic news is good, but Vikas Bajaj, on the front page of the paper today, searches desperately for the bad. Check out the first few lines:

Gasoline is cheaper than it was before Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. Consumer confidence jumped last month and new home sales hit a record. The stock market has been rising. Even the nation's beleaguered factories appear to be headed for a happy holiday season.

By most measures, the economy appears to be doing just fine. No, scratch that, it appears to be booming.

But as always with the United States economy, it is not quite that simple.

Consumer confidence is bouncing back from what was arguably some of its worst readings in years. Gasoline prices-the national average is now $2.15, according to the Energy Information Administration- have fallen because higher prices tamped down demand and supplies in the Gulf Coast have been slowly restored. The latest read on home sales, released today, contradicts virtually every other recent measure of housing activity that generally indicate a slowdown. And yes, manufacturers' fortunes are on the mend, but few besides airplane makers are celebrating.

It all means that the economy is likely to end the year with a splash, but that does not mean the broad economic picture next year will be even better.

How can anyone read that and not laugh?

"You think loners are weird? I think couples a weird."

Says a loner to Nina, provoking her to consider appreciating loner-tude... rather skeptically it seems to me. Is there a he's-just-not-that-into-you subtext here?

"Isn’t it the right of citizens of the state to answer this question?"

Yesterday there was a long, crowded hearing at the Wisconsin Capitol. The subject: a resolution to amend the state constitution to preclude gay marriage. Voters would make the final call next November.

"Does your emphasis on authority give any substance to the claim ... that conservatism is repressive and dictatorial?"

Marking the 25th anniversary of "The Meaning of Conservatism," Right Reason interviews Roger Scruton.

Not 35 million, 77 million.

A death toll, reestimated. (Via No Speed Bumps.)

Live-blogging the Alito panel.

Readers were hoping for a podcast of the big panel we had tonight at the Law School about the Alito nomination, but I couldn't make that happen. Fortunately, Steve S was there to live-blog!

Schweber is leery of radicals....

"I kind of like radicals," says Downs.....

Sharpless makes a joke - "I'm not a lawyer!" Then he goes on a bit of a rant....

It comes to Althouse... If you read her blog, you probably know what she'll say....

Read the whole thing. Lots more at the link.

He doesn't include the thing I found most interesting. UW lawprof Linda Greene, who was Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1980s, implied that the Harriet Miers nomination was set up to fail. She said it was a "signal that something was amiss" when Miers turned in an incomplete questionnaire to the committee, given the "intellectual talent that normally flocks to a nominee." Yeah, why didn't people nail that thing for her?

Anyway, the panel was sponsored by the Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society -- who seem to have a very nice working relationship here -- and they did a great job. Big crowd too!

"An unremarkable use" of the spending power or "a core violation of the First Amendment"?

Yale lawprof William Eskridge and George Mason Dean Daniel Polsby are debating about the Solomon Amendment case -- FAIR v. Rumsfeld -- which raises the question whether the federal government can require universities, as a condition of receiving federal funds, to give military recruiters the same access given to other employers. The Supreme Court is hearing argument in the case next week. Polsby says it's "an unremarkable use of Congress’s Spending Power, while Eskridge sees "a core violation of the First Amendment."

"The reaction from many bloggers has been nothing less than scathing."

The Christian Science Monitor has a big article on Pajamas Media:

Though Pajamas Media is bringing even more attention - and possibly a new revenue model - to blogging, the reaction from many bloggers has been nothing less than scathing. One site, pjmdeathpool.blogspot.com, is collecting guesses as to how many weeks or months Pajamas Media will last before it folds.

"If you say [something] is going to be great for months, and you announce it with a big gala bash, you're asking people to look at it," says Ann Althouse, a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin and a well-known blogger (althouse.blogspot. com). The nature of bloggers "is to mock and pick at things," she says, "that's sort of to be expected." But the Pajamas Media site hasn't helped itself, she says. It's been bland.

Mr. Simon urges patience and promises that the best is yet to come. "I don't think the site is going to seem the same to you in three weeks," he says. "We're learning. We are a work in progress. We are new media in the most extreme sense."

UPDATE: Daniel Solove responds to the article:

Pajamas Media seems like a corporate wrapping around the blogosphere. It has too much of a corporate structure and neglects one of the key elements of the blogosphere -- the unexpected way various blogs gain attention from the ground up. Blogging is a bottom-up grass-roots kind of practice, not a top-down enterprise.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. This is key. The great power -- the great beauty -- of blogging is the natural formation of connections among individuals. (Much more at the link. Go there.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dan at Riehl World View responds to the article. I like the way he makes his argument initially just by boldfacing some of the language in the article. He's got some laugh-out-links and a profoundly true link at "This is blogging." Hey, I was so there last February! MORE: here.

IN THE COMMENTS: I have cause to say: "I'm thinking of 'The Producers.'" And Jim makes a sublime wisecrack:

Best quote from the article: Simon wants The Entity's site "to be the place for breaking Internet opinion." And here we have the one objective that's actually been met, since they seem to be breaking it right and left.

"I am happy to let everyone sort themselves into whatever Nozickian communities they want."

Says Andy Morriss, taking issue with my criticism of the plan to wrest Ave Maria, a nicely established new law school, from its current place in Ann Arbor, Michigan and strand it in a cloistered enclave in rural Florida. Latching onto my word "creepy," he writes:

The very idea of a university, however, is to some extent a place where people are to a degree sheltered from the "real world" to allow them to focus on learning. What's particularly creepy about people wanting to be in an environment free from pornography, etc.? This doesn't strike me as any different from, say, people at a law school in a rural town touting the atmosphere available from rural living. Given UPS, the internet, Amazon.com, Netflix, and so on, I don't think "Ave Maria town" is likely to be particularly more closed off from the "real world" than most small towns in rural areas are today. What will be different is that it will be a community that shares values, Catholic values as it turns out, and that, in turn, strikes me as sounding a bit like what you might find in a monastic community.

But Morriss is missing one huge thing. There is an existing community of scholars in Ann Arbor that is not volunteering to move. They like it where they are, in a lively university town, where they've established lives for themselves and contributed to the building of an institution. (Don't believe me? Ask them!) The move is to be imposed, top-down, by one man who happens to have the money. There's nothing Nozickian about that.

Thanks to Juan Non-Volokh for linking to the Morriss piece and for quoting from an article and a letter in the WSJ.

Senate Democrates have "rebuffed, rebuked and rejected" civil rights and women's groups opposed to Roberts and Alito.

Says AP's David Espo:

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, chairman of the Senate Democrats' campaign committee, underscored their political objectives recently to ... representatives of groups opposed to Alito's nomination.

In a private session, Reid and Schumer urged the groups to show restraint when lobbying Democrats from states that Bush won in 2004 - senators from Nebraska, Arkansas, the Dakotas and elsewhere who probably will be the most tempted to support the appointment. Officials who described the session did so on condition of anonymity, citing the confidential nature of the conversation.

Reid, in his first year as party leader, first angered groups opposed to Bush's court nominees last spring. Hoping to head off a showdown over appeals court nominees, he privately told Republicans he would allow confirmation for a few of the appointments that Democrats had long blocked.

[Nan Aron, president of the Alliance For Justice,] made her disagreement plain. "We don't want a deal. We have worked too hard, since we see these nominees as really extreme," she said at the time.

I think it's easy to predict that Alito will be confirmed. I hope the Senate Democrats are smart enough to use the confirmation process to win respect for the liberal version of constitutional interpretation, rather than to portray law as a political struggle and Alito as a candidate they must defeat.

"I'd probably call it an afterthought. It was, 'Oh yeah, by the way, you don't have to do it.' "

Such was the attention to the subject of abstinence in sex education in one Wisconsin high school, as described by a current UW student. Now, a bill requiring a stronger abstinence message is about to pass the legislature here. (What the governor will do is another matter.)

The bill ... would require school districts that offer sex education programs to "present abstinence from sexual activity as the preferred choice of behavior" for unmarried students....

The current state law simply lists more than a dozen topics that districts "may include" in their sex education instruction but does not stress one as more important than others. The word "abstinence" does not appear, although "discouragement of adolescent sexual activity" is one of the topics districts can choose to include.

Should the legislature be requiring all the schools in the state to push abstinence as "the preferred choice of behavior"? The culture varies from place to place around the state, so I don't like a statewide requirement that goes this far, even though I think it's important for young people to hear a strong presentation of the case for abstinence. Shouldn't local school districts decide this one rather than posturing state legislators ?

Alito panel.

Here at the law school tonight, the Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society are hosting a panel discusion about the Alito nomination. Room 3250, 7 p.m. I'll be participating, along with Professors Church, Greene, Downs, Schweber, and Sharpless. It should be pretty lively!

UPDATE: Notes on the panel are here.

"UK scientists have identified the part of the brain that determines whether a person perceives themselves as fat."

Would that be the part connected to the eyeballs? Oh, I'm just being mean, and this is the second post today about fat people. (Althouse is obsessed!) Actually, it's a pretty interesting study.

And did you know that "people who suffer from migraine with aura can sometimes experience a phenomenon called the 'Alice in Wonderland syndrome', where they feel that various body parts are shrinking"?

Ah, that calls for another link back to an old, related post: "My scotoma."

Sex Pistols, Black Sabbath, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Miles Davis, Blondie.

The new inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Do you approve?

Note that Black Sabbath and Lynyrd Skynyrd got rejected the first seven times they were eligible, and the Sex Pistols got rejected four times.

"It's about time," Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward told Reuters, adding that he had long ago given up on getting inducted.

"What bothered me was not necessarily that Black Sabbath was being passed over but that hard rock and heavy metal was being passed over ... Bands that created heavy metal music or brought it into the foreground ought to have gone into the hall of fame some time ago, quite honestly."

The injustice!

Related post: I visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

AFTERTHOUGHT: I'll bet Lynyrd Skynyrd was helped by the very nice presentation they were given on "American Idol" this past season -- backing Bo Bice.

IN THE COMMENTS: There's some questioning of why Miles Davis belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. All I can say is: I saw him open for Neil Young & Crazy Horse at the Fillmore East in 1970.

Abortion case to be argued tomorrow.

Linda Greenhouse writes about Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England:

When the Supreme Court meets on Wednesday to hear its first abortion case in five years, the topic will be familiar: a requirement that doctors notify a pregnant teenager's parent before performing an abortion....

[O]f the 43 states with parental-involvement statutes, New Hampshire is one of only five that do not also provide an exception for non-life-threatening medical emergencies, and it was on this basis that two lower federal courts declared the law unconstitutional....

Waiting in the wings, as the justices surely know, is another, perhaps even more highly charged abortion case. The Bush administration recently filed an appeal in defense of the federal ban on the procedure that abortion opponents have labeled "partial birth abortion," and the court must decide shortly whether to hear it.

CORRECTION: "Today" in the title corrected to "tomorrow." It is not Wednesday!

"'The Wall' is where you don't want to put any more in your mouth."

Said Ian Hickman, who competes in eating contests. You have to train for these things!

First he'll fill up on liquids. Then "I'll practice eating hot dogs when I'm full. The contest is going to be won not by someone who's hungry but by someone who's able to eat when they're full."

Others rely on "guzzling large volumes of water or chowing down low-calorie foods, such as cabbage, in the weeks leading up to an event."

And note that the best contestants these days are not fat!

"About eight out of the top 10 are svelte, athletic," said an eater who goes by the name "Crazy Legs" Conti, who stands 6-foot-3, weighs 210 pounds, and runs marathons. [Sonya Thomas, 5' 5" and 98 pounds] beat him handily last month at a Buffalo wing contest in Bethesda.

He and others buy into what they call the belt-of-fat theory, which supposes that abdominal fat inhibits the stomach from ballooning. "A thinner person has much more room for expansion. An eater like myself, unfortunately, is struggling to catch up," Conti said.

Funny. I like watching a good eating contest. But maybe you think these displays are immoral or obscene. If your reason for objecting to these contests is that the food could have been used to feed someone who is hungry, should you not regard every fat person as embodying the same immorality?

Too many opinions, too few cases -- can't the Supreme Court do better?

Jason Mazzone draws attention to the Supreme Court's glaring problem:

Last term, the Supreme Court issued opinions in just 74 cases. That’s pretty pathetic. It means there are many areas of the law that are unsettled or unreviewed; many important issues in which the Supreme Court could helpfully weigh in but it doesn’t; many issues that, once decided, will not reach the Court again for decades, if ever.

A low number of cases does not, however, mean light reading. Many of these 74 cases produced multiple opinions by sub-groups of justices. It’s not hard to see why this is true. Divide 74 up among nine justices and 30-plus law clerks and the temptation to write separately is irresistible.

Most of the 74 opinions are also lengthy and convoluted, larded with unnecessary detail and footnotes, and containing inappropriate swipes at the work of the other justices.

Oh, don't I know this! Trying to teach constitutional law cases to law students, I sometimes feel I need to defend myself from their hostility by stating the obvious: I didn't write these cases! Or: I'm really sorry but this happens to be the Supreme Court case on the subject.

Like me, Mazzone looks to the new Chief Justice to whip the Court's work product into shape:

My advice for Chief Justice John G. Roberts: double the number of cases the Court decides (it decided 123 the term Roberts clerked for Rehnquist), halve the length of opinions, make unanimity the goal, and discourage separate concurrences.

Mazzone doesn't mention the other change in the offing and the effect it will have on the problems he describes. Justice O'Connor is leaving, and Justice O'Connor was frequently the one who insisted on carving out a middle path between two crisper opinions. Take away Justice O'Connor and replace her with someone who will commit to plainly stated doctrine, and you may not need all that much of the new Chief's charismatic powers to turn things around.

But will we be happy with the new set of problems that replaces the old? Hazy, blabby cases are a pain, but clear doctrine -- quite a shock after all these years -- might hurt a lot more. And it's going to hurt some of us a lot more than others, which explains the hand-wringing over the impending confirmation of Samuel Alito.

Four truths about Bob Woodward.

Her unique personal situation enables Nora Ephron to discern:

Truth #1: Bob is not a liar. ...

Truth #2: Bob has always had trouble seeing the forest for the trees. That’s why people love to talk to him; he almost never puts the pieces together in a way that hurts his sources....

Truth #3: Bob is not to be confused with other reporters.... He knows everything. What’s more, he has no idea what it adds up to. How could he possibly keep anyone, much less his editor, in the loop?...

Truth #4: If you don’t talk to Woodward, you’ll be sorry. I mention this not because it’s precisely true (look at me), but because it’s an operating truth in official Washington....

Unintentional humor: "My Best Friend's Wedding."

We're watching "My Best Friend's Wedding," which looks beautiful on HDTV, on Showtime, right now. And we just dissolved into hysterical laughter. Here's Julia Roberts, served an elegant dinner in a lovely restaurant, sitting across the table from Rupert Everett -- he's gay! -- and we hear her cell phone ring, she pulls it out, and the thing is as large as a man's shoe!

In the next scene, she's at home, and her phone rings. Chris says: "Her home phone is smaller than her cell phone." And we laugh a lot all over again.

Later:

Me: This is a pretty good comedy.

Chris: Do you remember totally hating this movie?

Me: What'd I say?

Chris: I think you said there were too many closeups.

Me: (laughs.)

Later:

Chris: These actresses [Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz], if you saw them in real life, they wouldn't be that attractive.

Me: But the thing is, their face, their whole body sends out so much personality.

Later (as Julia Roberts sets up Cameron Diaz for humiliation in the karaoke bar):

Me: She's really evil.

Chris: That's what people don't like about it.

Me: I like that about her!

That's why it's a cool comedy. Julia's bad!

"He did the worst thing an elected official can do."

"He enriched himself through his position and violated the trust of those who put him there."

"Who’s the real whore here?"

Steve H. is talking about me. In a good way.

MORE: There's a Wikipedia entry for Pajamas Media, now, and not only am I discussed under the heading "Feuds and Flamewars," but the expression "Berkeley house whore" appears.

AND: "Will they succeed? Who cares." Dan from Madison weighs in.

In Dubai: compulsory hormone injections for gay men.

Andrew Sullivan links to this disturbing news report from Dubai:

The Interior Ministry said police raided a hotel chalet earlier this month and arrested 22 men from the Emirates as they celebrated the mass wedding ceremony - one of a string of recent group arrests of homosexuals here.

The men are likely to be tried under Muslim law on charges related to adultery and prostitution, said Interior Ministry spokesperson Issam Azouri.

Outward homosexual behaviour is banned in the United Arab Emirates and the gay group wedding has alarmed leaders of this once-isolated Muslim country as it grapples with a sweeping influx of western residents and culture.....

The arrested men have been questioned by police and were undergoing psychological evaluations on Saturday. Azouri said the Interior Ministry's department of social support would try to direct the men away from homosexual behaviour, including treatment with male hormones.

"Because they've put society at risk they will be given the necessary treatment, from male hormone injections to psychological therapies," he said.

Tim Blair quits Pajamas Media!

You knew someone would be the first to jump ship. Did you think it would be Tim?

TO BE CLEAR: Blair has withdrawn from the Editorial Board. His blog is still listed as one of the member blogs. I don't know what the contractual details are here, but based on the offer I saw, the member bloggers had to commit themselves for 18 months.

Scientists say "romantic love" lasts one year.

Face reality. You are just some chemicals:

The University of Pavia found a brain chemical was likely to be responsible for the first flush of love.

Researchers said raised levels of a protein was linked to feelings of euphoria and dependence experienced at the start of a relationship.

But after studying people in long and short relationships and single people, they found the levels receded in time.

The team analysed alterations in proteins known as neurotrophins in the bloodstreams of men and women aged 18 to 31, the Psychoneuroendocrinology journal reported.

They looked at 58 people who had recently started a relationship and compared the protein levels in the same number of people in long-term relationships and single people.

In those who had just started a relationship, levels of a protein called nerve growth factors, which causes tell-tale signs such as sweaty palms and the butterflies, were significantly higher.

Of the 39 people who were still in the same new relationship after a year, the levels of NGF had been reduced to normal levels.

Now, stop being so damned sentimental.

"And, man, I was gratified when the fab chicks screamed."

Janet Maslin writes about -- sorry, he's an old Althouse favorite -- Donovan:

In his prime, the astral singer-songwriter Donovan appeared to take a serene view of show business and its cutthroat ways. Not anymore. Nowadays, Donovan would like you to know that he never received proper credit for Flower Power, World Music, New Age Music, the boxed-set album package, using LSD and the lyric "Love, Love, Love" before the Beatles did and playing folk-rock five months before Bob Dylan wielded an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

He deserves this credit too, Maslin says. Donovan states his claims in a book:

"The Autobiography of Donovan" is a very strange book (what else?) that revisits the fertile, trippy 60's, the elaborately constructed aura of Donovan's beatitude, the wild incongruities of that era's popular culture (when the guest list for one Donovan party included Milton Berle, Jimmy Durante and the Doors) and the lingo that has become so quaint. "And, man, I was gratified when the fab chicks screamed," he writes in all seriousness about appearing on his first television show....

"The constant gibes in the British press about my love of beauty has long left a false impression of my work," he maintains. "I was mocked as a simpleton when I sang of birds and bees and flowers like a child." He was also mocked for being wild about saffron, but it turns out that he loves saffron monks' robes and saffron cake with raisins. In any case, this book is where the mockery ends. And the last laugh begins.

Okay, that explains the saffron, but what about "I'm just mad about fourteen/She's just mad about me"? On "Donovan in Concert" he sings "Mellow Yellow" with the variation: "I'm just mad about fourteen-year-old girls. They're mad about me." Aw, they're just all the young girls in the audience, the fab chicks who screamed. I was one of them.

"More people seem to be interested in movie grosses than in the movies."

Mark Steyn writes. Yes, it's strange, isn't it? Maybe the reason for the box office slump is that all the talk about box office makes movies seem like devices for taking our money. From early childhood, Americans learn to detect and resist such devices. The box office slump is testament to how savvy we are.

Remember when intelligent adults thought engaging with the films of the day was an essential part of life?

What can you infer from a single incident?

Crooked Timber is talking about the Madison incident involving third grade teachers assigning their students to write letters calling for withdrawal from Iraq. It's a good discussion, even though they say this about me:

Ann Althouse, oddly, uses the case as a reason to suspect that the District does not have its act together—an odd conclusion to draw from a single instance in which it does the right thing effectively and immediately.

Here's what I said:

The project was cancelled -- school district policy prohibits teachers from presenting controversial issues with bias and promoting their personal political views.

I wonder how well that policy is enforced. That a group of five teachers thought this was an acceptable assignment suggests that it's hardly enforced at all.

"I don't see it as a controversial issue." I love that. It's so it depends on what the meaning of controversial is. Community standards seem to apply to that. And we're all here in Madison, Wisconsin.

What can you infer from a single incident? In this case, you have five teachers who got together and planned something without anyone figuring out what the problem was and one of them continuing to assert that it is not a controversial issue. How did these teachers arrive at such a mindset? From living and working in a particular environment, I would assume. Oh, but the system "does the right thing effectively and immediately," Crooked Timber says. Not really. The response only came because parents got mad. If a letter describing the assignment had not been sent to the parents, would anything have happened? What evidence do we have that the school district's policy has any mechanism of enforcement? I think the fact that the teachers thought what they were doing is fine strongly suggests that the policy is not ingrained in the practice of teaching in the district.

"It's like having a bum living in your house."

Larry David (in tonight's episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm") saying what it's like to have a dog.

I also liked his contempt for campfire-roasted marshmallows: "Why don't you reduce all your foods to cinders?"

Audible Althouse, #23.

Finally, the podcast is back. #23 has: the Thanksgiving squirrel, the Thanksgiving salmon, bedbugs, metaphorical vermin, the dog-eat-dog world of blogs, schoolteachers who get too political, and crazy architectural and lifestyle fantasies brought on by winning the lottery or taking LSD. 44 minutes.

IN THE COMMENTS: I apologize for coughing into the microphone.

"See, here's what I don't understand...."

I was just scanning the Pajamas Media discussion boards and ran across this comment:

I *very* much agree that the site needs to be bloggier. The ad revenue is supposed to mostly come from the associated blogs, not the portal, with the portal's role being to boost traffic to the blogs, give people an easy starting point, and provide some original reporting, etc., that will encourage people to go there and encourage bloggers to do more original reporting.

That means that the portal needs to be interesting, and to change a lot. Right now it's neither.

I thought: Wow, that's about the smartest, clearest thing I've read here yet. Who said that? Then I see, it was Glenn Reynolds. Okay. Well, see? That was a blind reading test.

A few posts down Cal lays down the harshest critique I've seen yet:

See, here's what I don't understand: why are these discussions even necessary? Why is Glenn saying (to paraphrase) "hey, great idea, I'm passing this on to the others!"?

What was Glenn doing for the past 8 months or so, exactly, as part of the editorial board? More to the point, what was anyone involved with this absurd enterprise doing all this time?

This isn't a bootstrap organization. It's not something that was cobbled together and thrown open to the public for feedback. This was a venture with 3.5 MILLION dollars in funding.

Where did that money go? Apparently, it was all spent on a blowout opening bash. It clearly hasn't gone to technicians who could quickly respond to the most basic requests for change. Nor has it gone to any more advanced development work--at least none that's readily apparent. Just as obviously, it wasn't spent on competent legal or marketing advice.

When the only evident sign of investment is in the party you throw to announce an organization with an illegal name offering a service that no one understands and that you yourself aren't entirely able to define, you've got a real problem.

So here's a suggestion for PJM/OSM board members and executives alike: Stop asking people what you should do. You convinced a number of fools to invest 3.5 million--or should I say MILLION--dollars in you. They thought you knew what to do. If you don't know what to do, then accept the harsh truth that your only real ability is lies in convincing fools to give you money. Use some of that money to hire people who actually know what to do, then use some more money to hire people who can actually do it. Then get the hell out of their way.

Almost three fifteen hours later, there is no response yet to Cal's devastating words. Shouldn't someone who cares about the operation say something in its defense? What if the folks Cal calls the "fools" are reading the discussion board? The silence over there is really uncomfortable.

IN THE COMMENTS: It's noted that Glenn Reynolds has now responded to Cal, but only minimally, to distance himself from what has gone on there. Per Glenn:

"The Editorial Advisory Board met for the first time the day after the launch. I'm guessing that the site design, etc., was seen by someone as a business decision, rather than editorial, but they didn't involve us. As for the rest, well, perhaps you should just watch the site evolve and see how it does."

I express sympathy.

Steve H. drops by to tell us about this post of his:

I learned something really funny about Pajamas Media yesterday. A source claiming to have inside information says they've actually raised SEVEN million in venture capital. Again, I have to ask, where did it go?

UPDATE: Moxie and Jay Currie have some thoughts on all this.

War poll: "55 percent believe criticism hurts morale, while 21 percent say it helps morale."

WaPo reports:

The results surely will rankle many Democrats, who argue that it is patriotic and supportive of the troops to call attention to what they believe are deep flaws in President Bush's Iraq strategy. But the survey itself cannot be dismissed as a partisan attack. The RTs in RT Strategies are Thomas Riehle, a Democrat, and Lance Tarrance, a veteran GOP pollster.

Their poll also indicates many Americans are skeptical of Democratic complaints about the war. Just three of 10 adults accept that Democrats are leveling criticism because they believe this will help U.S. efforts in Iraq. A majority believes the motive is really to "gain a partisan political advantage."

Not really surprising, is it? I think most Americans are not hotly partisan and are pretty sick of people who are.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lots of discussion, including this from DrillSGT:

As a Vietnam Vet (enlisted), subsequently a Regular Army Officer, and the Husband of a currently serving National Guard officer I can anecdotally state with near certainty that US public opinion belittling the hard work and sacrifices of soldiers in a combat zone and hearing their elected officials say things like "Bush Lied, soldiers died" and Democrat John Kerry accusing President Bush of sending U.S. troops to the "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" has a strong negative impact. It initially impacts the families at home. They get a constant stream of comments and it eats at their morale. That in turn bleeds over to the soldiers in the war zone. Unlike my war, soldiers in Iraq have access to real time MSM and can see that the MSM ignores all the successes and finds fault in every opportunity.

It hurts. It hurts. An average American understands what "support the Troops" means. Beyond Lieberman and a few other dems, the average American recognizes that Dean, the DNC and much of the minority leadership are rooting for a defeat in Iraq because it will hurt Bush. That sickens the average American.

MORE IN THE COMMENTS: Readers give DrillSGT a hard time for the quote I front-paged, and he reframes it. This post is certainly getting a lot of comments. I don't post very much on the war in Iraq, though the large number of comments a post like this gets shows me how very much people want to talk about it. I'd just like to say that I never write about things like whether we had enough troops when we started or how many troops should be brought home now. How could I possibly have a valid opinion here? I'm not a military strategist, and I don't have the inside information the people who are conducting the war have. My posts tend to be about political strategies and rhetoric about the war. As to the actual war, it seems pretty obvious to me that we must win. But it would be bizarre for me to act as though I knew how to do that.

"Put on this wig and believe."

A photographer spends six years finding 1,431 persons to put on a big, curly, black wig and pose:

"The wig was perfect because it was a blank slate," Kenneth Solomon said. "The variable was their face, their expression, their interpretation of 'Put on this wig and believe.' "

Too bad the mosaic of tiny photos at the NYT link isn't clickable for enlargements. The impact of the mosaic is nice, what with the thematic unity provided by the wig, but we can't see enough of the varied expressions that the wig set off. Is it supposed to say something about race? You really can't tell from the article.

For something much more substantive on the subject of race, here's a NYT review (by Slate's Dana Stevens) of biographies of two black actors, who found success in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s.

About "Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood" by Jill Watts:

Her trademark screen attitude of comic insolence reached its peak in "Alice Adams" (1935), when, playing Katharine Hepburn's family maid, Malena, she all but slammed down the plates in front of her white employers while resentfully chomping on a piece of gum.

Watts's sympathetic biography makes much of these moments of Trojan-horse resistance, linking McDaniel's finely calibrated defiance with modern notions in race theory: by infusing her body language with hostility or a parodic compliance, Watts argues, McDaniel was "signifying," deliberately turning racist tropes against themselves.

About Mel Watkins's "Stepin Fetchit: The Life and Times of Lincoln Perry":

He was reviled in the African-American press (and soon after, in the culture at large) as a racist caricature, the "subservient, dim-witted, craven, eye-rolling" Negro. By the 1960's, his name had become an epithet, like "Uncle Tom."

In a 1968 CBS special entitled "Of Black America," a young comic named Bill Cosby proclaimed that "the tradition of the lazy, stupid, crap-shooter, chicken-stealing idiot was popularized by an actor named Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry." The outraged Fetchit, then 66, movingly responded during a press conference: "They're making me a villain," but "if it wasn't for me there wouldn't be no Sidney Poitier or Bill Cosby or any of them."

The LSD-inspired Beatles theme park that might have been.

The Jane and Michael Stern review Bob Spitz's new book "The Beatles." They like it a lot. I've picked out this detail to get some conversation going:

Spitz leads readers on a dizzying ride through the 1960's, taking in the band's musical and financial high points, way-out mystical adventuring, struggles over the Yoko Ono issue and what he calls their "course of reckless hedonism." That course included John's making a deal with LSD-maker Stanley Owsley to pay for a lifetime supply of the hallucinogen. On one occasion, under its influence, they all went to the Aegean Sea to purchase a cluster of islands where they planned to build four houses connected by tunnels, with the land between the homes filled with meditation posts, painting and recording studios, a go-cart track, and a landing strip. When the acid wore off, they got bored and abandoned the idea . . . but bought the islands anyway.

What a nice theme park that would be today if only they'd followed through! What drug-influenced notion did you abandon when you straightened out that you now think would have been quite cool?

Editing "Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever" for 1991 sensibilities.

Here's a Flickr set detailing the differences between "Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever," 1963 edition, and "Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever," 1991 edition. (Via Drawn!) It's not just political correctness either (e.g., lightening the fur on the animal driving in a car stopped by a police officer, making the police officer female). It's also a softening of the tone. "He comes promptly when he is called to breakfast," becomes "He goes to the kitchen to eat his breakfast." Think about what a change like that meant to the editors. Telling children what to do and expecting them not to balk? How retrograde!

The set makes nice use of the "add a note" function in Flickr. The comments are good too. The photographer is Kokogiak.

Stories of surviving the tsunami.

An eight-part article in the NYT Magazine. Sample:

At first, [Sambiyo] thought a ghost might be luring him into the slough. For the past hour, he had been picking up the dead, and the ghoulish task had the effect of a nightmare. Bodies suddenly stared up at him from the water; they hung from trees like branches of flesh. Sambiyo was glad to have his AK-101 hanging from the shoulder of his wet brown uniform. "Brother, please help me," this raspy female voice kept calling. Reluctantly, he waded into the dark water, using his hands to shove aside debris and casting his eyes about in search of the supernatural. As he got close to the woman, he could see only her face and her hair, and they were mottled with mud. He ventured closer, and when he was within a few feet, he realized she was naked.

"But you have no clothes on," he protested.

"It's O.K.," Maisara pleaded. "Just help me."

Vivid fact: "A cubic yard of water - barely enough to surround two people seated with their legs crossed - weighs nearly a ton." Description of what it was like to be slammed by tons of water:

It seemed muddy and sulfurous. It spun her and jerked her. She couldn't see. As she struggled for breath, she gulped some, and it tasted salty and foul. Her arms were useless. Objects struck her, and she felt cut, poked and punched. Something smacked her left eye. Then she stopped, her body upside down, pinned against something flat that she took to be a wall. A car - or what seemed a car - pushed against her and then slid away. Finally, the wall broke apart, and the water pitched her to the surface. She gulped for air. She saw the car, some floating trees, nothing else.

Then there was another wave. And this time it knocked her out.

Much, much more at the link.

"My biggest goal and biggest ambition in life was to be a great conversationalist."

Says Isaac Mizrahi. "I care about clothes and design, but more than anything I care about being this unscripted personality."

I loved his old talk show on Oxygen, and he's got a new talk show on the Style network. I think he really gets how to do TV talk:

"One of the things that I'm very hellbent on doing is not pre-interviewing the hell out of subjects," he said. "On a lot of shows you can feel that the guest is being set up to tell the cute story. I'm like, 'Let's not and say we did.'"

Yeah, don't you hate the way Letterman and Leno bring on actors and actresses who plug in a scripted story? They play the role of an actor on a talk show, being spontaneous and charming the host. What a horror!

Ah! Sex and chess, the eternal subject.

I'm just trying to picture the guys who are thrilled by the idea of a World Chess Beauty Contest.

Found via the NYT, which has a giant article about attractive women who play in chess tournaments. The Times also points to the "Internet Chess Club" -- which makes me want to say "demented and sad, but social" (or demented and sad and not even social). It quotes a female chess player: "a large percentage of the comments [there] are about how hot the women are."

The Times tackles the issue of what to do when a male player accuses his female opponent of using her good looks to "distract" him:

"She was distracting... But there was nothing I could do. It was the beginning of April, right after spring break, and she was dressed appropriately for the time of year. It wasn't anything against the law. I told the guy, 'You are going to have to call upon yourself to overcome the distraction.' He ended up losing the game anyway, but I am not sure that was from being distracted."

I don't play chess, and I've never watched a chess tournament, but I've seen some film clips and photos of grand players, and I imagine that the physical presence of the opponent always has an unnerving effect of some sort. And isn't each player aware of the things about him that are a bit disconcerting, such as very large size, audible breathing, or nervous ticcing? And then there's the subtle question of whether a player is doing it on purpose. It must be distracting just to get sucked into thinking about whether your opponent is doing it on purpose.

"Metcalf died in 2003 at age 45 while living in a replica of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate built in Corbin, Kentucky."

The fate of a powerball winner. Now, Metcalf's ex-wife -- they separated on hitting the lottery -- has been found lying dead in her house by the Ohio River, her corpse undiscovered for days. She'd been keeping to herself since last December, when a dead man "was found in her 5,000-square-foot, custom-built geodesic dome house."

So, do you think you would have done better if you'd won $65 million? You think you wouldn't have built a geodesic dome or a replica of Mount Vernon?

IN THE COMMENTS: Readers identify the house they would build a replica of if they had the money.

"That new mattress delivered from a reputable department store, which kindly hauled away your old one? "

"It may have spent all day in a truck wedged against an old mattress collected from a customer with a bedbug problem."

"Anyone who stays in a hotel, rich or poor, can bring them home in a suitcase... Some of the best hotels in New York have them."

Bedbugs!

Breakthrough of the week.

When I see someone's talking about me on another blog, I don't click over and read. This is life in the blogosphere. At some point, you become a target. To go on, to do this thing, you have to accept that they are talking about you over there, but that there is no profit in knowing what they are saying.

Tedious seasonal news reports.

I have a rule: I change the channel/click the mouse when I see the word "tryptophan."

"The Apprentice."

Spoilers follow, of course!

So, our dear boy Adam is gone, and for the first time no white male makes it to the final episode. No white male makes it to the semi-final. Adam was always at a disadvantage, being so terribly young (22), and he should feel great that he made it as far as he did. I think he knew that. In his taxicab confession, he presented his resume for all his future contacts. Smart! They should all do that, rather than rip the other contestants.

Adam remained, every step of the way, a decent, diligent, good kid. And wasn't it cool of him that he didn't make that boring? We felt for the kid. In the clip show that aired on Wednesday, we saw extra footage from the show where they did the education program about sex in the workplace. The expert they brought in to help them asked "Who here has had sex?" He thought that, of course, everyone would raise their hand and then they'd laugh, and it would be an ice breaker. But Adam couldn't raise his hand. Who in the history of the world has had his virginity exposed so blatantly, to so many people? But Adam kept his nerve. He stood up for himself. He's a great guy.

A toast to Adam!

But this week's task? It was a great task. You have all this advertising wrapping, and you're supposed to find something interesting to wrap. But the winner would be chosen by the number of people who call a phone number for a free sample, not by executives judging the quality of the advertising, presenting a new brand to consumers who would pay money for the product. The product was perfume, named after a star, Shania Twain. Having an army of temps with sandwichboards and megaphones was a horrible association for a perfume. But the contestants were right to ignore that, and ignore the creative task of finding something cool to wrap. They concentrated on how they were to be judged: by the number of phone calls. I cringed at the hucksters on the street, who had a negative impact on the brand. It's perfume! The quintessential luxury item. They were hawking it like a strip club!

I loved the way Rebecca and Randal pulled together and won. And I loved the way Trump did something new, sending Alla back to safety and pitting Felica and Adam against each other to debate for their lives. Both of them did a fine job. Never on the show have I seen such an even match. The editors let them have it out for a good, long time. Imagine if job interviews were like that and you had to go head-to-head with one other candidate, pitching yourself as the better of the two!

"Poverty and Prostitution."

The NYT profiles Massoud Dehnamaki, whom it calls "Iran's Michael Moore":

Reformists and conservatives alike harshly criticized Mr. Dehnamaki for making the first movie, "Poverty and Prostitution." Conservatives were furious that one of their own had not only highlighted an un-Islamic social pathology but seemed to sympathize with the prostitutes. Reformists believed he deliberately exaggerated the problem to make a case against easing Islamic law....

In the movie, Mr. Dehnamaki interviews more than a dozen prostitutes and many of their customers. All the women tell the same story of poverty and the need to provide for their families.

"We are two sisters working, and we can hardly earn enough to buy food and pay our rent," says a sobbing woman, whose face was covered to hide her identity.

"I sometimes dream of having chicken, or good food, at least once a week," she goes on, wiping away tears. "I have worked at homes where they had so much money that they threw food in the garbage. I always envy people who can eat well."

A woman clad in the traditional head-to-toe chador, who introduces herself as the mother of the two sisters, says she has thought of killing herself and her daughters several times because of the hardship of their lives but she could not find the courage....

Mr. Dehnamaki, 36, believes Iran needs to modernize, within the confines of a strict Islam, but not Taliban-style.

"If we are against the Islam that the Taliban introduced, we must be able to offer a good model of the Islam that we believe is the source of compassion and kindness," he said. "But it has to be according to the needs of today so that it would be acceptable to our youth."

Much more at the link. Very compelling. Did they have to drag in Michael Moore, though?

"Salmon, lentils, rice with almonds and a salad of parsley, tomatoes, cucumbers and bulgur wheat."

What the war protesters ate for Thanksgiving dinner to express something or other. Get it? They built a stone (concrete?) monument to themselves too.

UPDATE: Dr. Helen contemplates the dubious connection between food and virtue.

Fiber, function, flexibility, freedom, fashion.

In 1924, the Englishman George Mallory and Andrew (Sandy) Irvine died trying to climb Mount Everest. A photograph taken at base camp showed them dressed in "English gentleman's attire of plus fours and tweed jackets":



Now, Graham Hoyland, the great nephew of a member of the expedition's members, wants to climb Everest wearing the clothes they wore. He says it's not as ridiculous as it seems because, in fact, as the recently recovered bodies revealed, the men wore a lot of layers:

"The typical myth of Mallory was that he was under-equipped and amateurish," said Mary Rose, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Lancaster University in the UK, who was inspired by the discovery of Mallory's body to attempt a recreation of his wardrobe.

In fact, she said: "We've found that he understood his clothing probably better than modern climbers.

"It was quite an advanced system; the silk gave wind-proofing, and the silk and woollen layers moved off each other so it was quite easy to climb."...

"I guess I will find it much easier to move across the terrain, but I imagine the wind will be really cutting," [Hoyland] said.

Cool project. It reminds me of efforts to recreate the shoes of the 5,300-year-old Iceman:

"These shoes are very comfortable. They are perfectly able to protect your feet against hard terrain, against hot temperatures, against cold temperatures," [said Petr Hlavacek, a Czech shoe expert who has created replicas]....

Despite their flimsy leather soles, the shoes offer a good grip and superb shock absorption, and are blister-free, Hlavacek said.

It's like going barefoot, "only better," he said. "In the Oetzi shoes, you feel something like freedom, flexibility."...

[The shoes were tested by Vaclav Patek, a Czech mountaineer ... who owns a firm that makes mountaineering shoes for extreme terrain, has climbed all of Europe's tallest mountains. "I daresay I would manage to climb them all in the Oetzi shoes," he said.

The love of natural fibers. That was a major 1970s cultural trend. Now it's an area of scientific study, but will the fashion trend ever come around again? I remember the reaction to the first wave of polyester clothing, when lots of people made a big point of wearing only natural fibers. Somehow we slid back into polyester (renamed "microfiber") and lost that well-cultivated aversion to the artificial. There are all sorts of high tech fabrics now, and we don't ever bother to shun them. We don't ever talk about the importance of layers anymore.

Now, there's a fashion trend that's got to revive at some point:

The perils of trying to cheer Germans up about Germany.

The slogan you dream up -- "Du Bist Deutschland -- You Are Germany" -- turns out to be a slogan the Nazis used. You spend $34 million designing a self-esteem campaign, because studies show Germans are among the gloomiest people in the world, very pessimistic about the economy, and then some historian digs up a photograph from a Nazi convention with a banner that has your slogan and an image of Adolf Hitler. Suggestion for a new slogan: Fortunately, Our Problem Is the Economy!

Did you read great books this year?

The NYT chooses 100 notable books for 2005. Can you recommend any of these? I've only read "Freakonomics" and parts of "Becoming Justice Blackmun."

I wonder if I would be a better person if the time I've spent reading various things on the web had been devoted to these books. How could I have spent a year reading so intensely, without reading books?

Miss Penitentiary.

Just something they do in Brazil.

"I feel my blog evolving."

"I’m not sure how it’s evolving, and I’m interested to find out." Beautiful. As ever. No one else ever wrote two sentences that made tears run down my face.

In the blogosphere, there are artists. There are many different individuals. But among them, there are the artists.

Before you link to a blog...

...do you look around a while to make sure there isn't a post that depicts an act of violence against you?

Me neither.

Ever link to a blog, maybe even a few times, and then later discover a post that depicts an act of violence against you?

Well, I have.

Fending off rabid attack poodles.

I really appreciate these two comments from Wombat Rampant. First:

I don't think I'll be dropping by the OSM portal much because I think Steven den Beste and Ann Althouse are correct in their criticisms of the business model and the way Simon and Johnson have handled things, i.e. poorly.

And second:

Ann Althouse is getting shot up from the right and the left these days, which unfortunately seems to be the fate of moderates in these polarized times. The Pajamas Media/OSM/Pajamas Media folks seem to have gone into hypersensitive rabid attack poodle mode ever since Professor A criticized them for things they themselves are trying to fix now; the latest blowup seems to be over her fairly mild criticism (if you can even call it that) of PM's Thanksgiving Parade liveblogging and related tightening of comment policing on the Professor's blog.

As for the yahoos at Daily Kos, sounds like the same hypocrisy on a different day as they defend their right to be as racist and sexist as they wanna be, because it's all just funny masks they wear in the comment section as a big inside joke. Ann exposes the stupidity of that argument, and ruminates that the Democrats went a long way towards killing off honest feminism in the Clinton years. All that's left are the "bitches" now, if you'll forgive my use of GULAG thieves' slang.

Thanks. A while back, instead of the quotes you now see in my banner, I had a description that began "Politics and the aversion to politics." I really am blogging as someone with a distaste for politics, someone who is put off by hot partisan passion. Most people who don't like partisan politics and who find themselves close to the political center aren't going to want to deal with the usual ugliness of the blogosphere. Why do I? I have my reasons.

I wish our teachers would (educate/indoctrinate) our children.

The news from Bennington, Vermont:

A high school teacher is facing questions from administrators after giving a vocabulary quiz that included digs at President Bush and the extreme right.

Bret Chenkin, a social studies and English teacher at Mount Anthony Union High School, said he gave the quiz to his students several months ago. The quiz asked students to pick the proper words to complete sentences.

One example: "I wish Bush would be (coherent, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes." "Coherent" is the right answer.

Principal Sue Maguire said she hoped to speak to whomever complained about the quiz and any students who might be concerned.

Pop grammar quiz: Principal Sue Maguire said she hoped to speak to (whoever, whomever) complained about the quiz and any students who might be concerned.

Back to the article:

Chenkin, 36, a teacher for seven years, said he isn't shy about sharing his liberal views with students as a way of prompting debate, but said the quizzes are being taken out of context.

"The kids know it's hyperbolic, so-to-speak," he said. "They know it's tongue in cheek." But he said he would change his teaching methods if some are concerned.

"I'll put in both sides," he said. "Especially if it's going to cause a lot of grief."

Chenkin's attempt at a defense is way better than we saw from the Madison, Wisconsin third grade teachers earlier this week ("I don't see it as a controversial issue"). And it's notable that he's teaching older students. I'd like to know more about the whole context. What were the other sentences on the test? What is the rest of the class time like? Do students comfortably debate with him and take different opinions? I like seeing his willingness to change and include divergent viewpoints, but it sounds as though he's only doing that to keep people from giving him "grief." He should want to do it as a matter of being a good educator.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum and Steven Bainbridge weigh in on this story.

No more Madonna and Child Christmas stamps?

Darleen discovers.

To know my mom is to know that she has never indulged in cutesy stuff. Every year she always selects the Christmas stamp that features a classic painting of Madonna and Child. She asks if they have any classic Christmas stamps and the man pulls out a couple of sheets of last year's Madonna and Child. Mom notices he doesn't seem happy and he says to her, "These are all I have and they'll be the last you ever see." Mom asks, "What do you mean?" He explains the USPS will not be issuing any more "religious" stamps.

After all these years of having a choice between the religious-themed and the non-religious-theme seasonal stamps, now all must choose the Santas and snowmen. So ends an American tradition that meant a lot to a lot of people. What was the point? No one had to pick the Madonna stamps. The Post Office makes millions off of people sending out Christmas cards. I think many people preferred the Madonna stamps because they reproduced beautiful works of art, from the grand historical tradition of depicting the Madonna and Child. The notion that the religious side of Christmas is something only Christians appreciate is actually quite wrong. I'll bet there are plenty of non-believers who prefer the religious imagery to the commercial-secular things that lack a beautiful art tradition. Leonardo da Vinci did not paint snowmen and Santas.

UPDATE: The commenters question Darleen's postal clerk and dig up some links. So I wouldn't take that story to mean that the Post Office has abandoned the stamps. I've added a question mark to the post title. Let my post serve the purpose of making part of the argument for retaining the stamps, for those who are feeling Newdowish about them. There's a lot of discussion about whether government should be issuing Madonna stamps, and I think it's still an interesting question, whether the policy has been changed or not.

IN THE COMMENTS: Darleen comes by and says:

I did offer my mom's story as an anecdote about what she was told, unsolicitied, over the counter, at her local PO. Not just about the stamps but about the "Happy Holiday" greeting in lieu of "Merry Christmas".

Via phone to USPS customer service I was unable to get a definitive answer on whether or not there WILL be religious stamps offered in the future.

A 2006 Madonna and Child design was presented in August to reporters at a Stamp show I have been unable to get a confirmation that the USPS is actually going to issue it next year.

The Pajamas Media Discussion Board.

Here. Set up by Laurence Simon, whose nerve I've recently praised. Now everyone can blogjam about the Pajamas Entity.

UPDATE: Over on the discussion board, someone named Louis Sifer writes "Honestly, I think Lou Minatti is Ann Althouse. Honest. It's my honest opinion. I detect the same writing style." What do you think are the chances that I would want to hide my writing under a pseudonym, and then what do you think are the chances that I'd come up with the name "Lou Minatti"? Now, I'm just giggling over the keyboard, which you might picture me doing a lot, but, in fact, I hardly ever do. But this Lou Minatti character seems pretty smart. The thread is limited to constructive criticism for Pajamas, and he's got:

Anyway, they need to turn it off. Now. Just shut it off.

Then sit down and ask what it is they're trying to do. Why not ask us, the readers? I can't recall anyone (Charles, Roger, Glenn) asking us for our ideas. It's their money of course, but it's like they just assumed that they would know what we wanted to look at.

Is PJM a blog aggregator? A competitor to Huffington? What is it? To this day I still do not know what PJM is, and I still haven't bookmarked it because it's guilty of the worst sin of all - there's nothing interesting to read there!

They need to get a clear idea of what they are. Until then, they are wasting time and money.

Ooh, I think Althouse adopted an unlikely pseudonym so she could make it look like someone else agreed with her and then link to "him" back on her blog. And she's probably also that Louis Sifer character too, using "him" to make the whole thing about her. She's an attention whore. Yeah, Louis Sifer, Lou Minatti -- I detect the same pseudonym-inventing style! Lou... Louis... her dad's name is probably Lou. Get the fedora'd detectives on this, quick!

Althouse-o-phobia seeps in the collective mind of the Pajama Entity, where the horrifying words echo:

They need to turn it off. Now. Just shut it off.

"Admission and Exclusion" at elite universities.

Michiko Kakutani reviews "The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton," by Berkeley sociology professor Jerome Karabel. Here's some fascinating historical information about the origins of the nuanced admissions procedures we academics hold so dear:

Mr. Karabel writes that until the 1920's, Harvard, Yale and Princeton, "like the most prestigious universities of other nations," admitted students "almost entirely on the basis of academic criteria." Applicants "were required to take an examination, and those who passed were admitted." Though the exams exhibited a distinct class bias (Latin and Greek, after all, were not taught at most public schools), he says that "the system was meritocratic in an elemental way: if you met the academic requirements, you were admitted, regardless of social background."

This all changed after World War I, he argues, as it became "clear that a system of selection focused solely on scholastic performance would lead to the admission of increasing numbers of Jewish students, most of them of eastern European background." This development, he notes, occurred "in the midst of one of the most reactionary moments in American history," when "the nationwide movement to restrict immigration was gaining momentum" and anti-Semitism was on the rise, and the Big Three administrators began to worry that "the presence of 'too many' Jews would in fact lead to the departure of Gentiles." Their conclusion, in Mr. Karabel's words: "given the dependence of the Big Three on the Protestant upper class for both material resources and social prestige, the 'Jewish problem' was genuine, and the defense of institutional interests required a solution that would prevent 'WASP flight.' "

The solution they devised was an admissions system that allowed the schools, as Mr. Karabel puts it, "to accept - and to reject - whomever they desired." Instead of objective academic criteria, there would be a new emphasis on the intangibles of "character" - on qualities like "manliness," "personality" and "leadership." Many features of college admissions that students know today - including the widespread use of interviews and photos; the reliance on personal letters of recommendation; and the emphasis on extracurricular activities - have roots, Mr. Karabel says, in this period.

Later, universities changed the goals of admissions, Karabel writes, in part because discriminating against women and minorities went out of style and in part because large amounts of money from the foundations and the federal government freed them from needing to cater so much to the preferences of alumni donors. Karabel characterizes these changes as self-interested: the Big Three wanted "to preserve and, when possible, to enhance their position in a highly stratified system of higher education." They were "often deeply conservative" and "intensely preoccupied with maintaining their close ties to the privileged."

You just can't win with these sociology professors. Try to adopt an enlightened policy, and they'll find a way to demonstrate that you did it for your own good. Well, maybe you did.

Kazakhstan versus Borat.

Has there ever been a funnier idea for a lawsuit than Kazakhstan suing Sacha Baron Cohen for playing the character Borat?

Responding in character as Borat, Cohen, who is Jewish, said: ``I like to state, I have no connection with Mr Cohen and fully support my government's position to sue this Jew.''

``Since 2003 ... Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world,'' he said on his website, www.borat.kz.

``Women can now travel on inside of bus, homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hat and age of consent has been raised to eight years old.''

I love Borat's website. Very retro-web.

Are you nostalgic for old-fashioned web design? Or is it still so horrible that it isn't funny yet? You know the day will come when big corporations will tap this look to create that rebellious, indie feel that's so sought after.

UPDATE, December 14, 2005: Kazakhstan asserts its power over the "kz":

Yesterday, the government-appointed organization that regulates Web sites ending in the .kz domain name for Kazakhstan confirmed that Mr. Cohen's site had been suspended. Nurlan Isin, president of the Association of Kazakh IT Companies, said: "We've done this so he can't badmouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name. He can go and do whatever he wants at other domains."

Surprise! Nixon had qualms about mass nuclear destruction.

The NYT reports:

Widely considered a military hawk, President Richard M. Nixon fretted privately over the notion of any no-holds-barred nuclear war, newly released documents from his time at the White House reveal.

The recently declassified papers, from the first days of the Nixon presidency in 1969 until the end of 1974, show that Nixon wanted an alternative to the option of full-scale nuclear war - a plan for a gentler war, one that could ultimately vanquish the Soviet Union while avoiding the worst-case situation.

The papers provided a glimpse behind the scenes at efforts to find choices other than "the horror option," as the national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, called the worst-case scripts for all-out nuclear war that were then in place.

It would be surprising if Nixon didn't have qualms. It's a long crazy step from "military hawk" to feeling at ease with the prospect of killing millions of human beings.

The documents reveal Mr. Kissinger's chilling insight that government budget-crunchers would prefer complete nuclear warfare because it was already planned for and would be cheaper than recasting American capabilities to permit limited strikes.

"They believe in assured destruction because it guarantees the smallest expenditure," he said in August 1973 at a National Security Council meeting in the White House Situation Room. "To have the only option that of killing 80 million people is the height of immorality."

This is what is shocking.

"Unprepared? Been There, Done That."

Michael Brown is starting a disaster preparedness consulting firm.

"They have no idea what they want to be or why they exist."

Concludes Jeff Jarvis upon reading the self-criticism session over at Pajamas Media. The Pajamas insiders are openly discussing their problems. Everyone admits the site is boring, skimpy, corporate-looking, and lacking bloggishness. Tammy Bruce writes about wanting to capture a "feel and structure" that's "smart but revolutionary, rebellious." Hmmm....What's more corporate than trying to think up ways to express rebelliousness?

By the way, what do you think of the new Pajamas logo? It's a bathrobe -- with emanations.

Anyone still want to accuse me of being too critical of Pajamas? The insiders are now saying many of the same things openly on the blog -- partly, probably, in an effort to convey that rebel spirit they need to mask the corporateness. It would be interesting to know what criticisms they are hurling about in private. You can look at their comments and try to figure out what they are not talking about -- the lack of advertising for one thing.

Anyway, here's another Pajamas post for you all. I didn't want to have to do it, but the self-criticism session is too big to ignore.

UPDATE: Steven Bainbridge looks at the Pajamas "blogjam" and says "at the risk of descending to a level of crudeness to which this blog rarely goes, the only phrase that comes to mind is 'circle jerk.'" Well, at the risk of descending to a level of crudeness to which this blog rarely goes, Bainbridge is giving me ideas for another joke like the one found here, which sent those Pajama entity boys into a tizzy.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jarvis's post included the line "Finish this sentence in no more than 10 words: Pajamas Media is _________________." Some wags are filling in that blank:

Right Thoughts: Pajamas Media is (run and topped by) an elitist group of uberbloggers who couldn’t care less about the health of the blogosphere at large as long as they get their names in the paper and get to spend that venture capital money.

Laurence Simon: My sneaky answer is "Pajamas Media probably won't be sending it's members more checks.", but based on the lack of two-way communication by the management and editorial board with the member bloggers, I get the distinct feeling who cares what I think.

(Simon is one of the insiders, so let's admire his nerve, breaking the code of silence.)

MORE: Aaron on the logo: "Ann, those aren’t emanations. That’s stink."

AND MORE: Lots more from Laurence Simon here:

There is zero communication with the member sites right now... Right now, things feel elitist in nature, and this blogjam just reinforces the views of the members I've chatted with privately that we're being kept at arms length. That builds up resentment and frustration at the silence.

More as I comb through my notes and work up constructive criticism of it. I have some really bad memories of Go.com, Starwave, Jamie Barton, ESPN, DIG, and iXL that takes a while to boil out all the bad blood so I can examine the rotten, putrid flesh underneath clinically and dispassionately for enlightenment with regards to this current fiasco.

I'm sorely tempted to throw up a PHP bulletin board and send out invitations myself. Unlike certain people, I don't believe you need an osm.org or pajamasmedia.com domain name to quick-and-dirty build these tools when there's an emergency. Sitting around and waiting for the "proper" tools to be supplied to you when disaster is crashing all around is reminiscent of the appearance-obsessive, press-fearing superficial Michael Brown of FEMA.

Like my hat? I got it at Nordstroms. Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?

YET MORE: The Pyjamas Media logo is much nicer. I love the way they kept the "stink" marks.

AND: Nice spoof of the hand-wringing blogjam.

A movie and a new policy.

What movie did we watch for Thanksgiving? "Boogie Nights." Appropriate? No. But we just felt like watching it. What a great film!

Checking in on the blog, I face up to the problem of the degradation of the comments caused by an influx of several categories of new readers. I realize I've got to be more vigilant and less tolerant, because the decline in quality is affecting our regular readers. Newcomers are welcome to participate, but I've got to uphold some standards or the comments will lose their value for everyone.

In particular, I'm not going to accept repetitious arguments, abusive language, and overblown accusations -- which seem to have become the style in the last few days. This is my place. I like debate and am ready to read criticism, but what has been going on lately has crossed the line, and I'm adopting a new, more activist form of supervision.

I will delete comments that offend my standards, and I will turn off comments on posts where the conversation is played out to the point where it is attracting too many deletable posts. You're welcome to practice your free speech on your own blogs. I intend to keep a civil dialogue on mine.

"The M&Ms float crashed. Oh the humanity! As God is my witness, I thought M&Ms could fly."

That's the reaction in the Pajamas Media live blogging when a Thanksgiving Parade balloon crashes and falls, along with a streetlight into a crowd. Here's an MSM report of the incident, quoting a spectator saying "It happened so fast. I said, 'Oh, my God!' It dropped like a rock." Also: "A 26-year-old woman and 11-year-old girl were apparently hurt by the debris."

Do our intrepid bloggers right themselves? Scroll at the first link to see how they carry on joking about the accident:

"Are we liveblogging someone's death? Because I didn't sign on to do parade snuff."

"Ed, you're thinking of skittles. Skittles have superpowers that M&M's do not. It's a generational thing."

I was at the parade in 1969, when Bullwinkle deflated all over a bystanders near the Ansonia Hotel, who moved inside en masse and started Plato's Retreat.

Yikes.
UPDATE: I've closed the comments on this post, based on my new, more vigorous policy announced here. For readers who may not know, the many references to "Jeff" in these comments are to the commenter Protein Wisdom, who is Jeff Goldstein, one of the participants in the live-blogging criticized in this post.

Is Pajamas Media too much like MSM? Well, one way in which it's different, to be sure, is that when you do a blog post, say, criticizing Dan Rather, he doesn't come over and yell at you in the comments! I think it's damned strange that you have what is supposed to be a business, with $3.5 million in financing, where the insiders behave like this. All I did was quote four things that they said and write "Yikes," and Goldstein comes over and rants in my comments -- on Thanksgiving! -- until I'm finally driven to close them down and announce a new comments policy to protect my space from being deluged by ugliness. He's also writing on his own blog, denouncing me as "absolutely despicable." For saying "Yikes" at those jokes made when a large object falls on a crowd? A little thin-skinned, Jeff?

And what about this character, another PJM insider? He writes about my post, saying I'd "lost my mind" and titling the post "Ann Althouse's Integrity"? All for a little old "Yikes"! Oh, I see, he was over here commenting and I deleted his comment. Yeah, because it was too abusive. Now, on his own blog, he's calling me "a liar ... spreading malicious untruths." Where's the lie? He thinks it's a lie to have written about the accident in this post when I wasn't watching the parade on television!

Let the historians of blogging judge who's lost their mind. I'd like to know which insiders are embarrassed to be yoked to folks who are harassing me this way just for criticizing them a little. How bizarrely unprofessional! And, worse, how hostile to the spirit of blogging, which they so desperately want and need to recover!

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader writes:

I think the 2 posts you describe in the update make it clear that these are not just people who are criticizing your blog because they happen not to like the things you say; it's a smear campaign (which means you're certainly entitled to delete ALL of their comments). A normal person would never say that you were lying in your post about the parade. So many of the recent criticisms of you from people who defend Pajamas Media are essentially saying: "You're criticizing them too much." (Weird attitude for bloggers to have!)

Indeed!

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Dan at Riehl World View notes that Pajamas could have foreseen that the wind that day would pose problems for the balloons and could have mobilized to provide the citizen journalism they've been talking about:

With just a very little bit of research into what turned out to be an important subtext of this particular parade, PJM might have been in a position to put something rather substantive out within minutes of the accident, offering readers something they likely wouldn't have gotten from the MSM on line for an hour.

News is rarely, if ever that which is expected - it's the unexpected which makes headlines. If we as bloggers want to move into an increasingly significant role as reporters, we're going to have to learn to be better prepared in certain cases.

That's a very sharp and constructive criticism. What does Dan get for it? Jeff Goldstein shows up in the comments and goes after him until Dan actually rewrites his post to "correct the emphasis."

MORE: Baldilocks doesn't understand why I wrote in the comments here that Jeff Goldstein acted as though been given "the assignment to be my personal Baldilocks." I explain over in her comments section.

AND: Was lighting into me for this post behavior befitting the insiders to a major business undertaking? Of course not. What would a media organization that was actually ready for prime time have done? They should have added a note at the end of their live-blogging that said something like:

Live-blogging is part of the great fun of blogging, but it poses risks too. Our live-bloggers didn't see much of the mishap with the balloon as they were watching the televised parade, and unfortunately, their comments carried on in the joking spirit of the live-blog. Afterwards, they saw the news reports, and their hearts went out to the young woman and the girl who got hurt. Looking back, some of those jokes seem pretty insensitive. But we took the risk of live-blogging, and we're going to keep taking risks in the grand tradition of blogging. We knew we'd step on some toes along the way, but we never meant to be mean to the nice people who go to parades.

Then Althouse would have amended her post and said Nice save by Pajamas!

Instead, I've got to say not ready for prime time.

ALSO: I'm going to allow new comments, but I will monitor actively. I will delete posts with hatred, abuse, shouting, personal attacks, repetition, and perseverating demands for apologies and retractions. You can debate and disagree, but you must try to engage with some of the issues on a rational, intelligent level, in the tradition of Althouse blog comments. If you're not familiar with my place, read some of the comments in other posts and get a feeling for the kind of community you are entering. The regulars who hang out here have created an environment that's different from a lot of places where you may be used to commenting. I will not allow you to spoil it for us.

"We have a tight community with a private language, and Althouse ... doesn't get that."

So says a commenter, over at Kos, who thinks he's explaining that I was unfair to the commenters over at Eschaton. Hello? They were attacking me. You're right that I'm not a member of the community, and I don't know their "private language," but since I could see you were talking about me, I thought I'd read some of what you were saying. I got about 100 comments into a series of 800+ comments and most of what I read looked like rank sexism. And no one stood up to say anything about it. All this in a post reacting to my complaint that Democrats don't seem to care about feminism. You folks looked awful. Your defense is, we're all insiders who share a private language?

You're talking on the web, in front of the whole world. You purport to be liberals, the people who usually tend to claim they are the ones who will protect the interests of women. But you present an ugly, degraded face to the world. Then you say, oh, this isn't my real face. This is a funny mask I wear and you just don't get it. Brilliant politics, folks.

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, feminists within liberal groups would give you hell if you talked about women like that. Saying you're joking, ironic, or speaking a private language would only earn you the next slam. That kind of feminism died in the Clinton Era.

A life spent playing the jug and the washtub bass.

Goodbye to Fritz Richmond, who played the jug and the washtub bass in Jim Kweskin's Jug Band:

Drawing on his expertise as an Army helicopter mechanic, he strung the washtub bass with a steel cable, turning it into a usable instrument. To play it, he developed his own steel-and-rawhide gloves.

He won national attention in 1963 with the Kweskin band. Only when he joined the band did he learn that he would be playing the jug as well as washtub bass. None of the members of the band knew the instrument firsthand; Mr. Richmond learned how to play it from scratchy old records.

Mr. Muldaur said Mr. Richmond was an innovator who, among other things, suggested the Lovin' Spoonful's name and was the first to wear the granny glasses with tiny colored lenses later favored by many other musicians. While most wore the glasses to be trendy, Mr. Muldaur said, Mr. Richmond wore them to hide the fact that the exertion of blowing the jug made him go cross-eyed.

Oh, so that's why we all wore those glasses! I wonder how many other fashion trends were started by someone who had an idiosyncratic reason for wearing something unusual.

Anyway, I loved the Jug Band. Here's a greatest hits record -- and you can listen to some clips.

Trends in Chinese blogging.

The NYT reports:

The new wave of blogging took off earlier this year. In the past, a few pioneers of the form stood out, but now huge communities of bloggers are springing up around the country, with many of them promoting one another's online offerings, books, music or, as in Mu Mu's case, a running, highly ironic commentary about sexuality, intellect and political identity.

"The new bloggers are talking back to authority, but in a humorous way," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley. "People have often said you can say anything you want in China around the dinner table, but not in public. Now the blogs have become the dinner table, and that is new.

"The content is often political, but not directly political, in the sense that you are not advocating anything, but at the same time you are undermining the ideological basis of power."...

Another emerging school of blogging, potentially as subversive as any political allegory, involves bringing Chinese Web surfers more closely in touch with things happening outside their country.

Typically, this involves avid readers of English who scour foreign Web sites and report on their findings, adding their own commentary, in Chinese blogs....

By far the biggest category of blogs remains the domain of the personal diary, and in this crowded realm, getting attention places a premium on uniqueness.

For the past few months, Mu Mu, the Shanghai dancer, has held pride of place, revealing glimpses of her body while maintaining an intimate and clever banter with her many followers, who are carefully kept in the dark about her real identity.

How interesting it is to see how individuals repressed by government censorship find new and clever ways to break through with blogging! I love the idea that what Mu Mu is doing is intensely political because it is in China, when it wouldn't be the slightest bit political here.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Find some critter to eat.

Arguing with Armando about Bush v. Gore and Samuel Alito.

I try to stay out of arguments about Bush v. Gore. One of my earliests posts on this blog agonizes over the impossibility of teaching it to law students:

Bush v. Gore is important, but I find it hard to believe that people are willing to invest the time to understand the federal and state statutes and the federal and state constitutional law provisions needed to grasp the legal issues in the case. Even if they do spend the time, I think their intake of information is affected at every step by their preexisting mindset about what the Supreme Court did (e.g., stole the election, saved us from an overreaching state court). But most likely, they won't spend the time, because they know very well what happened. Where did that knowledge come from?

I remember the night the decision came down, watching reporters on TV trying to read and understand the opinion in front of live cameras. That seemed at the time to be antithetical to a real process of understanding a piece of writing, but in retrospect I think nearly everyone reached their understanding at that point. Perhaps that is what human understanding is, and the rest is filling in the details.

It is hopeless and crucial and absurd to teach Bush v. Gore.

It's much worse to try to argue about Bush v. Gore in the blogosphere, especially when you have to talk with very partisan folks who know damn well what they think and write for thoroughly political purposes. So what am I supposed to do when the DailyKos, with its 700,000+ visitors a day starts talking about something I wrote about Bush v. Gore? Armando takes a passage from an article I wrote years ago, which I happened to have posted in the comments section of this post the other day. He refers to the passage as a "pile of manure" and doggedly states his opinions without engaging with the intellectual substance of what I'd said.

Naturally, he doesn't read the whole article that precedes the conclusion, which parses all the legal texts. I don't have a link for it. You'd have to go into LEXIS to read it. Look for: Althouse, The Authoritative Lawsaying Power of the State Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court: Conflicts of Judicial Orthodoxy in the Bush-Gore Litigation, 61 Md. L. Rev. 508 (2002). I don't blame him for not reading the whole thing, only for writing as if there wasn't an entire detailed article supporting the conclusion he's satisfied to call "manure." He writes that I do "not even bother to defend [Bush v. Gore] on legal grounds." But I do! Read the article. I just can't do it in short form on the blog.

Essentially, Armando does what I said in that old post that everyone does. My article conclusion ends with the line: "[T]hose who would criticize ought to see how the judges who voted for the outcome the critics liked were all doing something that they would have found a way to criticize if they had felt so motivated." But who can imagine Armando undertaking that particular thought exercise? In fact, I don't expect anyone to do that, because it's an unbelievable pain to work through the materials even without trying to adopt an experimental alternative perspective. And Armando's thing is to be a hardcore partisan, so why would he ever bother to spend his time like that?

Well, am I supposed to respond to him? On this one, it's monumentally easy to see in advance that arguing about what happened in Bush v. Gore is a mug's game.

But Armando uses my text to make an argument about the Alito nomination. I will talk about that. Looking at the way I wrote about Bush v. Gore, he asks:

[D]oes not Althouse admit that she too, is a legal realist? And given that admission, is it not fair to expect that Althouse would approve of a query in detail regarding Alito's views on legal issues? Is it not fair to expect that Althouse would not condemn critiques of the results of Alito's opinions without trying to engage in hypertechnical "gotcha-isms"?

No, I'm not a "legal realist." Legal Realism, like its close companion Critical Legal Studies, goes too far in portraying judges as acting in service of their own political and policy preferences. I simply recognize that the answers in many cases are not predetermined by text and precedent and, therefore, the individual judge's background, beliefs, values, and tendencies will affect the decision. It really matters who decides. I would guess even originalists like Justice Scalia and Thomas would admit that.

So, of course, we all ought to be concerned about what the mind of Alito is really like. Of course, it's not enough to say he's well educated and demonstrably proficient at crafting opinions from legal materials. So what's my answer to Armando's questions about how Alito's opponents should proceed?

It turns out I've already answered. Look at this post from last week, responding to that 1985 job application in which Alito professed a set of conservative beliefs:

Up until now, the attacks on Alito have been based on nothing of substance. Critics cherry-picked his cases, found the ones where he ruled against sympathetic parties, and treated the outcomes in cases as if there is no legal reasoning involved in reaching outcomes. Or they simply assumed that Alito must be a big right-winger because he (unlike Miers) was not being attacked from the right and conservatives all looked rather happy about having him as the nominee.

With this letter, we enter a new phase of the nomination process, in which the opponents have something very substantial to talk about. And, indeed, they must fight, based on this. I see two aspects to the coming fight.

First, there is the question of what is the better set of values. A lot of people will read Alito's statement and agree with it, while others will oppose it. Some may only care about a few of those issues or may agree about some things and not others. Though most of the talk will be about abortion rights, we have a valuable opportunity to talk about what the full set of conservative legal positions is, to compare them with the liberal positions, and to debate about which is better. I welcome this public debate and hope it can be done well.

Second, there is the question of how personal beliefs affect a judge's performance on the bench. Some will defend Alito by saying a good judge is a humble, faithful servant of the law who sets his personal, political beliefs aside. Related to this is one of Bush's big issues: the liberal judges are activist judges who make the law mean what they would vote for if they were legislators. In this rhetoric, the conservative judges somehow escape the temptation the liberal judges succumb to. As long as you have a conservative judge, the rhetoric goes, you don't have to worry about what his political beliefs are: He will do the proper, judicial thing and not "legislate from the bench" like those bad liberal judges. Those of us who are not political ideologues tend to think that judges try to follow the law, but that the texts and precedents are ambiguous or fluid enough to require some judgment to get to a decision. Thus, the background beliefs and political tendencies of any judge will need to flow into the decision-making, no matter how modest and dutiful the human being making the decision is.

Alito opponents should take the rule of law seriously and respect the institution of the courts. These are resources we all rely on. Trashing them is counterproductive. Challenge Alito in a way that also expresses a sound theory of constitutional interpretation. Work on a way to convince ordinary people that approaches other than originalism deserve respect. Help people care and believe in the individual rights you want courts to protect. Playing from the Legal Realism side, from an assumption that law is a kind of politics, empowers your opponents to say -- as they've been saying ad nauseam -- that you only want judges who will legislate from the bench.

At the Rotary Club.

Today, I gave a lunchtime talk at the Madison Rotary Club. I was charmed by the wall hangings, with banners from chapters of the Rotary Club throughout the world. Some of the banners looked very old. The president of the Madison Rotary told me they had many, many banners, collected by members attending meetings around the world, but they kept the oldest ones on the hangings that covered the walls behind the podium.







My talk was about the newly configured Supreme Court. I got to see, for the first time, the inner workings of a Rotary Club meeting. Everyone in the huge group seemed happy and friendly and devoted to Rotarian principles. Birthdays were announced, aphorisms were recited, and songs were sung. Today's singalong was "Georgia on My Mind."

The family your humble blogger married into.

Summarized... mercilessly. I'm caricatured at the end of this long post, by the way. ADDED: R says the references at the end of the post are not to me.

Scalia's kids tell him to get out more because "it makes it harder to demonize you."

So he's out and about, even taking a question from Al Franken, whom he apparently doesn't recognize.

UPDATE: Oh, it is so obvious: Scalia should blog!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's a more detailed report of the encounter with Franken:

Page Six said Franken ... "found out the hard way not to mess with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who chided Franken as if he were a delinquent schoolboy … ."

Franken asked "hypothetically" whether a judge should recuse himself if he had gone duck-hunting or flown in a private jet with a party in a case before his court, the Post reported....

Scalia lectured Franken, "Demeanor is the wrong word. You mean ethics."

I'm sure Franken felt cut to the core. And, by the way, "delinquent" isn't really the right adjective for a schoolkid who uses the wrong word. Now doesn't that make Page Six look... whatever.

The justice explained a judge does not have to recuse himself from a case if his friend, in an official capacity, was a nominal party in the dispute, according to Opinion Journal Editor James Taranto, who witnessed the exchange.

Sounds like a very ordinary question and answer session. If Franken didn't try to argue back or say something usual, it's hardly a story at all, is it?

"We don't want this to be all about the money."

"We want this to be all about kicking the crap out of an overpromising, underdelivering turkey of an alternative news site."

Ooh, I've never been linked like that before!

Nice likeness, capturing the spirit of Althouse.

All I really want is the stuffing.

Ruth Siems realized that's the way a lot of us feel about Thanksgiving food. RIP, inventor of Stove Top Stuffing. From the patent application:

"The nature of the cell structure and overall texture of the dried bread crumb employed in this invention is of great importance if a stuffing which will hydrate in a matter of minutes to the proper texture and mouthfeel is to be prepared."

Actually, I've never eaten Stove Top Stuffing, but I have a nostalgic feeling about the original TV commercials, even though I didn't enjoy them at the time.

The new logo and lower-casing.

So, what does it say to you, this blue-and-white striped marble and the lower-cased letters of the big old name AT&T? They've gotten cute and young and playful? I see a marble. Maybe you see globe. Or do you see stylized fingers, intertwined? Intertwined around a globe?

"Obviously, we're not talking about Steven Avery."

The NYT has a long, front-page story about Steven Avery, the man freed by my law school's Innocence Project who is now accused of murder:

For days, however, the case of Steven Avery, who was once this state's living symbol of how a system could unfairly send someone away, has left all who championed his cause facing the uncomfortable consequences of their success. Around the country, lawyers in the informal network of some 30 organizations that have sprung up in the past dozen years to exonerate the falsely convicted said they were closely watching Mr. Avery's case to see what its broader fallout might be.

Two years ago, Mr. Avery emerged from prison after lawyers from one of those organizations, the Wisconsin Innocence Project at the University of Wisconsin Law School, proved that Mr. Avery had spent 18 years in prison for a sexual assault he did not commit.

In Mr. Avery's home county, Manitowoc, where he was convicted in 1985, his release prompted apologies, even from the sexual assault victim, and a welcoming home for Mr. Avery. Elsewhere, the case became Wisconsin's most noted exoneration, leading to an "Avery task force," which drew up a package of law enforcement changes known as the Avery Bill, adopted by state lawmakers just weeks ago.

Mr. Avery, meanwhile, became a spokesman for how a system could harm an innocent man, being asked to appear on panels about wrongful conviction, to testify before the State Legislature and to be toured around the Capitol by at least one lawmaker who described him as a hero.

But last week, back in rural Manitowoc County, back at his family's auto salvage yard, back at the trailer he had moved home to, Mr. Avery, 43, was accused once more. This time, he was charged in the death of Teresa Halbach, a 25-year-old photographer who vanished on Oct. 31 after being assigned to take pictures for Auto Trader magazine at Avery's Auto Salvage....

Lawmakers who had pushed to have the state pay Mr. Avery more than $420,000 for his wrongful arrest have grown quiet. And the bill of changes - to the way the police draw up eyewitness identification procedures, conduct interrogations and hold onto DNA evidence - is no longer called the Avery Bill.

"The legislation is very important and very sound for our justice system as a whole," said Representative Mark Gundrum, a Republican who helped organize what was then called the "Avery task force."

"But this does detract a little bit," Mr. Gundrum said. "Obviously, we're not talking about Steven Avery anymore, not highlighting his conviction."

And plans for a "grand, glorious" signing ceremony for what is now simply called the "criminal justice reforms" package, he said, seem remote.

As I've written here before, Avery was proven innocent of the rape he was sent to prison for and deserved to be released, and the Innocence Project does essential work. But it's a terribly sad thing to see someone who symbolized your idealism revealed as a monster.

"They didn't expect the assignment to cause any problems, because it was part of a social studies project asking for peace."

The news from Madison, Wisconsin:

"We didn't intend to offend anyone, and I hope we haven't offended anyone," said Julie Fitzpatrick, Frank Allis 3rd grade teacher.

Fitzpatrick is one of five teachers at Madison's Frank Allis elementary school, who says some parents are upset over their message of peace....

Last Friday, third grade teachers at Frank Allis sent home this letter.

It explained a project, where the students would write letters to lawmakers, other students ... even to the president ... asking for an immediate withdrawal of U–S troops from Iraq.

Fitzpatrick says they didn't expect the assignment to cause any problems, because it was part of a social studies project asking for peace.

"I don't see it as a controversial issue ... I really don't," said Fitzpatrick.

The project was cancelled -- school district policy prohibits teachers from presenting controversial issues with bias and promoting their personal political views.

I wonder how well that policy is enforced. That a group of five teachers thought this was an acceptable assignment suggests that it's hardly enforced at all.

"I don't see it as a controversial issue." I love that. It's so it depends on what the meaning of controversial is. Community standards seem to apply to that. And we're all here in Madison, Wisconsin.

UPDATE: I did a little local TV segment on this story and the effect of blogging about it. You can watch the video -- with a commercial and quite grainy -- here.

"Did Roger Simon Form a Partnership With Dennis the Peasant?"

Entrepreneurship lawprof Gordon Smith does some analyzing

The story bears a striking resemblance to the facts of Urban Decay, where a California appellate court held that two women who developed ideas for a cosmetics company had formed a partnership.

Why won't those jealous outsiders stop being so mean?

The Pajamas Media Death Pool.

UPDATE: Joe Gandelman: "You KNEW it HAD to happen: a site has been started to formally start a deathwatch for Pajamas Media.... Why did you KNOW it had to happen?"

"The election was dragged into the courts by the Gore people. We did not go looking for trouble."

So said Antonin Scalia yesterday. Once the case had been set in motion, the Supreme Court had to take it, he said:

"The issue was whether Florida's Supreme Court or the United States Supreme Court [would decide the election.] What did you expect us to do? Turn the case down because it wasn't important enough?"

I wonder if Scalia approves of the bracketed language! I should think he'd want something more like "The issue was whether Florida's Supreme Court or the United States Supreme Court [would resolve the legal questions raised by Gore's challenge]." He's right, isn't he? Once the Florida courts started interpreting their way toward upsetting the result, the Supreme Court couldn't sit by passively.

UPDATE: If you've arrived here from DailyKos and are looking for my answer to Armando, go here.

Weighing blog traffic.

Duncan Black is touchy about something I said about his traffic. I suggested he gets a lot of traffic through minimal posts, including many "open thread" announcements. That is, people use the main page as a portal to the comments window. Of course, he should be touchy, because he makes a lot of money from ads, the advertisers rely on the traffic numbers, and the ads do not appear on the comments pages.

His average daily traffic, per Site Meter, read today, is 169,709. The average visit, however, is a mere 4 seconds, perhaps as readers jump over to the comments window, which Site Meter doesn't measure. By contrast, my average visitor stays 181 seconds. So, though I lack his immensely high traffic, if you multiply my daily traffic (10,827) times the seconds spent looking at the page, you get 1,959,687. Do the same multiplication on his numbers, and you get 678,836. Isn't that interesting? I'd like to see someone do a ranking of the blogs based on this statistic! On this standard, I even beat Kos! With 2 second visits, he's at 1,485,224.

Yeah, would somebody please produce this ranking?

UPDATE: Or am I wrong in the way I understand how Site Meter counts visit length? Here's the first comment on this post:

Ann you don't understand that sitemeter only measures a visit length when you move to the comments window. If a blog had no comments then visit length would hover near zero except for those few people who clicked on the archives. His lower visit time means that there are a lot of zero length visits which stay solely on the main page. Your higher visit time means that you have many active participants in your comment section. I don't think you proved what you thought you did.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Visit time is inaccurately measured by Site Meter, but it's still something, otherwise it would make no sense for them to include it on their charts. And I hardly think people stay on Eschaton's main page, since it's full of very short posts, often simply announcing an open thread. Some portion of zeroes are apparently averaged in, where Site Meter records no movement within the blog, but we all get zeroes averaged in. I'm just pointing out an extreme difference in these numbers. Today, November 26, my average visit time is up to 3 minutes and 48 seconds. I think avertisers ought to know that some blogs keep their readers on the page much longer than others. This is an important factor, even if a fully accurate statistic can't be produced.

"Federalism After Gonzales v. Raich."

It's a big, exciting symposium, published in Lewis & Clark Law Review, with the articles now posted here (in PDF form). Raich is the case from last Term where the Supreme Court said that the commerce power allowed Congress to regulate home-grown, home-consumed marijuana, even when the state wants to authorize its use for medicinal purposes.

Here's my contribution to the symposium, snazzily titled "Why Not Heighten the Scrutiny of Congressional Power When the States Undertake Policy Experiments?" I focus on Justice O'Connor's dissent and conclude:

Justice O’Connor seems to have responded sympathetically to the predicament in which the Raich plaintiffs found themselves. This sympathy resonated with ideas about the states as laboratories of democracy. But Justice O’Connor’s dissenting opinion never faces up to what it means as a general proposition. Many commentators will nevertheless look at her opinion and, through the lens of their own sympathy for the plaintiffs and perhaps also their own enthusiasm for the judicial enforcement of federalism, see a better formulation of Commerce Clause doctrine than what the majority had to offer. I would ask commentators who think the Court erred in Raich to look beyond the context of the case and consider the general issue of whether to endorse a new doctrine that would change the degree of deference to Congress where a state has undertaken a policy experiment in an area that traditionally has been left to the states. I think such a doctrine is unworkable. It would invite fifty states and innumerable cities to carve out exceptions of all sorts from important federal statutes that are unquestionably supported by the Commerce Clause. Much as I would prefer to believe that it would prove beneficial to free local government to conduct idiosyncratic policy experiments that take random bites out of major federal statutes, I predict disarray and detriment. But I would love to be convinced that I am wrong.

Other contributions to the symposium:

"Foreword: Limiting Raich" by Randy E. Barnett

"Is Morrison Dead? Assessing a Supreme Drug (Law) Overdose" by Jonathan H. Adler

"Raich and Judicial Conservatism at the Close of the Rehnquist Court" by Eric R. Claeys

"Rescuing Federalism After Raich: The Case for Clear Statement Rules" by Thomas W. Merrill

“'Society Must Be [Regulated]': Biopolitics and the Commerce Clause in Gonzales v. Raich" by John T. Parry

"The Medical Marijuana Case: A Commerce Clause Counter-Revolution?" by Robert J. Pushaw, Jr.

"What Hath Raich Wrought? Five Takes" by Glenn H. Reynolds & Brannon P Denning.

Alito and the Free Exercise Clause.

Emily Bazelon has a piece in Slate about what Samuel Alito has written about religious freedom. She starts off by linking to my NYT op-ed noting that his take on the Free Exercise Clause sets him apart from Justice Scalia, who has embraced a narrow interpretation. Well, she half-links to it, in that it's behind a pay-wall now, but I preserved a permanent link, and you can read it free here.

Bazelon writes:

Alito's religious-liberty opinions are mechanistic applications of precedent. They reveal little about the stance he'd take toward religious liberty as a justice of the Supreme Court.

This is incorrect. Judge Alito pushed the envelope in two cases. In two cases -- which Bazelon details -- he took the doctrine, which says that neutral, generally applicable laws do not violate Free Exercise and was unusually quick to see nonneutrality, which causes the standard to become strict scrutiny. This, in fact, is very revealing. It shows a judge chafing against the doctrine he's forced to follow!

Why didn't more parents name babies Elvis?

I mean, look at all the Dylans. Why didn't that happen with Elvis? I remember thinking, back in the 60s, that soon we'd be seeing lots of young people named Elvis. But it didn't happen. Why?

(Here's that Baby Name Wizard if you want to compare the naming trends over time.)

3-D TV.

Did you watch last night's episode of "Medium," the one with the 3-D? Did you go out and buy an issue of TV Guide to get the 3-D glasses and then find they didn't really work too well? That's what happened to the person here who loves "Medium" and procured the glasses. I was going to watch with him, and I even went to Borders and looked around for TV Guide. I couldn't find it, and I just couldn't bring myself to go to the information desk and ask for TV Guide. Man, it's embarrassing enough to buy TV Guide, but to have to ask for it... Just couldn't do it!

"What's wrong about all this is that in an effort to protect against illegal copying, it was Sony BMG that engaged in illegal conduct."

Said the Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott.

In separate legal actions yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an influential digital rights advocacy group in California, and the Texas attorney general filed lawsuits against the music publisher Sony BMG, contending that the company violated consumers' rights and traded in malicious software.

They are the latest in a series of blows to the company after technology bloggers disclosed this month that in its efforts to curb music piracy, Sony BMG had embedded millions of its music CD's with software designed to take aggressive steps to limit copying, but which also exposed users' computers to potential security risks.

The copy-protection software, called XCP, was bought by Sony BMG from a British company, First 4 Internet, and was installed on 52 recordings, totaling nearly five million discs, according to the music publisher, which is jointly owned by Sony and Bertelsmann....

Users do have to accept "license agreements" that appear on their computer screens before playing CD's protected by the First 4 Internet and SunnComm software, but the foundation called the terms of those agreements "outrageous" and "anti-consumer."

It will be interesting to see what the courts do with those click-thru contracts. Any idea how many of them you've "agreed" to over the years?

What the guys-in-suits made them do.

Hey, OSM is going back to the name Pajamas Media:

[O]h, what a drubbing we took. Many, many readers pointed out to us that OSM™ was an oxymoron; the open source tech community expressed concern; and a very fine gentleman named Christopher Lydon at Open Source (www.radioopensource.org) politely pointed out that we might be trampling on his space. ...

[T]he whole experience of being caught with our pajamas down has been a bit embarrassing, but in the end, when we realized we could get our beloved name back, we were overjoyed. So a warm, hearty thanks to all of you who expressed your displeasure with our phony identity.

Even me? My biggest problem with the name "Open Source Media" was not the wound imagery ("open sores"), but that is was so thuddingly dull and corporate-sounding -- as if they hoped to suck the life out of blogging.

So how did this happen in the first place? Back at the beginning, certain, shall we say, paternalistically minded parties (i.e., the guys in suits) decided that we should act like grownups, and being as yet somewhat immature—at least as businesspeople--we did as we were told.

Which is how, one day, we ended up sitting around a conference table listening to representatives from a "branding" company....

Enough said. So, in the spirit of "open source," we thought we’d tell you the real story behind the reason for our name change. And hope that our corporate parents will be satisfied with good grades and healthy revenue.

They're not the guys-in-suits. Some other guys, who once pushed them around, are the guys-in-suits.

Now that the name has been changed, will there be other changes? Will the site fill up with exciting, interesting material? Because it's the lack of good stuff to read that has always been their main problem. Did the guys-in-suits make that happen?

"If you don't like my attitude, then you can F-off...."

"Just go to Texas, isn't that where they golf?"

Don't you love Madonna's new "Confessions on a Dance Floor"?

Democrats have a long, long way to go to convince me that they care about feminism.

Atrios links to my post asking feminists to care about the sexual harrassment of women -- specifically in this case, me -- on the web:

I saw this the other day because my Google Desktop is for some reason obsessed with Ann Althouse. Waaah! Why won't feminists speak up for me!!! wahhh!

The underlying issue is, of course, a real one. Critics across the political spectrum (and of both genders) are quick to jump to use sexist and sexual language when criticizing women. Still, the "I can ignore it until it happens to me" game is annoying.

My question is why Atrios assumes I haven't been a feminist all along? Did he read enough of my work to make this assumption? It's quite wrong and offensive. I'd like him to prove to me now that it isn't the case that he's an example of the sort of person on the left who thinks that women who don't hew to liberal dogma deserve sexual harassment. These are the people who sold out feminism to protect Bill Clinton not so long ago. People of the left ought to see the need to prove to people like me that they actually care about feminism, as opposed to partisan politics, which, for Democrats, is concurrent with feminism often enough that they may imagine that their lack of real interest in feminism won't show. In my case, I don't care about partisan politics, but I do care about feminism, and I have a long record of writing to prove it.

Atrios, who doesn't deign to link to my blog as he discusses me, sets off a spate of comments that is now over 800. Let's see how his folks respond, and perhaps we can get a sense of how the left really processes feminism:

Feminism is OK in its place.

Feminism is OK in its place.
in the kitchen.

Feminism is OK in its place.
in the kitchen.
Hey, yeah! Fetch me an eclair!

"Remember back last February when Kevin Drum wrote about why there are so few women in political blogging?"
Because mainly ugly chicks and dudes are interested in politics. Pasty greasy faced (I saw the picture here and shivered in revulsion) fish belly white thighs and guts are not attractive.
That is why Pam Anderson can play a ditz and ROLL in cash.
Plus most Democrat women are real bow wows. One thing the Republicans have is a whole stable of hot blonde white women they can roll out for tv.
Who really wants to f**k her for her mind anyway?
But as an old black buddy of mine told me " Put a flag over her head and f**k her for old glory!
That's patriotism!

Hey, yeah! Fetch me an eclair!
You have to remove your pants first before I entertain that command.

Feminism is OK in its place.
So are Negroes. Once either gets uppity there's gotta be hell to pay.

but she looks like a man

It's pretty f**king awful to be a feminist, actually. You get called names by Rush Limbaugh and friends, you get to be ridiculed in the mainstream media and if the wingnut sources are anything to come by you are responsible for white women disappearing in Aruba, for the falling birthrate, for every divorce that has taken place and the demise of the Western civilization. You are even responsible for increased alcohol use among young women and male depression. In fact, you are pretty goddamnawful.
Yeah, but Echidne, every so often you get to use the Courts to beat the sons of bitches senseless and make them give you large amounts of money for having screwed you over. And that counts too.....

Well, I'm not one eighth of the way into Atrios's comments, and no one has shown up to beat back this sexist crap. Atrios managed to summon up worse misogynists than Charles Johnson did. I hope he's proud of his people.

Democrats have a long, long way to go to convince me that they care at all about feminism.

UPDATE: Atrios has now linked to this post, but he doesn't answer my questions and doesn't correct his false assumption that I have only recently adopted feminism and only to serve my personal interests. He doesn't condemn his despicable commenters. He just says I'm missing the "irony." Yes, yes, I lack an appropriate sense of humor. Sexist jokes galore, and I ought to just learn to laugh about it. He seems to lack a shred of sensibility about how pathetically retro-male chauvinist that is. I'll say it again: Democrats have a long, long way to go to convince me that they care at all about feminism.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Atrios (AKA Duncan Black) adds some more material his post that links to me:

...to answer Althouse's question, the reason I assumed that she hadn't "been a feminist all along" was because she wrote:

Are there any feminists around to see when it's happening and say a little something?

Meaning, quite clearly, that feminists are other people. Had she written, "as a feminist, I think it's important to point these things out" or something similar taking ownership of the label I (and proud feminist Echidne) wouldn't have responded the way I did.

That's a weak attempt at a close reading argument. If that were true, if I wrote "Doesn't anyone care?" it would mean that I didn't care. Both Edchidne and Black didn't pick up the allusion in the title of my post. "Can I get a feminist?" was meant to invoke "Can I get a witness?" Those who say "Can I get a witness?" are themselves also witnesses.

More from Black:

I of course haven't devoted my life to reading the entirety of Althouse's body of work, on her blog and elsewhere, though I certainly am no stranger to it. If Althouse would like to point me to something she's written which, for example, happened "say a little something" when it wasn't directed at her I'll happily make the correction.

I could send him three law review articles. Or I could spend three hours going back over the blog to put together the argument that I've consistently and frequently taken feminist positions on this blog. Or I could get affidavits from people who know me personally avowing to the fact that Althouse has been openly feminist as long as they've known her. What is this, discovery?

The point is that Black chose to make an assumption about me and assert something about me without checking it. I could shout triumphantly: Duncan Black doesn't fact check!

Or I could return his treatment in kind and assert: Duncan Black is an anti-feminist! Because I, of course, haven't devoted my life to reading the entirety of Duncan Black's body of work, on his blog and elsewhere, though I certainly am no stranger to it, but if Duncan Black would like to point me to something he's written which proves that he isn't an anti-feminist, I'll be glad to issue a correction.

Is that how we're doing assertions of fact about individuals now?

Black adds something that substitutes for chiding his commenters:

I agree that it's understandable if people find ironic jokes about racism or sexism genuinely inappropriate or offensive. Sometimes those jokes are almost indistinguishable from genuine racism and sexism, no matter the intent of the person making them, and I'm not going to tell people what should or shouldn't offend them.

That's the old sorry-if-you-were-offended faux apology. I'd like to ask Black to do one more thing. Compare the comments made after he did his post calling attention to me for crying about something with the comments made on the post he made one day earlier laughing at a Roger L. Simon for crying about something. I called attention to that post of his:

Atrios has unleashed the commenters on Roger. I can almost empathize. It's actually a good opportunity to compare the behavior of lefty and righty commenters. The lefties, in this sample, are all over the place, in "open thread" mode, despite the assigned topic.

The righty commenters referred to were those at Little Green Footballs, who were extremely viciously toward me in blatant sexual language. Now, we can see how the Atrios commenters acted in two similar situations, with the difference being the sex of the two chosen targets. Look at the difference, Duncan and all those of you who think the left adheres to feminist values.

I repeat: Democrats have a long, long way to go to convince me that they care about feminism.

IN THE COMMENTS: Commenters strain to distance Atrios from his vile comment thread: "Atrios can only do to his comments what Haloscan allows him to do. And when he has a dayjob and a blog and a family, there is only so much he can do when he is regularly gets 300+ comments to a post."

I answer:

You and others are missing the point. I am asking him to condemn the sexist comments, not monitor or censor everything. I'm asking him to show that he cares, that he is some sort of feminist. I'm just sick and tired of liberals and lefties who assume it's taken for granted that they care about feminism. Atrios is a channel for putrid sexist invective. It's irrelevant that the commenters had a smile on their face when they wrote it or think they are cute when they say it. Try living in the real world and speaking like that. It doesn't work. The fact is Atrios and his defenders are more interested in getting him off the hook than in looking to the infection of bigotry in their own house. Why is he not appalled that this is the "community" he's nurturing on his blog? My theory is he doesn't care about feminism, only his side of partisan politics. I'm calling him on that, and he and his defenders have yet to respond to that. The lack of response is in itself instructive. He doesn't care! Feminists, disaggregate yourself from these folks. Why don't you?

"A snake bit me but I do not need treatment. I need six years of deep meditation."

The 15-year-old Ram Bomjon is one-twelfth of the way through that time period. They say he doesn't eat or drink and that a light shines from his forehead. Meanwhile, he's something of a theme park:

A thriving market has grown in the once pristine forest, supplying pilgrims with everything from chewing tobacco and bicycle repairs to incense and sacred amulets. The ground is covered in litter.

A fence was built around Ram's tree to prevent pilgrims prodding him, then a second, and now a third is planned, as well as a bus park, leaving Ram at the centre of an ever growing circle of rubbish.

Prakash Lamsal, a businessman said: "Some people are selling 2,500 rupees [£20] worth of tea a day.

"These lamas [monks] are going to build mansions out of this. If I wasn't a bit embarrassed I'd take a van down there and set up a stall."

"The zobo and the ogive could not quite triumph over the qanat and the euripi on Sunday, and thus the contender was birsled."

At the World Scrabble Tournament:

Adam Logan, a 30-year-old mathematician from Canada, scored 465 points to beat Pakorn Nemitrmansuk, a 30-year-old architect from Thailand, with 426 points in the final game of a playoff.

Inevitable topic in any article about Scrabble champions: the way they don't care what the words mean. Why do we want them to? Why do we feel that it's wrong -- almost like cheating -- not to love the words the way literary word-lovers do? Is it something about the passion -- like sex without love?

During the contest, Mr. Logan said, when he was going for one particularly high-voltage triple-letter-score, triple-word-score word, he was so tense that "my hands were shaking and it was difficult to get the letters on the board" - passions perhaps not familiar to the average parlor player.

I've seen "parlor" players get like that, though. Haven't you?

What's the board game people get most emotional about? In my experience, it's Risk.

Susette Kelo, still at the old homestead.

She lost her Supreme Court case, but life goes on just the same as before:

[W]ary of public disapproval and challenges from groups like the Institute for Justice, the law firm that represented the holdouts in court, the state and the city have halted plans to evict the remaining residents. Investors are concerned about building on land that some people consider a symbol of property rights. At the same time, contract disputes and financial uncertainty have delayed construction even in areas that have been cleared.

With so many complications, some people are unsure whether the city's initial vision for the property - a mix of housing, hotel and office space intended to transform part of its riverfront and bolster a declining tax base - is even realistic anymore.

A nice lesson in what we at the Wisconsin Law School love to call "law in action."

Can you think of some other examples, in law or elsewhere, where the loser, losing conspicuously, took on some golden glow that served his interests better than winning?

And I love the line: "Investors are concerned about building on land that some people consider a symbol of property rights." Sounds like in the movies when something is built over an old Indian burial ground.

Charges of viewpoint discrimination in funding student groups at UW.

The Badger Herald reports:

The Student Services Finance Committee for the 2006-07 fiscal year voted to minimally fund Collegians For A Constructive Tomorrow at a meeting last Thursday.

Lindsey Ourada, a University of Wisconsin senior and intern program director of CFACT, said in the past few years the group has grown drastically in interns and student participation....

Ourada said CFACT’s main goal is to represent the other side of the marketplace of ideas, which is oftentimes neglected....

Although this year’s CFACT budget proposal asked for a total of approximately $385,000, the organization received minimal funding — about $3,000....

“I think it’s a really good system as long as the people act viewpoint-neutrally and in a fair way, but it was just clear that that wasn’t the case. The decorum in the room was appalling,” she said. “Some committee members did do their job, so I’m thankful for that, but unfortunately, the majority did not.”...

Wisconsin Student Public Interest Research Group, a university organization with goals similar to CFACT, received $123,209 in funding from SSFC for the upcoming fiscal year.

The process for allocating funding to student organizations at the University of Wisconsin has been the subject of high-profile litigation in the past: Board of Regents v. Southworth. The Supreme Court wrote that the First Amendment requires viewpoint neutrality: "The whole theory of viewpoint neutrality is that minority views are treated with the same respect as are majority views."

Studying blog advertising.

MIT management prof Starling Hunter has done a study of BlogAds. I'm interested in seeing more studies of the business of blogging, such as it is. Hunter says that leaning to the left has brought in more ad money than leaning to the right. I wonder why. I'll just theorize that the political left is more comfortable with the web and more likely to advertise there.

For example, I'm grouped with some conservative blogs for the purpose of selling ads at BlogAds. (Here's the corresponding group for liberal blogs.) Despite being in this group, I don't think I've ever had an ad for a political candidate or cause (and I've never refused an ad). It may be that right-leaning causes are managed by people who are put off by the language and nasty tone of some of the right-leaning blogs. Nasty, bloggy things may be more tolerable to those with left-leaning causes.

Really, there are a lot of reasons for advertisers to shun bloggers. They actually don't know what we'll say next. Do you think blogs will grow up and come under commercial umbrellas that will somehow discipline them into ad-friendliness? That would spoil much of the good of blogging, though, don't you think?

"As you build a free society in the heart of Central Asia, the American people stand with you."

The first President to go to Mongolia:

President Bush, buffeted by unrelenting criticism at home over Iraq, on Monday saluted Mongolia's "fearless warriors" for helping his embattled effort to establish democracy in the heart of the Middle East.

That's the first sentence of the AP report. I feel proud to see our President go to this remote place, to thank its people for standing with us in the war and to hearten them in the cause of freedom in their own country, where they have abandoned communism and adopted Western-style democracy. I'm disgusted that the editors saw fit to shoehorn the phrase "buffeted by unrelenting criticism at home over Iraq" into that sentence. The inability of news organizations to cover the President's trip without inserting commentary like that is embarrassing.

Being in Mongolia, Bush did some classic Mongolian things. He drank fermented mare's milk and listened throat singing. "He was greeted at the Government House by flower-toting children in traditional Mongolian robes and soldiers in bright red, blue and yellow overcoats." He met with the president, Nambaryn Enkhbayar, in a white tent -- a ger -- with "a red-and-yellow design on the roof and red wood doors."

Inside were red brocade chairs, tapestries, Oriental carpets and a towering, white statue of Genghis Khan, the legendary horseman-warrior and country founder whose empire once stretched as far south as Southeast Asia and west to Hungary.

Beautiful. I note that the AP declines to shoehorn in any criticism of Khan.

Audible Althouse, #22.

47 minutes of entirely Althousian talk. Take it or leave it. Do I say anything devastating about OSM? Do I say anything not about OSM? Wouldn't you like to know?

Is al-Zarqawi dead?

The AP reports:

U.S. forces sealed off a house in the northern city of Mosul where eight suspected al-Qaida members died in a gunfight - some by their own hand to avoid capture. A U.S. official said Sunday that efforts were under way to determine if terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was among the dead....

In Washington, a U.S. official said the identities of the terror suspects killed in the Saturday raid was unknown. Asked if they could include al-Zarqawi, the official replied: "There are efforts under way to determine if he was killed."

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

On Saturday, police Brig. Gen. Said Ahmed al-Jubouri said the raid was launched after a tip that top al-Qaida operatives, possibly including al-Zarqawi, were in the house in the northeastern part of the city.

During the intense gunbattle that followed, three insurgents detonated explosives and killed themselves to avoid capture, Iraqi officials said.

"Who cares why Harvard picks some students... especially when you know the guy is being less than completely honest"?

Readers over at Volokh Conspiracy react to the news that the assistant dean for admissions at Harvard Law School has a blog. But, of course, law school applicants will care, and they will read that blog trying to see through to what will help them. You can probably read between the lines and pick up some tips. There are all kinds of blogs. I'm tempted to say there are real blogs and fake blogs. There are the blogs written to express the thinking of a human individual and PR that takes the form of a blog.

When you can't attack the message, attack the messenger.

Thanks, Steven.

UPDATE: "Looks like they’re backing away like Murtha from the war," says Jeff Jarvis (who, like Steven Taylor, links to these posts from David Corn and Glenn Reynolds).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dennis the Peasant tells his version of the history of the founding of OSM, in a post that could have been titled "The Revenge of Jethro Bodine." MORE: Dennis's previous post is on point too, and unlike the later one has a comments section.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Atrios has unleashed the commenters on Roger. I can almost empathize. It's actually a good opportunity to compare the behavior of lefty and righty commenters. The lefties, in this sample, are all over the place, in "open thread" mode, despite the assigned topic.

Elsewhere in the the left blogo-hemisphere, Kos inflicts a different kind of pain. Noting, as I have, that frequently nearly all of the headlines displayed at OSM are from Xinhua News Agency -- "the official propaganda mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party" -- Kos quips: "So, um, did OSM's $3.5 million in venture funds come from the Chinese government?" When the first commenter doesn't get the joke of his title ("OSM is Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece"), Kos explains that he's joking and adds, cogently:

[This is t]he kind of kink they should've worked out before their all-too-public launch.

That's why I'm a big fan of soft-launches. Quietly launch, work out the kinks with the help of early adopters, and then make your big splash announcement.

Yes. I really cannot fathom the thinking behind opening big with what little they had. Was it hubris? Sheer recklessness?

MORE: Funniest Kos comment: "They stole Cialis's logo." I knew that spit curl looked familiar. Spit curl. It's this. I'm not bodily-fluids blogging again. My bodily fluids post of the day was here. And what a nutty photo on Cialis's page [when I visited]. The man's hand is in the nose-thumbing position, and the couple seems to have a relationship that is the furthest thing from sexual. But I guess that's their pitch: "If a playful moment turns into the right moment, you can be ready." Nice marketing, really, encouraging guys to take the drug "just in case." Why would OSM invoke Cialis imagery? They've got a website up, "just in case," somewhere down along the line, they have something to write.

YET MORE: Dan at Riehl World View has some serious questions for Roger L. Simon:

From what I've read of Kelly [AKA Dennis the Peasant], he has attacked OSM, ... [b]ut it appears you are dodging legitimate ethics questions by suggesting it's only personal.... You asked this Dennis to share his ideas and after going quite a ways down the road with him and hitting on some new, perhaps even better ones, you simply dropped him? Is that true? Come on, Roger - you're better than this. At least I hope you are.

It's too shrewd by half for you to now say no contracts were signed. This isn't fiction writing you're into now, Roger. OSM is supposed to be about reporting credible information. If the CEO of OSM is going to kick the thing off by saying, hey, don't mind my hand shakes, they don't amount to anything, it's an ominous start.

In the end, no one cares about Kelly - if he is out, he's out. But you have started and are by design now the purported leader of a serious new venture. Might I suggest you start acting like one? Either get serious, or go back to playing around with a less than wealth enhancing blog like the rest of us.

AND EVEN MORE: Jeff Jarvis amused me with this:

Yet Open Source Media, the whatever-it-is, promises this — with more haughtiness than I’d ever heard from Dan Rather — on its prevaricating post about the name:

The goal of our enterprise is to bring gravitas and legitimacy to the blogosphere.

Oh, gag me with a mitre.

I don’t think that blogs need to have legitimacy laid upon them … and who died and made you the legitimizer?

How could the prominent bloggers who put OSM together have retained so little sense of the spirit of blogging?

ON REREADING: To that last question, why did great bloggers lose the spirit of blogging? Perhaps, it was that they wanted to expand beyond blogging and had to leave blogging behind to pursue their ambitions. Oddly, lots of people trusted them to become business managers because they were good bloggers, but the enterprise involved sloughing off the blogger's attitude. Indeed, there was never any reason to think that because a person is good at blogging he'd be good at business.

The return of Valerie Cherish?

As you may know, I loved the show "The Comeback," which, the news was, HBO did not renew. So I was happy to see this in the email:

The guy who played Lisa Kudrow's gay hairdresser came into read for a part in the movie I'm making. I told him how much I loved the show and how much I hoped another network would pick it up and he said that what he heard was that...

"The show won't be coming back but Lisa Kudrow's character will."

He didn't know anything else but it sounded promising.

Let it be true! Hmmm.... Will she be a character on "Entourage"?

By the way, "guy who played Lisa Kudrow's gay hairdresser" is the wonderful Robert Michael Morris. I wrote about him here.

MORE: From the same emailer:

You'll be glad to know that he is a very very nice man and the few minutes I had with him were a lot of fun. Very down to earth and funny. A real gentleman and exactly like his character as well -- which doesn't diminish his acting ability because being natural is the hardest thing. But he said he and Lisa Kudrow were both heartbroken and shocked at the cancellation. One executive at HBO found the show too "painful" but I guess not exquisitely painful like we fans did -- and that's all it took.

Hey, sign the petition. I can't bear to think of Robert and Lisa as heartbroken! How candyass is HBO not to stick by a show that inflicted some pain?

"Crap Cars" and the figures of speech they inspire.

Roy Blount Jr. reviews Richard Porter's book "Crap Cars":

The DeLorean DMC-12 of 1981-83, he writes, had an engine "so weak it would struggle to pull a hobo off your sister." Not since Raymond Chandler have I met a metaphor so much more powerful than would do.

Which is not to say that Porter slings figures of speech around indiscriminately. The body of the G.M. EV1 (1996-99), he tells us, resembles "a snake trapped under a rock," and so it does. With regard to performance, Porter turns phrases the way sports cars should take corners. The Chrysler K-Car (l981-89) may have "pulled Chrysler from the depths of financial trouble," he concedes, "but did it have to be such a weedy little griefbox?" The handling of the 1974-78 Datsun B210 was "like trying to steer a wheelbarrow full of logs."

Do you like the outlandishly-overstated-metaphor style of humor? Overused, isn't it? I tend to think people who feel a lot of pressure to be funny use it when they don't really have a humorous observation to make.

A new dimension of post-Katrina anger.

There is the suffering that Hurricane Katrina caused for the people of New Orleans, but there is also the enlightenment Katrina brought about how much they suffered before the hurricane:

[A]fter tasting life elsewhere, they are returning with tales of public schools that actually supply textbooks published after the Reagan era, of public housing developments that look like suburban enclaves, of government workers who are not routinely dragged off to prison after pocketing bribes.

Local leaders have realized for weeks that they must reckon with widespread anger over how they handled the relief effort. But it is dawning on them that they are also going to have to contend with demands from residents who grew accustomed, however briefly, to the virtues of other communities....

"What's wrong with our school system, and what's wrong with the people running our school board?" asked Tess Blanks, who had lived here all her life before fleeing with her husband, Horace, to the Houston area, where they discovered that the public schools for their two children were significantly better. "Our children fell right into the swing of things in Texas. So guess what? It isn't the children. It's the people running our school system."

"Yeah, we're sisters."

Children of the same sperm donor find each other and build their relationship. If you were a sperm donor, originally intent on remaining out of the picture, but you knew that a large group of your children had sought each other out and formed powerful love bonds, would you have a change of heart? What if there were dozens of your kids out there, and they all got together and started to see themselves as a big family, with you as an absent presence? Would it make you sad? Would it make you lonely?

[Two half-sisters] are considering a trip to Wilmington, Del., which Donor 150 listed as his birthplace.

Hey, maybe it's my brother. I could be your aunt. When do I get in on this extended family action?

Are gifted children "a misunderstood, marginalized resource in a culture obsessed with equity and prone to conformity"?

The "gifted child movement" thinks so. Ann Hulbert, writing in the NYT Magazine, takes them on:

In fact, youthful prodigiousness is the leading edge of a wider cultural preoccupation with early high performance in our meritocratic era. Among the educated elite, the superchild has become the model child, and the model parent is an informed advocate with an eye trained on his or her child's future prospects. The unusual fate of the precocious child - to become adultified early and yet to remain hovered over for longer - is echoed in the situation of the privileged child, ushered along a highly scheduled path of credentialed performance from cradle onward, with college and career ever in mind.

In short, thanks not least to the gifted-child movement itself, the mission of discovering and molding precocious talent has been mainstreamed more successfully than anyone expected. Once in a while, the more mundane variety of Ivy League-aspiring kids and their ambitious parents pause to ask themselves whether the ethos entails too much early pressure to compete. For truly extraordinary kids, a different version of the question arises, but it is considered less often: could it be that in the quest to pinpoint and promote exceptional youthful promise, testers and contests and advocates may have unwittingly introduced early pressure to conform, not to the crowd but to an assiduously monitored, preprofessionalized and future-oriented trajectory?

A good starting point is always: Let kids be kids. Left to their own devices, what will become of the gifted?

Look at eminences in the past, and what stands out in their childhoods is an animus toward school, a tolerance for solitude and families with lots of books. What also stands out is families with "wobble" - which means stress and, often, risk-taking parents with strong opinions - rather than bastions of supportiveness where a child's giftedness is ever in self-conscious focus. Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics and himself a prodigy who went to Tufts at 11 and Harvard at 15, wrote that prodigious children need to develop a "reasonably thick skin" - to feel they aren't demonized and will find a niche, but not to expect the world to supply a spotlight. Simonton speaks of the importance of being able to be "on the failure track for a while, take time off, take a real risk."

I love the notion of "the failure track" and the suspicion that it might do you some good. "Families with 'wobble'" is kind of a cool concept too.

UPDATE: Victor Fleischer favors special programs for gifted kids. I'd like to see all kids perfectly placed with programs fine-tuned to their needs. But in an imperfect world, whose needs will be met first? Whom should we be most concerned with? If gifted kids get extra, which kids will get the magic label that gives them more? The ones with parents who fight for it? I'm just thinking about how the system plays out in real life.

"I went there to live because it seemed so simple."

Johnny Depp wants out...



... of France. "It's insane."

Is a role-playing lesson about Islam, complete with prayers, permitted in public schools?

The Ninth Circuit rejected the Establishment Clause claim:

During the history course at Excelsior School in the fall of 2001, the teacher, using an instructional guide, told the students they would adopt roles as Muslims for three weeks to help them learn what Muslims believe.

She encouraged them to use Muslim names, recited prayers in class and made them give up something for a day, such as television or candy, to simulate fasting during Ramadan. The final exam asked students for a critique of elements of Muslim culture.

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton ruled in favor of the school district in 2003, saying that the class had an instructional purpose and that students had engaged in no actual religious exercises.

The appeals court upheld her ruling Thursday in a three-paragraph decision that was not published as a precedent for future cases...

Edward White of the Thomas More Center, the attorney in the case for the two children and their parents, said he will ask the full appeals court for a rehearing. He said the panel failed to address his argument that the district violated parents' rights.

"What happened in this classroom was clearly an endorsement of religion and indoctrination of children in the Islamic religion, which would never have stood if it were a class on Christianity or Judaism,'' White said.

Isn't White correct? If he is, should we think that the school is more respectful of Islam or more respectful of Christianity? One might contend that the school is more hostile to the religion it would never make the students pretend to exercise, because of the exclusion, but I think the opposite is true. The role-playing seems acceptable to the teachers when they conceive of the religion as a manifestation of a culture and not really a religion at all. If you wouldn't do an exercise like this for all the religions, you shouldn't do it for any of them. Asking children to say prayers that they do not believe could be very offensive to those who actually believe the religion. And finding out that the school made your child recite prayers other than yours is infuriating.

"The darkness at the center" of every book about the Beatles.

John Lennon.

[Beatles biographer Bob Spitz] hits the Lennon-as-drug-addled-emotional-cripple note with jarring frequency, a riff that often obscures the bad-boy rock expressionist's outright genius—just listen to a bootleg of the "Strawberry Fields Forever" demos recorded only weeks prior to what Spitz calls Lennon's "apogee of drug taking and self-abuse."

Here's the Spitz book on Amazon, open to the Search Inside function. Find something interesting and post it in the comments. I found this on page 336, describing the recording of "Come Together":

"Shoot me!" The taunt was indicative of the way John was feeling at the time. If Yoko helped reinforce his contempt for Paul, the heroin made their differences more irrational. Convinced that Paul was stealing his thunder, if not his soul, John fought his resentment with numbness.

Not really that well written, is it? "Convinced that Paul was stealing his thunder, if not his soul" is awfully bad.

Note: "Spitz" should not count as bodily-fluids blogging. Or should it?

That gives me an idea. Hmmm.... No references to semen or pus in the entire book! There is blood, though:

[M]uch of [Yoko Ono's book] Grapefruit [John] found infuriating, scattered with outrageous instructional “pieces,” such as “Use your blood to paint. Keep painting until you faint. Keep painting until you die.” John, who loved nothing more than to whip up controversy, saw in Yoko a kindred spirit. She refused to play by anyone's rules. Yes, there was the "avant-garde crap" she perpetrated as art, but she was unlike any woman he'd ever met, a real challenge to figure out. She excited him.

"It's a bloggerly day in the blogging world/A bloggerly day for a blogger..."

In the unintentional humor category, over at OSM, the top news under "Current Headlines"-- I kid you not! -- is: "AP: Winnipeg bowler advances to semifinal of Qubica/AMF Bowling World Cup."

And in the intentional humor category... we have a winner.

Closing in...

... on the big 3 million mark. Can't think of anything to do about it -- other than to try to identify the 3 millionth person.

Jacob gives an A+.

He writes:

You know that part of Magnolia, or Jerry Maguire, or Oprah, where Tom Cruise starts singing "Save Me" or "Free Falling" or "Psycho Killer, Qu'est-Ce Que C'est?" or whatever, and you get so, so embarrassed and you have to look away? Times one hundred. For almost every second of the episode. I have hysterical blindness in my ears now. It's like the opposite of how Daredevil can hear really super-well, except the sense that's being compensated for is my sense of self.

He's describing the last episode of "The Apprentice"! Ha!

A suprising display in a State Street poster store window here in Madison.

Four posters:

1. Image: a painting of the face of a Nazi, wearing a monocle, in which is reflected the silhouette of a hanged man. Text: "This Is The Enemy."

2. Image: a painting of Hitler, cowering, under a sky full of Allied planes. Text: "When? It's Up to You."

3. Image: a photograph of what looks like a live chicken, fully plucked. Text: "I am."

4. Image: a short, very dirty hippy, wearing a soldier's helmet, on which is scrawled "Stop the War." Text: "Because I scare very easily."

What's up?

ADDED: It might be helpful to know that it's the same store I described here.

Faces at a conference.

These are some faces drawn to pass the time at a conference. I won't say who or where or when. (Click to enlarge.)

"Bloggers reacted quickly."

I've got to run and go shopping, but I don't want to disappoint readers who think I live to slam OSM. I wouldn't want to leave you with just LED-like butterfly wings, internet dating lawsuits, "South Park" on Scientology, Google's struggle with copyright holders, and Senator Kerry's quest to retain his rightful place in America's heart. So let me just ask a few questions about what's currently visible on the OSM home page.

Why would the "BEST OF THE BLOGS" be a dopey call for a "round of applause" for a cab driver who found a bag of diamonds left in his car and called the police?

Why out of 9 "current headlines" are 7 of them from Xinhua News Agency? And why does "Weather information for Asia-Pacific cities" count as a headline? It's not exactly news.

And why, if bloggers ought to hold back and give OSM a chance to get itself established before critiquing them, does OSM present its lead story with a news blurb followed by the line "Bloggers reacted quickly"? It's the way of blogging to react quickly. They're trying to present themselves as better than MSM because they are so quick. How can they or their defenders complain that other bloggers are quick to react to them?

Cue the Althouse-is-crazy comments.

Butterfly wings that are "identical in design to the LED."

BBC reports:

This slab of hollow air cylinders in the wing scales is essentially mother nature's version of a 2D photonic crystal.

Like its counterpart in a high emission LED, it prevents the fluorescent colour from being trapped inside the structure and from being emitted sideways.

The scales also have a type of mirror underneath them to upwardly reflect all the fluorescent light that gets emitted down towards it. Again, this is very similar to the Bragg reflectors in high emission LEDs.

"Unlike the diodes, the butterfly's system clearly doesn't have semiconductor in it and it doesn't produce its own radiative energy," Dr Vukusic told the BBC News website "That makes it doubly efficient in a way.

"But the way light is extracted from the butterfly's system is more than an analogy - it's all but identical in design to the LED."...

"When you study these things and get a feel for the photonic architecture available, you really start to appreciate the elegance with which nature put some of these things together," he said.

No, I'm not trying to restart the Intelligent Design debate. I just think it's cool.

Well, would you go out with him?

A disappointed love-seeker is suing Match.com:

A lawsuit recently filed in Los Angeles claims that Match.com's staff have turned up for dates with clients in order to keep them interested when no one else seems to be interested in them....

It has been brought by a Florida man who accuses the company of posting profiles of fictitious potential clients on its website to give the impression, he says, that it has more single people on its books than is really the case.

Well, would you go out with that Florida man? He seems unpleasantly litigious and prone to conspiracy theories. Picture yourself on a date with him, and he starts describing this lawsuit. Wouldn't you excuse yourself to go to the ladies' room and then never come back?

I anticipate comments that begin "but I'm a lesbian so I wouldn't go out with a man" or "but I'm a man so I wouldn't go out with a man" or "but I'm a gay man so I wouldn't go to the ladies room." I know I'm being heteronormative and gynonormative. Deal with it.

Too far in mocking Tom Cruise? What about too far in mocking religion?

Here's a CNN segment on the new episode of "South Park" that mocked Scientology and Tom Cruise. CNN jumbles a lot of things together and titles the segment "Did 'South Park' go too far in mocking Tom Cruise?" Why not ask whether "South Park" went to far in mocking Scientology? That was what most of the episode was about.

Not shown in the CNN clip is the show's hilarious animated depiction of the deep secrets of Scientology. Instead, CNN reruns rumors about Cruise's sexual orientation, replete with the usual clip of him jumping on Oprah's couch. It's true the "South Park" episode repeatedly used the phrase "Tom Cruise come out of the closet." (Cruise literally hides in a closet for a reason that has nothing to do with his sexual orientation.) CNN shows many of those repetitions and informs us that they counted 39 of them. It's very funny.

But religion is the real target of "South Park's" mockery, and CNN opted for the easy approach of tweaking Cruise one more time about the rumors. In a lame attempt to appear journalistic, CNN presented the rumors as a report on how other people are spreading rumors. (Isn't that usually how one spreads rumors?) Can you picture CNN actually going after Scientology the way "South Park" did?

Side note: I love "South Park's" crude imitation of John Travolta's voice, which you can hear in the CNN clip.

"Information wants to be found."

Everyone agrees to that. So if Google's Book Search program brings readers to the books that want to be found, how has it done anything other than enhance the value of the books? But it must scan the books into its system to perform the searches, that is, make a copy, and the copyright holders, not content that Google is doing them a service, wants to be paid for that copying. It's hard not to notice and envy that huge pile of money Google's got.

Publishers and authors are suing Google over its Book Search program (formerly called Google Print), which lets users search for terms within volumes. Though users will see only a few lines of text related to the search term, Google is planning to digitize entire copyrighted works from the collections of three university libraries. The publishers and authors contend that without their approval, that is a violation of copyright laws....

Google ... maintains that it needs to scan a whole book for its search engine to work. Successful searches will return only three to five lines of text, which the company says constitutes a "fair use," allowed under copyright law.

David Drummond, Google's general counsel, said the company's service allowed users to find books that are in libraries but no longer in bookstores, and that would otherwise go undiscovered by most potential readers.

[Allan Adler, a vice president for legal and governmental affairs at the Association of American Publishers,] and Nick Taylor, president of the Authors Guild, which is also suing Google, made several pointed references to Google's status as a for-profit company. "The issue here is indeed control," Mr. Taylor said. "It is the appropriation of material that they don't own for a purpose that is, however altruistic and lofty and wonderful, nevertheless a commercial enterprise."

Translation: Google is making money, so we don't care that it is improving life for both authors and readers. We want some of the money!

"I won't stand for the Swift-boating of Jack Murtha."

Senator Kerry employs a coinage that stirs up old feelings of pity.

"They're acting like CBS did last year after bloggers (like Charles!) proved the TNG memos were frauds. It's really uncanny."

Steven Den Beste commenting chez Dennis the Peasant. "It's a bad sign when they start editing the past, in this case by deleting the previous 'name defense' post." A later commenter adds: "Someone needs to do an animated overlay of OSM's original 'trademark' post v. the newer revised version. Alert the media!"

IN THE COMMENTS: Someone links to this recent post by Roger L. Simon, and it makes me say:

Yeah, I read that post of Roger's. It is incredibly whiny. The identification with Judith Miller is laughable. The expressions of weakness with respect to the organization he took a pile of money to run are reckless. How would you feel if you were one of the investors?

Poor, sensitive Roger? Let me remind you once again that Simon telephoned me when I first criticized the Pajamas offer that was emailed to me. He bullied me in the most unbelievably patronizing tone of voice, then, when I tried to express how I felt about blogging, said "Nice to talk to you" and hung up on me. He totally did not impress me as a sensitive sort of person, though he is playing that role in that post of his. I'm sure he feels terrible about his project. But the notion that bloggers shouldn't criticize it, when they had a flashy launch party, is beyond absurd.

And now we should hold back to spare Roger's feelings? Should we have worried about hurting Dan Rather's feelings too?

Suddenly, I feel like writing a post titled: "What's the Frequency, Roger?"

UPDATE: I just looked back at the original post I did about rejecting the Pajamas Media offer. It's very short and light, but it does try to express the feeling I have about blogging:

Did you get your offer from Pajamas Media yet? Are you going to put on the pajamas -- take a flat fee to commit the top four spots on your sidebar for a whole year? I thought Pajamas implied a bloggy freedom, different from a corporate, mainstream mentality. Are we supposed to marry Pajamas and give up on Henry Copeland's delightful BlogAds, which has been beautifully designed with a feeling for the spirit of blogging? Ah, I don't like pajamas anyway. I want to blog naked. With Henry.

This is what led Roger to lay into me over the telephone and then hang up on me. That's all I would have written, had he not called me and acted like that. I was trying to spare them. After the phone call, I wrote this, analyzing the Pajamas offer in detail. And so it became one of my regular subjects.

In which I advise local liberal lawyers to support Judge Alito.

After guiding my CivPro class through the mysteries of transfer of venue this morning at the Law School, I transfer myself to another venue, the Café Monmartre, for a little debate about the Alito nomination for a group of lawyers from the American Constitution Society (the liberal answer to the Federalist Society). I'm there to convince them that they ought to support the appointment of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. It's impossible, of course, but I do have some arguments: we need strong, well-established jurists on the Court, not stealth nominees and compromises; the wheel will turn again and allow a Democratic President to appoint a brilliant and distinctive liberal jurist to the Court; liberals should not want the institution of the Court to be degraded by political fights in which ordinary people are encouraged to believe that there is no creditable rule of law and judges are nothing but democracy-usurping activists.

The place looks awfully bohemian for a lawyerly event, but this is Madison, my friends:



It's very hard to get an unblurred shot of the place:



But in some ways a blur is appropriate -- symbolic, perhaps of the blurring of the line between law and policy, which I recommend sharpening ....



... and my opponent in the debate prefers to keep well blended. We must recognize that the Justices are "making public policy" for the country, he says, as I keep saying that progressives have a stake in preserving the rule of law and the legitimacy of the courts. They need an articulable legal theory that is as powerful as the conservative's originalism, I say. My opponent fairly seethes: "The concepts such as original intent of the framers are pernicious in my opinion." A member of the audience rejects my assertion that originalism is comprehensible to ordinary Americans and that liberals need a theory that is equally appealing in the political debate, where, now, their favorite judges are too easily painted as "activists" who are "legislating from the bench." Who believes the conservative's argument? -- he asks and says that everyone must know that what the courts do is politics by another name. I said, "If I had a videotape of you saying that and I put it up on my website, do you have any idea what the reaction would be?"

Any suggestions on how to mark the occasion?

The Site Meter is getting awfully close to 3 million right now.

My Life's Getting Somewhere Now.

That my suggestion for a follow-up recording for Salvatore Acquaviva:

A little-known Belgian songwriter won a plagiarism case against Madonna on Friday, leading a local court to ban the megastar's song "Frozen" from sale or broadcast in the country. Songwriter Salvatore Acquaviva's suit had alleged that Madonna's 1998 hit off the album "Ray of Light" plagiarized parts of his song, "Ma Vie Fout L'camp (My Life's Getting Nowhere)," which had been written five years earlier.

"The judge has ruled Madonna must withdraw from sales all remaining disks, and orders that TV and radio can no longer play 'Frozen,'" Acquaviva's lawyer, Victor-Vincent Dehin, said.

"Relinquished" is the new "graciously agreed."

Open Source Media, which airs a terrific public radio show, has a new post up about their their problem with OSM, which, I must say, makes OSM's defense of its name look really weak. Even stranger is OSM's “About Our Name” post, which keeps changing, but at one point said, as quoted by Brendan at Open Source:

There are other Open Sources. A gentleman named Christopher Lydon has an excellent web site called Open Source. His URL is www.radioopensource.com, and he graciously agreed to give us opensourcemedia.net.

Brendan responds:

This is just not true. And weird. We didn’t graciously agree to give them anything. We’ve never talked to them. They didn’t answer our email.

Right now, OSM has this "About Our Name":

There are other Open Sources. A gentleman named Christopher Lydon has an excellent web site called Open Source. His URL is www.radioopensource.com, and he relinquished the domain name opensourcemedia.net.

"Relinquished" is the new "graciously agreed."

Phase 1: Collect Underpants.

Iowahawk has made a chart explaining the OSM business plan. He explains the chart here.

In Phase A, various important blogosphere blogs are coerced into a mutual non-aggression pact under the auspices of the OSM directorate. This is very similar to NATO, but French people are excluded. In Phase number B, there is large alcohol party in New York, which is an important center for media business discussions. In Phase 3, the system creates values, which are translated into very large checks for everybody. In Phase number D, I drive my new yacht, the “Ha Ha Ha,” to a tax-free Caribbean island.

He's in the alliance, so you've got to give him credit for violating the first rule of OSM. And my name comes up, in a sentence that -- outrageously -- contains the name of a bodily fluid.

UPDATE: What's going on at the OSM website right now? They've had a picture of some chickens at the top of the page since yesterday. You know how whenever there's a story about avian flu, there's got to be a picture of some chickens or parrots or something, because otherwise, people might be wondering what the word "avian" means? Fortunately, OSM saves us from worrying about what the word "flu" means. They write out "influenza." They are professionalizing blogging, so no slang. Turgid writing is the rule.

Me and those precious bodily fluids.

My reference to bodily fluids in this post has gotten a lot of attention, but do you know this isn't the first time I've gotten a strange amount of attention for talking about bodily fluids?

Let me reminisce about last year's bout with the fluid. It was the day after one of those presidential debates that we paid such close attention to back then:

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.

Then:

[T]he 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?

Maybe I'll put in a Google Alert for the various bodily fluids and pursue this line of blogging in earnest, since it's worked so well in the past. Any other bodily-fluids blogging? -- you may wonder. Well, there's this, from back when this blog was young:

I was annoyed when the mango juice sold in the Law School snack bar changed its name from Fantasia (no connection to American Idol) to Naked. When I'm consuming liquid, I don't want to contemplate nakedness. That's just wrong: why are you making me think of bodily fluids?

Why? Just to get to you!

"The con man's game is always the same: sensing what the gull most wants to be true."

Stephen Metcalf has a nice piece in Slate about the decline of "the English professor as con man." NYU physics prof Alan Sokal plays the central heroic role, with his hoax article explaining why "an external world obedient to invariable physical laws was an Enlightenment fiction." Here's Metcalf:

I started graduate school a few years before the Sokal hoax, when what was still transgressive and sexy about literary theory was fighting it out with the sheer ay, caramba factor of such pronouncements as "E=MC2 is a sexed equation." By the time I exited grad school, the feeling of an era being over—however meretricious in some of its particulars the era might have been—was unmistakable. These days, no think tank pundit would bother to denounce literary theory; its biggest stars, by way of generating some final headlines, have publicly disowned it; and no fresh cohort of terrifying intellectual charismatics has crossed the Atlantic to revive it.

How many hours of your precious life did you throw away trying to get your mind around literary theory? What else did you fritter away your undergrad years studying and what intellectual pursuit would have been a better use of your time? What ideas did you take seriously then that seem so worthless now?

Donald's "Apprentice."

(Spoilers.) It was so obvious that Clay was going to go if his team lost that I kept saying, "Something better happen other than just Clay getting fired." I think Clay had just gotten worn down and had no reserve of patience for anyone anymore. At least Trump had the showmanship to make it seem as though Randal might get the ax for his blunder of putting the wrong the channel number on the poster for XM Satellite Radio, and -- let's face it -- for being too passive. I like the way, this season, Trump is a lot harder on contestants who try to win by being inoffensive. "What did you do on this task?" is a question that gets asked a lot.

For once they had a new kind of task, writing and recording a song, with the key being to make the song fit on a very particular channel on the elaborate XM dial: XM Café. Felisha heroically stopped her musicians when they got too jazzy and ordered them to fit the song exactly into the Café niche. None of this art and personal expression, guys. It's nice, but save it. You have to understand the task and do it. This reminds me of my attitude about law school exams: You must answer the question I've asked -- and show that you understand what the question is. Don't try to get credit by saying a lot of accurate and insightful but nonresponsive things. Don't answer the question you thought I could have asked or that you happen to know an answer to. That's like those musicians playing jazz for a Café recording.

The losing team made the mistake of not fitting the station's niche, which involves light rock and clearly articulated, heartfelt lyrics. There was something quite creepy about interviewing the artist -- Jide -- and deciding what his feelings were and then writing the lyrics for him. Clay was shot down for starting in on lyrics that Rebecca decided seemed too much like something a woman would sing. Was that too obviously an expression of her distaste for Clay's homosexuality? Rebecca substitutes lyrics about how Jide, who immigrated from Nigeria as a toddler, feels that he has betrayed his heritage. I cringed at the way they blithely imposed that self-criticism on him.

The early stage of the task was "American Idol" meets the "Apprentice," with sets of three contestants sitting at a table like the AI judges and hearing singers audition. Too bad there were no clips of them telling singers they were simply horrible. The team that lost actually picked the better singer. Chez Althouse, we laughed a lot at the singer who wasn't Jide when he sat down at the piano and started banging and howling. Did he think he was Elton John?

The other thing that made us laugh a lot was Miss Universe. They made a big show of introducing her -- Trump owns the "Miss Universe" contest -- and then they went on to this music task. "Apparently, Miss Universe has nothing to do with the task." "I guess they just couldn't think of a task to go with 'Miss Universe.'" So, she just stood there. The camera shows a close up of Rebecca, as if she's thinking, Yeah, okay, I get it. She's prettier than me. Screw you.

Bob Woodward is in the news.

I haven't been following the Plame story closely. The infusion of Bob Woodward into it excites some folks, but I've always found Woodward frightfully dull. Maybe he gets his stories by being so gray that people don't notice him. But I ran across a drawing I did of him a while back, saying something so quintessentially Woodwardish. I have no idea what he was talking about, but I love the maddening blandness of it.

"Note just what it is about your work the critics don't like..."

"... then cultivate it. That's the part of your work that's individual and worth keeping." Jean Cocteau said that, quoted, recently by RLC. I've been thinking about that quote all day. It's quite inspiring. So look out.

Professor Bainbridge makes an economics exam out of my old post about Pajamas Media.

His exam. My old post. Very funny. And I don't know the answers to the economics questions. Do you?

What a horrendous pro-Alito ad!

From the Committee For Justice. View it at this link for the full effect with cheesy visuals and cornball patriotic trumpet music. Here's the text:

In 1990, the U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed Samuel Alito to serve on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

Today, liberal groups led by People for the American Way oppose Judge Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court. Their agenda is clear.

They want to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance and are fighting to redefine traditional marriage. They support partial birth abortion, sanction the burning of the American flag, and even oppose pornography filters on public library computers.

Do these groups represent you? If not, call your Senators. Tell them to support Judge Alito.

I support Alito, but I am disgusted by this kind of argument in favor of him. Alito is a judge, not a political candidate. This is very similar to the way the White House presented Harriet Miers, as a social conservative who would vote for outcomes that would please social conservatives. The Alito nomination corrected the mistake that was made with Miers. He's a well-qualified, experienced judge who appears to have a sound judicial temperament. Don't try to help him by making it sound as though he's not.

Felix.

They're talking about Felix the Cat over on Metafilter (with lots of good links). Don't you like Felix the Cat?

Can I get a feminist?

Remember back last February when Kevin Drum wrote about why there are so few women in political blogging? He guessed that "men are more comfortable with the food fight nature of opinion writing — both writing it and reading it." I had occasion to think about that yesterday. One thing Kevin failed to note is that male attacks on women are not so much of a food fight as a sex fight. Blogosphere-strength fighting with a woman takes on an outrageous sexual tone, aggressively declaring that that this is a boy's game. Are there any feminists around to see when it's happening and say a little something?

UPDATE: Kevin Drum asks whether my observation is specific to the LGF comments section -- in which case, who cares? -- or whether it applies elsewhere, including at at Washington Monthly. Lots of good comments from readers.

MORE: Drum also gets his word in about OSM:

Open Source Media — formerly Pajamas Media — had its big rollout yesterday, and it was an odd affair. I never really understood what OSM was about, but I figured they'd explain themselves at their launch party and then I'd get it. Except that they didn't. The main site is here — bankrolled by $3.5 million in venture capital money! — but all it contains is a couple of posts, some newsfeeds, and an explanation (as of noon on Thursday) that they are actually OSM, not Open Source Media, so no worries over Chris Lydon's trademark over "Open Source."

Everyone else is as befuddled as me, which is an odd reaction to a product launch, but perhaps OSM is just running behind schedule and decided not to put off the party just because there was no actual product yet. It wouldn't be the first time in the high tech biz.

YET MORE: Enough folks have misread my intention in writing this post that I feel compelled to add that I am not whining about needing someone to help me out of a jam because I'm a victim. I actually am concerned about the larger feminist issues identified in the post.

"The Avery Bill."

That's the name given a bill, passed by the Wisconsin legislation, designed to guard against the criminal conviction of the innocent:

His name was dropped from the legislation after he was arrested last week and charged Tuesday with killing and mutilating a young woman.

Avery really did not commit the rape for which he spent years in prison before being freed as a result of the legal work performed by the Wisconsin Innocence Project. The goals of the legislation his case inspired are sound.

But maybe it's not such a good idea to name legislation after living human beings. They do not remain in stationary, symbolic form for you.

Actually, this reminds me of Cindy Sheehan, who served as a symbol for the anti-war movement for a while, but who also did and said things that she saw fit to do and say. She helped the movement for a while but then she turned out not to be so useful.

Martha's "Apprentice."

Did you watch Martha's "Apprentice" show tonight? There's so much more emotional dysfunction among the contestants on this show than on Donald's. Everyone seems to be scheming to bring someone down, and they conspire and gang up on the one they perceive as weak. I loved the way that played out tonight, especially the scene where Jim gave Marcela a talking to. That was one of my all-time favorite "Apprentice" scenes. Jim kind of rules, don't you think. Oh, and Amanda crying? We laughed a lot chez Althouse at that. Spoil away in the comments.

Audible Althouse, #21.

Here. Drugs taken and not taken, dispensed by doctors and friends; lobotomies; whom to cast in the various roles if they ever make a movie of the new biography of Sandra Day O'Connor; not wanting to eat in an empty restaurant; how scary "Rodan" and the eagle owl are; and how a few stray words about Open Source Media (the erstwhile Pajamas Media) led to a spew of comments calling me things like "a Berkeley house whore." 41 minutes.

I was on "Open Source."

Is the name Open Source Media too close to Open Source Radio? (You know, I was on Open Source Radio a couple weeks ago, the night the Alito nomination was announced. You can listen to that show here if you want -- Cass Sunstein, Charles Fried, and Eric Muller are also on.)

UPDATE: Open Source Radio complains (incredibly meekly):

In May we named our show “Open Source” and we named our non-profit production company “Open Source Media.” In fact, this used to be our URL until we decide to scrap the “net” and look for an “org.” But here’s the actual legal-type description of what we are:

A joint production of Open Source Media Inc. and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, Open Source is presented by WGBH Radio Boston and distributed by Public Radio International (PRI).

What this means is that we are seven people in a rented office with, incidentally, a rather bold mouse who does not yet have a name. We make a radio show four times a week that uses bloggers as local and topical experts; this show is distributed to public radio stations by Public Radio International, and to truckers and early adopters by XM satellite radio.

So this morning I got an email from a listener with the following subject header:

did someone steal your name?

Hm. A company that used to call itself Pajamas Media now calls itself Open Source Media, which is — scroll down to our legal notice — kind of exactly what we call ourselves. They’ve collected $3.5 million in venture capital, and, to celebrate their re-naming of our already-named name, they’re holding an event at the Rainbow Room.

Imagine if you were the venture capitalist who forked over this kind of money and now know, on day one, that they mismanaged step one.

Okay, I'm not going to talk about OSM for a while. I'll observe a circumspect silence out of sheer pity... the sheer pity of "a Berkeley house whore." Ah, listen to the podcast if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Taking off the Pajamas: now, what do you see?

Kevin Alwyrd is present at the revelation of Open Source Media, the erstwhile Pajamas Media, and he's a little distracted (by one of the speakers), but he "still [doesn't] completely get it." He links to Mike Krempasky ("It’s a pretty flashy event - but I don’t think they’ve done much to explain their business to the attendees") and Jeff Jarvis ("Now I’m even more confused").

Jeff Goldstein is live- fake-blogging the event beginning with a trip to the hotel bar:

I found Tim Blair, Roger Simon, and Ed Driscoll bunched around a small table near the restrooms. Ed and Roger were nursing Gibsons, while Tim (who at 5’1" is much shorter than I thought he’d be) was drinking what looked to be IPA out of a pilsner glass inscribed with the legend, "Bloggers Do It In Their Pajamas." "Heh, cool," I said, motioning to Tim’s glass. "You have those made up for the launch?" "What do you think, genius?" Blair asked, not looking up. "I maybe had it printed up special for myself?"

Would you drink a fluid out of something that said "Bloggers Do It In Their Pajamas"? I think of bodily fluids. But no matter, now the bloggers can do it in their Open Source Media. Or as somebody already quipped: Open Sores Media. Swapping semen for pus, bodily fluids-wise.

UPDATE: Did they notice the "Open Sores" pun? I see that back in June, Roger L. Simon raised the question of what to rename Pajamas, and "Open Source" came up in the second comment, got repeated a few times, and then drew this:

Open Sores News--
"Band Aiding the World"

So they had to know the joke was there.

But what do you think of the new Open Source site? Is it fun to use and workable? I notice a lot of flabbiness in the writing. The home page currently features this block of text to draw us into the blog opinion on a top news story:

The historic Gaza border deal reached yesterday between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (Associated Press, Christian Science Monitor), brokered by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in marathon negotiations, has been received by the blogosphere with a far greater amount of skepticism than it has where the mainstream media are concerned. Blogger Joshuapundit seems quite unhappy: he says that Israel was pressured by Rice, the Eurooean Union's Javier Solana and Middle East special envoy John Wolfensohn to accept the agreement with little, if any, safeguards. The deal, whose full text can be found at the State Department website, would allow Palestinian authorities to take control of the border between the Gaza strip and Israel, notably in Rafah, and would open links with the West Bank. Both Time and the Washington Post have all the behind the scenes details on how the agreement was reached. War to Mobilize Democracy is "nervous" about security, but notes that the deal will ease the international pressure on Israel; Heavy-Handed Politics write that history makes them simply skeptical. On the other side, Anything They Say not only cautiously welcomes the new situation, but is pleasantly surprised by Rice's deal making skills, at least compared with her "terrible performance as National Security Advisor."

"Has been received by the blogosphere with a far greater amount of skepticism than it has where the mainstream media are concerned"? You'd think they'd write their very first sentence crisply!

And why should anyone care what these bloggers think? Who are they? Unless you're already sold on blogging, the teasers are laughable: "Blogger Joshuapundit seems quite unhappy," "War to Mobilize Democracy is 'nervous,'" Anything They Say "is pleasantly surprised."

There's nothing snappy or exciting in any of that, no sense that these bloggers are likely to come out with anything more interesting than whoever was sitting next to you in the living room where you watched the evening news.

"Eurooean," "Heavy-Handed Politics write" -- so much for professionalizing the image of blogging.

And this on the day when you are asking for attention, trying to hook new people.

ANOTHER UPDATE: If I were an insider to OSM, would I mock them like this? Isn't much of the value of bloggers that we are on the outside? Rolling up together in a group to make money -- is that worth the sacrifice of independence? Everyone who signed on is now stuck with the presentation on that website that we were not able to see when we were asked to sign on to 18-month commitments.

STILL MORE: I'm told Jeff Goldstein wasn't even at the OSM launch, which surprises me, because I began reading it on the OSM home page under their heading "live-blogging." That's an awfully strange way to introduce people to their service. Aren't ordinary people being asked to trust the OSM portal?

Also, Charles Johnson linked to this post to note my bad taste -- the "fluids" wisecrack -- and this set off his commenters who just started wildly insulting me -- hilariously assuming I'm a big lefty and using lots of bad taste insults against me. How does that make sense? If they are outraged at my bad taste, as Charles suggests they be, then why aren't the comments primly proper? They must be insulting me because they assume I'm a lefty. Ha, ha. Somebody tell Armando! Anyway, Charles's fans end up hurting him on the day when he is trying to make an impression as an elder statesman of blogging, by making his site look all trashy. And the irony is priceless: he is complaining about my bad taste. Yet "semen" and "pus" are both perfectly sound English words, not slang at all, and pointing out literary images is quite high tone.

AND NOW THIS: Wonkette links, and it's not to the semen-pus thing.

THURSDAY MORNING: One day after the launch, Jeff Goldstein's fake-live-blogging is still the only blog post quoted on the home page, under the heading "BEST OF THE BLOGS." In all this time, that's all they've found? The highlighted post ends with this line: "Or as my friend Bill Bixby once said to a French prostitute (god rest his soul), 'bonjour, you plump little tart!'" How they can think it's a good idea to open the site with such writing? Who does that appeal to? And if it didn't appeal to you yesterday morning, but you kept going back to give them another chance, what would you think? The site is stupefyingly inactive and as yet devoid of sharp commentary. There is only this obscure insider humor about the founders of the site getting drunk and talking about a prostitute.

Awards season.

The 2005 Weblog Awards are gearing up.

The icepick lobotomy doctor -- a little too " stubborn" and "impervious to criticism."

The "King Lear in medical garb" who lobotomized 3,000 persons, including some as young as 4 (to nip schizophrenia in the bud) and some for nothing more than youthful sullenness (the stepmom said he didn't want to take a bath and turned the lights on during the daytime).

UPDATE: Here's the link to the NPR audio reviewed at the original link.

"We have free speech too, don't we?"

Judge Posner asks, rhetorically, ruing the demise of Article III Groupie:

"If he does it on his own time and does not compromise his official duties in some way, I don't see the problem," the judge said in an e-mail message. "We have free speech too, don't we?

"If Lat appears before judges whom he's made fun of in his blog or who may be offended by the blog (the humorless judges), then there might be a problem, though only a problem if he is 'outed' - and he outed himself!"

Counting on other people to have a sense of humor is a very dangerous business.

"A government investigation hung completely on testimony from journalists, with journalists turned into witnesses ... a scary notion."

Have you really thought through what Scooter Libby's defense is going to be like for the press?

Lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former White House official indicted on perjury charges, plan to seek testimony from journalists beyond those cited in the indictment and will probably challenge government agreements limiting their grand jury testimony, people involved in the case said Tuesday.

"That's clearly going to be part of the strategy - to get access to all the relevant records and determine what did the media really know," said a lawyer close to the defense who spoke on condition of anonymity....

In interviews, lawyers close to the case made clear that the defense team plans to pursue aggressively access to reporters' notes beyond the material cited in the indictment and plans to go to the trial judge, Reggie B. Walton of United States District Court, to compel disclosure as one of their first steps....

The prospect of another legal battle over access to reporters' records "could be worse for the media" than the Miller showdown, said Lucy Dalglish, head of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "You now have a situation where you have a government investigation hung completely on testimony from journalists, with journalists turned into witnesses, and that is a scary notion."

Ms. Dalglish said that unlike the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who was restricted partly by Justice Department regulations on subpoenaing reporters' notes, Mr. Libby's defense team will not be bound by those same rules.

"This is a very unsettling case, and it could take years in the courts to resolve," she said.

"I acquire quite a few medications and then dispense them to my friends as needed."

Says Katherine: "I usually know what I'm talking about." This is, apparently, a big trend:

For a sizable group of people in their 20's and 30's, deciding on their own what drugs to take - in particular, stimulants, antidepressants and other psychiatric medications - is becoming the norm. Confident of their abilities and often skeptical of psychiatrists' expertise, they choose to rely on their own research and each other's experience in treating problems like depression, fatigue, anxiety or a lack of concentration. A medical degree, in their view, is useful, but not essential, and certainly not sufficient.

They trade unused prescription drugs, get medications without prescriptions from the Internet and, in some cases, lie to doctors to obtain medications that in their judgment they need.

Oh, these young people. They used to just smoke marijuana.

Academic blog controversies.

Slate has a big piece today, written by Robert S. Boynton, about the dangers of blogging when you're an untenured academic. It's loaded with material about Dan Drezner, but there's not a peep about Jeremy Freese, recently tenured in the Sociology Department here at UW, who wrote and still writes an unusually quirky blog that is dotted with pithy applications of his expertise.

From the Slate piece:

In many respects, Drezner's predicament was merely a cyber-version of an age-old dilemma. Whether online or off, the kind of accessible and widely read work that brings an academic public recognition is likely to draw the scorn and suspicion of his colleagues. Furthermore, so-called public-intellectual work won't count for much when it comes time to decide whether one gets tenure. In most disciplines at large research universities, tenure is directly related to the number of peer-reviewed books and articles one publishes. Teaching and community service are factored in but are usually far less important than one's publishing record. "For the time being," says John Holbo, an assistant professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore and the founder of a group blog called The Valve, the most academic bloggers will receive is "a bit of 'service' credit, for raising the department's profile."...

But in another sense, academic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university's ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called "The Conversation of Mankind"—an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture. Drezner's blog, for example, is hardly of the "This is what I did today …" variety. Rather, he usually writes about globalization and political economy—the very subjects on which he publishes in prestigious, peer-reviewed presses and journals. If his prose style in the blog is more engaging than that of the typical academic's, the thinking behind it is no less rigorous or intelligent....

The current antipathy toward blogging may have something to do with the fact that universities have no tools for judging blogs. And most people agree that blogs would need to be evaluated through some kind of peer-review mechanism if they are to be taken into account. "It is utterly absurd to propose giving someone credit for activity with no barriers to entry," Holbo says.

One thing missing from this article is the recognition of the fear nonblogging academics have about bloggers. For one thing, they don't understand what the bloggers are doing and worry that we'll do something damaging or dangerous with our power (such as it is!). But they also don't want to know that it's good, because that unleashes the other fear: Will I be required to blog? If blogging is good, are they going to be judged deficient for not blogging. And they are probably already at least a little jealous about ther colleague's heightened profile. It seems a little unfair that the ability translate expertise into blog form brings prominence that nothing ensures will be proportionate to the quality of the traditional written research. Of course, the actual quality of the traditional research has never been precisely calibrated to an academic's prominence, but blogging lets different individuals use different paths to prominence. Most notably, it gives new power to persons who don't teach at elite schools and don't have elite connections. It's a new way to get connected. It's threatening! And since it may be intertwined with political power and a kind of pop culture celebrity, it can be infuriating!

In any case, I agree with Holbo that most academic bloggers really deserve service credit for what we're doing. Most of the on-topic things we write are communicating our knowledge to the general public, which is a worthy old tradition, long categorized as service, not research. It is possible for some parts of blogs to count as research, but that, of course, would need to be judged to count in the tenure process.

If various academic departments are looking for a way to judge writing published in places that are not peer reviewed, I have some advice: Look to the way law schools do their tenure process, because most of what law professors publish is not peer-reviewed. Here at the UW Law School, our tenure process goes through the Social Sciences Divisional Committee and is judged by committee members who serve in departments like Political Science, Economics, and Sociology. You can image how these folks look at the student-edited law reviews where lawprofs publish. But we've developed ways to interact with them. Adapt these techniques for blog-writing that deserves to be treated as research.

Snow!

There's a light dusting of snow this morning, the first of the season. It brightens things up, like confectioner's sugar on a doughnut.

At last, a jaunt to NYC is possible!

Finally, a non-stop flight between Madison and NYC:

The flight will leave La Guardia at 3:40 p.m., arriving in Madison at 5:10 p.m.. The flight is then to leave Madison at 5:40 p.m., arriving at La Guardia at 9:01 p.m.

This might make a quick weekend trip to the city attractive. Having to pass through O'Hare, with all the potential for delays and missed flights, takes all the fun out of the idea. Thank you, American Eagle!

Back from my post-operative haze.

I guess there are about six procedures involved in dealing with my foolishness in waiting so long to do something about a tooth that turned out to be cracked. Yesterday was the fourth one: screwing an implant into my jaw. The procedure was not harrowing, because I opted for the IV-sedation, but it caused a good deal of snoozing the rest of the day: a nap in the recovery room, a nap at home on the sofa, and an 8-hour overnight sleep. I wasn't in pain or nauseated, just useless.

I'd thought I'd watch a lot of television, but that turned out to be too challenging. I put on an old episode of Saturday Night Live, the one that begins with Wayne and Garth enthusing over the first Gulf War -- "Oh, she's a scud!" -- then I fell asleep during Sting's monologue. Later, I tried to watch "Special Report With Brit Hume," but it was over my head. Much later, getting into bed, the new "South Park" was just starting, so I let that go for a while.

Old people keep accidentally driving their cars into crowds of townsfolk, the citizens finally come up with the remedy of taking away the driver's license of everyone over 70. "How will I get to the drug store to buy my medicine?" "You belong in a nursing home anyway. We'll help put you there." The old people call in the AARP, which parachutes in hordes of old people with machine guns. I had to switch it off and conk out, so I don't know how the battle played out. I'm going to guess that in the end the townsfolk realized that taking every old person's license away was an overbroad remedy.

Now my long post-operative mental haze is over. I think. Time for some blogging, newsreading, CivPro-teaching, job-talk listening, article editing, etc. Or am I supposed to spend the day reclining, as it said on the sheet of paper the oral surgeon gave me, the one with all the advice about salt water and soft foods? I could have my painkiller prescription filled, make a groggy mess out of myself for a second day and lounging about sampling the contents of the TiVo. Wouldn't you?

Or am I still a groggy mess and too blurred to see it? If this post lacks my usual cogency and clarity, let me know. I could call in sick for the first time in twenty years.

The O'Connor biopic.

Yesterday, we were discussing the new biography of Sandra Day O'Connor. In the comments, readers started to cast the movie made from the book:

P. Froward said...

I want to see an O'Connor biopic! Like a "Behind the Music" kind of thing, you know, personal torments and redemption and all that. Loretta Lynn, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash... Justice O'Connor....

Simon said...

Also starring Nick Cage as Stephen Breyer, Catheryn Zeta-Jones as Ruth Ginsburg, Chris Barrie as Dave Souter, and Charles Bronson as Antonin Scalia.

Featuring a cameo appearence from Sir Sean Connery as Robert Bork, who turns out to have been the arch-villain all along!

Please contribute to this casting fantasy!

For the record: I hate the biopics that come out this time of year. Which singer will die next and have his dumb musician's problems reenacted by a hammy actor who wants an Oscar really bad? Oh, this is a two question post now. Name the singer who will die and the actor who will play him/her.

What I'm dreading today.

I've got another appointment with the oral surgeon. This time I'm taking the IV-sedation -- as opposed to the novocaine/nitrous combo I had for that tooth extraction two months ago. Today, some sort of metal screw will be screwed into my jaw, while I'll be in some strange mental state the like of which I've never experienced. I have never let a doctor manipulate my consciousness and don't like the idea at all. But that extraction was harrowing, and the doctor told me that IV-sedation is what he'd advise a family member to have. You know, doctors have to give you all the information and let you decide, but the main thing you want to know is what they would decide. Anyway, for now, I can't eat or drink anything. I need to teach my class at 11, and I've never had to deal with a public speaking situation where I had to be utterly thirsty throughout. Maybe my students are reading my blog and will make a special effort to do most of the talking today.

What has become of Article III Groupie?

After succumbing to the temptation of the super-hot embrace of Jeffrey Toobin at The New Yorker, Underneath Their Robes has fallen out of the blogosphere! What has happened?

"They are making me crazy. They have ruined my life."

It's those terrible not-ladybugs. Remember when you were all ooh! cute! ladybugs!? We know so much better now:

Unlike domestic ladybugs, the multicolored Asian variety likes to keep its polka dots indoors in the winter. In older rural neighborhoods, where houses are not knit tight, only insecticide can hope to keep them out. They swarm by the tens of thousands. Unlike the domestic ladybug, the Asian variety leaves a yellow stain. It can bite. Worst of all, it stinks.

As Michael F. Potter, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, explained: "When the beetles are handled or disturbed in any way, they emit this yellow substance from their leg. It's lady-bird blood. It has a noxious odor."

Or, as Lorene Bowling of Olive Hill, Ky., put it, "They stink something terrible."...

Ruth Hopkins, who lives in Mount Vernon, about 40 miles from Lexington, said she got up several times every night last winter to get her hand-held vacuum and sweep the bugs off the sheets and off her ailing 89-year-old husband.

"I would just take that sweeper and sweep all night," said Mrs. Hopkins, whose home is near the Daniel Boone National Forest. "All winter long, we got no rest. They would drop off the ceiling everywhere."

We have them in Wisconsin, but not anywhere near that bad. They seem to be energized by a warm day after it's been cold, on certain days in the fall and spring. I guess in the south, there are days like that all winter. I suppose with the onset of global warming, we'll be seeing more of these horrible bugs. Is there any solution other than insecticide?

In Asia, the bugs do not winter in dwellings, but land on tall, light-colored rocks and find their way into warm, damp recesses in the stone. When the beetles got to the United States, the white vinyl siding on small buildings and granite or light stone walls on larger ones may have beckoned the same way their native rocks had.

So, usually on warm, sunny autumn afternoons after a hard frost, beetles light on the western and southwestern sides of buildings, favoring light-colored buildings over dark ones, and showing a particular affinity for surfaces with contrasting dark vertical lines - like vinyl siding. When they crawl around in search of warm recesses, they end up inside, in light fixtures or attics for the winter.

I'm going to take that into account the next time I have my house painted. I want to know how dark I need to go to make my house not remind them of a rock in China. The poor darlings are just homesick.

UPDATE: Wouldn't mosquito netting work better than a DustBuster? I'm really disturbed by the idea of repeatedly vaccuuming a sick, old man.

TimesSelect + New Coke.

Google count: 64. Ha ha. But not everyone observes the official absence of space between the esses. So add 37. Aw, too bad. Can they please stop it now? They've got to know they will have to stop sooner or later. What good does it do dragging out the death of a mistake?

"I thought I was replacing The Donald."

"It was even discussed that I would be firing The Donald on the first show." That's how it sounds to be Martha Stewart explaining why your TV show just ... didn't ... succeed.

Here's how it sounds to be The Donald: "I think there was confusion between Martha's `Apprentice' and mine, and mine continues to do well and ... the other has struggled very severely. I think it probably hurt mine and I sort of predicted that it would."

So what's your theory about why Martha's show was never nearly as good as Donald's? Mine is that she always cared too much about her image (and the image of her company, Omnimedia). If you're going to be a bitch, be a bitch. You can't be a please-like-me female at the same time. That's icky. Trump lets himself be a truly weird buffoon (even as he makes a lot of sense a lot of the time). Stewart can't bear to play into her own bizarreness.

Second theory: Trump has Carolyn Kepcher. Everyone loves Carolyn. And Martha had that guy that wasn't quite George. She needed better sidekicks!

Third theory: Trump's show has fabulously dramatic photography, editing, and music. It's just mesmerizing! By comparison, Martha's show felt flat and bland. Did they just not give her as much money, or were the aesthetic choices like her interior decorating choices? Beige, beige, beige.

A restaurant experience.

Ever go to a restaurant where you're the only customers, and the restaurant is really good and th