"The word that got me in trouble is using the word 'clean.' I should have said 'fresh.' What I meant is: he's got new ideas."

Joe Biden is on "The Daily Show" tonight, and Jon Stewart confronts him with his dreadful quote about Barack Obama: "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

(I wrote about the quote earlier today. And Best of the Web wrote about it here and connected it to my earlier post suggesting that there was racism implicit in the excessive praise we've been hearing for Obama.)

So how does Biden deal with it? He smiles very broadly (while audience members boo), then says: "Well, let me tell you something. I spoke to Barack today...." Stewart butts in: "I bet you did." Another big, toothy smile from Joe, and then: "I also spoke to Jesse and Al Sharpton and uh..." Stewart butts in again: "And Michael Jordan and anybody you could get your hands on. The Jackson 5. Who else?" Biden: "Michael didn't call me. Look, what I was attempting to be was not very artfully [sic] was complimentary. This is an incredible guy. This is a phenomenon. This guy is... And look, the other part of this thing is... I... The word that got me in trouble is using the word 'clean.' I should have said 'fresh.' What I meant is he's got new ideas. He a new guy on the block. And... it's not workin', right?"

Oh, man, is that not workin' out. No one says "clean" to mean "fresh" in the sense of new ideas! It's like they took out the thesaurus and looked up "clean" to fish around for other words that he could say he meant. Yeah, "fresh" is a substitute for "clean" maybe in some ad for soap or some feminine hygiene product. But no one stumbles into "clean" when they're going for "fresh ideas." And there's no "clean guy on the block."

Stewart does a bit where he repunctuates the quote, but it's not too clever. Biden does that smile again and kids "That's what I meant to say." Stewart asks if he feels like that guy in the Maxell ad:



And Biden says "I kinda did," and then "It reminded me: Welcome back to presidential politics" -- as if the response he got was somehow exaggerated and unfair.

How hopelessly inept! Ironically, the message he wanted to get out in his interview was that Bush is hopelessly inept and the next President must be someone with the sort of practiced competence that you aren't going to find in Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, that you'll have to come to Joe Biden for. What a joke!

"American Idol," the Los Angeles auditions.

"You sound like Cher after she's gone to the dentist," Simon says to a woman who is trying to follow in her mother's footsteps. They're in Los Angeles, inviting in the Hollywood crowd, and this mother was one of the so-called "Golddiggers" on the old Dean Martin TV show. She sings a song that ends with the line "Shall I stay or shall I go?" and they scoff that they know the answer to that question. Told no, she gets down on her knees and begs, saying "I'm down on my knees, begging." She says "please" over and over, melodramatically, demonstrating that she'd also lose if this were an acting competition.

And I'm just not in the mood to describe anything else. It was a rather boring show tonight. There was a guy who used to be a backup singer who was good and seemed nice. There were a lot of quite bad people, unsurprisingly. And they had a guest judge. I hate that. Olivia Newton John. How terribly nice for her. How hideously boring for us. How it undercuts Simon's power to tell the contestants that they are hideous. To tell the truth, I'd probably have enjoyed the show a lot more if I weren't simultaneously -- Simontaneously -- trying to fix the problem with the damned feed on this blog that switching to New Blogger caused.

Perhaps I can snap out of this bad mood by watching "The Daily Show." I don't usually watch it these days, but I still TiVo it, and I see that Joe Biden is on! Watch for the new post about that. How can the poor man show his (unclean) face?

Ban incandescent lightbulbs?

This is a California idea. If I lived there and faced this ban, I'd buy my lightbulbs in another state. It's just too horrible to live in such an ugly glare. People who have no aesthetic sense don't understand how a limit like this affects people. I'd be happy to make up for it by turning off more lights or using dimmers.

Why don't you ban air conditioning?

"If I had to vote today... without a doubt... former United States Attorney and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani."

So says Baseball Crank, who calls himself "a pro-life Reaganite conservative." His reasons:

1. We Need To Win The War....

2. We Need To Win The Election....

3. Leadership Matters....

4. We Can Hold The Line In The Courts....

Read the whole thing. If I had to vote today, I'd pick Giuliani too, but it's much easier for me, because I support abortion rights and the other liberal causes that make conservatives worry about Giuliani.

How do I get my feed to update again...

... now that I've switched to New Blogger? (I'd appreciate some help, with a very clear explanation. I know it has something to do with Feedburner... I think...)

Biden gets attention.

Everyone's talking about the interview Biden gave to the NY Observer. But I can't get through to it right now. Drudge is quoting him as saying, about Barack Obama, "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." Clean! So, then, Biden's campaign is over, right?

UPDATE: I'm on the same page as Kos on this one.

Unfortunate...

Tattoos. And then there are the things you do to yourself that you can't hide with a shirt.

Here's a website devoted to bad tattoos. And here's one I like even better. There are different kinds of bad, though, you know, and I'm going to endorse this kind:

Meat-eating terror birds.

Run for your lives!

"Their lives overflow with dramatic possibility and struggle -- struggles that must be viewed through the prism of their gender."

David Lat defends his obsession with divas:

We will not apologize for having a weakness for divas. We have loved divas for our entire life, ever since we popped out of one's womb....

Every blogger develops his or her own idiosyncratic hobbyhorses and obsessions. Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, is obssessed [sic] with "porkbusting." Dave Kopel, of the Volokh Conspiracy, is obsessed with guns. The Wonketteers are obssessed [sic] with Katherine Harris.

And then there's this post, devoted to Janice Rogers Brown (who Lat thinks looks like Wanda Sykes):

During the Q and A, we got up and asked her (among other things): "Judge Brown, you're a fabulous judicial diva. But you're stuck on a court that focuses on administrative law. Do you feel that being on the D.C. Circuit cramps your diva style?"

Tee hee. And I love the use of all-caps in her answer: "I have NEVER thought of myself as a diva."

Labels.

Now that I've converted to New Blogger, I can add labels to my posts. I could even go back and add labels to old posts. But what's the point? It adds visual clutter. I don't like that. I guess you can click on them and get old posts with the same label to appear... Are people going to do that? I suppose I could go back and add labels to posts that would get the same label as some label I've put on a new post. Like, wouldn't you love to click on the "American Idol" label and see all the old "American Idol" posts? It might be a shameful display!

ADDED: I just realized I could go to the "Edit Posts" page, do a search for a term (such as "American Idol"), then "select all" in the results, and use the pull-down "Label Actions" menu to apply a label to all those old posts. So how many old "American Idol" posts do I have? You can click on the "American Idol" label below to see them, but I'll tell you: 206! I know, some of you are thinking: Where can I click to see the blog minus the "American Idol" posts?

AND: Here's a question for you. Now that I know how to use labels to collect a particular category of posts by searching for a recurrent term, what labels would you like me to create? Remember, it needs to be a particular word, for example, a name. I wonder which individuals I've written about the most, especially the ones I've obsessed over out of proportion to their significance in the current news.

AND: I'm doing some labels for various political characters: Kerry, Obama... It was interesting to see the first opinion I had about Barack Obama:

Now here is a speaker I can stand to listen to. He's modulating his voice and he seems to have the speech memorized, so he doesn't have that awful teleprompter stare. He places some emphasis on personal responsibility....

Obama does a great job delivering the speech, even though the words of the speech are quite banal. There are many references to hope. The speech is blessedly short.

Many references to hope, but actually quite banal...

0%.

The #1 movie at the box office has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (i.e., not one good review). That's got to be a record.

The next four movies have very poor reviews too. It's no secret why so many bad movies are made.

"Maybe goddesses have some hypnotic effect on policy wonks...."

Linda Hirshman responds to me and Mark Schmitt on Bloggingheads.

"Some people call this 'Idol' country...."

Ah! We're in the South tonight, where -- chances are! -- we'll find the best singers.

We're in Birmingham, home of Ruben Studdard, Taylor Hicks, and Bo Bice.

Our first contestant, Erica Skye, is pleased to serve up what we know to be Simon's favorite song, except she calls it "Unchained Melodies." It's as if "Merrie Melodies" is intruding on the solemn grandeur of "Unchained Melody." She's a power singer, but ... she's not hitting the right notes. This is a deep shame that has prevented me from singing anywhere for decades, so I think it's kind of cool that a 19-year-old woman hasn't heard of this particular inhibition. But... she's crap... and she deserves the insults. "Erica, it was like a neverending torture." She's so horrendous -- yet powerful! -- that Paula is propelled off-stage. They tell Erica they hate her, and she does this little brushing gesture on her shoulder. Simon has to say, "What's that mean?" And Paula's response is bleeped.

Next is this crazy dorky girl who talks like a baby, but her singing makes me cry. Why? The singing is desperately mannered. There is something in it. There's a person in there. That's my theory anyway. Simon says no, but Randy says yes. They drag out the tension with Paula, and Paula agrees with Randy. We're not surprised, but we love this dear girl, Katie Bernard. She's this year's Kellie Pickler.

Next is Tatiana McConnico. She sings "I never loved a man the way that I loved you..." in a way that doesn't make us wish we could hear Aretha instead. Beautiful!

Bernard Williams II. He's going to rock with us! Paula thinks he's off-key. But Randy and Simon say yes, so he needs to find the key for Hollywood.

"I've got you standing in front of me, looking like some Easter Bunny nightmare experiment," Simon says to Margaret Fowler, who looks more fowl than bunny and in no way seems 26, which is what she claims. They demand the truth and eventually she admits she's 50.

Jamie Lynn Ward... she's 16 and her father shot himself, because her stepmom was cheatin' on 'im, and he's paralyzed from the waist down. She's not good enough. But Paula says something that makes them see the part that is good, and they let this sweet child through.

Chris Sligh is next. He says people tell him he looks like Jack Osbourne. I think he looks like Mark Volman. He sings "Kiss from a Rose" and gets a rise out of Paula. He's good.

There's still a third of the show left. but really it's not worth talking about. There's a woman whose hair is extremely long, but let's just leave all the rest unsaid.

Sorry, I've been away.

Yes, I know, I was a fool to click the button to switch to "new Blogger" in the middle of the day. I have a big blog to transfer, and I didn't realize it would take three hours. But I'm back, and I'm new. Whether anything will be different, I'll have to see.

"Wa wa wee wa, is Borat in trouble again?"

The Himalayan Times reports (yeah, I'm getting my news about Sacha Baron Cohen from Nepal!):

Dovale Glickman plans to sue the Golden Globe-award winning comedian for copyright infringement...

The Israeli comedian coined the phrase ["wa wa wee wa"] 16 years ago, for a character on the hit Israeli comedy show "Zehu Zeh." Glickman further popularized the expression in a series of TV commercials for the Israeli yellow pages. It caught on and is still commonly heard on the street in Israel.

Copyright infringement for a 4-syllable exclamation? Wa wa wee wa! Oops, now I'm in trouble!

It's me and Mark Schmitt...

...on Bloggingheads! Topics:

Ann's rock-star aura of coolness

Mark wants outrage over income inequality

Hillary Clinton calculates a central position

Those impulsive, irrational women

How Obama has entered our space and organized our thoughts

Who wants to join the peace march? Not Mark and certainly not Ann

How George McGovern made us fat

Wigging out.

From bad chompers to bad hair. Watch out for the NSFW expletives.



I saw that the other day, half forgot it, then played it again today and laughed even more. I see some commenters over at YouTube think it's fake -- I disagree -- and others feel very sorry for the young woman -- and I disagree with that too. The line "you'll look back on this and laugh" is spoken in the clip, and it was never more true. But if it's not -- if the bride never looks back and laughs -- I feel very sorry for the groom.

UPDATE: Hoax! (Via Metafilter.)

Exploding head syndrome!

It's just one of a number of unusual things.

And what do "My Head is Spinning," "Now, Stand Back For Your Own Safety!,” "Okay I'll Admit That I Really Don't Understand," "Schizos (Are Never Alone)," "Television Rules the Nation," "That Tastes Horrible," "Egg Sandwich," "Thermonuclear War (Is Good For Your Complexion)," The “Batman” theme song, and "Pennsylvania 6-5000" have in common? (Answer here.)

Actually, I think I experienced exploding head syndrome once. If you don't know what it is, you may be saying, how could you possibly have it more than once, and, moreover, why are you still here?

The Self-Esteem Dentist v. A Creature Unlike Any Other.

Dentist Larry Rosenthal has had it with relationship guru author Ellen Fein:

"If she had a life, she wouldn't be harassing him," said David Jaroslawicz, the dentist's lawyer. "What kind of nut sets up something called LyingDentist.com?"

The tooth doc, dubbed the "mouth whisperer" for his New Age methods, says Fein tried to extort $100,000 from him for allegedly ruining her chompers a decade ago....

The blond author, who lives on Long Island, co-wrote a female-friendly series of dating books called "The Rules," that include nuggets of wisdom like "Be a Creature Unlike Any Other."

Rosenthal is a high-profile proponent of "self-esteem dentistry" and has sold a raft of celebrities on his smile-your-way-to-success theories....

Fein went to Rosenthal to have her teeth spiffed up in 1996. But she says he butchered a mouth realignment and gave her "gigantic" teeth.

The two will gnash it out in court.

Self-esteem dentistry? New-Age-y as it sounds, it looks like nothing more than unnecessary procedures done for the sake of beauty. The link is to Rosenthal's website, where we see pictures of him smiling toothily next to Donald Trump, Tommy Hilfiger, and Kathie Lee Gifford.

You can find the Lying Dentist website yourself. I'll link to the website for "The Rules," which were quite the thing a few years back. Check it out: the authors will consult with you by phone for $250 an hour. Or just read some Rules yourself:

Be a creature unlike any other

Being a creature unlike any other is really an attitude, a sense of confidence and radiance that permeates your being from head to toe. It's the way you smile (you light up the room), pause in between sentences (you don't babble on out of nervousness), listen (attentively), look (demurely, never stare), breathe (slowly), stand (straight) and walk (briskly, with your shoulders back). When a relationship doesn't work out, you brush away a tear so that it doesn't smudge your makeup and you move on!

It's the way you smile.... with gigantic chompers.

Why aren't we ashamed of fawning over Obama?

Slate's Tim Noah has introduced a new regular feature called "The Obama Messiah Watch," devoted to "gratuitously adoring biographical details" about Barack Obama. The first item, from the LA Times, quotes a former classmate of Obama's marveling over the conciseness of the notes he took in class ("the pithiest, tightest prose you'd ever see").

Slate has some distance from the fawning it will be serving up. We can tell that Noah is sniggering at the overenthusiasm. Yet these regular features mean something. This one invites us to partake in the adoration of a man. "Bushisms" offers endless examples of another man's supposed stupidity. But Slate is committing to the repeated presentation of Obama as godlike for accomplishing tasks that require skill within the range of mere mortals.

"The Obama Messiah Watch" is ostensibly a fun little feature, highlighting the foibles of people who just love Obama so much. But what Noah fails to talk about is the likelihood that he's picking up evidence of racism. What accounts for amazement to the point of adoration at the fact that a man possesses excellent skill at something like note taking? Is it not that he can do it and he's black? You can laugh at Noah's nuggets of gratuitous adoration, but you ought also to look at them critically and think about the implications.

IN THE COMMENTS: Working on the theory that there's racism everywhere, readers are questioning my use of the word "sniggering"!

MORE: La Shawn Barber had some similar thoughts a few months back.

"I fear that Judge Alito will ... roll over when confronted with an administration too willing to flaunt the rules...."

Yes, we need judges who dare to tell the administration to quit waving the rules about in a showy fashion.

I know it's awfully late to point out usage errors from the Alito confirmation battle, but I was just reading up on Senator Hillary Clinton. I recorded a Bloggingheads episode yesterday, and my co-head, Mark Schmitt, let loose with a remark about Clinton's great accomplishments as a Senator. I was incredulous and went looking to see if there was something I'd failed to notice. (The diavlog isn't up yet, but I'll update with a link when it is.)

These Senators. They're always running for President, and their main accomplishment is that they are Senators. And that they can get themselves reelected.

UPDATE: The episode is up. The moment referred to is at about 36:40.

"This duck has taken us all on an emotional rollercoaster."

Oh, for the love of Daffy! I hope it's only the British press -- in some incomprehensible British eccentricity -- that's covering the duck-in-the-refrigerator story:

"But once the surgeon started sewing her back up she stopped breathing again, this time for 15 seconds."

When a second thump failed to bring Perky round, veterinary surgeon David Hale tried manipulating the duck's beak, before using a needle to shock her into consciousness.

At one point the duck was given pure oxygen through a face mask, Ms May said.

"At that point the vet turned and said: 'I'm sorry, she's gone.'"

The room fell into shocked silence as those present took in the news, but then Perky raised her head and began flapping her wings.

The relief reduced everyone to tears, Ms May said, describing one of her colleagues as "extremely emotional" as she left the room.

"For the duck to have gone through all of this and then to die at that time was a real shock," Ms May said.

This is a duck shot by a hunter and put in the refrigerator, presumably, to be eaten soon enough. Manipulating the duck's beak? This should become an idiomatic expression along the lines of "pulling my leg."

We've talked about this story before, and as one commenter said, why is it at all surprising that a duck can live in a refrigerator? They live outside. The appalling thing is that the hunter put the duck in the refrigerator in a condition that was survivable. As Meade said: "what sort of slob duck hunter fails to field dress or breast out the game upon retrieval while it is still warm?"

"Women Feeling Freer to Suggest 'Vote for Mom.'"

This is a front-page "political memo" from Robin Toner.

Today, many political strategists say women no longer have to be so defensive. Voters have grown more accustomed to women in powerful positions....

What this means, strategists say, is that motherhood and a focus on children can become one more political asset to be showcased — a way of humanizing a candidate and connecting with voters, especially other women....

National security remains a threshold issue for voters but is no longer such an automatic advantage for the Republicans because they have lost so much support on the war in Iraq, the polls suggest. And neither Ms. Pelosi nor Mrs. Clinton is neglecting these issues. On the campaign trail in Iowa on Saturday, Mrs. Clinton argued that all of this — security, maternity, affordable health care — was part of her potential-first-woman-president package.

“I’m going to be asking people to vote for me based on my entire life and experience,” she said. “The fact that I’m a woman, the fact that I’m a mom, is part of who I am.”

Well, I've already said what I think about Hillary Clinton on this one. I think she's overdone the mommy stuff at this point. But managing our feelings about women and power is a complex task. We may be "more accustomed to women in powerful positions," but it's still very complicated. And raising motherhood as a qualification is a new move, and we're not accustomed to that at all. This new rhetoric will create its own swirl of complex feelings about women and power. It remains to be seen who will be helped and who will be hurt.

"Arthur Godfrey once said that 'I'm proud to pay taxes in America, but I could be just as proud for about half the money.'"

Arthur Godfrey! You're quoting Arthur Godfrey?! Well, Governor Huckabee wins the prize for least hip candidate in the '08 race. That is beyond square. Truly weird! It was incredibly square and old to like Arthur Godfrey 40 years ago... 50 years ago!

MR. RUSSERT: You said this to the Des Moines Register: “Let’s face it. In our lifetimes, we’ve seen our country go from ‘Leave it to Beaver’ to ‘Beavis and Butt-head,’ from Barney Fife to Barney Frank.” Why, why include Barney Frank, a gay congressman, in that reference?

GOV. HUCKABEE: I think it was a matter of a rhetorical device...

Ack! Static! I can't hear anything he's saying at this point. Even the "Beavis and Butt-head" reference is old, old, old. (Note: I'm older than Mike Huckabee.) And the gay-baiting? So tawdry, however much you like traditional values. And, anyway, was Barney Fife a positive masculine role model?

Back to The Bee:

I just completed a book in which I talk about the difference between horizontal politics, where everything is left or right, everything is liberal or conservative, everything is Democrat or Republican. I think the American people are hungry for vertical politics, where we have leaders who lift us up rather than those who tear us down.

Well, you're doing a huckava job.

"Women don't decide elections because they're not rational political actors... [T]hey vote on impulse, and on elusive factors such as personality."

Linda Hirshman editorializes in the Washington Post. She interviewed some woman about Hillary Clinton:

I had such mixed feelings listening to these women describe their political selves. They're clearly idealistic, want to be good citizens, make an effort to get the information they need. It was hard not to like them. Their delight in seeing a woman so close to real power was palpable. Yet I couldn't escape the fact that they took in little of politics, especially compared with their husbands, that their decision-making seemed impulsive and that their response to Clinton's candidacy was driven to an amazing extent by personality.

They unwittingly confirmed my theory about why women don't decide elections....

The point here is that Hillary Clinton shouldn't count on women to get her elected. If she thinks women will vote for a woman because she's a woman, she's wrong.

Hirshman portrays woman as lame political actors. I get the impression that she's just exasperated that they don't reliably support liberal causes. Which, of course, wouldn't make them lame. Quite the opposite.

She seems to find it rather pathetic that they don't lock onto the political news the way men do, but that may be a perfectly sensible way to live a competent life. By contrast, it's rather crazy to be fretting about November 2008 right now. It's not so much that men are rational and women are emotional. Men just have different emotions. Male emotion tends more in the political junkie direction. "Junkie" is not the image of rationality.

Hirshman offers Clinton some advice on how to take advantage of women voters:

First, when it comes to women who vote, the political is the personal.... If the polls continue to reflect male aversion to her beyond the baseline male Republican tilt, Clinton may have to go personal to bring the women home. Maybe she could get a couch on casters.

Hirshman's contempt for women is rather shocking. She goes on to suggest that Clinton open up her personal story:

[S]he has had the soap opera story of the century with that charismatic, faithless husband. This has made her suffer, something one of the Wednesday women specifically singled out as a reason to support a candidate. Will she be willing to open that old wound to convince potential female supporters that her policies, such as universal child health care, arise out of her concern for women like them, rather than being just the usual liberal agenda?

She can't make Bill look bad now! And anyway, why would some personal sob story, even if it did show you really cared about children in some special way, make you seem as though you deserve the presidency? So you found yourself in a personal fix? Therefore we should put you in charge of the country?

The second lesson is that elections that turn on the female electorate bear an unfortunate resemblance to a popularity contest. The Republicans have succeeded with women at the polls when they've made Democrats look not just mistaken, but clownish or geeky. Reagan in blue jeans beat Jimmy Carter in a cardigan. George H.W. Bush looked like John Wayne next to Dukakis peering over the edge of a tank in a helmet. And who knows what would have happened if Kerry hadn't donned a wetsuit to go wind-surfing? Even the devil wears Prada. And women know it.

Hirshman is well on the way to convincing us that women shouldn't have the vote! On the other hand, I'm totally planning to blog about what everyone's wearing and how they look in their photo ops. And isn't Mitt Romney dreamy?

Hey, Hirshman forgot to mention that in each of the cases she described, we picked the better boyfriend. And don't forget Bill Clinton. He's the best boyfriend. And Hillary's our rival. We're going to inspect her critically, because why does she have the best boyfriend? She's just using him! Oh, why doesn't he see that she's not that pretty and she's not that nice? In short, Hirshman fails to complete that "popularity contest" thought!

Audible Althouse #77.

Oh, you've waited so long, podcast fans... if I still have podcast fans. This is just a podcast about trying to revive the joy of podcasting. There's some substance too. But I'm just hoping you'll come along for the ride as I try to discover a way to live inside the podcast again. So stuff those earbuds into your earholes and take a chance.

You can stream it right through your computer here. But the hardcore fans subscribe on iTunes:

I saw "The Queen."

I start recording a vlog, just as a way to psyche myself up to do a podcast, and though I mean to talk about blogposts, in my podcast style, I get exasperated with that effort and end up talking about going to the movies today.



Podcast to follow... presumably....

Nutritionism, the ideology that has replaced food.

Michael Pollan writes about how we got so twisted up about nourishing ourselves (as opposed to eating). He pinpoints the start of the problem. In 1977, a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition -- led by George McGovern -- told people to cut down on red meat and dairy products, then, caving to pressure from the red meat and dairy industries, revised the advice to: "Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake."

A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same. First, the stark message to "eat less" of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless — and politically unconnected — substance that may or may not lurk in them called "saturated fat."

Pollan adds that the head of the Committee, George McGovern lost his next Senate election:

[T]he beef lobby helped rusticate the three-term senator, sending an unmistakable warning to anyone who would challenge the American diet, and in particular the big chunk of animal protein sitting in the middle of its plate. Henceforth, government dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about whole foods, each of which has its trade association on Capitol Hill, and would instead arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and speaking of nutrients, entities that few Americans really understood but that lack powerful lobbies in Washington. This was precisely the tack taken by the National Academy of Sciences when it issued its landmark report on diet and cancer in 1982. Organized nutrient by nutrient in a way guaranteed to offend no food group, it codified the official new dietary language. Industry and media followed suit, and terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, monounsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, polyphenols, amino acids and carotenes soon colonized much of the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible substance formerly known as food. The Age of Nutritionism had arrived.

Did you know the politics of why we're so fat and sickly? It's McGovern's fault! Everyone started scarfing down Snackwell’s and pasta. Later, reacting to that disaster, everyone freaked out about carbohydrates and went on the Atkins diet.

By framing dietary advice in terms of good and bad nutrients, and by burying the recommendation that we should eat less of any particular food, it was easy for the take-home message of the 1977 and 1982 dietary guidelines to be simplified as follows: Eat more low-fat foods. And that is what we did. We’re always happy to receive a dispensation to eat more of something (with the possible exception of oat bran), and one of the things nutritionism reliably gives us is some such dispensation: low-fat cookies then, low-carb beer now.

In the end, the advice is to eat real food and to eat less. Actually, he's got 9 points of advice at the end -- well worth reading -- but it's mainly eat real food and eat less.

***

Interesting idea: "the Okinawans practiced a principle they called 'Hara Hachi Bu': eat until you are 80 percent full." Funny! I don't think Americans could even grasp the concept of identifying the 80 percent point. It's hard enough for us to notice the point at which we are full. We don't even know how to be put off by the gross portions that are set down in front of us in restaurants.

When I go to steakhouses here in Madison, I always order the smallest size -- "petite" -- and it's 6 ounces. I never want to eat the whole thing, and then I feel silly bringing home a 3 ounce portion. But, you know, 3 ounces is considered -- by some official standard -- to be one portion of meat. So I go to a restaurant, order the dinky size, and it's a double portion. It's very hard to develop common sense about how much to eat under such conditions. If you pay $30 for a steak, you don't want to leave $15 worth of it! You push yourself to eat even though you aren't hungry, and it becomes second nature.

Hear Hillary sing "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Actually, I think it's pretty cute:



Yeah, she sings badly, but she never said she could sing well, and bad singing is an American (Idol) tradition. She's a little off on the words. You can ding her for that.

We will still have Kerry to kick around.

I thought he was withdrawing from the political fray, but apparently, he was redeploying. Here he is, botching up a storm. The long national nightmare continues.

Anticipated next scene: Kerry proffers some mind-bending explanation of how his use of the words "international pariah" didn't mean what Fox News manipulated unintelligent plebes into believing.

"He can enter your space and organize your thoughts without necessarily revealing his own concerns and conflicts."

Some superheroes leap tall buildings with a single bound. Barack Obana enters your space and organizes your thoughts without revealing anything about himself!

(Same link as the previous post. The amazing and cool quote is from Harvard lawprof Charles J. Ogletree Jr.)

What a fabulous superpower, so perfect for a political actor. But, you realize, of course, that if you were writing a novel and giving that trait to a character, he would be your villain. He might make a wonderful diplomat, bringing all sorts of people together, yet we'd be crazy to give him the power to work his will before we knew what he was really about. But this ability to enter our space and organize our thoughts may be just the thing to make us that crazy, with our thoughts organized into the belief that he is the great man who will save us.

"I was born in Oslo, Norway, the son of a Volvo factory worker and part-time ice fisherman."

"My mother was a backup singer for Abba. They were good folks.... [In Chicago,] I discovered I was black, and I have remained so ever since." So goes the satirical script, written by Barack Obama's Harvard Law School classmates.

He proved deft at navigating an institution scorched with ideological battles, many of which revolved around race. He developed a leadership style based more on furthering consensus than on imposing his own ideas. Surrounded by students who enjoyed the sound of their own voices, Mr. Obama cast himself as an eager listener, sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once.

Friends say he did not want anyone to assume they knew his mind — and because of that, even those close to him did not always know exactly where he stood....

Why did his fellow law review editors elect him to lead them, to serve as their "president" (most law journals say "editor-in-chief")?

The election was an all-day affair with the ego-crushing drama of a reality TV show. Inside Pound Hall, the editors picked apart the intellectual and social skills of the 19 contenders, eliminating them in batches. At the last moment, the conservative faction, its initial candidates defeated, threw its support to Mr. Obama. “Whatever his politics, we felt he would give us a fair shake,” said Bradford Berenson, a former associate White House counsel in the Bush administration.

Read the whole article. With all those lawyers to interview and all the jealousy Obama must have inspired with his success at Harvard, it's notable that nothing nasty comes up.

But then maybe this article -- in the NYT -- is a puff piece and some juicy quotes got clipped out.

Madison Saturday politics.

The problem with a woman running for President.

I'm watching Hillary Clinton doing her town hall meeting in Des Moines, Iowa. A man -- Representative Leonard Boswell -- is introducing her. He ends by waving his arm around and saying: "We wish you every success." Not a peep out of the audience. He goes on: "Let the conversation begin!" Still nothing! He adds "God bless ya... we're glad to have you here" and, finally, elicits a cheer.

"Thank you all," she yells in that harsh tone her voice gets when she's going for volume. "Well," she says, now properly modulated and holding her hands out, palms up. "I'm Hillary Clinton." She leans forward and laughs, like it's a big joke that she actually is Hillary Clinton. The crowd laughs, either because they get the "joke" or they actually are jazzed up at the experience of witnessing the grand personage in the flesh.

"I'm running for President, and I'm in it to win it." Has she been going around saying "I'm in it to win it"? This sounds clever for half a second, and then you get distracted thinking about what other possible reasons might lead a person to run for President. And then I find myself in a pit of irrelevance musing about the mind of Dennis Kucinich...

She has some material about how ordinary people aren't making enough money these days, unlike rich people, who make too much money. Democrats are required to say this. To me, it sounds like patronizing the audience. You folks are the good, deserving people. Elsewhere, there are bad people taking way more than their share.

Next, she talks about how a woman can be President. Americans are "good at breaking barriers, and I wanna see us get back to doin' that." Droppin' those gs is really gettin' to me. Kerry did that too, didn't he?

"We need strong leadership and smart solutions to deal with our problems."

Okay, enough generalizations. It's time for the town hall questions... the conversation...

The first question is about whether a woman can be President. Clinton's response sounds natural and decent enough, and I'm thoroughly bored with this issue now. Of course, a woman can be President, but we shouldn't elect her President just to prove the point. She's a specific person, now get on with it.

The second question comes from a doctor who wants to know what she's going to do about obesity and diabetes in the United States. I pause the TiVo and the expression on her face seems to show exasperation at having to respond to this sort of thing. I unpause and see the gears click into place: It's time for Universal Health Care tape loop. The system is screwed up because it's easier to get insurers to pay if you need to have your foot amputated than if you'd like to visit a nutritionist.

There's a question about education from a teacher, who informs us that her job requires her to deal with "raging pubescent hormonal individuals" -- 8th graders -- and the hard thing is she's going through menopause. She says this in a stand-up comedian style, and I get the feeling that she thinks Hillary is going to offer her some special menopausal camaraderie. Hillary does not. Bill may have told us about his underpants, but Hillary isn't going to let us in on the extent of her need for Tampax.

The next woman complains about how "women's work" -- she does air quotes -- is underpaid. "How do we change the culture" to value this work? The obvious answer is: not through the presidency. Hillary talks at length about women's work, the culture, etc.

How I'd have loved to hear something like: You know, what's ironic here is that I'm a woman, and you're undervaluing me, asking me questions about women's things, and not treating me like someone who is offering to take on the work that genuinely belongs to the office I'm seeking. How is a woman supposed to become President if all you ever picture her doing is taking on the caregiving responsibilities that have typically belonged to women?

I can't endure the whole event, not in one sitting... but I do vlog about it...

ADDED: Wait, it will take me a minute to get the vlog up. Meanwhile, the show was almost over, and I did watch it to the end. All the questions were on womanly subjects. I predict trouble if HC can't get people to think of her outside the traditional role while she's trying to get hold of a nontraditional role.

HERE:

The Peace March.

Here's the peace march that took place today at about 1 p.m. on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin. This clip shows the whole length of the parade. Note the man at the front, just behind the banners, who is holding a sign that says "Vive Saddam." (It's the third sign from the right.) The entire clip -- which I shot while walking in the opposite direction -- is about 3 minutes long. It includes a large dove puppet and a large papier maché skull.



ADDED: The march reminds James Wigderson of "the sham gunfights I saw in Tombstone, Arizona, to show off for the tourists." Oh, I don't know. If they were just acting the part, they'd have had it together for the chant a little more. The people at the front are all "Bring them home. Now." The middle is just "Peace. Now." mixed with "No more war." Behind them is the original chant, shortened to "Bring them home." And did you notice the guy who's marching while talking on his cell phone?

Anyway, let's critique the "Bring them home" chant. It's a chant that made sense for Vietnam, a war for which men were drafted. I very much understand the resistance and shock and desperation that was felt for the young men who were forced to go to Vietnam, feelings that would make many people say, quite simply, "Bring them home." But for Iraq, everyone has volunteered. Everyone who's there made a profound decision to do something. The chant "Bring them home," in that context, seems to be shouting disrespectfully in their face that they made a blunder. There are people who chose to do something and are working very hard to accomplish it. While it is true that our leaders owe them the right decisions about how to win the war, the individuals who volunteered deserve respect for the choices that they made. The chant omits the honoring of that choice.

We know how to make coffee in Wisconsin.

Intriguing, no?

A possession of mine.

Discussed here.

Things I read/watched but don't quite feel like blogging about this morning.

1. People kind of hate real estate agents.

2. Maybe you really don't have to save that much for your retirement.

3. A developmentally disabled guy reacts to opposition to a group home for the developmentally disabled.

4. An autistic woman demonstrates what she considers to be her language.

5. One night, back in the 60s, Bob Dylan did a call-in advice show on the radio.

6. Allen Shawn wrote a book about his phobias, but maybe he's not all that phobic.

7. A law and economics professor did a study that correlates earnings to skin tone.

8. Professor Bainbridge gives up on the "magazine" format for his blog.

9. The Swampland bloggers are squabbling.

10. Hillary Clinton needs to get some more votes in Iowa.

11. Powerline is at a conservative summit of some sort.

12. People don't like to shop at The Gap so much anymore.

13. Seminary students don't necessarily feel like becoming ministers.

14. An episcopal rector mocked parishioners and got in trouble.

15. An ugly incident upset people on a campus.

16. Elia behaved badly on "Top Chef."

17. People are talking about Libby and Rove and Cheney.

18. Bush is resigning himself to an Iraq resolution.

19. A guy had amnesia.

20. Angelina Jolie might be in a bad mood.

The government is here to help you with your body image problems.

Here's a story about how Spain is standardizing clothing sizes for women "as part of a government drive to ease pressure on young girls over their body size":

The change of sizes will be led by Spain's National Consumer Institute, which will measure more than 8,000 Spanish females between the ages of 12 and 70.

Spanish fashion houses will then try to fit clothes to them, rather than the other way round.

Last year Spain's main fashion show banned designers from using so-called "size zero" women to model their collections.

Now designers aiming for commercial markets should be encouraged to "promote a healthy physical image that conforms with the reality of the Spanish population," the ministry said in a statement.

It's one thing to standardize the sizes. I can't see objecting to that. The standardization of weights and measures is central to free trade. A pound of sugar from one manufacturer should weigh the same as a pound of sugar from another. Clothes sizes are much the same. I suppose you could say that the proportions should be variable. If the average woman is pear-shaped, will it be illegal to design for the apple-shaped woman? But basically, it doesn't bother me that manufacturers won't be allowed to manipulate the numbers to get the jump on their competitors.

But weren't they putting smaller numbers on larger clothes? I don't know about Spain, but here in the United States, they didn't use to have size 0 or even size 2 in ordinary women's departments. I should think reality-based sizing would have women shocked to learn what their real size is. But at least it won't vary from shop to shop. Some women might get upset not to fit into a size they were used to fitting into. Whether that sends them into crash dieting is another matter.

The bigger issue is whether government should demand that clothing manufacturers participate in the promotion of healthy bodily images. I don't much like government efforts to improve people's thought processes. It puts me in a bad mood.

Hey, why not ban black clothes? They're depressing and worn by people who are depressed. Let's mandate pastels and snappy prints!

***

The reason I'm blogging about this is that I got a phone call this morning asking me if I could go on the radio to talk about this story -- which I hadn't yet read. Wanna talk about it for 5 minutes, like 8 minutes from now? Okay.... Anyway, so I did that. This blog post is just a byproduct.

The pen is mightier...

... than the mountain lion.

"Ms. Fanning’s commitment to this material is unwavering in its creepiness."

NYT film critic Manohla Dargis writes about the movie "Hounddog," saying something that resonates with me:

“Hounddog” and the media storm that accompanied its world premiere on Monday expose the contradictions that grip Sundance, which insists on its commitment to quality even as it continues to program work that suggests otherwise. A Southern gothic about a white girl (Ms. Fanning) who learns how to sing the blues from a kindly black man after she is raped, the film had earned censure sight unseen from the likes of Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel.

(Oh, so it's also another one of those movies about how white people learn the meaning of life from idealized black people? Can't we retire that cliché?)

As sincere as it is stupid, “Hounddog” is pure art-house exploitation, as evidenced by the images of its 12-year-old star dressed in a wet T-shirt and panties, of her writhing on a bed and of her awkwardly grinding in a hootchy-kootchy pantomime to the Elvis Presley song of the film’s title. As in “The Accused” (the Jodie Foster rape movie), the film’s narrative momentum builds to the rape, which is discreetly staged; unfortunately, it is also presented with some of the same tropes of the classic movie love scene: there is a shot of the girl’s clutching hand and, after the assault, a close-up of her face. Ms. Fanning’s commitment to this material is unwavering in its creepiness.

Dargis obviously can't stand Sean Hannity and his ilk, but she's not letting that keep her from seeing what's wrong with this. By contrast, read this wrongheaded blather by Meghan O'Rourke in Slate, which concludes:

The problem for an American audience weaned on this waif, and chock-a-block with repressed feelings about adolescent sexuality itself, is that Dakota Fanning the actress (if not the character she plays) has chosen to take on this graphic a role. She has opened Pandora's box. Once she has become part of the sexual economy of adolescence—about which Americans are so clearly conflicted, living as we do in a hypersexualized era that is also peculiarly hyperprotective of children—she can't go back.

Sorry, Meghan, those of us who do not want to see a 12-year-old girl dressed in a wet T-shirt and panties... writhing on a bed and... awkwardly grinding in a hootchy-kootchy pantomime are not repressed and conflicted and hyperprotective.

Questioning "dignity."

Peter Singer has a NYT op-ed about the "Ashley Treatment" (which we discussed recently here). The idea is to restrict the girl's growth and prevent her from reaching puberty because she is, mentally, a baby and will always be. Singer:

A Los Angeles Times report on Ashley’s treatment began: “This is about Ashley’s dignity. Everybody examining her case seems to agree at least about that.” Her parents write in their blog that Ashley will have more dignity in a body that is healthier and more suited to her state of development, while their critics see her treatment as a violation of her dignity.

But we should reject the premise of this debate. As a parent and grandparent, I find 3-month-old babies adorable, but not dignified. Nor do I believe that getting bigger and older, while remaining at the same mental level, would do anything to change that.

Here’s where things get philosophically interesting. We are always ready to find dignity in human beings, including those whose mental age will never exceed that of an infant, but we don’t attribute dignity to dogs or cats, though they clearly operate at a more advanced mental level than human infants. Just making that comparison provokes outrage in some quarters. But why should dignity always go together with species membership, no matter what the characteristics of the individual may be?

What matters in Ashley’s life is that she should not suffer, and that she should be able to enjoy whatever she is capable of enjoying. Beyond that, she is precious not so much for what she is, but because her parents and siblings love her and care about her. Lofty talk about human dignity should not stand in the way of children like her getting the treatment that is best both for them and their families.

Are you so ready to throw out the "dignity" talk?

Look into my eyes.

You know you can't resist the sexy, ultraviolet glow.

Is it getting obvious that Sharpton can't stand Obama?

The two men pose in front of a painting of Thurgood Marshall:



Click on the (terrific) picture to enlarge it. Can you read the body language? The priceless expression on Sharpton's face?

Sharpton also met with Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton yesterday... and declined to make any endorsements.

Obama said the two talked about their shared agenda of fighting for the dispossessed. "I assured him that I not only want to hear his views and thoughts and policy recommendations, but publicly any of us who step into this fight for the nomination have to be held accountable and speak to these issues," he said.

Sharpton said they talked about economics, health care and education issues. "We are going to keep talking and he knows I'm talking to everybody," he said.

The normally loquacious Sharpton was unusually curt and cut off further questioning by saying he was behind schedule. But he told reporters who followed him that he would decide about his own candidacy "once I see what these guys do or don't do."

The normally loquacious Sharpton was unusually curt...

Is it getting obvious that Sharpton can't stand Obama?

MORE: Here:

“I left the meeting a little curious, feeling that he was noticing our civil rights agenda, but I didn’t understand what his civil rights agenda is,” Mr. Sharpton said.

He was noticing our civil rights agenda ... Noticing! Come on, that's harsh!

That power-grabbing President.

I love this collection of newspaper cartoons from 1937, portraying Franklin Roosevelt's aggressive view of executive power. (via Instapundit.)



This web-resource would be SO much better if you could get a separate address for the cartoon. Unfortunately, the graphically uninteresting block of explanatory text comes along with the vivid image.

Let's Google for a more workable source of FDR cartoons. How about this? Here's a favorite (which I especially enjoy after spending the first week of classes teaching Marbury v. Madison in two different classes, to 1Ls and to 2- and 3Ls):

Here comes your "national nervous breakdown."

Oh, who's to blame?

• Bush schadenfreude. Partisan pleasure in George Bush's pain dates to the anguish of the contested 2000 election loss. The Democrats have run against something called "Bush" for so long that this sentiment is now bound up in any act or policy remotely attached to the president. Iraq's troubles, or Iran or North Korea, are merely an artifact of crushing this one guy.

• The Iraq Study Group. The ISG report wasn't defeatist, but it enabled the vocabulary of defeat. Its warning of a "slide toward chaos" was re-defined as the current Iraqi status quo. They called their bipartisan solution "phased withdrawal," but it was a euphemism for defeat. Momentum was already building in this direction, and the ISG propelled it.

• The leadership vacuum. The administration never rallied the nation behind the war in a concrete way. A young Marine officer recently returned from combat in Iraq told me this week he is taken aback at how disassociated the American people seem from Iraq, no matter how constantly it's in the news. He says it's as if the problem is not so much what is actually happening in Iraq but that the war is "annoying" to Americans, as if to say: Can't it just go away or not be on the front page all the time? Rallying a nation at war is a president's job.

• The opposition vacuum. One reason the negative mood in politics is so disconcerting is that the opposition's alternative vision is nonexistent. On joining the opposition recently, GOP Sen. Norm Coleman announced, "I can't tell you what the path to success is." Joe Biden says the "primary" Iraq strategy should be to force its leaders to make the political compromises necessary to "end the violence."

"Is Barack black enough to beat Hillary?"

Bob Wright and Mickey Kaus talk about that on Bloggingheads in a segment that begins with Mickey calling John Kerry a "terminal doofus" but gets around to the promised topic.

And here's the link to Kausfiles on that topic, which discusses this essay by Debra Dickerson that asserts that Barack Obama isn't (the right kind of) black. Bob Wright and I talked about the same subject in a segment of Bloggingheads last week, which was based on this blog post of mine, talking about this news article about black leaders not (yet?) supporting Obama.

ADDED: WaPo has a big story on the general subject today:

The question of how Obama chooses to define and approach race looms large as he moves closer to formally launching his campaign next month....

Melissa V. Harris-Lacewell, a Princeton University professor who has followed Obama's political ascent, said that he may be forced to choose: "You can be elected president as a black person only if you signal at some level that you are independent from black people" -- a move she said would be "guaranteed" to make black people angry. "He is going to have to figure out whether there is a way not to alienate and anger a black base that almost by definition is going to be disappointed," she said.

"We have to have the stomach to finish the task."

Dick Cheney faces down Wolf Blitzer:

BLITZER: Here's what Jim Webb, Senator from Virginia, said in his Democratic response last night. He said:

"The President took us into the war recklessly. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable and predicted disarray that has followed."

And it's not just Jim Webb, it's some of your good Republican friends in the Senate and the House, are now seriously questioning your credibility because of the blunders, of the failures. All right, Gordon Smith --

CHENEY: Wolf, Wolf, I simply don't accept the premise of your question. I just think it's hogwash. Remember --

BLITZER: What, that there were no blunders? The President himself says there were blunders --

CHENEY: Remember, remember me -- remember with me what happened in Afghanistan. The United States was actively involved in Afghanistan in the '80s supporting the effort against the Soviets. The Mujahideen prevailed, everybody walked away. And in Afghanistan, within relatively short order, the Taliban came to power, they created a safe haven for al Qaeda, training camps were established where some 20,000 terrorists trained in the late '90s. And out of that, out of Afghanistan, because we walked away and ignored it, we had the attack on the USS Cole, the attack on the embassies in East Africa, and 9/11, where the people trained and planned in Afghanistan for that attack and killed 3,000 Americans. That is what happens when we walk away from a situation like that in the Middle East.

Now you might have been able to do that before 9/11. But after 9/11, we learned that we have a vested interest in what happens on the ground in the Middle East. Now, if you are going to walk away from Iraq today and say, well, gee, it's too tough, we can't complete the task, we just are going to quit, you'll create exactly that same kind of situation again.

Now, the critics have not suggested a policy. They haven't put anything in place. All they want to do, all they've recommended is to redeploy or to withdraw our forces. The fact is, we can complete the task in Iraq. We're going to do it. We've got Petraeus -- General Petraeus taking over. It is a good strategy. It will work. But we have to have the stomach to finish the task.

BLITZER: What if the Senate passes a resolution saying, this is not a good idea. Will that stop you?

CHENEY: It won't stop us, and it would be, I think detrimental from the standpoint of the troops, as General Petraeus said yesterday. He was asked by Joe Lieberman, among others, in his testimony, about this notion that somehow the Senate could vote overwhelmingly for him, send him on his new assignment, and then pass a resolution at the same time and say, but we don't agree with the mission you've been given.

BLITZER: So you're moving forward no matter what the consequences?

CHENEY: We are moving forward. We are moving forward. The Congress has control over the purse strings. They have the right, obviously, if they want, to cut off funding. But in terms of this effort, the President has made his decision. We've consulted extensively with them. We'll continue to consult with the Congress. But the fact of the matter is, we need to get the job done. I think General Petraeus can do it. I think our troops can do it. And I think it's far too soon for the talking heads on television to conclude that it's impossible to do, it's not going to work, it can't possibly succeed.

"The more we play God or try to improve on Mother Nature, the more damage we are doing with all kinds of experiments that... turn into nightmares."

That sounds like the alarmism of a religious fundamentalist, but hostility to scientific research comes from the progressive side when the question is the source of sexual preference.

That quote is from Martina Navratilova, who is one of the many critics of Charles Roselli, a researcher who is studying why some male sheep have a sexual preference for other males. Roselli tells his critics that he hates the idea of trying to manipulate the sexuality of human beings and claims that his real interest is in fact sheep.

Don't we accept the idea of sheep breeders doing what they can to get sheep who will in fact breed? Should someone who objects to efforts to cure human beings of homosexuality resist efforts to manipulate sheep? Assuming you don't care about the individuality and personal fulfillment of sheep -- and note that PETA started the campaign against Roselli -- don't you have to admit that any learning about sexual orientation will be applied to thinking about human beings?

But shouldn't we want to know the truth? Shouldn't gay rights advocates care when they sound like the religious fundamentalists they usually deride?

"American Idol" goes to NYC.

Yes, they're in NY, but they don't look any more urbane/hip/sophisticated than the people in all those other cities. They're all from Queens, right? Queens, Long Island, New Jersey.... Or anywhere really. They just need to show up in NY.

The worst thing about today's show is revealed at Minute 2. There's a guest judge. That never works out well. What's-her-name -- Carol Bayer Sager -- is given the Paula seat between Randy and Simon, and our girl Paula is all the way over on the left. Boo! We see pictures of Sager glammed up in 80s hair and makeup -- almost, but not, Pat Benatar. Well, she looks like Pat Benatar in the stills, and Joan Collins in the real-time photography. Who is she? She's written various songs -- "Groovy Kind of Love" -- and she was once married to Burt Bacharach. Big deal! She's not going to say anything interesting.

First up is Ian Benardo, who, we're told, has a sense of entitlement. In profile -- I don't wanna be mean, but... --- he looks like Zippy the Pinhead. He's funny when he says that after people see him, they're going to forget about "Taylor Who?, Carrie Under Where?" (Underwear!) When Simon Cowell asks him the classic question "Why are you here?," he gives the answer everyone could give, a big sarcastic "Duh" face and then "To try out for 'American Idol.'" He sings "Gloria," but it's not "she comes around here about midnight" "Gloria." It's some other "Gloria." Simon tells him it's "rubbish," and he's all what is that some British expression? Rubbish? Who even says that?

In the second segment, we get some truly annoying contestants. A 19-year-old woman who lies to her father and skips school to pursue her "dream" gets too many minutes on screen crying about her ordeal, including a phone conversation with said dad where he learns she's "going to Hollywood" and just basically says wow, great. So much for that problem. Then we get a woman who seems to think Greek ethnicity is enough. She doesn't make it. Neither does Ashanti, a young woman who's actually gone to Hollywood in two past seasons, and wants to snag a slot again this year. When they tell her no, she goes into the hammiest pleading ever... fortunately, to no avail.

Two kind of nice and pretty best friends both make it through, and we're tipped off that their friendship will get tested in Hollywood.

A really great singer named Kia Thompson does Aretha Franklin and is proclaimed the best of the day.

Then it's Day 2... there were a few more singers, including a nice opera-singer girl who gets through. There were some delusionals and another medley of bad singers. But I was getting bleary-eyed in the second hour. Enough already! These 2-hour shows are killing me!

ADDED: Here's the TWOP recap, which makes me want to add that those best friends are named Amanda Coluccio and Antonella Barba, and that dad-calling girl is Sarah Burgess. Now what was Opera Girl's name? I like her, but apparently not enough to remember her name.

Some names to memorize: Jenry Bejarano (he's 16, he's black, he's adopted, and his mother's Bolivian), Jory Steinberg (she was Canadian, but now she's Santa Monican), Porcelana Petino (she worked out to get in shape for the show and wore the lowest cut jeans you can wear on TV without a digital blur... in front!), Chris Richardson (a decent-looking white guy is good so they rave... blah blah blah... Timberlake!), Nicholas Pedro (he quit in Hollywood last year because he forgot the lyrics to "Build Me Up, Buttercup," and now he's back).

Kerry gets the hint.

We don't have the joke-botching Senator to kick around anymore.

"Systematic abuse of prosecutorial discretion."

New ethics charges against Duke lacrosse team prosecutor, Mike Nifong.

"God bless."

I like this device in the NYT that lets you search for words in the text of all of President Bush's State of the Union addresses and displaying the results graphically. They've done a few key words -- "Iraq," "democracy," "oil" -- for you already. I decided to search for "God" (as they say....). The results show the only use of the word in an anecdote about Dikembe Mutombo, who, we're told, "believes that God has given him this opportunity to do great things.”

What? Bush didn't end with "God bless America"?

I check the full text. It ends this way:

This is a decent and honorable country, and resilient too. We’ve been through a lot together. We’ve met challenges and faced dangers, and we know that more lie ahead. Yet we can go forward with confidence, because the state of our union is strong, our cause in the world is right, and tonight that cause goes on.

God bless.

Somehow those last two words got left out of the "interactive graphic."

But it's interesting that Bush just said "God bless." Didn't he always say "God bless America"? Let's look:

2001: "Good night and God bless."

2002: "May God bless." (Said shortly after "God is near.")

2003: The most religious ending: "Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity. We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not know -- we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history. May He guide us now. And may God continue to bless the United States of America."

2004: "May God continue to bless America."

2005: "[M]ay God bless America."

2006: "May God bless America."

2007: "God bless."

He seems to have come full circle. The blessing started out short, took its fullest form in the grandiloquent 2005 speech, then got small again. Reading the different blessings, what strikes me the most is that in 2001 he used, word for word, the tag line Red Skelton always ended his show with.



I would have thought that if Bush was going to switch to saying "God bless America," it would have happened in 2002, given the prominence of the song "God bless America" after the 9/11 attacks. But it's the 2003 speech, the one with the elaborately religious ending that introduces "God bless America" to Bush's State of the Union style. He adopts the long form: "may God continue to bless the United States of America." This is the speech that immediately precedes the invasion of Iraq. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity. Ah! It was Bush's tragic mistake to believe that. God behind all of life, and all of history. May He guide us now. Ah! To think such a thing!

"Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others."

So read the note from Dick Cheney, translated for the jury by Scooter Libby's lawyer Ted Wells, paraphrased by Michael Isikoff:

The vice president was not going to allow Karl Rove to be protected and Libby to be sacrificed. Libby had stuck his neck “in the meat grinder” because he had been authorized by President Bush himself to talk to reporters and rebut what the White House considered unfair criticism by Wilson that the intelligence about Iraq had been “twisted.” And the “incompetence” Cheney was referring to was by the CIA which, he claimed, was responsible for whatever the White House had gotten wrong about Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction.

It looks like the trial is going to be quite a meat grinder. Per Isikoff:

Well’s argument was both brilliant and complex-and perhaps difficult for non-news hounds on the jury to follow. But it raised the prospect that the Libby trial will now turn into a horror show for the White House, forcing current and former top aides to testify against each other and revealing an administration that has been in turmoil over the Iraq war for more than three years.

"So much for the right to marry; so much for sexual autonomy; so much for consenting adults deciding whom to love...."

Eugene Volokh has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about how bizarrely hard it is to get a date with a dental hygienist in the state of Washington.

"To quote the titular song, 'You said you was high class/Well, that was just a lie.'"

The movie "Hounddog" -- about which such a stir was kicked up -- is a dog:

"Hounddog" is from the overheated and overacted school of Southern drama, filled with stereotypical characters, pseudo-poetic dialogue, and heavy symbolism ("Hounddog"'s biggest deviation from formula is that it features a killer R&B band that plays into the dead of night, presumably on call should 12-year-old girls need help with their personal problems). Fanning stars as Lewellen, a girl obsessed with Elvis who lives with her no-good father (David Morse) and her strict grandmother (Piper Laurie).

Piper Laurie! I'd be waiting for li'l Dakota to start making all the kitchen knives fly through the air!



Oh, sorry, I got distracted thinking about a time when movies were such great fun. And deep too!



Say it!!!

Back to "Hounddog," with its hangdog earnestness (and 12-year-old actress in a simulated rape scene):

Fanning plays the character as a cross between an innocent child and a wise strumpet; as a whole, "Hounddog" seems conceived simply to give her a role to flex her pre-teen acting chops.

The film has generated its share of controversy due to a scene in which Fanning's character is raped (it's handled without exploitation). Kiddie porn it isn't. Unfortunately, "Hounddog" isn't much of anything. It doesn't really resonate as a coming-of-age story, a family drama, or an exploration of the 1950s Southern experience, leaving precious little left but the controversy.

Ultimately, "Hounddog" is pretty mangy.

Well, I guess I'm glad the movie's bad and hope it goes nowhere. I would hate to see it get traction out of getting a rise out of social conservatives with something that good feminists should/used to care about. But the issue is still not dead. The fact that the movie isn't "kiddie porn" or that the scene as edited into the movie is "handled without exploitation" is no answer to the problem discussed at length in this post and its many comments. The problem was the use of the child actor to film the scene. The final cut of the scene and how it looks to movie viewers is a separate matter from how the child was treated on those days when she was filming the movie. This is a matter covered by statutory law and by moral principle, and there's no special exception for high-class films or overheated and overacted Southern dramas posing as high class.

MORE: Here's Orlando Sentinel critic Kathleen Parker:

[In Hounddog,] we witness a real 12-year-old portray a girl waking up as her naked father climbs into bed with her; "dancing" in her underwear while lying in bed; and getting raped by a teenage boy.

We are, in other words, voyeurs to a young girl acting out a sexual predator's fantasies. If we have a problem with that, we're told these are real issues that beg honest exploration. No, amend that. We're lectured -- by a 12-year-old, who, we're reminded, is a sophisticated actress.

"You know, I'm an actress," Fanning patiently explained to The New York Times. "It's what I want to do, it's what I've been so lucky to have done for almost seven years now. And I am getting older."

Does anything quite equal the ennui born of being scolded by a too-precious child?

Far be it for anyone to suggest that adults know more about such things than children. At least some of them do. Fanning's parents support their daughter's decision to play the rape scene, noting that this could cinch an Oscar for the child star.

Even Marc Klaas -- the ubiquitous been-there father of his murdered daughter Polly -- has given his nod to the film, vouching for its sensitive, supportive treatment of Fanning.

Only the actress' face is shown during the rape scene, which reportedly has been tastefully executed.

It's hard to get enough of tasteful rapes, I admit. Unless you're a real child rapist, the bunch of whom doubtless will be sufficiently stimulated by Fanning's rape-face, as well as her panty-dance and her little visit from bad Daddy.

But it's Art, so relaaaaax. And it's real, so get with it.

Hey, that was awfully minimal State of the Union blogging...

You're not one of these people who watched "American Idol" and not the State of the Union...

Are you?....

Because obviously you did watch "American Idol"...

Well?...

What the hell is going on in this country? Doesn't anybody have any sense anymore?

Makes perfect sense to me!

"When the music does take a moment to catch its breath, a mellifluous voice emerges."

So reads the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages, writing about Cougar, a musical group with a "post-rock's tone" and "a pedigree in jazz":

Turns out that Cougar's "vocalist" is none other than ubiquitous constitutional law commentator Ann Althouse, a professor at the U of W. "Trent was a law student," Skogen laughs. "We picked her lectures because she's got such a cool cadence of speech. The timbre and phrasing of her speech all sounded so nice."

Here's "my" group:



Hey, all you current students, I hope when you're putting up with me going on and on about sovereign immunity or some such thing, you appreciate the cool cadence of speech, the timbre, and the phrasing. You've got to pause now and then and think, man, this is mellifluous.

(Here's an earlier post of mine about Cougar. Here's their MySpace page, showing lots of upcoming shows in the next few weeks, including one in Madison.)

"I know that for me, I need to get over the fear..."

Says Melinda Doolittle, auditioning for "American Idol." She's a background singer, taking a chance, stepping forward, and they reach out and offer her a hand, as she sings Stevie Wonder, "For Once in My Life." "You walk in," Simon says, "with no confidence, no attitude, and yet you are... a brilliant singer... You are... what it's all about."

Yes, there was a whole hour show, and, in fact, I did watch it, but I'm just going to leave this little message for Melinda. We're looking for someone to love. And we love you.

"This rite of custom brings us together at a defining hour – when decisions are hard and courage is tested."

The State of the Union.

ADDED: "How'r'ya doin'" our President says, turning to Nancy Pelosi. He begins by taking credit for the new step of saying "Madam Speaker."

MORE: That "added" part was on the wrong post (the previous one), I see the next morning. I couldn't get Blogger to publish last night, so this went up -- as far as I could see -- after I went to bed. And the idea of simulblogging the speech went out the window. Sorry!

Rent a protester.

Pick a young and pretty one.

"Although I harbor endlessly reverberating regret about the abortion I had..."

"... I've always resisted the consolation industry, the people who show up with Kleenex after plane crashes, or hold 'post-abortive' workshops allowing you to 'grieve, forgive yourself, and move on.'" Amba writes:

This movement encourages [deeply troubled women] to pinpoint their abortion(s) as the fountainhead of all their disturbance, a devastating act they committed in powerlessness and ignorance, one foisted on them by a no-good man, by an evil lying abortionist who told them it was only a "blob of tissue," by a callous culture. Writer Emily Bazelon concludes the article:

And then there is the relief in seizing on a single clear explanation for a host of unwanted and overwhelming feelings, a cause for everything gone wrong. When Arias surveyed 104 of the prisoners she had counseled in 2004, two-thirds reported depression related to abortion, 32 percent reported suicide attempts related to abortion and 84 percent linked substance abuse to their abortions. They had a new key for unlocking themselves. And a way to make things right. “You have well-meaning therapists or political crusaders, paired with women who are troubled and experiencing a variety of vague symptoms,” Brenda Major, the U.C. Santa Barbara psychology professor, explained to me. “The therapists and crusaders offer a diagnosis that gives meaning to the symptoms, and that gives the women a way to repent. You can’t repent depressive symptoms. But you can repent an action.” You can repent an abortion. You can reach for a narrative of sin and atonement, of perfect imagined babies waiting in heaven.

It's complicated. Yes, female powerlessness is a major cause of unwanted pregnancy and abortion: women are forced into sex or are afraid to say no or they try to trade sex for love; they find themselves pregnant with bad, irresponsible boyfriends, no job, no money, and at best fragile plans to complete their education and make something of themselves. Sadly, choosing to end a pregnancy in such circumstances sometimes gives a woman almost the only feeling of power she's ever had. Other times, she wants to hold on to the pregnancy (I did), but is pressured out of it by the man.

Nonetheless, I think, to try to coddle the woman and encourage her to think of herself as another innocent victim is to disempower her all over again....

... I don't want to forgive myself. First of all, guilt is not what I feel. I feel regret, which is appropriate and irrevocable. I don't torture myself or suffer psychological disturbance as a result of having had an abortion; I'm too healthy and probably too pagan for that. What I suffer is barrenness for myself and loneliness for someone who should have been literally as close to me as my own heart, whose face I never saw and whose voice I never heard. (The latter struck me only recently, and I wondered why I hadn't thought of it before.) What I suffer is being alone in the world and disconnected from life in the most primitive way. And that is appropriate. That is a fact. Those are the consequences of the choice I made.

Read the whole thing.

Fox smears Clinton and Obama in one broad stroke.

Is there any other way to look at it?

Oscar nominations...

Did you watch the announcement live? I did. Poor Salma Hayek was devastated that "Volver" didn't get a Best Foreign Language Film nomination. I was glad Alan Arkin got nominated, even though I didn't think much of "Little Miss Sunshine." I do like him.

Lots of the usual suspects in the Best Actress Category. Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet are in some long contest for most nominations ever. Then there's Helen Mirren and Judi Dench. Makes you want to be for Penelope Cruz, doesn't it?

Here's the full list of nominees.

UPDATE: Drudge writes: "'DREAMGIRLS' LEADS PACK -- BUT SNUBBED IN FILM, DIRECTOR CATS..." Oh! The poor cats! What did those sweet little kitties ever do to deserve such treatment from the Academy?

"Effort to 'Humanize' Clinton Is Underway."

That's the hilarious teaser on the home page of the Washington Post, leading to this article.

The effort to "humanize" Clinton, as her advisers have put it, was in full swing just two days into her presidential campaign.

Oh! So it's her advisors who are supplying the term that implies that she is not human. Wouldn't want the WaPo editorializing. But since it's her advisors... well, let's just have a laugh at the ineptitude of political advisors. Come on, you fools, just humanize her. Don't tell the press you're trying to humanize her!

Dressed in the same pastel jacket for all her appearances, Clinton sat on a sofa against a soft backdrop of bookshelves and a yellow curtain for her Web chat. She was joined by her campaign's blogger, Crystal Patterson, who read viewer questions aloud. Almost all of the inquiries were from women, and nearly one-third were from New York. One question was about the role Chelsea Clinton will play in the campaign (unclear, her mom said).

She hedged on her favorite movie, saying that, as a child, she had loved "The Wizard of Oz," only to discover "Casablanca" in college and law school, watching it so often that she memorized the lines. (Her passion for the Meryl Streep-Robert Redford classic "Out of Africa" came later, she said.) But she was clear about her own conviction that she can become president.

Can't you just picture the robotic brain gears turning, trying to think of a movie that would say just the thing she needs said? Oh, why didn't she have a "favorite movie" planned before she went into this on-line chat to humanize herself? "Wizard of Oz," can't go wrong there.... except it's childish, and not very imaginative or distinctive. "Casablanca"! That's a great movie everyone loves. Possibly more sophisticated than "Wizard of Oz." But anyone could think of "Casablanca." I need something that would have at least some individuality to it. Was there ever anything that ever stirred me? Damn it, I've been busy. I haven't been sitting around like you cookie-bakers staring at screens, waiting for some damned moving image to stir some -- what is it you people have? -- emotion. Oh, hell, there was that thing.... "Out of Africa"!

Plot summary (with spoilers):

Karen Blixen [Meryl Streep], a Danish woman, marries a friend for the title of Baroness and they move to Africa and start a coffee plantation. Things unfold when her husband begins cheating on her and is away on business often, so she's at home alone, working on the farm and bonding with two men she met in her first day in Africa. She eventually falls in love with the one, Denys Finch-Hatton [Robert Redford] and goes on safari and whatnot with him. Later, she begins to want more from him than the simple friendship/relationship they have and pushes marriage, but Denys still wants his freedom.

No, no, damn you, bloggers! You're so eager to bring up my problems with Bill. Don't you be digging up my problems with Bill. Don't you bastards say that I picked "Out of Africa" because I empathized with Karen Blixen! Who the f*ck do you think you are? How dare you dredge up this scurrilous suggestion that I am............................. human.

Baraboo High School bans the "U.S.A., U.S.A." chant.

It's considered an obscenity:

The "U.S.A." some of the students were chanting stands for a three-word insult, an unsporting acronym the first letter of which stands for "You."

Fans at athletic events have been trying to sneak a few such cheers with double meanings past officials, leading administrators to tighten enforcement of WIAA rules and causing some students and parents to wonder what's wrong with a little team spirit.

So, kids, if there is something you don't like, make up a second meaning for it, pass it around, have a few laughs, and make the adults go nuts and ban it.

I remember the fun we had in 9th grade biology by deciding that the word "mutate" would refer a particular rude bodily function. What are you kids laughing about??!!

"'Teeth' is, more than anything, a coming-of-age story."

Just checking the news from Sundance:

Monday, in one of the festival's first deals, the Weinstein Company signed on to distribute "Teeth," in which a teenager discovers vaginal teeth that emerge when she is attacked.

Director Mitchell Lichtenstein says "Teeth" is, more than anything, a coming-of-age story. "Besides whatever other element it has, it's about a girl growing up and learning to accept her fate"....

Now, now. Don't confuse art movies for the elite with sleazy movies for bad people. It's a coming of age film.

Other films that include references to sex this year include "Zoo," a documentary about a man who died having sex with a horse. Here, the incident became a means of exploring universal human emotions, like loneliness.

How about the universal human emotion of bullshit detection?

The split-screen in the 2004 presidential debates helped Bush.

Yet it was the Bush side that wanted a single screen focused on the speaker, precluding reaction shots:

"Republicans thought they knew what they were doing by asking for single-screen, and the Democrats and all the pundits argued that it had hurt Bush because of the split screen. But the data shows that's not true," says Dietram Scheufele, a UW-Madison journalism professor. "It hurt Kerry quite a bit and didn't hurt Bush at all. The pundits didn't live up to reality."...

The study, published in the February issue of the journal Communication Research, put that assertion to the test, as 700 university students were asked to evaluate a five-minute-long debate clip in single screen and split-screen formats. The study was conducted in the two weeks prior to the 2004 election....

"The split-screen debates hurt Kerry and not really Bush," [Scheufele] says. "It was largely a function of what people thought about the two candidates in the first place. Split-screen coverage made Bush supporters more extreme in their support for the president and their opposition to Kerry. Kerry voters, on the other hand, didn't like Bush in the first place, but the split-screen coverage also didn't change much about their support for Kerry."

For Bush, the split-screen format shored up his base and helped him with GOP-leaning undecided viewers.

"When they saw Kerry on split screen and saw his smirks or writing something down in reaction to what Bush said, that produced a much more negative view towards Kerry," he adds. "People who leaned toward Bush in the first place felt even worse about Kerry."

The less Kerry the better!

"One man turned out to be a certain kind of comedian's dream -- he was a lawyer, and a Republican..."

"... and Philips concluded many of his jokes about the Grand Old Party by simply gesturing at the man, as if to say: I rest my case."

Philips? That would be Emo Philips, who was in town yesterday.

"I'm not a Republican, but I'm saving up to be one."

"I aestheticized the sleaze right out of it."

Says Robinson Devor, director of "Zoo," a documentary about bestiality:

Not graphic in the least, this strange and strangely beautiful film combines audio interviews (two of the three men involved did not want to appear on camera) with elegiac visual re-creations intended to conjure up the mood and spirit of situations...

"A lot of people looked at me as if I was an exploitative person, dredging up something for profit, and that bothered me. I was certainly asked many times, often with a wrinkled brow, 'Why are you making this film?' It was something I did resent; I thought artists had the opportunity to explore anything."

In the end, Devor ended up agreeing with the Roman writer Terence, who said "I consider nothing human alien to me."

Would you go to see this? I must admit, I've already seen a movie about bestiality, but it was for laughing, not for marveling at strange beauty.

"Bill Rehnquist was concerned about efficiency. He didn't want to waste time. You could raise your hand, but it was not encouraged."

Here's a nice, big, juicy excerpt from Jan Crawford Greenburg's new book about the Supreme Court, "Supreme Conflict." Excerpting the excerpt:

The new chief justice was a master of the short statement at the Court, and he demanded brevity from fellow justices in their conferences. Rehnquist made it known that he expected less talk than his predecessor Burger had allowed. He found endless debate unproductive, and he believed the justices could best exchange legal reasoning and ideas in written memos and drafts. Whenever Rehnquist thought a justice went on too long in conference, he would simply cut him off. "It will come out in the writing," he'd say.

"Bill Rehnquist was concerned about efficiency. He didn't want to waste time. You could raise your hand, but it was not encouraged," O'Connor said of the conferences. "I thought Rehnquist's push for efficiency was a pretty good thing -- to get on with the task and get the work done."...

As chief justice, Rehnquist rarely pushed the independent O'Connor, even when she sided with liberals on social issues. Despite their long friendship -- and the number of times he needed a fifth vote -- it was a rare instance when Rehnquist picked up the phone to press his views....

It wasn't Rehnquist's style to lobby. Once, in Clarence Thomas's first year on the Court, the new justice was struggling with a case over the plight of thousands of Haitians who'd fled their war-torn country on boats for the United States. The George H.W. Bush administration ordered the coast guard to intercept them and return them directly to Haiti. Lawyers asked the justices to step in and stop the coast guard. Thomas was anguished. He sympathized with the Haitians. He called Rehnquist for advice, and the chief referred Thomas to a favorite poem by Arthur Hugh Clough. "Say not the struggle naught availeth," the poem begins, urging fortitude in the face of battle. It then ends on a hopeful note: "Westward look, the land is bright."

Thomas made a copy of the poem and slid it under the glass top of his desk, where he's kept it. He joined seven other justices and declined to intervene in the plight of the Haitian boat people. "I am deeply concerned about these allegations" of mistreatment in Haiti, Thomas wrote in a separate opinion explaining why the Court would not step in. "However, this matter must be addressed by the political branches, for our role is limited to questions of law."

Much more at the link. And in the book.

Brownback's unusually religious announcement that he's running for President.

Let's analyze it. (I'm boldfacing the religious words.)

I have decided, after much prayerful consideration, to consider a bid for the Republican nomination for the presidency.

Now, now, he didn't say God told him to run, did he?

I am running to spread hope and ideas. We are a blessed nation at an important crossroads. War, corruption, disintegrating families, and for some, hopelessness, tear at the American Dream. We need hope and ideas.

I am running for America…to be of service in a crucial time of trial.

Ours is an exceptional nation. A nation between two oceans made up of people from every nation on earth. A great nation united by our ideals. But we are a great nation because of our goodness. If we ever lose our goodness, we will surely lose our greatness.

All very uplifting. Hope, greatness, goodness. But it's all threatened.

We believe in a culture of life—that every human life is a beautiful, sacred, unique child of a loving God.

His #1 issue is anti-abortion, and he has situated it within a larger setting of the crucial need for a nation to believe in profound ideals.

We believe in justice for all—at all times.

We believe in liberty.

But the central institutions that best transmit these values—the family and the culture—are under withering attack.

We must renew our families and rebuild our culture!

We need to revitalize marriage, support the formation of families, and encourage a culture of commitment.

The Presidency isn't about family, however, so why is he running? Justice and liberty seem to have more to do with the duties of the President, and he puts those two things first only to say "but" the family is what we primarily rely on to "transmit these values," and this gets him right back to the matter of the traditional family, which he clearly has as his core concern. But we care about more than transmitting the values of justice and liberty to the next generation, and the President has a direct role in protecting liberty and insuring that justice is done, so it's worrisome to hear him shift immediately to the the subject of the family. I'm picturing him in the debates, taking every question and finding a way to answer with family, family, family.

We need a culture that encourages what is right and discourages what is wrong—and has the wisdom to understand the difference.

Each generation of Americans is called upon to carry the torch of virtue during its brief season. If one generation lets the torch fall, its light is extinguished for all future generations. That’s a big responsibility, but we can achieve it if we pick up the torch with courage, generosity, and realism. We must meet and fulfill the job we are called to accomplish in our day. The time to act to insure our future as a nation is now.

This wordy passage mostly restates the importance of tending to the next generation. The imagery isn't very good. (What's the realistic way to pick up a torch? Grab the end that's not on fire!)

Problems abound. The federal government wastes and spends too much. We lack compassionate yet practical programs to help the poor here and around the world. We need energy independence and alternative, clean-burning, domestic-grown fuels. The scourge of cancer has killed too many and must be stopped. We need term limits for judges and members of Congress like we have for the President. We need a flat tax instead of the dreadful, incomprehensible tax code we now have.

This is the issue logjam. I certainly agree that cancer must be stopped.

And we need humility.

While I am proud to be an American, when I consider my citizenship and the responsibilities it carries today in the light of eternity, I am more humbled by it. We have been given much and will be held to account for what we have been given.

He is unashamed to present his role in the Presidency as a matter of service to God. Humility is a nice theme, and a hard one to pull off when you're putting yourself forward as deserving the most powerful position in the world. I remember John Roberts making much of the humility theme at his confirmation hearings, when he described the role of a judge. But a judge is appointed by another person -- not pressing himself forward, and a judge can rightly humble himself before the law and promise to do only what the law requires. A President must impose his will. And everyone who runs for President is pursuing his will to achieve power.

I ask mostly for your prayers. Pray for America, that our division as a people might end and that our land be healed.

Thank you for your interest and support. Thank you for your prayers. Please join our campaign of national renewal and hope for the future!

God Bless you, and God Bless this nation we love so dearly...

I heard this part of the speech on television and was struck by how religious it sounded, more so than in text form. There was passion and sincerity in his voice. Hope, healing, renewal, prayer, America, God. We get the message.

First day.

After a seemingly endless winter break, it is finally the first day of what we call the Spring Semester. I'm here before sunrise, so the thick snow out there is looking very blue. But I'm happy -- as symbolized by my taxi-yellow walls -- and eager to get started. The courses are Constitutional Law I and Federal Jurisdiction, and both start -- propitiously -- with Marbury v. Madison.



The poster shows part of a painting by Pierre Bonnard. Would Pierre like the blue and yellow in the photograph combined with his pinkish purple? Consider this:

A vlog about not podcasting.

If you have trouble understanding that vlog, learn to speak body:



ADDED: I have nothing to say, because my speaking orifice is distorted.

Wait. Why was this duck taken to the hospital?

Our respect for the will to live is touching and strange.

The view after the treacherous drive home.

I made it home from the café, up the hill toward home, behind a Mini Cooper that couldn't make it. Some people hopped out of a van to push the Mini a ways and get it going, but it was inching toward an even steeper part of the hill, so I took a detour the long way back, through deep snow on a sidestreet so narrow that even when there is no snow, one car will have to pull to the side if there are two cars going in opposite directions. Despite encountering another car, I made it home unscathed, parked Silvio on the street and stopped to take two photos from my front stoop:

"I am a Situationist... I am an adventurer of the present."

It's time to pay attention to the Crumbs again. Aline has another book, and we're supposed to think this represents something new. But she's been doing autobiographical comics for years, as have many female artists, so it's actually not new at all. But anyone with a book coming out is entitled to seek publicity, and if she has a famous husband to leverage her fame, am I going to object? Well, yeah, I am. A little. I like to see women succeed, but the ones who do it through men irk me a bit. It's not their fault they're married, and using one's marriage to get ahead is a long tradition. But it irks me. It irks me in Hillary. It irks me in Padma. If you take the benefits, you also have to pay the costs. Including Althousian irkage.

To its credit, the NYT buries the information about Aline's new book. Unless you click on the slide show in the sidebar, you won't notice much about it in the article. The Times took advantage of the access to R. Crumb, who really is a great artist and someone who made his own way in the world. I love the movie "Crumb." As you can see in my profile, it's on my list of favorite movies. I watch it about one a year, and when I saw it originally in the theater, I went back and saw it again the next day. It's a movie I impose on other people. I don't accept everything about Crumb (the man), and neither does the movie. But, clearly, he's a worthy artist and a fascinating human being.

Speaking of the marriage between Robert and Aline, there's this juicy material:

Another village newcomer is Christian Coudurès, a printmaker, who moved from Paris. When he was depressed after breaking up with a girlfriend, Ms. Crumb decided he was a project she wanted to take on.

“When I first met him, he was in bad shape, drinking a lot,” she said. “I decided I needed to save this worthy person.” Mr. Coudurès eventually became what Ms. Crumb calls her “second husband.”

The Crumbs have long had an open marriage, that brave (and largely discarded) institution of the 1960s. Mr. Crumb travels to Oregon once a year to rekindle a relationship with an old girlfriend.

Speaking of Mr. Coudurès, Mr. Crumb said, “Between the two of us, we kind of make an ideal husband, because he can do all the masculine things I can’t do.” He cited Mr. Coudurès’s talents for wiring, plumbing, engaging in shouting matches with the highly energetic Ms. Crumb and driving a car.

“If she ever started making comparisons about our lovemaking technique, I might get jealous,” Mr. Crumb added.

Their daughter, Sophie, is not so sure about the arrangement. She called the idea of her mother’s having a second husband “gross.”

Nonetheless, the strong-jawed Mr. Coudurès, 61, has become a part of the support system that frees Mr. Crumb to focus on work. The Frenchman, who has a thick mane of black hair, does handyman chores. His daughter Agathe McCamy, 35, helps Ms. Crumb color her comics.

“I am a Situationist,” Mr. Coudurès explained in French after sharing a dinner with the Crumbs next to a gently crackling fireplace in his kitchen. He was referring to a European avant-garde philosophy born in 1957 and championed by Guy Debord. “I am an adventurer of the present.”

Hey, they are artists. Deal with it.

If I blog that Hillary's in, do I have to blog every time anybody else is in?

Everyone's declaring all of a sudden. I guess Obama touched off a stampede. I don't think Hillary meant to go in so early. But now it's everybody into the pool.



So do you really want to talk about the scintillating Bill Richardson and Sam Brownback? Vilsack, Brownback... I have nothing to say about them, but you could write a poem about them. I will say that I think it's funny to call Vilsack "The Sack." We could think of nicknames. The Back? Speaking of nicknames, did you notice Hillary is officially "Hillary." None of that confusing "Clinton" business. Or the disturbing "Rodham."

Wait a minute! I'm just looking at Tom Vilsack's website. Is he trying to scare us? Is he running for prison warden? Vice principal? Maybe this can be fun...

"So what is it that makes Rosie's 'ching chong' so offensive?"

Language Log gives us the expert linguistic analysis. Aren't you allowed to imitate a foreign language with a simple syllable? The Swedish Chef Muppet did.

C'mon, guys, wear leggings!

The designers want you to. You might look something like this:



Well, I mean, do you look something like that? I imagine my readers as very good looking. But if you're this good looking, you don't need to wear leggings, you just need to eschew shorts, because, as you know, there is an Althousian veto on shorts (unless it's hotter than 80° or you're engaged in a sport where shorts are required). But should you wear leggings because they are comfortable?

... I know a lot of guys who wear leggings around the home to watch DVDs, lounge around before Premiership games or surf the Internet. But actually on the street, never mind into a nightclub or bar? Yet, the truth is that leggings are way more comfortable than pants and that if we fellows were not all so uptight and worried about our status we would have all begun wearing them a long time ago. So hats off to Castiglioni, and on with the leggings.

Hmmmm.... do you know a lot of guys who wear leggings around the house? I think only guys who say "around the home" know a lot of guys who wear leggings around the house. Or guys who can write things like this:

These leggy knits were paired with mercerized cotton jerkins, snug little Rude Boy with manners jackets and Two Tone era skinny ties – a big Milan trend. Marni shoes were also real winners, knobby workerist boots in bottle green or metallic gray with subtle strips of contrasting color like burgundy.

And I'm going to assume they look astonishing in leggings, so I say, yeah, get out of the house... the home... in those leggings. You'll look like Romeo... or Baryshnikov:



And if you don't, you know you're not wearing leggings around the... house now. You're wearing sweat pants. And if you go outside: Put on some pants.

ADDED: In the comments Palladian reminds us of the joyous expression leggings unleash:



But don't get carried away:



MORE: It worked for Errol "in like" Flynn:

There's a lot of snow out there.

It's coming down faster than the City of Madison is prepared to deal with today. The trip to the airport was a little rough and then, driving back toward town, it was crazy. A car couldn't make it up the hill and everything got backed up. I saw it in time and took a detour, then eased into an open parking space right by State Street.



It looks pretty from here.



Ah! My coffee.



Let me gaze.

Joe Queenan has had it with reviewers calling things "astonishing."

Yeah! I agree. If you picture it literally, a reader astonished by a book looks mentally unstable. Maybe if he found he was a character in it, it would be astonishing.

Queenan's high-profile mocking of "astonishing" should put the word off limits. Now, reviewers will have to think of another word for -- let's face it -- good. You can't just say "good" or "really good." You can't use "amazing" or (especially) "awesome." Too teenagery. "Great" got ruined quite a while ago. I think "great" got fatally overused by people who had their vocabulary severely diminished by marijuana. (It was the only word of praise you could think of other than "wow," back in the days before the discovery of "awesome.") "Grand" -- I think -- was dead from overuse half a century ago -- along with "swell." "Terrific" is just too casual, despite its root in terror. I guess there was a time when saying a book was terrific would call up a mental picture of a reader who seemed ridiculously mentally unstable... unless, of course, the book was about him.

So get out your thesauri, reviewers. You pathetic praise-slatherers.

Analyzing the text of Hillary Clinton's announcement.

I listened to Hillary's announcement a couple of times, and I just want to say two things about the language.

1. "Basic bargain" seems to be her key slogan:

[I]t is time to renew the promise of America. Our basic bargain that no matter who you are or where you live, if you work hard and play by the rules, you can build a good life for yourself and your family.

I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America, and we believed in that promise.

I still do. I’ve spent my entire life trying to make good on it.

Whether it was fighting for women’s basic rights or childrens’ basic health care. Protecting our Social Security, or protecting our soldiers. It’s a kind of basic bargain, and we’ve got to keep up our end.

The repetition of "basic" jumped out at me. The phrase "basic bargain" appears twice, and "basic" reappears, connected to women's rights and children's health care. The idea of a bargain repeats in the word "promise," which is used twice, and the phrases "make good on it" and "keep up our end." So what is going on here? I'm sure these words were very carefully chosen. I think the "bargain" idea is a way demonstrate a commitment to social welfare policies without appearing to support handouts. People have to "work hard and play by the rules" and they have to have the right goal: to "build a good life." These are middle-class values for Middle America, you're supposed to see, and you can trust her to bring them to you because she's from a "middle-class family in the middle of America," and she's worked hard herself for what is good. The word "basic" is important, because it makes you think that she's not going to go too far with lavish programs. Just the basics, and only because people work hard and deserve it. But when they deserve it, government owes it: There's a bargain to live up to.

2. It's all about the dialogue, the chat, the conversation:

I’m not just starting a campaign, though, I’m beginning a conversation — with you, with America. Because we all need to be part of the discussion if we’re all going to be part of the solution. And all of us have to be part of the solution.

Let’s talk about....

And let’s definitely talk about...

So let’s talk. Let’s chat. Let’s start a dialogue about your ideas and mine.

Because the conversation in Washington has been just just a little one-sided lately, don’t you think? And we can all see how well that works.

And while I can’t visit everyone’s living room, I can try. And with a little help from modern technology, I’ll be holding live online video chats this week, starting Monday.

So let the conversation begin. I have a feeling it’s going to be very interesting.

You could say this is just... talk. It's pointless blather. Let's yammer and yak and jaw and babble. Let's chew the fat and confabulate. It'll be great. But if it's not nothing and it's something, I think it's a signal of openness — possibly as an antidote to the disease of calculation that everyone thinks she has and possibly to leave plenty of room to readjust any and all of her policies and proposals.

And let me add that I think she looked fine. It's not easy to sit on a comfy couch and not sink into the cushions and look like a blob or to sit too upright and look like someone who's trying not to sink into the cushions and look like a blob. She had reasonably natural, appropriate hand gestures. And her voice was decently modulated with some midwestern edge to it. She did a nice job of injecting the feeling of a smile into her voice at times, which had a good humanizing effect.

Al Pacino will play the part of Salvador Dali.

How surreal!



I can see it. Al can do what he wants.

Does the new Dakota Fanning movie violate the federal child pornography law?

It's a serious question. In the face of cries that the filmmakers should be prosecuted, the child actress is put forward to defend their film:

“That’s not who Lewellen is,” she said, sitting in her agent’s office in Universal City, braces on her teeth and a small crucifix over her sweater. “Because that has happened to her, that doesn’t define her. Because of this thing that has happened — that she did not ask for — she is labeled that, and it’s her story to overcome that and to be a whole person again.”

“There are so many children that this happens to, every second,” she added. “That’s the sad part. If anyone’s talking about anything, that’s what they should be talking about.”...

She added: “Lewellen is still very innocent, she’s still a child, but she’s also a little bit wise beyond her years because of the things she’s seen and been through. So I think that I should be able to do what I feel is at the right time for me.”

Speaking of which... Dakota Fanning is 13 years old. The law is there to protect her, not to support her free choice. I think it's exploitative even to use her to voice these arguments.

The linked NYT article refers to the Minor Consideration website run by Paul Peterson. He has this essay there:

It now appears Dakota Fanning was wearing a flesh-tone body suit (or a two piece suit) when she acted out the rape scene in "Hound Dog." Defenders of the production company were silent for two weeks when the controversy erupted, and now offer up this "cover up," days later, as proof that they were, in fact, concerned about the propriety of wardrobe worn in this rape scene using the talents of a twelve year-old child. These same voices are silent about what Dakota was wearing when she filmed the mutual masturbation scene. I keep pointing out to these people that it wasn't what Dakota was wearing, but what she was doing!...

I am trying to tell you that for a gifted child actor asked to portray a difficult emotionally loaded scene that over time there is NO difference between reality and pretend. In order to convince an audience to suspend disbelief you must, internally, believe utterly in the character and event you are portraying. That's the gift…and the curse.

ADDED: Here's a nice "Talk of the Nation" segment about child actors. I ran across it as I was looking for some information about how they get child actors to cry. I wanted to know how, for example, Chaplin got Jackie Coogan to cry in "The Kid"? Actually, in the clip they talk about how Vincente Minelli got Margaret O’Brien to cry in "Meet Me in St. Louis." (He told her that her dog had died.)

MORE: There's a lot of heated argument in the comments, so let me say that I think it's important not to assume we know exactly what Dakota Fanning was made to do in the film. Here's the director's defense of herself in Premiere Magazine:

"I think to some extent what they're accusing me of is putting Dakota through some ordeal or a simulation of rape, but that's not the case," says [Deborah] Kampmeier. "The scene was never run through from start to finish; it was shot in increments, over and over, never in a single take. The construction creates the impression of the violence, but doesn't represent the feeling on the set or something that might have traumatized Dakota, especially since there had been so much rehearsal.

Despite her problems financing the movie, Kampmeier was surprised by the vehemence of the reaction to its plot details. "I was naive — I had no idea this would come," she says. "Our decision was to not respond to any of it 'cause everything that's been written or said about us is false. But at a certain point it was so upsetting to read lie after lie and be powerless to change the public perception. I finally had to stop focusing on that and get back to the film."

It's quite a confusing story. Kampmeier complains that people are lying about her movie, but she also says that as she was seeking funding "No one wanted to touch the material" and that "potential investors... would... ask to remove the rape scene." She says she's upset about the misinformation, but refuses to provide the truth. The fact that everything said was a lie is the reason she gives for deciding to say nothing at all. There's something quite odd about that. And I don't understand the way she's acting so wounded. Her critics are people who care about the welfare of children. Why give them the cold shoulder? I assume the movie is intended to show concern about victimized children, so why act as if you actually don't care?

Hillary's in.

It's official. Did she announce early because of Barack Obama?

Her advisers this week have rejected the idea, spreading in Democratic circles, that she would rush to announce as a way to overshadow Mr. Obama, who has engendered intense Democratic interest as a steady critic of the Iraq war and as a skilled orator who comes across as a nonpartisan and unifying force in politics.

Like Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama is also poised to make history. If successful in the primaries, he would be the first African-American to win the Democratic nomination. He is her only real rival at this point in drawing huge crowds of voters at political stops and driving the 2008 political discussion in the media.

This past week alone has shown the ways that the Clinton and Obama candidacies are intersecting: He announced Tuesday and dominated political coverage in the media; she swept in on Wednesday, fresh from her trip to Iraq, and appeared on the network morning shows to talk about the war (pushing the news of his candidacy to second place); later that day, he issued a statement embracing a cap on American troops in Iraq, hours after she had made a similar proposal. And they are now both jockeying for donors in New York, Hollywood, and elsewhere.

"I don't buy the argument that, 'Oh, I wouldn't have acted so racist or anti-semitic if I'd known this film was being shown in America.'"

Says Sacha Baron Cohen about the people who are suing him over the film "Borat":

"This wasn't Candid Camera," he says. "There were two large cameras in the room."

It makes you wonder -- doesn't it? -- why we didn't hear about people suing Allen Funt all the time back in the "Candid Camera" days. Maybe people accepted the pranks because they were primed week after week with the jaunty theme song that instructed us to have a sense of humor:

When it's least expected - you're elected. You're the star today
Smile! You're on Candid Camera!
With a hocus-pocus - you're in focus. It's your lucky day
Smile! You're on Candid Camera!

It's fun to laugh at yourself. It's a tonic, tried and true.
It's fun to laugh at yourself as other people do.

How's your sense of humor? There's a rumor: Laughter's on its way.
Smile! You're on Candid Camera! Smile! You're on Candid Camera!

I don't know. Looking back at those lyrics -- and remembering the tune -- I get the feeling they are laying it on way too thick. It seems to tip us off that they are nervous that their victims will get mad or the viewers will think they are being too mean.

According to the producer of "Candid Camera," there weren't lawsuits and it was because "We never tried to embarrass people or put them in a precarious situation... We did much gentler things."

All that niceness and denial of any cruel edge make it less funny, though, doesn't it?

On Bloggingheads, we were talking about whether it was wrong to respond to Simon Cowell's invitations to laugh at people who look odd or are afflicted with delusional self-esteem. I had to say that part of what makes "American Idol" work is this feeling that it's wrong. That feeling that to laugh is to transgress is what makes you laugh.

Comedy is sadistic.

"She liked his quiet confidence; he didn't seem to be pushing too hard for the job."

Jan Crawford Greenburg tells the story of George Bush's Supreme Court appointments. Here's the part about Samuel Alito:

The call from the White House surprised Alito. Living in New Jersey, he had been insulated from the negative Washington buzz over Miers. He had absorbed the disappointment about being passed over and had come to terms with remaining a federal appellate judge. Alito didn't know that he had been Miers's choice for the O'Connor vacancy after Roberts got the nod for the top spot. She liked his quiet confidence; he didn't seem to be pushing too hard for the job. When Alito was nominated just four days after Miers dropped out, she greeted him warmly in the White House, moments before Bush introduced him as his next nominee.

Note the implication: Others lost favor by pushing too hard.

And here's Greenburg's conclusion:

Bush fulfilled his early vow to appoint justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas. Together with those two justices, Alito and Roberts make the Roberts Court the most conservative Supreme Court in half a century. Roberts and Alito will not be as forceful as Scalia and Thomas on the bench or in their opinions; they are unlikely to push moderates away with their strong views. For that reason, they may be more effective than Scalia or Thomas in finally removing the court from the contentious social issues that conservatives think belong in legislatures. With the court now poised to recede from some of those divisive cultural debates, George W. Bush and his lawyers at the White House and Justice Department will continue shaping the direction of U.S. law and culture long after many of them are dead.

So, that seems to say, if there's any moderation in Roberts and Alito, it serves the function of making their conservatism more effective.

"Ciomu's case is a dangerous precedent for all Romanian doctors."

"In future doctors may have to think very carefully about what work they undertake." Yes, you wouldn't want medical malpractice liability to get out of hand. We all make mistakes. (Via Metafilter.)

Interesting caption under the photo....

Smoke.

Photos.

Taking an oath of office with reservations attached.

Here in Madison:

The Madison City Council voted 13-4 Tuesday to offer those taking an oath of public office a formal way to protest Wisconsin's new constitutional ban on gay marriage and civil unions.

The resolution, passed after 45 minutes of debate, allows officials to make a supplemental statement to the oath that notes they took it under protest because they disagree with the constitutional amendment passed by 59 percent of Wisconsin voters in November.

The statement also says the oath-taker will "work to eliminate this section from the Constitution and work to prevent any discriminatory impacts from its application."

Bert Zipperer, president of the city's Equal Opportunities Commission, which brought the proposal to the council, said the vote was "an act of integrity" that "reflected a sense of hope that was deeply injured in November. This is not to undo the constitution. It's a voluntary statement for justice and liberty for all."

But Ald. Cindy Thomas, 20th District, who voted against the proposal, said the council's action set a dangerous precedent.

"You can't weasel your way out of your oath," Thomas said. "When people from afar hear about our vote on this, we will become a laughingstock."

Okay, people from afar: Are you laughing?

"Denny, you know there aren't many who can sing a song the way that you do..."

Goodbye to Denny Doherty.

The Mamas and the Papas, who were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, were one of the first major rock groups to include both women and men in equal performing roles, with Mr. Doherty, Mr. Phillips, Michelle Phillips and Cass Elliot striking an image of casual, collegiate friendship. In reality, they were a destructive tangle of love affairs, accompanied by plenty of drugs and alcohol.

“It was an untenable situation,” Mr. Doherty said in an interview with The New York Times in 2000. “Cass wanted me, I wanted Michelle, John wanted Michelle, Michelle wanted me, she wanted her freedom. ...”

Everyone loved Denny.

Here's Denny's own telling of the story of the Mamas and the Papas, if you can get to it. (I'm seeing "bandwidth exceeded.")

How well I remember when their first album came out. What an impression it made, including the amazing cover photo:



See the sign superimposed over the toilet. The original photo, with toilet in full view, was considered too scandalous. But we still have the four singers crowded into the bathtub. That's Denny, over in the corner, underneath the beautiful Michelle and the luscious Cass. What an amazing life lay ahead -- we thought -- if those four hippies could get in the bathtub together like that.

And drink out of the same hat:



"The Mamas and the Papas Deliver." What a great album!

Note the continuing theme of shared, water-containing vessels. What did that mean? Like everything else about the Mamas and the Papas, it meant a world of peace, love, and understanding, achieved through communal living and musical harmony.

Back in the real world, those sexual crosscurrents broke up the group. But there were a couple years -- 1966 and 1967 -- when they seemed exactly perfect. I'm sure my life would have been completely different if I had not gazed on those two album covers and heard the songs inside and wildly imagined what these people were singing about:

You gotta go where you wanna go,
Do what you wanna do
With whomever you want to do it, babe

Caricaturing Obama.

This is the first real caricature I've seen of Barack Obama. I find it amusing, and it reinforces my observation -- you can hear it in this Bloggingheads segment -- that he's bland.

O'Reilly on "Colbert" and Colbert on "O'Reilly."

There was a big media event last night. Did you notice? Let's watch.

Bill O'Reilly begins his segment -- which he calls "Culture War" -- by proclaiming that Colbert's "owes everything to me" -- which was hilariously Colbertish. Stephen Colbert is in character as the O'Reillyish ass he plays on "The Colbert Report." Colbert expresses his awe at being "in the holy of holies" -- that is, on "The O'Reilly Factor." O'Reilly begins by revealing the shocking results of his investigation: Colbert used to pronounce the "t" at the end of his name and changed to the Frenchy pronunciation after he came to Manhattan. Colbert admits it was a scheme to get the cultural elites on his side: "Bill, you know, you gotta play the game that the media elites want you to do, okay?" After much banter, including Colbert's claims that he's Irish, Bill -- who's being pretty funny and good natured, in fact -- yells "Who are you? Are you Colbert or Col-bear?" Colbert: "I'm whoever you want me to be."

Later, on Colbert's show, the segment is called "Great Minds Think Alike." The two men sit down in front of a "Mission Accomplished" sign. (Here's the video.) O'Reilly claims he's not a tough guy, really. "This is all an act." Colbert: "If you're an act, what am I?"

Nicely done, by both men.

"I'm Art Buchwald, and I just died."

Funny. He wants you to laugh. [ADDED: Hope the link works now. MORE: Actually, the Times is making it really hard to link to the video. Go here and then look for the video in the sidebar.]

AND: Here's Buchwald's last column, written to be published after his death. He has surprisingly little to say about death, perhaps nothing at all. He says a little something about life and about dying. He made a decision to forgo dialysis, and he says that decision was his and it was "healthy." He doesn't expound, and I suppose he means for us to find humor of this use of the word "healthy" when the decision would kill him. Not having dialysis was utterly unhealthy, but the decision could still be healthy. A decision is something that occurs in your mind.

"Who's the Conservative Now?" - a new diavlog.

I'm on Bloggingheads.tv again, this time in an extra-long diavlog with Bob Wright. So set aside an hour and a quarter and launch in, or proceed segment by segment:

The scourge of anti-Althousiana (03:04 minutes)

Iraq: Hangings, Hillary, etc. (13:48)

A Gore-Obama ticket? (05:37)

Non-Barack-backing blacks (04:17)

The Duke Case: Race, gender, and jocks (09:31)

Ann the feminist vs. Bob the reactionary (20:45)

The American Idol freak show (11:52)

Lost at age 8, found -- after living in the wild -- 18 years later.

Her father recognized her from a scar on her arm:

The reconciliation was a joyous one for the father, but apparently not for the daughter, who refuses to wear clothes or eat with chopsticks, fights off anyone who approaches, will not wash and has tried to escape back to the jungle.

Because she can apparently speak no language, it is impossible for her to explain who she is or how she has been living.

“It is not easy, but life is waiting ahead for her,” said Mr Ksor, a policeman who belongs to the Jrai ethnic minority group [in Cambodia]. He is optimistic about the future, and yesterday, six days after her discovery, the woman’s behaviour was said to be improving a little. “When she is hungry, she pats her stomach as a signal,” Mr Ksor said. “If she is not sleeping, she just sits and glances left and right, left and right.”

Physical assault, head shaving, a chocolate with a liver center...

Did you watch "Top Chef" this week? That was nutty!

AN ADDED, LAWPROFFY QUESTION: How many crimes were committed?

"If Hillary frames herself as the school-marm disciplinarian..."

Andrew Sullivan thinks she might do well. In left-handed compliment style, he adds: "It's ... an image more suited to her actual personality than anything resembling charisma."

That reminds me of the old saying: "Let Nixon be Nixon." Which worked.

Those dancing silhouette ads.

They own your brain.

Retaliatory grading by a Duke professor?

Consider this:

A former Duke lacrosse player has filed a civil suit against Duke University and a professor, charging that the teacher unfairly gave him a failing grade after an escort service dancer said she was raped at a lacrosse team party....

The lawsuit said [Kyle] Dowd and another lacrosse player -- neither of whom was charged in the sexual assault -- were in [Kim] Curtis' "Politics and Literature" class last spring. Before the scandal broke, the lawsuit said, both players were passing the course. But after the rape case made news, both players failed the final assignment, and Dowd's final grade was an F. The players were the only ones to receive F's, the lawsuit said....

The lawsuit said Kyle Dowd had a 3.4 grade-point average on a 4.0 scale going into his last semester at Duke. He got a C-plus and a C-minus on the first two papers in Curtis' class, according to the suit. Curtis had told students they would be graded on three papers and class participation, with each counting 25 percent toward the final grade.

When Dowd contested the grade, Curtis sent him an e-mail message saying she had failed him in class participation because he had missed the last month of the class, according to the lawsuit. Dowd had to miss five class sessions to meet with lawyers in the investigation that focused on the team, the lawsuit said.

You missed a month of class when class participation is 25% of the grade? It seems to me that you ought to have better evidence of the defendant's wrongdoing before you file a case... Hey! What does that remind me of?

ADDED: This post got a lot of comments, nearly all of them siding with the student and many of them criticizing me for seeming to side with the professor, so I'll say a little something more. First, this is a very minimal post. It does not directly express my opinion of the whole affair. So let me make several additional points that may let you see how I think about these things:

1. I don't like to see lawsuits, especially by students who are suing their teachers because they don't like their grades. At some point, I accept the need for lawsuits. For example, when I went to college, at the University of Michigan, one of the professors was reported to tell his students that women shouldn't become what he was teaching students to be and that therefore women could only get, at best, a B in his course. If these reports were true, he clearly deserved to be sued.

2. Complaining about your grade when you've missed a month of class looks very bad to me. His excuse -- that he was always meeting with lawyers -- sounds lame. Commenters who disagree are extracting material from his legal complaint. They need to recognize that they are looking at the student's version of the story. You should wait to hear all the facts before being so sure you know what happened. And if you don't see that you're acting like the people who assumed the truth of the prosecutor's side of the rape story, you need to think again.

3. Obviously, many teachers are biased in how they present material in class and how they judge what the students write. It may well be that Curtis has a very strong point of view and isn't fair to students who say divergent things, but I don't think students should sue teachers for that. Your remedies are mostly internal to the university. There is not a good role for courts to play here. Students will often say that a teacher has been "unfair," and they are sometimes right. But think what would happen if courts welcomed lawsuits like this. How many students would find ways to say their teachers had some personal grudge about them? Do you really want all these lawsuits? The cost of the lawyers for the teachers will need to be reflected in the tuition that all students pay.

4. The students who were involved in the Duke incident have reason to be outraged about what happened to them, but we should also see that they are playing hardball and that it is possible for them to go too far.

The Complainer, the Whiner and the Sniper...

What kind of difficult person are you? I mean, how do you deal with the difficult people in your life? Be careful answering. How can you answer without complaining, whining, or sniping?

This article is about all the self-help books about dealing with difficult people. I'll bet the difficult people themselves are buying a lot of them, don't you? I'm thinking that what makes them so difficult is that they think so many other people are difficult.

Anyway:

Several authors think it is useful to characterize infuriating people into types and prescribe ways to deal with them, as Robert M. Bramson did in 1981 in “Coping With Difficult People,” one of the first popular books on the topic. Its overarching lesson is to find a way to communicate with these people because they are not going away. Dr. Bramson lists seven difficult behavior types: Hostile-Aggressives, Complainers, Silent and Unresponsives, Super-Agreeables, Know-It-All Experts, Negativists and Indecisives.

Categorizers...

"Everybody in the world says they’re going to do a television series based on us..."

"But then they realize that the story of four middle-aged men, with no sex and violence, is not going to last two weeks."

Senators Schumer, Durbin, and Miller and Representative Bill Delahunt live together.

The common bathroom upstairs is stocked with supersize bottles of Listerine, CVS cocoa butter, Suave shampoo (with dandruff control) and a hair dryer...

The refrigerator is mostly empty save for apples, grapes and about two dozen bottles of beer.

Roommates... dandruff... no food... no sex... The life of a Congressman is hard!

Do you want your politicians to wear something more adventurous than a dark suit?

Do you get nervous when they get at all unusual? Like the first picture here. Or is it something about the way that is unusual?

What is the "innovative" arrangement with the FISA Court about the NSA program?

After a year of argument about the Adminstration's warrantless approach, there is now a new arrangement. But what is it exactly? Orin Kerr speculates:

[I]t sounds to me like the FISA Court judges have agreed to issue anticipatory warrants. The traditional warrant process requires the government to write up the facts in an application and let the judge decide whether those facts amount to probable cause. If you were looking for a way to speed up that process — and both sides were in a mood to be "innovative" — one fairly straightfoward alternative would be to use anticipatory warrants....

What's the mystery legal development that helped make this possible? If my guesses are on the right track, it's probably the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Grubbs, which was handed down on March 21, 2006. The Grubbs case is the first Supreme Court decision approving the use of anticipatory warrants.

"American Idol," episode 2.

Quote the first:

What the bloody hell was that?

It was me... Was that not good enough?

No.

Not even close.

'kay...

It was almost... non-human...

Second quote (from Simon):

You look a little odd, your dancing is terrible, the singing was horrendous, you look like one of those creatures that live in the jungle with those massive eyes. What are they called? Bush babies.

Third, from a guy they required to swear he wasn't kidding:

I swear on my mother's life that this is real... and you are beautiful.

Fourth:

What was that?

"We think the ad's authors were right to give voice to the students quoted, whose suffering is real."

Here's the new open letter from various Duke University professors, saying why their original ad -- "This is a social disaster" -- is not something to apologize for:

The ad has been read as a comment on the alleged rape, the team party, or the specific students accused. Worse, it has been read as rendering a judgment in the case. We understand the ad instead as a call to action on important, longstanding issues on and around our campus, an attempt to channel the attention generated by the incident to addressing these. We reject all attempts to try the case outside the courts, and stand firmly by the principle of the presumption of innocence.

As a statement about campus culture, the ad deplores a "Social Disaster," as described in the student statements, which feature racism, segregation, isolation, and sexism as ongoing problems before the scandal broke, exacerbated by the heightened tensions in its immediate aftermath. The disaster is the atmosphere that allows sexism, racism, and sexual violence to be so prevalent on campus. The ad's statement that the problem "won't end with what the police say or the court decides" is as clearly true now as it was then. Whatever its conclusions, the legal process will not resolve these problems.

The ad thanked "the students speaking individually and...the protesters making collective noise." We do not endorse every demonstration that took place at the time. We appreciate the efforts of those who used the attention the incident generated to raise issues of discrimination and violence.

There have been public calls to the authors to retract the ad or apologize for it, as well as calls for action against them and attacks on their character. We reject all of these. We think the ad's authors were right to give voice to the students quoted, whose suffering is real. We also acknowledge the pain that has been generated by what we believe is a misperception that the authors of the ad prejudged the rape case.

We stand by the claim that issues of race and sexual violence on campus are real, and we join the ad's call to all of us at Duke to do something about this. We hope that the Duke community will emerge from this tragedy as a better place for all of us to live, study, and work.

"The disaster is the atmosphere...." -- we're told. The students' perceptions matter and deserve to be "give[n] voice." But the professors don't like how they were perceived by the world outside the university; that was misreading. But if it is perception -- atmosphere -- that matters -- how can you think that you can contribute things to be perceived and avoid responsibility for the effect that you have?

ADDED: La Shawn Barber is scathing.

MORE: I've been thinking a lot about this post -- minimal as it is. There is so much behind this that could be said, so much going back over the 20 years that I've been a law professor. My office for the last decade or so was once occupied by my brilliant colleague Patricia Williams. She wrote something long ago about Tawana Brawley that maybe not everyone remembers, but you should know if you mean to find your way around American academia. I'll put it in context in this 1997 article by Neil A. Lewis (TimesSelect link):

Critical race theorists, who are on the faculty at almost every major law school and are producing an ever-growing body of scholarly work, have drawn from an idea made popular by postmodernist scholars of all races, that there is no objective reality. Instead, the critical race theorists say, there are competing racial versions of reality that may never be reconciled.

Many theorists say that because few whites will ever be able to see things as blacks do, real racial understanding may be beyond the nation's reach....

Some theorists go so far as to say that what really happened in a particular incident may be no more important than what people feel or say happened. For example, some argue that even though Tawana Brawley, then a teen-ager, made up her account that a gang of white men, one with a badge, raped and defiled her in New York in 1987, her story is still valid because it offers truths about the oppression of black women.

In her book "The Alchemy of Race and Rights" (Harvard, 1991), Prof. Patricia Williams of the Columbia University Law School appeared to suggest that it made little difference whether Ms. Brawley had made up her account. The teen-ager, Professor Williams wrote, was the victim of an unspeakable crime "no matter who did it to her -- and even if she did it to herself."

"Her condition was clearly the expression of some crime against her, some tremendous violence, some great violation that challenges comprehension," Professor Williams said. "Tawana's terrible story has every black woman's worst fears and experiences wrapped into it."

Critics of Professor Williams's comments, however, note that a New York State grand jury investigated Ms. Brawley's story and concluded that she had made it up. Professor Williams, Professor [Suzanna] Sherry wrote, seems "unable to distinguish between Brawley's fantasized rape and another woman's real one."

In a recent interview, Professor Williams said she had been misinterpreted. She meant, she said, that the debate about whether Ms. Brawley was telling the truth obscured that she was a troubled minor.

"Her needs were not dealt with, as they should have been with any child," Professor Williams said. Further, Ms. Brawley was transformed into a stereotype of "black women as hard women who can never really suffer any violation," she added.

Misinterpreted. Remember that word. Professors like it. We mean well. We mean to demonstrate empathy and outrage in all the right places. And if you don't credit us with the grand ideals we intended, we will say you don't read well enough. Try again.

MORE: Another brilliant colleague I'm lucky enough to have is Donald Downs -- who wrote this book -- and teaches in the Political Science department here. He emails me this:

The Duke case is symptomatic of the victimhood syndrome has beset too many campuses, and which (as one poster discusses) undermines the agency and vitality of its putative beneficiaries. The case is also symptomatic in another, less recognized sense: members of the economics department published their own dissent to the now infamous "88" and the campus climate that was hostile to due process, and got hundreds of signatures from alumni and other groups. This is precisely what campuses like Duke need: counter-mobilization by faculty who are fed up with this kind of climate and behavior. Perhaps there is hope for Duke, after all, but faculty have to take a stand against the inanity.

Professor Downs, you should know, has done just the thing he recommends and organized the faculty at his home institution.

"A slogan is not a strategy."

Says Hillary Clinton, confronted -- on NPR -- with Bush's line "Failure is not an option" and asked whether failure actually is an option.

Confronted with her line, I say: A slogan about a slogan is too slogan-y. And don't think that by making a slogan about a slogan that you can distract us from seeing that you think failure is an option.

The audio at the link will not be available until 10 ET, and I recommend listening. Clinton talks of going to Iraq and meeting Prime Minister al-Maliki. She says outright that, based on this meeting, she did not believe that al-Maliki intends to do what he has promised to do. She's running for President (presumably). She makes a trip to Iraq and meets with its leader. And then she flatly says she doesn't believe him. Is that presidential? Meet with leaders, then call them liars.

UPDATE: Here is the NPR coverage. And this is the exact quote that I was referring to in the last paragraph of the original post:

"I was listening for a level of commitment to securing Iraq by the Iraqi government and the Iraqi army and police force that has been missing, and I didn't hear that."

This is phrased more diplomatically than I had thought, so "she flatly says she doesn't believe him" is put too strongly. It actually was rather clever to use the phrase "level of commitment," and to stress her own "listening" and "hearing."
Here's the NYT coverage of Clinton's media blitz this morning:

... Mrs. Clinton called for capping the number of American forces in Iraq to the total number there on Jan. 1 — before Mr. Bush proposed adding forces. That total is roughly 140,000. She also proposed making a new threat to Iraqi government leaders to force their cooperation: the loss of American funds to train and equip Iraqi forces, rebuild the economy, and, to make the pressure more acute, to provide security for the leaders themselves.

Mrs. Clinton did not outline benchmarks for that progress, but she indicated that the Shiite-led government would be expected to crack down on sectarian militias in Baghdad and elsewhere and to find new ways to work with Sunni political groups.

She also called for sending more troops to support the American military mission in Afghanistan, which she referred to as “quite a success story.” And she opposed any shift of forces out of Afghanistan as part of the troop expansion in Iraq.

Yet when it came to a threshold political issue for many Democrats — the end of the American military effort in Iraq — Senator Clinton did not embrace an instant withdrawal or a specific timetable for doing so.

“I’m for redeploying our troops out of Baghdad and eventually out of Iraq so we can make sure that they’re not in the midst of a civil war,” she said on CBS’s “Early Show.”...

Mrs. Clinton, who met with American commanders and Iraqi officials during her visit to Baghdad, said she received “lip service” during her meeting with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal Al-Maliki.

“This is clearly an abdication of responsibility by this government — we need some leverage on them,” Senator Clinton said on CBS.

The expression "lip service" is much closer to insulting Maliki than what she said on NPR. I'm not saying she's not justified in mistrusting Maliki, only that she needs to demonstrate that she can do diplomacy well enough.

"American Idol" is back.

Are you watching?

ADDED: No simulblogging tonight. Just a quote for now, from a kid who was crying over not getting through to Hollywood:

Jason, you're 16 years old...

16 years old and I want to start out famous.

MORE: Here's a story about Denise Jackson, the Madison 16-year-old who described herself as a "crack baby."

"A cloned human would be imbued with the same immaterial presence that binds us all, even Antonin Scalia, to the Godhead."

Esquire answers the question: Would a cloned human being have a soul?

"It's snowing," says Chris. He's in Austin, Texas.

I exhort him to take some photographs. Note the window sticker (not really) proving the car is indeed in Texas.



The door handle wants to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex:



Here's some local news coverage, showing kids figuring out how to sled.

Those damned media atheists.

Giles Fraser writes:

Many of the propositions that fundamentalists are keen to sell the public are oft-repeated corner-stones of the media atheist's philosophy of religion.

Both partners in this unholy alliance agree that fundamentalist religion is the real thing and that more reflective and socially progressive versions of faith are pale imitations, counterfeits even. This endorsement is of enormous help to fundamentalists. What they are really threatened by is not aggressive atheism - indeed that helps secure a sense of persecution that is essential to group solidarity - but the sort of robustly self-critical faith that knows the Bible and the church's traditions, and can challenge bad religion on its own terms. Fundamentalists hate what they see as the enemy within. And by refusing to acknowledge any variegation in Christian thought, media atheists play right into their hands.

It's nothing. Just something I learned over in Scotland.

So Bob Dylan is buying a home in Scotland -- the "25 acre 10 bedroom Aultmore House at Cairngorms." The Aultmore House? Sounds like I should live there... A..lt...House. I belong there more. Well, I mustn't continue with these ramblings, lest Dylan think I'm crazy, and I'll never get an invitation. I'd like to see Scotland sometime. I never have. And I have ancestors from there. MacBeth clan.

Has Dylan ever showed an interest in Scotland? What is it about Scotland that goes with Dylan? I searched the Dylan lyrics -- you can search all Dylan's lyrics here. He's never once mentioned Scotland. You'd think with all his many songs and wide-ranging language he would have gotten around to mentioning it at least once. But then, has he mentioned a lot of countries? England: only 3 times. I wonder what country he's mentioned most often. I take a guess and get 7 hits. I tried a lot of others and none came close. See if you can guess, or maybe find one with more than 7. It turns out he rarely names countries. Even the United States. "But even the president of the United States/Sometimes must have/To stand naked." That's one of only 2. And only 1 for America: "I think I'll call it America/I said as we hit land." And that one's a dream that ends with him leaving (and desperate to leave):

But the funniest thing was
When I was leavin' the bay
I saw three ships a-sailin'
They were all heading my way
I asked the captain what his name was
And how come he didn't drive a truck
He said his name was Columbus
I just said, "Good luck."

So, good luck, Bob.

Life is cruel to the male.

Consider this:

Many... species are beleaguered by infections that can turn males into females, selectively assassinate males, or render males irrelevant by allowing females to give birth without them....

Males are a target for a reason, [says Rochester University biologist Jack Werren]. Many types of bacteria travel from parents to offspring through eggs. Males represent a dead-end, so such infectious agents benefit by doing away with them before they're born while leaving females unharmed.

If that weren't enough, Werren says, males tend to find themselves disproportionately targeted by mutations and other "selfish" genetic anomalies....

More often than not, however, infections and selfish genetic agents bias the sex ratio toward females, since species can soldier on with fewer or even no males, while losing the females means quick extinction.

You men still want to think you're better off. I'll bet you've already processed this cruel truth into some fantasy involving multiple female partners.

"There is no going back to a world where we can assume that marriage is the main institution that organizes people's lives."

Inexorable unmarriedness.

"If you are affected — moved, amused, provoked — by the assembled Hayes oeuvre, then is it art?"

Holland Cotter asks:

Are Ms. Bancroft and Mr. Nesbett artists?... Are they themselves perpetrators of a scam? Or are they critical thinkers working in an alternative direction to the market economy?...

Is it an example of the white art world — Ms. Bancroft and Mr. Nesbett are white — getting mileage out of the work of a black artist, real or not?

Requiring gun ownership.

Glenn Reynolds has a NYT op-ed about towns that require residents to own guns. He likes this on the ground that it reduces crime if it is known that everyone in town has a gun in the house. What if you don't want to own a gun? If you think individuals have a right to own guns, shouldn't you think they have a corresponding right not to own guns? The right of free speech includes the right not to speak.

Whether the Second Amendment protects an individual right or a collective right is a hot question. ("Under the 'collective right' view, the Second Amendment is a federalism provision that provides to States a prerogative to establish and maintain armed and organized militia units akin to the National Guard, and only States may assert this prerogative.") Glenn alludes to the collective right view here:

The twin purposes of self and community defense may very well lie behind the Second Amendment’s language encompassing both the importance of a well-regulated militia and the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. As the constitutional and criminal law scholar Don Kates has noted in the journal Constitutional Commentary, thinkers at the time when the Constitution was written drew no real distinction between resisting burglars, foreign invaders or domestic tyrants: All were wrongdoers that good citizens had the right, and the duty, to oppose with force.

Don't you have to adopt the collective right view to believe people can be forced to possess guns?

Golden Globes!

Hey, watch the Golden Globes with me! Comment away. I'll be adding to this post, with each update indicated by a number.

1. And they start right up with no preliminaries and -- even nicer -- they give the first two awards to two of my favorite people: Jennifer Hudson and Prince. Hudson, who wins Best Supporting Actress for "Dreamgirls" and accepts the prize from the lovely George Clooney, says thanks for making her "feel like an actress." Prince, who wins for some song in "Happy Feet," is not there, and Justin Timberlake, who for a long time seems not to know what to do, finally accepts the award for him, and, to do it, he does a deep knee bend to get down to a 5'1" height and symbolize the tiny purple genius.

2. Jeremy Irons has big bags under his eyes and is dressed in a strange but elegant suit that seems to come from the 19th century. He wins in some TV Supporting category. Next comes TV Dramatic Actress. Kyra Sedgwick. Her dress seems to come from ancient Greece.

3. Emily Blunt. Never heard of her... Best TV Dramatic Actor: Hugh Laurie... "Cars" wins for animation.... Wow, we're up to Best Actress, and with very little fanfare, we hear it's Meryl Streep. Oh, it's just Best Actress in the Musical/Comedy. Meryl also seems to be wearing a dress from ancient Greece. She says "I think I've worked with everybody in the room" in an affected voice that seems intended to impersonate an actress from the past that I can almost remember. I'm wracking my brain and rewinding the the TiVo, and I just can't get it. It's not Katharine Hepburn. It's someone more precious sounding.

4. Best Supporting Actor. Eddie Murphy. He's charming and sweet. Helen Mirren wins for her TV queen role (Elizabeth I). Whether she'll win for her big movie queen role (Elizabeth II) remains to be seen.

5. Cameron Diaz is transformed by black hair. She wears multi-layers of ruffles and yet somehow the effect is not wedding-cake. She seems very pleased by her ability to inform us that "The Departed" is another Scorsese masterpiece.... Next is the Best Screenplay award. "The Queen." The writer tries to make it a political speech about how public protest can affect political leaders. Just when you think you're about to hear about the current war, he's told to wrap up, and he does with a quick "I love you all."... TV Comedy actor: Alec Baldwin. He seems like an amusing guy, referring to the "autumn of my career."

6. "Ugly Betty" wins for Best TV Comedy. Do you watch that show? I watched the first episode, on the theory that it was supposed to be good. It wasn't terrible, but I didn't like it enough to stay with it. But then I don't really watch TV sitcoms, so pay no attention to me on this.

7. How stringy our Sharon Stone has become. The award is for foreign language film, and it goes to Clint Eastwood for "Letters From Iwo Jima," and the thought shoots through my head that I should see a movie every week. "You don't know what this does for my confidence," Clint says. He's wearing all black and a little silver bow tie.... In the comments, people are talking about whether Angelina Jolie is in a bad mood. Which is what's really important. She's so beautiful, and she's got the beautiful man, so, please, Lord, let her be unhappy.

8. Oh, Prince is in the audience. He was too late to receive his award. No wonder Timberlake was confused. We're told Prince was stuck in traffic. I find it hard to believe the world does not stop to allow the diminutive deity to proceed, but -- oh! -- Prince is there. Your humble blogger breaks down and cries.

9. Musical/Comedy TV Actress. Some terrific ladies. And it goes -- I'm not surprised -- to America Ferrera. Who, like every other woman there tonight, is wearing ancient Grecian garb. She's sweet, talking about "beauty that is deeper than what we see." Of course, she is lovely, but if she can speak for the ugly, that's nice. She thanks "Mommy." And you know you should all thank Mommy.

10. Tom Hanks is giving some award to Warren Beatty, who has such an embarrassingly self-satified look on his face. "What balls this man has. What balls this man has. And by balls, of course, I mean artistic vision and fortitude. What balls has Warren Beatty." Oh, he'll always be Milton Armitage to me.

11. Martin Scorsese wins the Best Director award, which he accepts with touching geeky fan style. He wanted to make a movie like "Public Enemy" or "Angels with Dirty Faces," and he lists all the actors he worked with on "The Departed," including "the great" Alec Baldwin... Next is the Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy award, and it goes to the brilliant man I love so much, Sacha Baron Cohen! As he walks up to the stage, they play his Kazakhstan national anthem. Here's a phrase: "When I saw your two wrinkled Golden Globes on my chin."

12. For dramatic acting, the two admirable Brits collect awards. Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker.

13. To present the last award, out comes our true American, Arnold Schwarzenegger, on crutches. The award for best dramatic movie goes to "Babel." And as Angelina Jolie gives Brad Pitt a slap on the back of the neck, I decide I should go see that movie.

ADDED, NEXT MORNING: Isn't it odd that there were two -- count 'em, two! -- speeches about testicles? (From Tom Hanks and Sacha Baron Cohen.)

Old age is cool.

According to Norman Mailer (who is 83):

There's one good thing about old age that people don't recognize. Which is that if you have a reasonable old age, as I do, in that you're not in pain, and you're not in terrible trouble emotionally with your children, or your mate, then what happens is you cool. And you finally are cool in a way that you never were before. And you realize that you won and you lost, and that's just what happens to everyone else. They win and they lose also. And what you didn't succeed in doing, you didn't succeed in doing, so f--- it....

In other words, I'm at peace with myself in a way that I wasn't for many, many years. I feel more sane than I've ever felt in my life.

"Cracked-Out Shark-Jumping Awesome"... or not?

After giving the opening episode an A and saying "This Show Is Going To Be Cracked-Out Shark-Jumping Awesome," Jacob at Television Without Pity gives the second episode an F and says "Well, that was a new low... the worst ***damn show on television." I TiVo'd but didn't watch it. My TV time yesterday was limited to "Meet the Press" and an episode of an ancient season of "Survivor." I was going to decide whether to watch the new "Apprentice" episode based on Jacob's grade, and F is so bad you just have to look, right? I'm not quite sure what's going on with Jacob's wild mood swings, but it is clear that he's very deeply offended by the Playboy Mansion. And somehow juxtaposition with Hugh Hefner makes Donald Trump seem more loathsome than usual.

"It's the dishonesty."

Joe Kristian weighs in on the AMT:

The AMT has provided cover for sleazy tax policy ever since it was enacted. It works like this: a politician promises a tax benefit. The tax benefit is written so that it doesn't work for AMT....

The politician gets to brag about a brave new loophole, and the taxpayers think he's a great guy, or gal. Then they complain about how that darn AMT got them. It's the ultimate bait-and-switch of tax policy.

This trick has been part of every major tax break in the last 20 years, and many of the minor ones. Perhaps the biggest example is the 2001 Bush tax cuts...

Read the whole thing, including Joe's assurance that they can't repeal the AMT. Yeah, I pretty much knew that. So, go ahead, accuse me of writing "Why I love the new Democratic Congress!" just so I could condemn the Democratic Congress when they break their vow.

ADDED: Here's a NYT op-ed from 2005 about TurboTax and the AMT:

In a world without paid preparers and TurboTax, taxpayers would face the tedious process of calculating their taxes twice - once under the regular income tax and once using the cumbersome alternative minimum tax rules. But software does that calculation in the blink of an eye - and for taxpayers who have to pay the tax, tell them how to adjust their withholding so that next year they won't even notice that they're paying it....

We have created a vicious cycle. Congress has made taxes increasingly complicated and burdensome over the years. To cope, taxpayers have sought help from tax preparers and computer software. But that consumer convenience has bred inertia, shielding bad policy from the wrath of taxpayers who bear the burden of it.

AND: Here's an old post of mine, from 2005, before I started using TurboTax:

[It took me 20 minutes to figure] out my AMT, and Turbotax would have spared me from having to feel very bad about this, I suppose. I feel bad about the federal tax for having the AMT and bad about the state taxes for being so high in the first place and for being the reason I owe so much on the AMT.

Rationally, I admit that it isn't fair for people in states that charge high taxes to get away with contributing less to the federal effort. Why should people in low-taxing states, deprived of the benefits of the local services more taxes would fund, have to pay a larger portion of the costs of the federal government?

Rationally, I know my real problem should be with the state taxes, yet the feds are irking me with their complicated forms. In which case, I really ought to use Turbotax, not only to avoid the aggravation of witnessing the AMT grinding out the extra thousands, but so that I won't irrationally blame the federal government for doing something that is actually fair. Or am I losing my mind?

I love one-idea blogs.

Like this. (Via Metafilter.)

It's absurd that the governor of the largest state can't run for President.

Let's amend the Constitution for Arnold. Is there anyone more fundamentally American?

"How Moroccans laugh at religion, sex and politics."

They don't.

"The head of Mr. Tikriti was severed from his body by the noose as it snapped tight around his neck."

New, more gruesome hangings. The Iraqi government assures us this complication is "rare." Here's some information on the efforts that have been made over the years to perfect hanging, chiefly by calculating the length of the drop so that the neck is quickly broken but the head doesn't come off. Done right, it's considered comparatively humane. Done wrong, it's obviously not.

UPDATE: And there is video, described here.

"To say that we are going to feed more American young men and women into that grinder..."

That's Senator Chuck Hagel on "Meet the Press," really -- as my son John puts it -- "ramping up the gruesome imagery." Context:

The Middle East is in more trouble today, more combustible, more dangerous than at any time since World War II. And you can measure that in, in Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian states, Iran, Syria. And to say that we are going to feed more American young men and women into that grinder, put them in the middle of a tribal, sectarian civil war, is not going to fix the problem....

[H]ow in the world do we think we can pursue a legitimate policy that’s going to work, that doesn’t continue to consume more of our young men and women, continue to erode America’s standing and respect in the Middle East where we’ll have no hope to have any influence other than bog down further in an unwinnable situation. That’s a very dangerous strategy that will not work.

"They're convinced that the United States will pack it in and go home if they just kill enough of us."

Says Dick Cheney, speaking of our terrorist enemies, on tonight's "60 Minutes." "They can't beat us in a standup fight, but they think they can break our will."

He's right. And so are our terrorist enemies.

"Men are still resisting and clearly prefer the rounder, fleshier type. But women want to be free and powerful..."

"...and one way to reject submission is to adopt these international standards that have nothing to do with Brazilian society." That's one attempt -- by a historian, Mary del Priore -- to explain the changing standard of beauty in Brazil. It's a strange idea -- isn't it? -- that the natural feminine body is a sort of enslavement and that anorexia is a way to power. It's surely not limited to Brazil, but the Brazilian manifestation of it is so stark:

Experts also agree that Brazilian men, whatever their class or race, have been much slower to accept slenderness as a gauge of feminine beauty. When they are looking for a sexual partner, Brazilian men are consistent and clear in saying that they prefer women who are fleshy in the rear — “popozuda” is the wonderfully euphonious slang term used here — and have pronounced curves.

In the past, that standard was so firmly established that some Brazilian women resorted to breast reduction or buttock augmentation surgery, sometimes even transferring their own tissue from top to bottom.

Sometimes even transferring their own tissue from top to bottom. Now, that is something. That's amazing. And "popozuda" -- what a cool word.

So, anyway, what do you think, are Brazilian women undercutting themselves, missing out on this nicely accommodating old standard of beauty to take on the rigors of the "international" standard of beauty, or is there actually something oppressive about the old standard?

The words mean something, "but not if you try to figure them out."

Says David Byrne in this 1983 Letterman appearance, that's talked about in this really long NYT article calling Byrne "Indie Rock's Patron Saint." ("Once the archetypal nerve-racked data-age persona (his famously uncomfortable 1983 Letterman interview is on YouTube, if you need a reminder), Mr. Byrne is today much more mellow.")



I rather think Byrne is doing a performance there, don't you? Nowadays, the Times tells us, he's "comfortable in his skin" (a phrase that has always bugged me for some reason):

He seems comfortable in his skin, chatty and quick to laugh; his conversation ranges energetically from computerized embroidery machines to a recent visit to a neuroscience lab in Canada with his pals from the Arcade Fire. (“We didn’t get a chance to get into the M.R.I. machines,” he said, “but we had a lot of fun.”) He has even become a blogger, and a self-disclosing one at that.

“I was a peculiar young man,” he wrote in a reflective entry last April. “Borderline Asperger’s, I would guess.”

Hmmm... well, then I guess he wasn't just acting. I forgot about his blog. Here it is.

ADDED: John, on watching the clip: "He acts like Billy in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.'" (Remember, we watched that recently.) He's right! Now, we're listing to "Talking Heads: 77." Me, looking through the old records: "It should be easy to find. I know it's orange."



I was saying that's my favorite.

Here's some politics:

I see the states, across this big nation
I see the laws made in washington, D.C.
I think of the ones I consider my favorites
I think of the people that are working for me

Some civil servants are just like my loved ones
They work so hard and they try to be strong
I'm a lucky guy to live in my building
They own the buildings to help them along

It's over there, its over there
My building has every convenience
It's gonna make life easy for me
It's gonna be easy to get things done
I will relax along with my loved ones

We played "Talking Heads: 77" so many times... in 1977! You have to try to imagine how that sounded then, when rock was arena rock and disco was everywhere.

My second favorite: "More Songs About Buildings and Food." But if you want to play that, you'll have to take it down from the picture frame hanging on the wall:

No, Mickey, it's the money.

Mickey Kaus thinks the main objection people have to the Alternative Minimum Tax is the hassle of doing two calculations. I use TurboTax, which does the calculations automatically, and the AMT cost me $4900 last year. It's definitely the money!

And if you want to know why the AMT costs me so much, let me tell you it's a reason that Democrats should care about, because it's all about living in a blue state. The deductions I lose in the AMT calculation are -- as I wrote here -- are state and local taxes, like my incredible $12,000 property tax bill:

What the AMT does -- certainly in my case -- is to make sure that people who suffer from a really high state and local tax burden still pay their share of federal taxes. Getting rid of the AMT makes it easier for state and local government to maintain high taxes because these taxes will lower our federal taxes. Anyone in a state with low taxes should probably be pissed off at this, because their states do with less revenue while their citizens fork over more to the feds. But presumably those states vote Republican, so who cares? My state votes Democratic, and it's got a lot of people who could really save a lot -- and contribute generously to the Democrats who have tended to us so well.

Plus, they vowed to get rid of fix the AMT. I'm watching them closely on this one.

ADDED: Glenn Reynolds says: "[T]he hassle factor probably does matter some, and programs like Turbo Tax also make increased tax code complexity easier. Should conservatives hate those, too?" It depends on the conservatives. If they are in favor of simplicity, they shouldn't like a program that makes complexity feel like simplicity. But if they are in favor of benefiting red staters, they should love the way it mutes AMT outrage. I used to fill out the AMT form by hand, and it was.... vexing.

"I don't like to call the police or call his boss. . . . I'm a libertarian. I'm not into that."

Said Tucker Carlson about the video store clerk who had blogged about Carlson's previous visit to the store (and called Carlson's wife "ridiculously wasped-out"). (Via Memeorandum.)

The clerk -- Charles Williamson -- had failed to observe the video store clerk - video store client privilege, and he paid the price for it. He got fired. How much sympathy should we have for Williamson? He's 28, old enough to know that if you use access to information that you get on the job in a way that hurts your employer, your employer won't like it and you can get fired. A video store client wants to feel a sense of privacy about the information that he creates by renting videos.

The linked article, in the Washington Post, doesn't take the privacy issue seriously. It's so tempting to mock Carlson and to feel for the little guy -- here's his blog -- and to think that blogs are a special enclave that should be immune from the limits imposed on the rest of the world. But let's focus on the larger issue. Do you want your video rental information disclosed?

Back when Robert Bork was nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court, a Washington newspaper published a list of the videos he had rented. The Bork list had nothing particularly interesting on it, but the disclosure of the list scared people enough that the Congress soon passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which made anyone engaged in video sales or rental liable for the disclosure of "information which identifies a person as having requested or obtained specific video materials or services from a video tape service provider."

Well, I guess good libertarians should think this law is terrible. And good for Tucker Carlson for not invoking his legal rights -- if any -- on this one. (I don't know how "specific" the information Williamson published was.)

Think of all the fun we've missed over the years not having all this juicy information to chew over. But even if there were no law, video business owners would probably have a policy against disclosure and would fire clerks who published information about clients. Wouldn't you avoid the store where the clerks blogged about what the customers rented?

Anyone who thinks the answers depend on whether or not we hate the particular client really doesn't know how to think straight!

"They are basically jealous. They’ve been toiling in the trenches for decades, and along comes this son of a Kenyan farmer..."

"... suddenly he’s measuring the drapes in the Oval Office," says a "Democratic strategist," who doesn't want to be named but does have an explanation for why various black leaders have so far declined to embrace Barack Obama.

Here's a quote with a name -- Harry Belafonte -- to go with it: "He’s a young man in many ways to be admired. Obviously very bright, speaks very well, cuts a handsome figure. But all of that is just the king’s clothes. Who’s the king?"

And Al Sharpton attaches his name to a quote: "Right now we’re hearing a lot of media razzle-dazzle. I’m not hearing a lot of meat, or a lot of content. I think when the meat hits the fire, we’ll find out if it’s just fat, or if there’s some real meat there."

• • •

I love the way Sharpton speaks in phrases that sound like existing expressions. "When the meat hits the fire." Google it, and you'll see that the hits are all this very quote from Sharpton. It meshes well with "hearing a lot of meat," and "hearing meat" isn't an expression -- how noisy is meat? -- and it's sort of a mixed metaphor. There's a faint echo of "Where's the beef?," the classic political catchphrase.... based on this commercial:



"When the meat hits the fire" sounds vaguely like other phrases: "Where the rubber meets the road," "When the sh*t hits the fan".... But "when the meat hits the fire" is a Sharpton original, I think. He concludes the thought with "we’ll find out if it’s just fat, or if there’s some real meat there," which seems to me to refer to the common expression "all sizzle and no steak." But in the case of a candidate who's "all sizzle and no steak," hitting the fire would be the point at which you'd get the most sizzle, based on the presence of fat, and you still wouldn't "hear the meat."

• • •

But back to the meat of this post. Sharpton -- and others -- must be profoundly jealous and resentful -- and with good reason. In a political culture in which the media have long consulted them and preserved a place for them in the debate, now it seems that Obama will be given that place, and Obama is likely to say things that are far more mellow and conciliatory to the majority of Americans. They have to be asking -- and we should ask too -- whether that is why Americans like Obama so much. Looking at the problem from this angle, we should see that it's not simply a matter of personal jealousy, it is a real fear that their message is being effectively excised from the national debate.

This blog is 3 years old today.

Here's what I said 2 years ago:

One year old!

The day has finally come. This blog is one year old today. It's been pretty cool. I remember starting off in utter obscurity, thinking I'd better take care what I write, because I've got to assume that, eventually, some people who know me are going to find this. And now the Sitemeter is up over 900,000. Thanks to all the readers for coming by!

One year ago... minimalism was in:

Two years old today...

This blog is.

Going all the way back to the beginning, January 14, 2004, to the first post, at 10:36 a.m.:

This blog is called Marginalia, because I'm writing from Madison, Wisconsin, and Marginalia is a fictionalized name for Madison that I thought up a long time ago when I seriously believed I would write a fictionalized account of my life in Madison, Wisconsin. There is nothing terribly marginal about Madison, really, but I do like writing in the margins of books, something I once caused a librarian to gasp by saying. Writing in a blog is both less and more permanent than writing in the margin of a book.

But I'm still here somehow, still checking in daily from my remote outpost in Marginalia.

"Good lawyers representing the detainees is the best way to ensure that justice is done in these cases."

So said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. This came after the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, Charles D. Stimson, was wrongheaded and stupid enough to say:

"I think the news story that you’re really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a result of a FOIA request through a major news organization, somebody asked, ‘Who are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there?’ and you know what, it’s shocking." The F.O.I.A. reference was to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Monica Crowley, a conservative syndicated talk show host, asking for the names of all the lawyers and law firms representing Guantánamo detainees in federal court cases.

Mr. Stimson, who is himself a lawyer, then went on to name more than a dozen of the firms listed on the 14-page report provided to Ms. Crowley, describing them as “the major law firms in this country.” He said, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

Gonzales is obviously right, and I would like to know how Stimson could even entertain the notion that it might be acceptable to say what he did.

UPDATE: Stimson apologizes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Stimson resigns (2/2/07).

"I'm a 67-year-old fat, white-haired, liver-spotted woman."

Oh! It's Grace Slick! She's old and fat and doesn't mind telling you so. And she's doing art now -- pictures, panned by critics, with titles like "Hooka Smoking Caterpillar" and "White Rabbit Remembering the Good Old Days."

"I didn't see or hear anything odd or unusual from the apartment. I just figured them for father and son."

Said Rick Butler.

[He] lives across the street [and] said he saw no evidence that the boy was scared or trying to get away. He even saw Devlin and the teen pitch a tent outside in the complex...

Last fall, Butler said he found a cell phone outside, called a number on it and the teen came outside to retrieve it.

What a strange story! Why didn't Shawn Hornbeck escape?

The crime of overfeeding your dog.

Here.

Bush is "simply too stuntedly ill-informed and reality-detached."

That clotted phrase is James Wolcott's assessment of why President Bush "will not be able to rehabilitate himself in retirement" -- unlike Richard Nixon.

I remember seeing an aging Nixon on C-SPAN speaking and answering questions smoothly and cogently for over an hour on a range of geopolitical topics without benefit of notes and with a humbled confidence that was (for Nixon) charming. Clinton has that kind of sophisticated knowledgability, Jimmy Carter does as well, but Bush never will, so uninterested is he in other cultures and so reliant upon platitudes and homilies and self-affirmation. I think (hope) Steve Gilliard is right: Bush's presidency will unravel in shame and disgrace, as Nixon's did. But unlike Nixon, Bush will not enjoy a lion-in-winter third act. For better or worse, Nixon was his own man, a stark lesson in the possibilities and limits of self-reliance.

Why would you hope things will go badly? Wolcott is characteristically sour, but the subject of former Presidents working on their reputations is important, and speculating about how Bush will fare is worth doing. It's also slightly fascinating to watch people warm up to Nixon now that he's at a great enough distance or -- more likely -- when warming up to him works as a way of expressing how terribly much you hate Bush.

"I thought it was O.K. to be single. I thought it was O.K. to not have children..."

"And I thought you could still make good decisions on behalf of the country if you were single and didn’t have children," says Condoleezza Rice in an interview with the NYT.

During the hearing itself, Ms. Rice did not appear to take issue with Senator Boxer’s comments. During the interview, she addressed them only in response to a question. But the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, suggested earlier on Friday that Senator Boxer’s comments were antifeminist.

“I don’t know if she was intentionally tacky,” Mr. Snow said in an interview on Fox News. “It’s a great leap backward for feminism.”...

Senator Boxer’s comments and the claims and counterclaims about what she meant have captivated the blogs and received extensive coverage on Fox News and other cable channels. One blog, called Swampland, labeled it “Womb Wars.”

Conservative blogs and commentators were quick to seize on the issue. “One Great Leap (Backwards) for Womankind,” read one blog, Bikini Politics. “They will be known by their Fruits,” read another, Macsmind, which billed itself as “Conservative News, Commentary and Common Sense.” Rush Limbaugh also got into the act. “Here you have a rich white chick with a huge, big mouth, trying to lynch this, an African-American woman, right before Martin Luther King Day, hitting below the ovaries here,” Mr. Limbaugh said on his radio show.

As I said yesterday, I don't think it's good feminism to require greater sensitivity toward women than toward men when it comes to political arguments like the one Boxer made. The "Who pays the price?" argument is either a good one or a bad one, and calling attention to childlessness shouldn't be any worse for women than for men.

But let me make three new points:

1. Boxer served up a juicy nugget, and it should have been predictable that blogger types -- and Rush -- would gobble it up. I'm sure she regrets saying it and that this incident will tend to reduce these kinds of statements in the future. It's stupid to give your enemies this kind of raw material. Politicians need to become more savvy about what's bloggable. And the already-savvy Snow did a great job of flagging the bloggability.

2. Women in power should stand on the same level as men and not demand special outrage for insults, but we know that people will say some things about a woman precisely because they think it will hurt her more or because it will stir up prejudices about women. I don't think it's clear that in this case Boxer had that sort of nasty intent, but we can see in some of the reaction to Boxer's statement -- including that quote from Rice, above -- that people continue to think there is something tragic and unnatural about a woman who has not formed a family around herself.

3. Heightening sensitivity to implicit insults in statements made about women can serve the interests of the Democrats. They are the ones with an important female presidential candidate. Now that Republicans have had this little huff over Rice, Democrats will have more power to claim offenses to feminism whenever anyone says anything mean about Hillary Clinton.

“He feels very disappointed that he can’t go on for her."

A quote from the lawyer representing Michael B. Nifong, the prosecutor in the Duke rape case, who is now asking to withdraw from the case in light of the ethics charges against him. I'm reading this in the NYT, which is covering Nifong's problems quite a bit more sympathetically than what I've read elsewhere:

Mr. Nifong’s friends told him he had two choices: dismiss the case or ask the attorney general to take it over. It was a bitter decision, friends said. His reputation hung in the balance. Mr. Nifong decided he had to do something he had left to his investigators over the 10 months since the alleged assault: talk about it directly with the woman he called “my victim.”

In a two-hour meeting at his office on Thursday, Mr. Nifong and an aide talked about the choices, an official involved in the case said. He told the accuser that a trial would be brutal, but that he had already talked with the attorney general’s special prosecutions unit and trusted that office to give the case a fair review. He asked what she wanted to do.

She was concerned about the effect of the case on Mr. Nifong’s career, the official recalled. She wanted to sleep on the decision. She continued to insist she had been sexually assaulted.

On Friday, she and Mr. Nifong spoke by telephone. She again said she wanted to go forward. Although she was not happy about Mr. Nifong’s giving up of the case, the official said, she said she understood his reasoning and pledged to cooperate with any new team.

"Say you're an average congressman. How do you react to President Bush's Iraq speech?"

William Kristol channels congressional thought processes:

You suspect, deep down, that he's probably doing more or less what he needs to do. We can't just click our heels and get out of Iraq--the consequences would be disastrous. And the current strategy isn't working. You have said so yourself. Last fall you called for replacing Rumsfeld. You've complained that there weren't enough troops. What's more, you've heard good things about General David Petraeus from colleagues with military expertise. So now Bush has fired Rumsfeld, put Petraeus in command, and sent in more troops. Maybe this new approach deserves a chance to work?

Is that what they really think? I'd guess they were thinking this new approach doesn't deserve a chance, because it's not going to work. In Kristol's account, the members of Congress go on to undercut the President's efforts for little reason other than their own political advantage.

Ford did more to end the Cold War than did Reagan.

According to Gerald Ford in old interviews The Grand Rapids Press is now free to release.

Ford said Reagan, who challenged him unsuccessfully for the GOP nomination in 1976, was "a great spokesman for attractive political objectives" such as a balanced budget and defeating communism, "but when it came to implementation, his record never matched his words."

Reagan was "probably the least well-informed on the details of running the government of any president I knew," Ford said. In a separate interview, he said Reagan "was just a poor manager, and you can't be president and do a good job unless you manage."

Ford contended his own negotiation of the Helsinki accords on human rights did more to win the Cold War than Reagan's military buildup. Other key factors were the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after World War II and the establishment of NATO, he said.

He also said Carter -- who challenged him successfully in 1976 -- was "a disaster." Who did he like? Eisenhower. And Nixon wasn't so bad.

In which I rave about the MacBook screen.

I replaced my year-old Power Book with a new MacBook today, mostly because the screen on the old computer was looking dimmer and dimmer, and I thought it was going to die. Whether it dies or not is another matter, but I'm setting it aside as a spare right now. I knew the MacBook had a much brighter, clearer screen, and since I don't see all that well, especially in bad light, I decided to spring for the new computer. I can't tell you how happy I am with the new screen. On the old computer, I was always enlarging the font size to read. I was using the new one for several hours before I realized I'd stopped doing that. I can read the normal-size print comfortably again. What an improvement!

"I write tales with brave Ulysses but I prefer the WriteRoom with black curtains."

Possibly the cleverest -- and creamiest -- Metafilter comment ever. Must be read in context.

"So why do respectable but obscure figures think they have a chance at the White House?"

A question raised on the occasion of Christopher Dodd declaring his candidacy.

Their patron saint is Jimmy Carter....

Bonding with MacBook.

There's that Photo Booth stage...









ADDED: That last photo, taken at a café every good Madisonian knows, looks like it's trying to turn into "Starry Night," by Vincent Van Gogh.

Comfort movies.

Do you have a comfort movie? This would be a movie you rewatch in times of stress, when you want to create a comfortable environment for yourself. My son John says he uses the "Back to the Future" movies to mellow out at exam time. He says a lot of people his age -- mid-20s -- have "The Princess Bride" as their comfort movie? So, what's yours?

When I was in college -- in the days before home video -- one campus cinema always showed Marx Brothers movies at exam time. It was understood that this was what you watched to escape the stress. I was trying to think of what I would have now that fits in this category. I was going to say "My Dinner with Andre," "Slacker," "Fast ,Cheap and Out of Control," and "Grey Gardens." But John is disqualifying these choices on the ground that these are actually movies that I consider great, not the sort of junk food that we're trying to talk about here. It's true that I don't have any not-actually-great movies that I like to rewatch for comfort's sake. He says that I use TV reality shows for this. He's right. You know, the other day I watched three episodes of an old season of "Survivor."

(Song that John is playing that is amusing me while I write this post: "Nuages"... by Django Reinhardt. I'm looking for a YouTube clip of that for you, but what I'm seeing is that everyone tries to play that song.)

HEY: This post has a vlog:



And John never found the clip.

OH: I thought of one -- look, we watched it the day I wrecked my car -- "Serial Mom."

Should a blogger long to be a columnist?

Eric Zorn -- who says he "felt like a slacker sharing the stage" with me last night -- compares blogging and column-writing. He does both, so maybe he's not biased. Of course, everyone blogs, and only a few people have newspaper columns...

Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, and me.

I've said it before, but let me say it again. It's our birthday.

When Barbara Boxer took note of Condoleezza Rice's childlessness.

Senator Barbara Boxer, questioning Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about the war, drew attention to the fact that Rice has no children who might have to "pay the price" for the war. The blogosphere is talking. Wizbang demands an apology. There seems to be some notion that it's a special insult to mention the fact that a woman has no children. In the video clip at the first link, we see Rice's reaction, a little irked tilt of the head. I think the negative reaction to Boxer is overblown. It's another one of these statements that we hear all the time about how the people in power who are making the decisions don't have family members serving in the war. Coming to the defense of Condoleezza Rice in this instance is not a feminist gesture. Female politicians have to take this criticism just like their male counterparts. If you think they need special protection, you're not helping the cause of women.

Talking about blogging tonight in Naperville.

Take note:

North Central College will host two professional bloggers — Ann Althouse of the University of Wisconsin Law School and Eric Zorn, columnist for the Chicago Tribune — in a panel discussion about the effectiveness of ... blogs, in public discourse. The free discussion, titled “Blogging: Simultaneous Translation,” will be held on Thursday, Jan. 11, at 7:30 p.m. in Koten Chapel at Kiekhofer Hall, 329 E. School St. [Naperville, IL].

If you're in the area stop by. We'll be taking questions from the audience.

UPDATE: That was fun. I'm back in Madison, arriving here at midnight.

The Old Fashioned restaurant.

The capitalization in the title isn't a deviation from my style book. The place is actually called The Old Fashioned. I like the classic things and how they align them... ironically, right?

"Social Darwinism on stilts: We failed them, now they’re on their own."

That's David Brooks's characterization of a typical Democratic alternative approach to Iraq. (TimesSelect link.) "So we are stuck with the Bush proposal as the only serious plan on offer."

If you can get through to the column, you'll see some background on the source of Bush's plan. According to Brooks, it represents an outright rejection of Prime Minister Maliki's idea:

Maliki essentially wanted the American troops protecting his flank but out of his hair. He didn’t want U.S. soldiers embedded with his own. He didn’t want American generals hovering over his shoulder. His government didn’t want any restraints on Shiite might....

The Iraqi government wants a unified non-sectarian solution in high-minded statements and in some distant, ideal world. But in the short term, and in the deepest reptilian folds of their brains, the Shiites are maneuvering amid the sectarian bloodbath all around.

Bush's speech glossed over this, according to Brooks, "to soothe the wounded pride of the Maliki government."

"A calculated gamble that no matter how much hue and cry his new strategy may provoke, in the end the American people will give him more time..."

I doubt that President Bush has any capacity to inspire Americans about the war in Iraq. I vaguely wish that he could. He's made his decision, and I think people need to support what he's doing and not undercut him by revealing to our enemies that we can be worn down and demoralized. Yet it doesn't bother me that much that Americans are not fired up by presidential speeches. We don't like war, and we especially don't like to live with a long war that doesn't reward us with distinct successes from time to time. We express our dissatisfaction, but I think most of us realize it's the President's responsibility to get us through this. Electing Democrats to Congress can be read as an expression of dissatisfaction, but does it also mean that we expect or even want Congress to interfere with the President's plan?

Here's Sheryl Gay Stolberg's analysis:

By stepping up the American military presence in Iraq, President Bush is not only inviting an epic clash with the Democrats who run Capitol Hill. He is ignoring the results of the November elections, rejecting the central thrust of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and flouting the advice of some of his own generals, as well as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq.

In so doing, Mr. Bush is taking a calculated gamble that no matter how much hue and cry his new strategy may provoke, in the end the American people will give him more time to turn around the war in Iraq and Congress will not have the political nerve to thwart him by cutting off money for the war....

Wartime clashes between presidents and the Congress are a familiar thread in American history. But perhaps no president since Richard M. Nixon has so boldly expanded an unpopular war. Explaining his decision to invade Cambodia in April 1970, Nixon said: “A majority of the American people, a majority of you listening to me, are for the withdrawal of our forces from Vietnam. The action I have taken tonight is indispensable for the continuing success of that withdrawal program.”

I remember watching that Nixon speech on a little black-and-white TV -- one of the few TVs in East Quad -- when I was a freshman in college at the University of Michigan. We hooted with derision and hatred. How could that evil man think we would believe his insane reassurance about a despicable plan, and how could he dare to portray a new invasion as a response to our demand that he end the war?

More Stolberg:

[N]o American president has been able to prosecute a war indefinitely without the support of the American public. With polls showing fewer than 20 percent of Americans supporting increasing troop levels in Iraq, Mr. Bush and those Republicans who support him know that the new policy will be a tough sell.

“The American people have no reason in the world to think it’s going to work just like the president paints it,” said one of those backers, Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, “but I think the American people, in their usual good sense, are going to wait around for a while and say, ‘Mr. President, you’ve taken us down a lot of roads in Iraq, let’s go down this one and see if it works.’ ”

I think she's quoting Domenici because he sounds so dumb. Sure, trial and error, people are fine with that system. But what he's saying inelegantly is probably true. People, unhappy though they are, will steel themselves and hope the President has come up with a decently workable plan this time. If you're not one of those people and you're flipping out because you can't understand why Americans -- despite the poll numbers -- seem to accept the President's decisions nonetheless, you probably will only hoot with derision if I say I understand how you feel.

How to make a comedy about Hitler.

I'm sure you could think of a lot of rules, but surely one of them is: Don't make Hitler sympathetic. Yes, perhaps in comedy, rules are there to be broken, and as soon as you come up with an important rule, someone's going to say, then that's the one we've got to break. You're betting on your own genius then. And most films are... bad:

The advance buzz about “Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler,” which opens [in Germany] Thursday, has been almost uniformly negative...

“Most of the jokes are flat, harmless or stale, and what’s particularly offensive is that Adolf Hitler, of all people, is given quite sympathetic character traits,” wrote Harald Peters in Welt am Sonntag.

Even Helge Schneider, the madcap German comedian and actor who portrays Hitler, has distanced himself from the film, saying in a radio interview here: “It didn’t thrill me. I just don’t find it funny.”

No doubt, some of the bad reaction is a matter of taste. “Mein Führer,” directed by a Jewish filmmaker, depicts Hitler in scenes that could be drawn from a movie by the Farrelly brothers — wetting his bed, playing with a toy battleship in the bath, padding around his office on all fours while barking like a dog and so on.

But the noisy national debate — over what is by all accounts a flawed film that the public has not yet seen — shows that Hitler remains an enduringly uncomfortable topic for many here.

"Uncomfortable"... "for many"...

"The consequences of failure are clear: Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits."

The President's speech.

The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time. On one side are those who believe in freedom and moderation. On the other side are extremists who kill the innocent, and have declared their intention to destroy our way of life. In the long run, the most realistic way to protect the American people is to provide a hopeful alternative to the hateful ideology of the enemy – by advancing liberty across a troubled region. It is in the interests of the United States to stand with the brave men and women who are risking their lives to claim their freedom – and help them as they work to raise up just and hopeful societies across the Middle East.

Were you satisfied?

What will be role of bloggers in the 2008 presidential election?

Please prognosticate.

The Santaland Diaries, Tuesdays With Morrie, and anything with the word 'magnolias'...""> "The Santaland Diaries, Tuesdays With Morrie, and anything with the word 'magnolias'..."

= plays not to produce if you're hoping to entice theater critic Terry Teachout to review your regional theater production in The Wall Street Journal.

Basically, if you can demonstrate your seriousness, he's willing to travel and show you some respect. Lots more advice at the link, including:

I ... have a select list of older plays about which I'd like to write that haven’t been revived in New York lately (or ever). If you’re doing The Beauty Part, The Cocktail Party, The Entertainer, Hotel Paradiso, Man and Superman, Rhinoceros, Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Visit, What the Butler Saw, or anything by Jean Anouilh, Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan, or August Wilson, drop me a line.

I hope his invitation will encourage regional theaters to stand up to the pressure to pander.

The amazing mileage Jeffrey Rosen gets from an interview with John Roberts.

Lawprof Jeffrey Rosen has an interview with Chief Justice John Roberts. It starts off as a very interesting examination of Roberts's approach to his role on the Court:

Some of the least successful chief justices, Roberts suggested, had faltered because they misunderstood the job, approaching it as law professors rather than as leaders of a collegial Court. Harlan Fiske Stone, a former dean of Columbia Law School, was a case in point. Stone “was a failure as chief, because of his misperception of what a chief justice is supposed to be,” Roberts said, gesturing to the justices’ private conference room through an open door of his office. “It’s his desk out there that is separate from the conference table, and he … sat at his desk, and the others were at the table, he almost called on them and critiqued their performances. They hated that.” Roberts laughed. “As a result, he was a failure as a chief justice.”...

... Roberts declared, he would make it his priority, as [Chief Justice John] Marshall did, to discourage his colleagues from issuing separate opinions. “I think that every justice should be worried about the Court acting as a Court and functioning as a Court, and they should all be worried, when they’re writing separately, about the effect on the Court as an institution.”

In Roberts’s view, Marshall’s success in unifying the Court was a reflection of his temperament. “He gave everyone the benefit of the doubt; he approached everyone as a friend. The assumption was … ‘This is someone I’m going to like unless proven otherwise,’” Roberts said. “He was convivial, he took great pride in sharing his Madeira with his colleagues … [He was not] the artificial glad-hander type; it was just in his nature to get along with people. I think that had to play an important role in his ability to bring the Court together, to change the whole way judicial decisions were arrived at, to really create the notion that we are a Court—not simply an assemblage of individual justices … It was the force of his personality. That lack of pretense, that openness and general trustworthiness, were very important personality traits in Marshall’s success,” Roberts observed....

Roberts praised justices who were willing to put the good of the Court above their own ideological agendas. “A justice is not like a law professor, who might say, ‘This is my theory … and this is what I’m going to be faithful to and consistent with,’ and in twenty years will look back and sa