The 2007 posts-of-the-month.

January: C'mon, guys, wear leggings!

February: That polar-bears-on-the-melting-ice-cap photo.

March: I'm going to watch "An Inconvenient Truth."

April: Let's take a look at that 10 Commandments monument.

May. Caricature and handwritten notes from the 7th Circuit conference.

June: Why the judge cried about the pants.

July: Ingmar Bergman has died.

August: Just a few museum photos.

September: About Justice Kennedy's garish carpet and the way his desk is wedged in a corner.

October: Madison and New York/young and old.

November: A vlog about Thanksgiving squirrel, Mancow, guns, law school, commenters, and Madison versus New York.

December: I get pissed off at TNR.

Blogging the presidential campaign — month by month, 2007.

January: Analyzing the text of Hillary Clinton's announcement.

February: "Wearing an overcoat but gloveless on a frigid morning, Mr. Obama invoked a speech Lincoln gave here..."

March: "And people are going to have to take better care of themselves. We cannot afford all the illness that folks are bringing on themselves."

April: Is Obama a gasbag?

May: Chris Wallace asks Giuliani about his statement that it's "okay" if Roe is overruled and "okay" if it's not — but doesn't push him on his answer.

June: Let's take a closer look at Bill's carrot and Hillary's onion ring.

July: Giuliani and race.

August: You people are soooo invisible. And you will always be invisible. Without me.

September: The world, tired of hating America, wants Hillary to win.

October: Like George Bush, Hillary Clinton "presides over an office of intense and focused workaholics, protective of their patron and wary of outsiders."

November: "Hnh, Biden stomps some dirt on Robert Bork's grave."

December: "It said my house is pink. I would not have a pink house, I assure you."

Here's where I pick out all my favorite quotes from the things I've collected on this blog over the past year.

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." Joe Biden on Barack Obama.

"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...." Chuck Hagel, sure the surge would fail.

"I am self-involved, mercurial and comfortable eating dinners of frozen waffles in my underpants."

"Is Coulter truly oblivious to her gender weirdness? It's no coincidence that words like 'tranny' and transvestite' clog the anti-Coulter blogs." Camille Paglia, getting ugly.

"I'm pretty much going to stay out of it until the course — the case has finally run its final — the course it's going to take." President Bush, declining to say if he'll pardon Scooter Libby.

"Since the slaughter raised no real issues, it was a blank slate on which anyone could doodle." Christopher Hitchens on the Virginia Tech Massacre.

''He still didn't put the butter up... I was like, 'You're just asking for it, you know I'm giving a speech. Why don't you just put the butter up?''' Michelle Obama.

"An aging roué, who is almost too facile, and a grimly ambitious feminist lawyer, with a tough but conventional mind." Noemie Emery -- in The Weekly Standard -- on Bill and Hillary Clinton.

"We believe bottled water has become less about the physical act of hydration and more about being a companion to people."

"We like the United States of America, but we do not like your Waschbaeren!"

"I suggest to you with respect, Your Honor, that you're a few French Fries short of a Happy Meal..."

"If you don't like your life, change it." Something simple but profound that Laurence Olivier once said, noted on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

"Maybe his solution will be to get out his small varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his lawn." Something hilarious John McCain said about Mitt Romney.

"I will follow him to the gates of hell." "You sure wouldn't want to be where Saddam Hussein is, where we helped put him." Hell talk from John McCain and Rudy Giuliani.

"Teachers taught, and students listened. Teachers commanded, and students obeyed." Justice Clarence Thomas.

"I believe that Ann intentionally keeps her camera focused on the books behind her... so that she is filmed in a flattering soft focus." Some ADS sufferer on Bloggingheads.

"Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" Justice Antonin Scalia.

"Gerald began - but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them ’permanently’ meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash - to pee." Winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

"I wallowed in a morass of general and specific dislike and pity for most people but me especially..." Young Hillary Clinton.

"Clinton's low-cut shirt simply reflected a few centimeters of sartorial miscalculation..." Robin Givhan.

"He quickly matched my urgency in the clothes-removal efforts and we were naked and happy in no time." Al Gore's daughter writes a novel.

"We are 45 doctors and we are determined to undertake jihad and take the battle inside America."

"Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear." Mother Theresa.

"I will on no account vote for a smirking hick like Mike Huckabee, who is an unusually stupid primate...."

"He knows enough to know he's not descended from apes!"

"So here’s the rule. You never repeat right wing talking points to attack your own, ever. You never enter that echo chamber as a participant. Ever. You never give them a hammer to beat the left with. Just. Don’t. Do. It." Jane Hamsher tells Elizabeth Edwards what to do.

"What politics has become requires a level of tolerance for triviality and artifice and nonsense that I have found in short supply." A quote from it's-easy-to-guess-who that I wrote 10 questions about.

"He's typing and drinking and threatening to 'shave Paul Krugman with a broken bottle.'" Maureen Dowd, describing Stephen Colbert as he's writing a guest column for her.

"Si te gusta el sexo oral, vote por Caragol por consejal." My favorite foreign language quote of the year.

"And another thing - the crotch, down where your nuts hang - is always a little too tight, so when you make them up, give me an inch that I can let out there, uh because they cut me, it's just like riding a wire fence. These are almost, these are the best I've had anywhere in the United States. But, uh when I gain a little weight they cut me under there. So, leave me , you never do have much of margin there. See if you can't leave me an inch from where the zipper (burps) ends, round, under my, back to my bunghole, so I can let it out there if I need to." LBJ, ordering pants.

"The rage he harbors raises questions about whether he can sit as an impartial judge in many of the cases the Supreme Court hears." New York Times editorial about Clarence Thomas.

"It strikes me as a self-hurt book." Jon Stewart on Chris Matthews' self-help book.

"Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a 'before' in a Charles Atlas 'before and after' ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy — he ain't so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?" Bob Dylan.

"I knew this was no fetish-laden intrigue with a woman of another race, but a gift from God." Clarence Thomas, on meeting his second wife.

"I'd done what I thought was right, and I took heart from George Benson: I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone's shadows/If I fail, if I succeed/At least I live as I believe/No matter what they take from me/They can't take away my dignity." Clarence Thomas, steeling himself by listening, over and over, to "The Greatest Love of All."

"What I wanted was for everyone — the government, the racists, the activists, the students, even Daddy — to leave me alone so that I could finally start thinking for myself." Clarence Thomas describing how he felt after reading Ayn Rand.

"He insisted that we bathe in what he called a 'teaspoon' of water, using laundry detergent instead of soap. 'Waste not, want not,' he repeatedly warned us. We weren't allowed to use towels to dry ourselves, either, since Daddy thought washcloths were good enough to get us dry (as well as being easier to launder than towels). Whenever he thought we hadn't gotten ourselves clean enough, he finished the job himself, a terrifying experience that we did everything we could to avoid." Clarence Thomas, on the baths of childhood.

"Sen. Clinton is claiming basically the entire eight years of the Clinton presidency as her own, except for the stuff that didn't work out, in which case she says she has nothing to do with it." Barack Obama.

"And I would never spend my money on a Chinese girl skeleton. That would be crossing the line. It's a Chinese boy, for the record." Marilyn Manson.

"Maybe yellow blotches, wrinkles, and phantom fetuses really get a pubescent neotenic mole salamander in the mood for love." Go Fug Yourself.

"At the moment, Giuliani and fellow moderate Mitt Romney are attacking each other for being insufficiently Tancredo-esque." David Brooks.

"I did shift from being against the death penalty to thinking that if it has a significant deterrent effect it’s probably justified." Cass Sunstein.

"Blogs are walking up to legal scholarship and slapping it in the face. Blogs say to legal scholarship: 'How dare you! Evolve or Die!'" From the Bloggership Symposium.

"If you don't pass universal health care by July of 2009... I'm going to use my power as president to take your health care away from you." John Edwards, megalomaniacally.

"It's basically akin to someone sitting on their couch and chewing up food and spitting it all over the floor and the walls and the furniture month after month until it piles up and congeals and grows into mold, turning the room into a repulsive, health-threatening mess." Bad Simile of the Year, from Glenn Greenwald.

"Oh gee, I can't figure out what I think. Don't pick on me by asking that question! That's a gotcha question!" Rudy Giuliani spoofs Hillary Clinton.

"Everything I'm saying here is my wife's position, not just mine." Bill Clinton, remembering to talk not only about himself.

"I'm not doin' hand shows today." Fred Thompson.

"Well, Hillary, I'm looking forward to you advising me as well."

"WHAT DI DHE DO AFORE HOW LONG AND WITH WHO ?? PLS TELL BOB HELLO BOB."

Happy Year's End.

I hope you had a good year. If not, it's over anyway.

I thought I'd mark the occasion with three posts gathered from the things I've collected in this giant archive over the last 12 months.

The first one will have a post from each month. Maybe it's what I consider the best post of the month, or maybe it's just one post from the month that I feel like bringing up again at year's end.

The second post consists of one post from each month about the presidential campaign. I've excluded all the debate simulblogging, because who wants to read those again and because the debates are fairly easy to remember and I thought it would be interesting to bring up some things that may have slipped away.

The third post is just all my favorite quotes from the many quotes I've copied out here over the course of the year.

So hang on a minute. I'm almost ready to put these up.

I wave good-bye to a beautiful year.

Just a picture from back in April, which I'm seeing tonight as a frantically survey the past 12 months of posts to put together 3 year-end posts for tomorrow.

"What one's sin is, means it's missing the mark. It's missing the bull's eye, the perfect point."

Mike Huckabee explains what he means when he says that gay people who do not abstain from sex are sinners. From today's "Meet the Press":

MR. RUSSERT: This, this is what you did say about homosexuality: "I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle." That's millions of Americans.

GOV. HUCKABEE: Tim, understand, when a Christian speaks of sin, a Christian says all of us are sinners. I'm a sinner, everybody's a sinner. What one's sin is, means it's missing the mark. It's missing the bull's eye, the perfect point. I miss it every day; we all do. The perfection of God is seen in a marriage in which one man, one woman live together as a couple committed to each other as life partners. Now, even married couples don't do that perfectly, so sin is not some act of equating people with being murderers or rapists...

MR. RUSSERT: But when you say aberrant or unnatural, do you believe you're born gay or you choose to be gay?

GOV. HUCKABEE: I don't know whether people are born that way. People who are gay say that they're born that way. But one thing I know, that the behavior one practices is a choice. We may have certain tendencies, but how we behave and how we carry out our behavior--but the important issue that I want to address, because I think when you bring up the faith question, Tim, I've been asked more about my faith than any person running for president. I'm OK with that. I hope I've answered these questions very candidly and very honestly. I think it's important for us to talk about it. But the most important thing is to find out, does our faith influence our public policy and how? I've never tried to rewrite science textbooks. I've never tried to come out with some way of imposing a doctrinaire Christian perspective in a way that is really against the Constitution. I've never done that.

MR. RUSSERT: But you said you would ban all abortions.

GOV. HUCKABEE: Well, that's not just because I'm a Christian, that's because I'm an American. Our founding fathers said that we're all created equal. I think every person has intrinsic worth and value...

MR. RUSSERT: But many Americans believe that that would be, that would be you imposing your faith belief...

GOV. HUCKABEE: But, no. It's not a faith belief. It's deeper than that. It's a human belief. It goes to the heart of who we are as a civilization....

If he's really not going to import his religious beliefs into law — and you may not be willing to believe that, but assuming he's not — do you really care if the President thinks you're a sinner? I mean, assuming he's kindly and mellow about it. I wouldn't want a President who seethed and obsessed about it inordinately, mainly because I prefer an unnutty President. But don't most religious folk perceive lots of sin out there in the world? Why pick on Huckabee for being honest about it? At least we get to see more of how he feels about sin and sinners, and it looks kindly and mellow enough to me.

ADDED: Video removed, but you can watch it here.

Remembering the carrots.

After calling that last episode with me "The Forgotten Carrots Edition," Bloggingheads now has the explanation at the top of the right sidebar:

A few months ago, Ann Althouse's spiel about carrots in a Hillary campaign ad rocked the blogosphere. Steve Kaus felt the shockwaves; he remarked on the issue in a diavlog with Bob Wright. But now Steve has forgotten about the carrots entirely.Or has he? Is that a glint of recognition in his eye?

He claims — here in my comments section — that he only remembered later. But since I'm big on seeing things in video and standing by my observations, I really shouldn't point that out.

ADDED: To continue the interpretation of video, watch Bob Wright — on the left in video 2 — after he says "And I'm not sure I've ever thought of carrots that way." Has he? Is that a glint of recognition in his eye?

UPDATE: I've removed the embedded video, which seemed to be causing a lot of problems with the page loading. I've put in links, so you can still see the video if you want.

"Is Gen. Petraeus Killing Kos?"

"Was the left-wing blogosphere always mainly about Iraq?... Maybe the whole blogosphere was about Iraq!"

Traffic problems — noted by Mickey Kaus.

Hitting a blog is an emotional expression, and some blogs attract readers by being the place it feels good to hit when you are charged up about something that is happening in the world. A mutually dependent relationship develops as the blog must satisfy your emotional needs without curing the distress that made you hit it in the first place.

ADDED: Actually, the Kos traffic looks like a pretty stable plateau to me.

We never dreamed that a little girl might lie to get something she wanted.

The store Club Libby Lu gave a big prize — a trip for 4 to a Hannah Montana concert — to a 6-year-old girl for writing an essay that began: "My daddy died this year in Iraq." Now, the girl and her mother are being publicly humiliated because, apparently, there is no dead soldier dad.

Well, of course, it was bad of the little girl to lie, but little kids lie. Making a spectacle out of disgracing a 6-year-old is disgraceful. After failing to check the very checkable fact that made the company think of her essay as the best, it should have quietly resolved the matter with the girl's family — probably by sending her on the trip anyway — and given the prize — the honor of winning plus the trip — to someone else.

"Life spans measured in years don’t take into account how fast we live them."

Bernard Holland says, as he looks at the lives of great composers:

Composing at the speed of life (forgive me), Schubert at 31 was like any normal musical genius at 65....

Schubert was ill [in 1827-1828], probably with venereal disease, and knew it. He was also eaten up by too much drinking. Given the time spent sleeping, taking meals, visiting friends and going to concerts, it is a puzzle how Schubert found time to copy all this music out, much less think up what to write. Forty composer-years were lived in about one and a half....

On the other hand, what more would Chopin have produced had his Paris doctors had the anti-consumption drugs that have since rendered tuberculosis sanitariums nearly obsolete?...

Sometimes the spirit outlives the body that houses it. Haydn in old age, broken and exhausted by “The Creation” and “The Seasons,” said musical ideas assaulted him physically when he no longer had the strength to act on them.

Most of us rely on the belief that we will live a long time, and we fail to accomplish things quickly in the energy of youth. There's plenty of time later. But maybe there isn't, or maybe there is, but you won't do much with it. You'll have a different sort of body and mind when you're older, and it may not do those things the younger you had planned for it.

And don't you wish you could be like Haydn, so beset by your own creativity that you feel your ideas are physically assaulting you? It would be sad if you reached the point where you couldn't do anything about those ideas, but how wonderful to know, even as you approached death, that the full force of creativity still lived in you. It is so much more likely that you will feel well enough but find nothing inside you that demands your artistic work.

"Does he have sex appeal?... Can you smell the English leather on this guy?"

"Does he have sex appeal? . . . Can you smell the English leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva, the sort of mature man's shaving cream, or whatever, you know, after he shaved? Do you smell that sort of, a little bit of cigar smoke?" "

So said Chris Matthews about Fred Thompson — from a list of quotes of the year assembled by Glenn Greenwald, who editorializes that Matthews is "fantasizing about the pleasing, manly body smells of Fred Thompson." Greenwald's unnumbered list is hit and miss, but I'm amused by the manifestations of male enthusiasm for manly males.

"What's appealing about Rudy Giuliani is not the generous side, what's appealing about him is the tough cop side.
Right. You just wait until daddy gets home.
Yes, that part...
That Daddy.
... of the daddy. It's the tough cop side, so...
Yes. Yes" --
Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman, breathlessly sharing their excitement over the firmness of their Daddy, Rudy Giuliani.

He has "chiseled-out-of-granite features, a full, dark head of hair going a distinguished gray at the temples, and a barrel chest . . . . and has shoulders you could land a 737 on" --
Roger Simon, The Politico's chief political columnist, enthusiastically admiring numerous parts of Mitt Romney's body.

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian explains fragrances for men (and he really knows what he's talking about).

Bad idea, Giuliani kiddies.""> "Supporting anyone except your dad for President when your dad is running for President. Bad idea, Giuliani kiddies."

Bad ideas of 2007 — from the Daily News. That's #3 of 25.

"I think he would play the role that spouses have always played for presidents."

"He will not have a formal, official role, but just as presidents rely on wives, husbands, fathers, friends of long years, he will be my close confidante and adviser as I was with him."

Get into your cage, Bill Clinton!

Notice anything terribly wrong with Hillary Clinton's answer to Wolf Blitzer's question?

"I really regret that anybody would try to politicize this tragedy. I personally knew Benazir Bhutto..."

Huh? The question wasn't about Bhutto, and the clip of Barack Obama had him criticizing her about Iraq. She gives a little smirk and a shake of her head as if Obama had just politicized the Bhutto assassination — which he hadn't mentioned (unless there's some editing) — and then she goes on to promote herself based on her various meetings with Bhutto. I'm not going to criticize her for "politicizing the tragedy" though. I'm going to criticize her for not answering the question asked, for cueing up a robotic answer, and for not having much of substance to say about the problems we have going forward with Pakistan. I don't want hushing about "politicizing the tragedy" filling up the time that should spent on a serious discussion of our policy toward Pakistan.

(Thanks to my son John for sending me the link to this clip, at TPM's YouTube channel Veracifier.)

ADDED: Here's the Washington Post's assessment of how the various candidates did responding quickly to an important incident:

One candidate, Democrat John Edwards, passed with flying colors. Another, Republican Mike Huckabee, flunked abysmally. Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain were serious and substantive; Republicans Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani were thin. And Barack Obama -- the Democratic candidate who claims to represent a new, more elevated brand of politics -- committed an ugly foul...

Then Mr. Obama committed his foul -- a far-fetched attempt to connect the killing of Ms. Bhutto with Ms. Clinton's vote on the war in Iraq. After the candidate made the debatable assertion that the Iraq invasion strengthened al-Qaeda in Pakistan, his spokesman, David Axelrod, said Ms. Clinton "was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, which we would submit was one of the reasons why we were diverted from Afghanistan, Pakistan and al-Qaeda, who may have been players in the event today."

The clip above makes more sense if we see Hillary as responding to that, and I wonder whether the TPM editing was unfair.

IN THE COMMENTS: Christopher Althouse Cohen (my son) writes:

I watched the whole interview when it aired, and the clip you see here directly follows a long conversation about Benazir Bhutto and what should be done in Pakistan. Obama's comments should be looked at in the context of him attempting to connect Clinton's vote for the war with Bhutto's assassination, which he has personally done. Clearly, that's what she was speaking about and she interpreted the clip as being in that context. Wolf Blitzer did some kind of a lead-in from the discussion of Bhutto to showing the clip from Obama that the YouTube clip leaves out in order to make her answer look bad. People on YouTube are out to get her, and you need to look at the entire context.

Do you love a movie that everyone else hated?

In the first post of the day today, I condemned a movie about Heaven:

This was an early CGI film that was enough to make me never want to see another CGI film. And I only saw the trailer for it.

That made Blake write:

Ann Althouse casually dissed one of my favorite movies on her blog, which provoked in me a great idea for a forum topic/series of blog posts: Movies I loved that everyone else hated....

So, why do I like ["What Dreams May Come"]? ... [T]he "Hell" that Annie (Annabella Sciorra) goes to isn't a place she's assigned to by some bureaucratic angels, it's a place she herself has created through her grief. In other words, Heaven and Hell are made of the same stuff, just not by the same people. It also seems to be far, far away from Heaven, which reminds me of St. Augustine's notion that "Evil is distance from God".

The post inspires a comment from Trooper York:

The reason why people hate this movie can be spelled out in two words: Robin Williams. I have some rules in life: Never play cards with any man named "Doc." Never eat at any place called "Mom's." And never, never, no matter what else you do in your whole life, never go to see a movie starring Robin Williams.

Okay, so we've really got 3 topics here now, don't we?

1. Movies you love that everyone else hated.

2. Movies you're willing to condemn with confidence based on the trailer.

3. Rules for life movies.

I'll start:

1. Pecker.

2. Already answered. But it's my reaction to most trailers. Sometimes the feeling is so strong, I feel compelled to try to help people by saying something out loud — "There's no way that's a good movie" or perhaps a subtly vocalized "Ugh!"

3. Any movie with Claude Rains is worth watching. (A rule best demonstrated by "Deception." Sample line that is incredibly cool because it is said by Claude Rains: "Like all women: white as a sheet at the sight of a couple of scratches... but calm and smiling as a hospital nurse in the presence of a mortal wound... Good night!")

"Mike Huckabee is learning how it feels when people actually pay attention to what you're saying."

Huckabloopers.

"You may have seen that some Hillary Clinton 'sock puppets' were recently outed on a New Hampshire blog, to the campaign’s great embarrassment."

Thanks, Matt Bai, NYT Magazine writer who is now also blogging on the NYT website. I'm extremely interested in that story, which I missed. I see you have created a link on those words "a New Hampshire blog," but when I click on it, I just get the whole blog! If you're going to blog, Matt, you have to link to the relevant posts. And he's written a book on blogging. Come on, Matt, links are key. Now, I'm forced to Google for the damned story myself, which is not a very bloggy experience.

Easiest to find is this, from the WaPo:

[R]eaders of Blue Hampshire -- about 800 a day, a relatively small but consequential group that includes party activists and state Democratic leaders -- recommend "diaries" that visitors should read. Yesterday, four readers who created new accounts and recommended pro-Clinton postings were traced back to Clinton's campaign. And those readers, Blue Hampshire noted, didn't disclose their relationship with Clinton. In the blogosphere, there's a word for this frowned-upon behavior: "sock-puppeting."

WaPo links to the relevant post at Blue Hampshire, which shows the ineptitude of the puppetry:

Recently, we admins noticed this comment thread on a recommended diary, and the oddities it posed made us look a little deeper than we normally would.

As the comment thread revealed, users pinballwizard, elf, shley24, MTAY all registered in succession to recommend the diary. A further look by us revealed that:

* they had registered within minutes of each other, including another user a bit later, janbaby, who was not among the recommenders,

* the same IP address was used by all of them, and is registered to the Clinton campaign,

* two other recommenders, blues and kmeisje, also registered from the same IP address.

Surely, there must be much more puppetry that escapes attention if this is how dumb it is when it's caught.

Meanwhile, here's how Matt Bai begins his most recent post: "I’m still trying to get used to blogging...." Please. Spare me the neophyte posing. You wrote a whole book about blogging! You should be demonstrating the art of master blogging.

ADDED: Speaking of Matt Bai not linking, I was just reading (and linking to) this essay he wrote about Stephen Gilliard — who died this past year. Look at how it ends (with my boldfacing):

[T]he few dozen mostly white bloggers who came to Harlem for the funeral saw for the first time the stark urban setting of Gilliard’s childhood, while his parents and relatives groped to understand what kind of work he had been doing at that computer and why scores of people had come so far to see him off. They must have been confused when Gilly’s online pals, sickened by the way some right-wing bloggers were gloating over his death, advised them not to disclose where he was buried, out of fear that someone might deface the site. The grave, like Gilliard himself, is known only to a few.

What right-wing bloggers? What did they say? Were "Gilly's online pals" correct in their characterization, or were they out of line? This just hangs there. NYT readers are left to think ill of the right wing of the blogosphere. Why, they're a bunch of monsters who want to piss on a young man's grave! Did any significant blogger gloat over Gillard's death?

AND: Speaking of inadequate linking at the NYT... Glenn Reynolds notes a NYT book review that has a hyperlink on N.R.A., where the reference is to Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration, that takes us to a list of articles about the National Rifle Association. The mistake is still there 2 hours after Glenn conspicuously shamed them about it. The NYT should be making a conspicuous show of its professionalism and superior resources on the web, but instead it is making mistakes that would mortify me — in my little one-person operation.

"If he overidentifies with Sharpton, he looks like he’s only a black candidate."

"A black candidate doesn’t want to look like he’s only a black candidate.... A white candidate reaches out to a Sharpton and looks like they have the ability to reach out. It looks like they’re presidential. That’s the dichotomy."

Said — is it too obvious? — Al Sharpton.

And from Julian Bond: "A portion of black voters want Obama to give them some raw meat. Because they want so badly to have their concerns addressed and highlighted, and they expect it of him because he’s black."

From a NYT article titled "A Biracial Candidate Walks His Own Fine Line":

Too young to have experienced segregation, [Barack Obama] has thrived in white institutions. His style is more conciliatory than confrontational, more technocrat than preacher. Compared with many older politicians, he tends to speak about race indirectly or implicitly, when he speaks about it at all....

In his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Mr. Obama recalls sitting with a white, liberal Democrat in the Senate and listening to a black, inner-city legislator, whom he identified only as John Doe, speechifying on how the elimination of a particular program was blatant racism. The white colleague turned to Mr. Obama and said, “You know what the problem is with John? Whenever I hear him, he makes me feel more white.”

Mr. Obama finds a lesson in that moment: White guilt has exhausted itself. Even fair-minded whites resist suggestions of racial victimization. Proposals that benefit minorities alone cannot be a basis for the broad coalitions needed to transform the country, he concluded. Only “universal appeals” for approaches that help all Americans, he wrote in his book, “schools that teach, jobs that pay, health care for everyone who needs it” can do that, “even if such strategies disproportionately help all Americans.”

Exiting through the door marked 2007.

The NYT Magazine has its annual "Lives They Lived" issue, with short essays on a wide range of individuals who died in the past year.

A blogger gets a farewell essay this year. Steve Gilliard:

Though Gilliard, unlike many bloggers, always used his real name, few readers knew much about him. They didn’t know, for instance, that at age 39 he had open-heart surgery to repair an infected valve. They didn’t know he lived alone in a small apartment in East Harlem. And, although Gilliard often wrote about race and alluded to his own perspective, a lot of readers never realized he was black....

The paradox of Gilliard’s existence is a familiar story on the blogs, where people often adapt avatars that are more like the selves they imagine being. Online, he was vicious and uncompromising. In person, Gilly, as his close friends called him, was reserved and enigmatic.... He lamented that he didn’t know what it was to “wake up naked in a strange bed,” but, he wrote, “at 35, I’ve figured out that this is it, at least for now. Anything I do, any life I make, is going to revolve around words and computers and strange, bright people.”

[T]he few dozen mostly white bloggers who came to Harlem for the funeral saw for the first time the stark urban setting of Gilliard’s childhood, while his parents and relatives groped to understand what kind of work he had been doing at that computer and why scores of people had come so far to see him off.

There was Brett Somers, one of "The Match Game" celebrities:

She wasn’t Mae West, 80 trying to act 20, or an embalmed Gabor, but rather, with her Elton John glasses and Toni Tennille hairdo and saucy answers, an average-looking menopausal woman with a healthy regard for sex. In one of the most memorable broadcasts, Somers’s husband, Jack Klugman, was on the panel and seemed to be rushing the host, Gene Rayburn, along, as if to say that he and Somers had something better to do.

There was Mary Crisp:

Crisp testified before a Congressional committee on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1973 without really thinking about it much supporting the E.R.A. had been a Republican Party position for nearly 35 years. (The Democrats had been more split, some worrying that the amendment would wipe out hard-won but ultimately counterproductive laws protecting women from things like working overtime or lifting heavy objects.) But in 1978, Crisp ran head-on into the new insurgent right, which had built its grass-roots strength on issues like opposition to the E.R.A. and abortion. Once it became clear that Reagan was going to be the party nominee, she knew her time was just about up...

The Republican Party made Crisp nonexistent at the convention she had helped organize. Her name vanished from the program. She left her Detroit hotel clutching a big pink stuffed elephant inscribed, “Go Mary!” which, alas, she could not fit into the airport taxi.

There was Robert Adler, the guy who invented the object some people hold in their hand more than any other object.

Two animals got recognized — a parrot and a chimpanzee — because they almost, maybe, cared about talking to us.

And here's a list of the famous people who died in 2007. As usual, it's a diverse group of people thrown together by the happenstance of death occurring around the same time. It excludes those who died too close to the publication date — but Benazir Bhutto made it — and those — it could be you or I — who die in the last few days of the year. We do have 3 days left. The new list starts with January, so, the spiffy look of the list is more important than acknowledging those who slipped into eternity through the closing door of the previous year.

Denny Doherty, 66, Mamas and Papas singer....

Frankie Laine, 93, hit-making crooner....

Anna Nicole Smith, 39, famous for being famous....

Kurt Vonnegut, 84, novelist who caught the imagination of his age.....

Don Herbert, 89, "Mr. Wizard" to science buffs....

Tammy Faye Bakker, 65, emotive evangelist....

Michelangelo Antonioni, 94, Italian movie auteur.

Ingmar Bergman, 89, master filmmaker....

Luciano Pavarotti, 71, tenor of his generation....

Joey Bishop, 89, last of the Rat Pack....

Norman Mailer, 84, towering writer with matching ego...

Evel Knievel, 69, legendary daredevil...

Ike Turner, 76, R&B singer and former husband of Tina Turner.

Don't you picture them traveling together into the afterlife? Didn't I see a movie with a diverse group of recently dead persons making the passage? I remember them in black and white, on a small boat, and arguing. Let's check this list:

1. Between Two Worlds (1944)... passengers on a shrouded luxury liner visit with The Examiner, who hears their cases and tickets them for their next destination, depending on who they were and how they died....

Close. It's a boat, but it sounds too large.

2. A Matter Of Life And Death... (1946).... the differences between Brits and Yanks—when the latter arrive in heaven, they stampede straight to the Coke machine....

I'm sure I never saw that, judging from the clip at the link, with David Niven sitting on the escalator to heaven.

3. Black Orpheus (1959)... following the rhythm of Carnival and the belief that the barrier between life and death can be easily, almost playfully circumnavigated, for those with the right attitude and the right paperwork.

This is one of those classics I always felt I should see back in the days when I was fulfilling the obligation of seeing all the classics. But I've never seen it.

4. Defending Your Life (1991)... After dying, mortals go to a big, bland city full of big, bland courtrooms, where their lives are examined to see whether they've conquered fear enough to be ready for the next stage of existence....

This is a pretty good Albert Brooks movie with Meryl Streep that got many viewings chez Althouse in the 1990s. It always irritated me that getting into heaven was an entirely 1990s American idea of self-actualization. "Self-actualization" isn't the right word, though, is it? People stopped saying "self-actualization" more than 15 years ago, I think. It sounds self-indulgent, but nevertheless more challenging than "self-fulfillment," which is what we'd say now. Imagine access to heaven depending on whether you'd fulfilled yourself on earth.

5. Afterlife (1998)... government workers... operate out of a run-down rural facility where the newly dead spend a week among peeling paint and bargain-basement furniture, selecting the memory from life that means the most to them. Then the facility staff recreates those memories on film for the dearly departed, who take nothing but that memory when they move on to whatever comes next.

This is an elegant movie, focusing on what is being left behind and not the arrival in the next world. We see a strange little place of transition.

6. Corpse Bride (2005)... the dead seem to hang out in skeletal or zombie form in a big Burtony goth-tinged paradise full of aggressively animated "inanimate" objects and spontaneous song-and-dance routines.

Not what I'm trying to think of, but it sounds cool.

7. Beetlejuice (1988)... recently dead couple Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis wind up haunting their old house... Davis and Baldwin have to acclimate via a handbook titled Handbook For The Recently Deceased, and because they’re held in place by an apathetic, overworked, hostile bureaucracy full of people whose bodies clearly and comically display the marks of their ugly deaths.

Excellent. I've seen this one many times. But it's not the one I'm trying to remember. Perhaps I'm thinking of an old "Twilight Zone."

8. The Rapture (1991)... Michael Tolkin’s oddball meditation on apocalypticism. After Mimi Rogers, suffering in the desert waiting for the second coming, performs a mercy killing on her daughter, she winds up on a featureless, vaguely otherworldly plain.

I remember Siskel and Ebert raving over this one back then.

9. Carousel (1956)... starts off with Gordon MacRae already dead and reaping his eternal reward, as part of a crew hanging up glittering stars in a space that might represent the sky, but which more resembles the auditorium in a particularly well-funded high school during a “Starlight Express”-themed prom.

That's not it.

10. Flatliners (1990).... the afterlife is a terrific place, full of Elysian fields or giant naked boobs, depending on the proclivities of the people who go there.

Fine-tune your fantasies, people, before it's too late. Make sure it's something you won't find tedious after a billion years.

11. What Dreams May Come (1998)... heaven ... has kindly guides to help newcomers adapt and understand the next phase of their existences, and it even adapts itself to its inhabitants' personal interests and tastes....

This was an early CGI film that was enough to make me never want to see another CGI film. And I only saw the trailer for it.

12. Don't Tempt Me (2001)... Heaven is a deserted, black-and-white version of vintage Paris where everyone speaks French, and a deserving soul like Victoria Abril gets her own private ’30s nightclub where hundreds of illusory patrons hang on every note she sings and beg for more...

In the audience, perhaps, Denny Doherty, Frankie Lane, Ike Turner, and Luciano Pavarotti.

Bloggingheads! The Forgotten Carrots Edition!

It's me and Stephen Kaus.

Topics:

Covering the Bhutto assassination: NBC drops the ball (08:47)
Would a second Clinton presidency offend Jefferson’s ghost? (07:09)
Hillary’s secrecy about her First Lady days (08:36)
Prosecuting steroid use in baseball (10:42)
Ron Paul’s many weird ideas (11:16)
Ann schools Steve in the art of blogging (09:20)

You'll cry. You'll laugh.

The Death and Life of Ice Cream:



(I love the comments over there: "dude.. i would of ate that.")

"When a fly lands on a ceiling, does it execute a barrel roll or an inside loop?"

Questions The Explainer never answered.

"We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahadeen."

Al Qaeda claims credit for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

ADDED: "It was a spectacular job. They were very brave boys who killed her," said one militant leader. But note, it wasn't the bullets that killed Butto: "Bhutto was killed when she tried to duck back into the vehicle, and the shock waves from the blast knocked her head into a lever attached to the sunroof, fracturing her skull."

"Bhutto was fearless."

David Ignatius on Benazir Bhutto:

I remember encountering her once when she was a graduate student at Oxford, shaking up the august and occasionally somnolent Oxford Union debating society as its president. She was wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt, the one with the sassy tongue sticking out, and I recall thinking that Pakistani politics would never be the same once she returned home, and I recall thinking that Pakistani politics would never be the same once she returned home.

Christopher Hitchens:

I found out firsthand how brave she was. Taking the wheel of a jeep and scorning all bodyguards, she set off with me on a hair-raising tour of the Karachi slums. Every now and then, she would get out, climb on the roof of the jeep with a bullhorn, and harangue the mob that pressed in close enough to turn the vehicle over. On the following day, her Pakistan Peoples Party won in a landslide, making her, at the age of 35, the first woman to be elected the leader of a Muslim country....

And, right to the end, she carried on without the fetish of "security" and with lofty disregard for her own safety.

How dare you talk about Hillary's voice for an entire minute!

Greg Sergent is disgusted that a minute was spent analyzing a campaign ad on "Hardball" last night. The commentators found it notable that the ad excluded Hillary's voice, which they speculated people are tired of hearing.

Sergent makes the don't-you-have-anything-better-to-do argument that I think needs to be recognized as nonsubstantive and trite. To Sergent's credit, he admits at the top of his post that it's a cheap shot and he's desperate. Anyway, start noticing this argument, and you'll see it's used all the time and get annoyed — as I am — by how desperate it is. It's really no different from saying I hate what you're saying or shut up, but it has this moral edge to it, as if you're neglecting some pressing obligations. The really rude way to put it is: Get a life. That is, you are not even a member of the human race if you are paying attention to this. You do not exist.

And let me add that it is worth analyzing the campaign commercials — even on the day Benazir Bhutto died.

"The 10 Most Anti-Christian Movies of All Time."

From New York Magazine. Don't miss the film clip at #1, which is "Uh, NSFW, unless you work in Hell."

(Via Feiler Faster.)

Great unknown musicians.

The 10 best of the year.

No They Do is the all-robot musical collective led by musicologist and "future's Alan Lomax," XJ3. Its album is the soundtrack of the inevitable future, in which robots destroy the human race, discover acoustic guitars and play robot folk music.

And that's just #10.

"We welcome and accept Will Smith's statement that Hitler was a 'vicious killer.'"

Noted.

What various law types read in 2007.

Collected at Legal Times — including an entry by me.

ADDED: You have to register to read it, so let me copy what I wrote:

My favorite reading experience this year was walking around New York City and listening to the audio version of Eric Clapton’s autobiography [Clapton: The Autobiography] and then going directly into the audiobook of Alan Greenspan’s autobiography [The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World].

I loved the Clapton-Greenspan segue. Like Clapton, Greenspan found his first grounding in life in music. Clapton, the better musician, proceeded into the creative, destructive, disordered life of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Greenspan got far enough down the musical path to play alongside Stan Getz, but he packed up his clarinet and moved into a brilliantly orderly life observing the creative destruction of capitalism. Now, as I continue to walk the streets of the city, the street corners keep reminding me of rock ’n’ roll, economics, and the delightful company of Eric and Alan.

Why does Naomi Wolf regret working for Al Gore?

Was it because her advice that he wear "earth tones" and establish that he is an "Alpha Male" brought him and her ridicule that continues to this day? No! It's that she took money to work for the Gore campaign. And it's a "big mistake for any writer" to take money from a candidate:

[B]ecause you can't then say whatever you want to say whenever you want to say it. That was the great luxury of being a freelance writer and beholden to nobody--which I had been, up until then.

Writers have to be free to criticize anybody and criticize the powers that be and to always be transparent with their readers. So since I was formally signed up with the campaign rather than volunteering as I had in '96

The problem with "earth tones" and "Alpha Male" wasn't that her advice was silly or embarrassing, it's that "the evil Republican National Committee... completely invented " it, and she "wasn't in a position, contractually, to hit back."

So it was very frustrating, when I'm used to being able to speak up, to not have a voice when the Bush Team was doing such a brilliant job of what we have subsequently learned is their specialty: creating imaginative lies and saturating the media with them.

This is from a Huffington Post series called "My Favorite Mistake," which I think is supposed to be about your own mistake (and how much you learned from it). Obviously, there is an immense temptation to identify something good you tried to do and to use the occasion to condemn your nemesis. Wolf succumbed.

My mistake was being so naive about how profoundly evil my enemy is.

"David Gregory Does Battle With Talking-Point Dispensing Robot."

Writes David Linkin (linked by Stephen Kaus). He's talking about Hillary Clinton in a maddening exchange with David Gregory. What struck me is this. She starts by deflecting Gregory's characterization of the way her campaign has treated Barack Obama. She calls it "inaccurate," and when Gregory asks what was unfair about it, she says, "I'm going to let voters decide that, not the press." Get it? Not the press. Then, referring to her status as "a proven leader," she says, "That's what The Des Moines Register said...." In other words, the press. She then proceeds to answer every probing question with the Des Moines Register:

... Well, I would ask people to read the Des Moines Register editorial....

... You know, [Bill Clinton] not only said that, but the Des Moines Register editorial implied that....

I'm very happy that I have -- I have strong supporters and I have editorial support....

I know listening to George Bush for the last 8 years has been trying, but are you prepared to listen to this for the next 4 — maybe 8 — years?

Shame on NBC News.

At 7:26 this morning, Central Time, I received a "breaking news" email from CNN, saying "Ex-Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has died, according to media reports." After quickly putting up a post, I thought the best way to see the unfolding news would be television. To my surprise, the 3 network news shows were not covering the story. All were either running commercials or doing the usual morning show material about your family's health or some American crime scene. I shifted to CNN and Fox News. Fox had Greta Van Susteren reminiscing about the time she spoke to Benazir Bhutto, so only CNN was seriously covering the story.

After a while, I went back to see if the network shows had caught up, and only ABC had. Most shocking was the "Today Show," which I set to record on my TiVo and filmed — crudely, sorry — to show you how appalling it was:



As you can see, Matt Lauer and Ann Curry are horsing around on the street, Matt introduces the news reader, and she proceeds to tell us that Benazir Bhutto has been wounded.

The next story is about a murder investigation in Washington, followed by the tiger escape in San Francisco, a pit bull mauling, and then — replete with photos of shoppers riding escalators — the way some people go to the store after Christmas.

It goes on. There's Willard Scott with the weather. There's a festive weather map of America dotted with snowflakes and Mr. Sun wearing sunglasses. Local weather. I stop the video at this point, but the embarrassment continues.

They go to commercial and return with a long story about colds and herbal tea. A long commercial break follows, and then we see Matt Lauer, sitting in front of a silver-wrapped package and silver balls, warmly sympathizing with us about the travails of celebrating New Year's. He's got a lovely lady in a low-cut top next to him on the sofa and, on the coffee table, there's a line-up of champagne flutes filled with champagne and other champagne-like drinks. Now, it's a pre-recorded segment on "all things bubbly." Back to Matt: Can he tell the difference between $5 sparkling wine from a can and $100-a-bottle Dom Perignon? That's got to be a more important question than whether Benazir Bhutto has died and what might happen in Pakistan. It is now 8:26 Central Time — an hour after the CNN email. Matt takes the taste test and guesses. The lady (Jenna Wolfe) giggles and says "Now, I don't remember which one I gave him." So they can't even get the idiotic champagne tasting right! Matt acts like it's just really funny.

Commercials. Local weather again. Commercial. Video of a cheerleader getting knocked down by football players. It's just one of many video clips that "caught our attention this year," we're told by a pretty woman sitting on the sofa, flanked by two pretty women and — over to the left — Willard Scott. Now, it's back to the story of the girl who survived the plane crash. The women murmur and coo mindlessly — "ooh," "mmm," "heartbreaking." And — you know what? — there is a coach who has helped his team overcome adversity. They chatter about what to do for New Year's. Why not cook something with your kids? They have some recipes for you. Willard says he likes to be with the family on New Year's Eve — "make cookies, drink cocoa." More weather from Willard. More local weather. Commercials. Plane crash survivor. Commercials. That coach who helped the team. Commercials. Those recipes. Commercials. Local news (about the weather). Commercials.

Finally, it's the top of the hour, 9:00 Central Time, and we see a picture of Benazir Bhutto, with the dates 1953-2007. Matt Lauer and Ann Curry are on the sofa, and Matt says he's back now with more. "In just a moment, we're going to have the latest on the suicide bombing today in Pakistan that killed former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. We're going to have a report on that in just a couple of minutes." And also more on that tiger attack. And that plane crash survivor. It's "nothing short of miraculous."

What an embarrassment!

Benazir Bhutto has died.

Terrible news.

Pakistan former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has died after a suicide attack, according to media reports.

Geo TV quoted her husband saying the politician had died following a bullet wound in the neck....

The attacker is said to have detonated a bomb as he tried to enter the rally where thousands of people gathered to hear Bhutto speak, police said....

Earlier, a spokesman for Bhutto told CNN she was safe and taken away from the scene.

Trees, snow, moon — at 7:26 a.m.

Nothing subliminal here.

(Via Bloggingheads.)

"If you want to find out if someone's really a libertarian, ask him: Do you think children should be allowed to buy heroin from vending machines?"

"A real libertarian will answer: Only if the vending machines are privately owned."

James Taranto retells an old joke (and then lambastes Ron Paul).

"WaPo writer Keith Richburg's journalistic hand-job" on Al Sharpton.

TNR's Dayo Olopade graphically expresses displeasure at WaPo journalism.

Unserious.

I've been looking back over my 2007 archive and putting together some year-end posts as I've done in the past, and I ran across this reference to a crazy Bloggingheads snafu that made me laugh a lot back in February. But I couldn't embed the video back then, and I can now, so let me show it to you. It's Jonathan Chait and Jonah Goldberg, and neither knows that Chait's camera is going into demo mode:

Vlogging the alternative radio studio.

I'm passing the time, waiting for the show — described here — to go on:



You should be able to listen to the show here ("A Public Affair," today, at noon.)

A tiger escaped from its enclosure and roamed around the San Francisco Zoo preying on human beings.

Astounding. Imagine going to the zoo — on Christmas — and encountering a free-ranging Siberian tiger. Three men were severely mauled, and one has died.

The zoo's director of animal care and conservation, Robert Jenkins, could not explain how Tatiana escaped. The tiger's enclosure is surrounded by a 15-foot-wide moat and 20-foot-high walls, and the approximately 300-pound female did not leave through an open door, he said.

"There was no way out through the door," Jenkins said. "The animal appears to have climbed or otherwise leaped out of the enclosure."

Let me quote — as I did when a 300-pound gorilla escaped from his enclosure — these lines from The Life of Pi:

[Zoo] animals do not escape to somewhere but from something. Something within their territory has frightened them ... and set off a flight reaction. The animal flees, or tries to. I was surprised to read at the Toronto Zoo ... that leopards can jump up to eighteen feet straight up. Our leopard enclosure in Pondicherry was sixteen feet high at the back. I surmise that Rosie and Copycat never jumped out was not because of constitutional weekness but simply because they had no reason to. Animals that escape go from the known to the unknown--and if there is one thing an animal hates above all else, it is the unknown.

This may be so, and then the question is not why Tatiani was able to escape, but why she wanted to and why so many other zoo animals do not.

The hangdog photo is bad, but "[w]hen the news is about your son actually hanging a dog...."

Great laugh line shoehorned into a WaPo article on bad photographs of candidates.

But let's read the article, which displays that terrible photograph of Hillary Clinton — we talked about back here — and talks about the various candidates:

In the partisan media (much of the blogosphere, the tabloids and several cable channels), these images are used freely and gleefully. In media that strive for objectivity, the hangdog shot raises difficult issues. In an earlier age of newspapering, sorting through the archives for an image that confirmed your headline was acceptable practice. Today, serious newspapers try to use images from the most recent campaign events rather than something a few months old, even if it fits the story line better....

And yet, the hangdog image is almost irresistible. All the hard-edged questioning in the world, all the grilling at news conferences and televised debates may fail to knock the candidate off message. But a single image of a sad, powerless, depressed politician is enough to break through the kabuki makeup and get at the Shakespearean psychic meltdown that is supposedly just underneath the surface.

Supposedly? We love to stare at the photographs that reveal the humanity of distant celebrities, but are these just as illusory as the smiling masks they try to wear all the time? The point is that there are so many images out there, that the choice of photograph is the real expression, and that belongs to whoever is displaying the photograph.

How to make patients think of the nurse as a doctor?

Have the nursing program give doctorate degrees and start calling the nurses "doctor"?

[O]pponents... say a plethora of professional doctorates will confuse patients and cheapen the prestige of academic doctorates, or Ph.D.s. Universities should not be forced to dole out doctorates to students doing master's level work, as is happening with nursing...

I agree with the opponents. A master's degree is not a doctorate. And I include the J.D. degree and note that no one goes around calling lawyers "doctor." Sometimes I get letters addressing me as "Dr. Althouse," and I invariably regard it as a mistake.

What was Hillary Clinton's experience as First Lady that might qualify her for the Presidency?

Patrick Healy writes an important piece in the NYT, and I urge you to read the whole thing. The first few paragraphs stress that Hillary Clinton did not have a security clearance, attend National Security Council meetings, receive a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing, or "assert herself" on various crises.

But read on. Healy interviewed Mrs. Clinton and various others, and I think an impressive picture of her experience emerges at some point. I am, as I've said many times here, averse to the idea that the position of First Lady is a springboard to the Presidency, but I could feel myself softening as I read this:

Friends of Mrs. Clinton say that she acted as adviser, analyst, devil’s advocate, problem-solver and gut check for her husband, and that she has an intuitive sense of how brutal the job can be. What is clear, she and others say, is that Mr. Clinton often consulted her, and that Mrs. Clinton gained experience that Mr. Obama, John Edwards and every other candidate lack — indeed, that most incoming presidents did not have.

“In the end, she was the last court of appeal for him when he was making a decision,” said Mickey Kantor, a close Clinton friend who served as trade representative and commerce secretary. “I would be surprised if there was any major decision he made that she didn’t weigh in on.“In the end, she was the last court of appeal for him when he was making a decision,” said Mickey Kantor, a close Clinton friend who served as trade representative and commerce secretary. “I would be surprised if there was any major decision he made that she didn’t weigh in on.”...

Mrs. Clinton said in the interview that she was careful not to overstep her bounds on national security, relying instead on informal access....

She said she did not attend National Security Council meetings, nor did she have a security clearance — though she was briefed on classified intelligence before going on some important diplomatic trips.

“I don’t recall attending anything formal like the National Security Council,” she said, “because I had direct access to all of the principals. I spent a lot of time with the national security adviser, the secretary of state, other officials on the security team for the president. I thought that was both more appropriate, but also more efficient.”

Mrs. Clinton declined to say if she ever read the President’s Daily Brief, a rundown of the latest intelligence and threats to national security provided to the president each day. “I would put that in the category of I-never-talk-about-what-I-talk-to-my-husband-about,” she said. But she indicated, and other administration officials confirmed, that Mr. Clinton would sometimes talk to her about contents of the briefing.

“Let me say generally, I’m very aware of and familiar with what the P.D.B.’s actually are, how they work, what they include,” she said. “And it wasn’t always through the Clinton administration — when I went to Bosnia, for example, I had a full briefing from the military commanders there about what the situation was like.”

Hillary Clinton is in a very strange position where if she claims too much experience, she confesses to overstepping limits. She didn't have a security clearance or the official role of co-President, but you get the sense that, at the time, she behaved as though she did. Of course, now, she's compelled to deny it, but she also wants to let us know that it's true. Yes, I know: how Clintonesque. And yet, I'm inclined to accept the experience argument now. What next? Grill her about those decisions during the Clinton years!

Mrs. Clinton said she was “only tangentially involved” in Mr. Clinton’s first major overseas test, whether to send American soldiers after the Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid and his forces, a raid that ended in 18 American deaths. Asked if she had pressed for an invasion, she said she had acted “more as a sounding board” for Mr. Clinton....

Asked about her role in Somalia and Haiti, [former Secretary of State Warren] Christopher said in an interview, “She wasn’t at any of the meetings in the Oval Office or cabinet room, and didn’t take any formal role that I saw.”

Spare me the "formal role"/"tangentially involved" niceties, and hold her to account. Make her defend Bill Clinton's decisions or tell us exactly what she thinks he did wrong. And don't let her dodge around by playing on our feelings about the marital relationship.

Christmas decorations, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and a radio alert.

I'll be on WORT radio today at noon Central Time, talking about Christmas decorations and the Constitution with Annie Laurie Gaylor of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. (She's a co-president of the organization, which is based in Madison.)

You have to be in a 50 mile radius of Madison to listen on the radio (at 89.9 FM), but you can listen on line here. We'll be in the studio and taking questions by phone. At (608)-256-2001 or (toll free) at (866) 899-WORT. After the show, go to the archive to listen.

If you want to bone up on the law beforehand, read Lynch v. Donnelly — the case where a creche was held constitutional — and County of Allegheny v. ACLU — the case where the creche was not constitutional (but a Christmas + menorah was). For extra credit, read Capitol Square Review Bd. v. Pinette — which held that Ohio violated the KKK's free speech rights by not letting it put up a cross on the statehouse square. There are also the two cases about Ten Commandments displays that were decided on the same day in 2005 Van Orden v. Perry (constitutional) and McCreary County v. ACLU (unconstitutional).

The Freedom from Religion Foundation just filed suit against mayor and City Council president of Green Bay, Wisconsin, over a creche outside city hall:

Mayor [Jim] Schmitt says Christmas is a nationally-recognized holiday, and city leaders have every right to adorn city hall with Christmas flair.

"I'm saddened by what has all transpired here. I'm saddened by the lawsuit, by some of the divisiveness it's caused, but it's Christmas and I'm going to celebrate it," Schmitt said....

"They're sending a message of endorsement of christianity over other religions and they're sending a message of exclusion to everybody else," said Annie Laurie Gaylor....

"In my opinion, it was a very expensive for taxpayers publicity stunt by a right-wing politician," Gaylor said.

Expensive? The expense is the litigation.

Here's an opinion piece by Dan Barker (who is the foundation's other co-president):

[S]ome of us do find the anti-humanistic nativity scene offensive since it assumes we are all sinners in need of salvation and slaves who need to humbly bow to a dictator — in a country that is supposedly proudly rebellious, having fought a Revolutionary War to expel the king, sovereign and lord.

And here's my 2004 post about the Christmas decorations in the Wisconsin Capitol building, including a photograph of a sign the state allowed the Freedom from Religion Foundation to display, which tells us "Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens the heart and enslaves the mind."

ADDED: Here's some background on the Green Bay creche. Don't miss the time line:

Wednesday, Dec. 12 – Schmitt is bombarded with e-mails, phone calls and criticism and praise for the display. He says the city likely will have to honor all requests for display space until the City Council can draw up guidelines and limits.

Thursday, Dec. 13 – City receives six formal requests to display symbols on the roof.

Friday, Dec. 15 – Practitioners of Wicca, a religion associated with witchcraft, drop off a wreath containing a pentacle, a five-pointed star used as a Wiccan symbol for the elements of nature. The wreath is installed on the entrance roof.

Saturday, Dec. 16 – City receives a request to display a plain aluminum pole, said to be a symbol of Festivus, a religion promoted by the TV show "Seinfeld."

Monday, shortly after midnight – Police receive a report someone removed the Wiccan display. Schmitt announces no displays other than the nativity scene will go on the roof until the City Council meets and decides a policy....

Ironically, trying to make the public recognition of Christmas more serious ends up making it more of a joke. There is a symbiotic relationship between litigious atheists and pandering politicians. They serve each other's interests, but does anyone else benefit?

ADDED: I corrected mischaracterization of the creche in Lynch.

UPDATE: Gaylor ended up phoning in and only making herself available for 5 minutes. She had her points ready and reeled them out on cue. But when she took at gratuitous swipe at George Bush for closing the federal government on the day before Christmas, and I disrupted the presentation by asking if she thought the Christmas holiday violated the Establishment Clause. She refused to answer and rushed off the phone. I got the impression that she was unnerved at the idea of going off script and exposing her ideas to scrutiny. I noticed that she continually asserted that the Establishment Clause law is very clear — which is laughably wrong and therefore best to done as a monologue or when — excuse the expression — preaching to the choir.

The Christmas cat.

(No, I didn't get a cat for Christmas. I'm not allowed to own pets. That cat just found a warm spot on my car.)

Merry Christmas.

I hope you have a happy Christmas, if you're celebrating Christmas. Is anyone here not celebrating Christmas today? If so, is it because you never celebrate Christmas or is this year different for some reason? Are you experiencing Christmas woes? For Christmas solace, congregate here.

"I know it's the holidays but we hope people use some common sense when traveling."

Did the weather wreck your Christmas plans?

Highways remained slippery for some holiday travelers Monday in the upper Midwest in the aftermath of a blustery snowstorm that blacked out thousands of homes and businesses and snarled air travel....

Early Monday, Sgt. Tim Elve of the Dane County Sheriff's Office said: "The roads aren't quite as ice-covered but we're still telling people not to drive unless they have to. The interstate is still slick and the rural roads are really bad."

Authorities had issued urgent pleas for travelers to stay home Sunday but officials worried that people would insist on driving Monday, regardless of the weather, to get to Christmas Eve destinations.

What are you doing to save Christmas?

IN THE COMMENTS: All I'm getting is people bragging about how good the weather is where they are. No one want to talk about the bad things that happened? Well, I know I don't. But I was trying to send out a subtle signal of empathy.

It's Christmas Eve, and thus far the posts aren't looking too Christmasy."

So let's go back to the previously blogged Christmas Eves and republish the most Christmasy one from each year.

2004:

First Encounter with Santa Claus.

Here I am, the skeptical one in the center. I'm almost 3, and the year is 1953. My sister Dell is enjoying the moment, while I'm suspicious about that beard and the lack of convincing attachment around the mouth.

2005:

Blue Christmas.

The view from my window, tonight at nightfall:



It seems that every year, there's something that gets us started singing "Blue Christmas." Like last year, it was another photograph: here.

Now we're listening to various versions of "Blue Christmas" -- first Elvis (the best), then Ringo, then the Beach Boys (the second best), Jon Bon Jovi, Vince Gill, Willie Nelson (nicely zippy), Fats Domino, Low, Leon Redbone, the Platters, Chris Isaak, Dean Martin, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Harry Connick Jr., Sheryl Crow (the worst!), Booker T. & the MGs, John Holt (reggae does not fit this song), Tammy Wynette... I note that most artists try to sing the song like Elvis -- it's pretty much homage to Elvis for Ringo, Bon Jovi, and many others. Too many people make a big point of slowing the song way down (which is, apparently, a way of life for Low). Ah, now we're back to Elvis, with a different version, from the 1968 TV special. The greatness of Elvis really came through in that little exercise.

You'll be doin' all right, with your Christmas of white/But I'll have a blue, blue Christmas.

2006:

Christmas Eve.

It's the third Christmas Eve for this blog, and I was just looking back to see what I did last year for the occasion, and I see that I looked back to the previous year and saw that I decided to repeat this photo I put up the first time I blogged Christmas Eve:



There, now, it's definitely a tradition.

Which child is me? The more skeptical one.

ADDED: And remember Palladian's version?

Now, my echo has acquired an echo.

"What we do is try to inject a brief moment of wonder that helps wake them up from that rushed stupor. That’s the true holiday spirit, isn’t it?"

Shopdropping = planting some item of yours in with a store's merchandise.

Anti-consumerist artists slip replica products packaged with political messages onto shelves while religious proselytizers insert pamphlets between the pages of gay-and-lesbian readings at book stores.

Self-published authors sneak their works into the “new releases” section, while personal trainers put their business cards into weight-loss books, and aspiring professional photographers make homemade cards — their Web site address included, of course — and covertly plant them into stationery-store racks.

Does it amuse you? Do you admire the shopdroppers? Or are they more like vandals?

This week an arts group in Oakland, the Center for Tactical Magic, began shopdropping neatly folded stacks of homemade T-shirts into Wal-Mart and Target stores in the San Francisco Bay Area. The shirts feature radical images and slogans like one with the faces of Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian anarchist. It says, “Peace on Earth. After we overthrow capitalism.”

What's the bloggiest sentence ever written?

Can you come up with anything to beat this?

Well, someone else read that post and used Google Reader's new "share" function to flag it and then I read the post and though I already knew waterboarding was torture, I'd never heard of the Aquatic Ape hypothesis before so I've been looking into that (it seems that most scientists reject it for what sound to me like good reasons) ... all in all an excellent way to waste some time while semi-watching the Giants play the Bills.

Blogging is doing something to our minds....

Masculine conundrum.

Is this a manly leg?



(Via Wired, via Andrew Sullivan.)

Originally, I wrote: Is this a manly arm? — a mistake that I caught by clicking to this and that goes part of the way toward answering my question.

I think that boy is going to spend a lot of time alone with that leg.

And quite aside from the crazy idiocy of a man giving silicone implants to his tattoo of a lady, that's an incredibly badly-drawn tattoo. For a while, I was looking at it and wondering why the artist made the woman so fat, and then I realized that was her right arm. And look at the left hand. It's anatomically all wrong. Well, what's the point in nit-picking, really, when you're dealing with an aesthetic blunder of this dimension? And I don't even want to talk about the effect of the man's leg hair on the woman's groin.

ADDED: Here's the theme song for that tattoo.

"It's apparently endorsement season in the blogosphere."

Writes Dan Drezner, reflecting on Andrew Sullivan's endorsement of Ron Paul. (Note: For the Republican nomination. Sullivan endorsed Barack Obama on the Democratic side, so... do the math.)

Do you want your bloggers endorsing candidates? Perhaps some, but not all. I don't see myself as the candidate-endorsing sort of blogger.

Let's take a closer look at Ron Paul.

Here's the transcript of Ron Paul on "Meet the Press" today. He stimulates our thoughts, and he adds important dimension to the debate, so I can see why a lot of people love to encourage him. But let's focus:

TIM RUSSERT: ... [T]his is what you have been saying on the campaign stump, "I'd like to get rid of the IRS. I want to get rid of the income tax." Abolish it.... What would happen to all those lost revenues? How would we fund our government?...

REP. PAUL: .... You need the income tax to police the world and run the welfare state. I want a constitutional-size government.... To operate our total foreign policy, when you add up everything, there's been a good study on this, it's nearly a trillion dollars a year. So I would think if you brought our troops home, you could save hundreds of billions of dollars....

MR. RUSSERT: It's 572,000. And you'd bring them all home?

REP. PAUL: As quickly as possible. We--they will not serve our interests to be overseas. They get us into trouble. And we can defend this country without troops in Germany, troops in Japan. How do they help our national defense? Doesn't make any sense to me. ...

MR. RUSSERT: Would you cut off all foreign aid to Israel?

REP. PAUL: Absolutely. But remember, the Arabs would get cut off, too, and the Arabs get three times as much aid altogether than Israel. But why, why make Israel so dependent?...

MR. RUSSERT: So under your doctrine, if we had--did not have troops in the Middle East, [al Qaeda] would leave us alone.

REP. PAUL: Not, not immediately, because they'd have to believe us....

MR. RUSSERT: Do you think there's an ideological struggle that Islamic fascists want to take over the world?

REP. PAUL: Oh, I think some, just like the West is wanting to do that all the time...

MR. RUSSERT: You would vote against the Civil Rights Act [of 1964] if, if it was today?

REP. PAUL: If it were written the same way, where the federal government's taken over property--has nothing to do with race relations....

MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. "According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery."

REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the--that iron, iron fist...

MR. RUSSERT: So you think we're close to fascism?

REP. PAUL: I think we're approaching it very close....

Ron Paul supporters: Are you serious?

Let me read Andrew Sullivan's endorsement of Paul:

For me, it comes down to two men, Ron Paul and John McCain. That may sound strange, because in many ways they are polar opposites: the champion of the surge and the non-interventionist against the Iraq war; the occasional meddling boss of Washington and the live-and-let-live libertarian from Texas. But picking a candidate is always a mix of policy and character, of pragmatism and principle...

I admire McCain in so many ways. He is the adult in the field...

Let's be clear: we have lost this war....

McCain, for all his many virtues, still doesn't get this. Paul does....

The great forgotten principles of the current Republican party are freedom and toleration. Paul's federalism, his deep suspicion of Washington power, his resistance to government spending, debt and inflation, his ability to grasp that not all human problems are soluble, least of all by government: these are principles that made me a conservative in the first place. ...

He's the real thing in a world of fakes and frauds....

So I guess Sullivan is serious, but he's serious at a level of abstraction that I think is really quite dangerous.

Fretting about the crèche.

Part 1: "'Your people shall be my people and your God my God.' I meant those words when I spoke them. I don't have to believe in the same God as my husband for these words to be true. I don't have to believe in God at all."

Part 2: "Tell him to take us to court to get it out of there. As far as I'm concerned, they can leave it there." "I take any such display to violate the separation of church and state, a concept which I hold dear." "This is very ironic, because much of Sauk County was settled by non-religious people."

"This season makes me think that individualism is way overrated."

Nina writes:

Isn’t it true that most people view themselves as being quite independent, carving their own path, listening to some internal voice rather than conforming to the (petty) demands of others?

It seems that the time you most like to do your own thing is when what is expected is too annoying, too displeasing, uncomfortable, grating.

If you place two individuals in the same room and both view themselves as being extraordinarily independent, what happens?...

[I] no one bends, then, unless you’re both on the same planet with your individualism (and it can happen, but how likely is that?), you’re going to be running past each other all the time.

Don't do it!

I don't know what "it" is, but it sounds really important. Am I being a troublemaker?

Nice photo at the link. Is the girl really dreaming? Or is she terribly unhappy? Look at her eyes.

"If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I'd take the fingers..."

Says a guy who waterboarded himself (but did not sledgehammer himself).

527s!

"Bitter attacks":

"John yesterday said that he didn't believe in 527s," [said Barack Obama]...

“I do not support 527 groups. They are part of the law, but let me be clear: I am asking this group and others not to run the ads. I would encourage all the 527s to stay out of the political process,” [said John Edwards]...

... Obama said his concern was not with the independent spending by labor unions per se but with the question of Edwards' character.

"I love labor," he responded. "It's just important not to say that you oppose" 527 spending "the day before" the spending begins. ...

"I already said I'm against 527s," Edwards said, ignoring a question about whether he'd call publicly for his allies to cease spending on his behalf. "I've been fighting against these people my entire life."

In 2004, Edwards demanded that President Bush stop independent spending on his behalf by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth with "three words: Stop these ads."...

But a person close to the group [said it] was barred from responding to Edwards' call for them to stop advertising — because that would constitute coordinating with his campaign, which is illegal.

Count the delicious ironies.

Twittering the Iowa Caucus.

Clever.

Graffiti on State Street, in Madison, Wisconsin.

I'll bet your mom is buying you presents right now. Isn't she ignorant? The sheep. Doing what the corporations have trained her to do. She doesn't know what real emotion is. Unlike you. Thanks for you chalky wisdom.

Did you come out in the drizzling rain last night to a place that looked like this?

A random photo from the Madison meetup, which happened last night. Were you there?

ADDED: Dan from Madison was there, and he told an amazing story about that time somebody was ringing his doorbell incessantly at 4 a.m. — ringing it with his nose.

No embedding? No comments? The Royal Family on YouTube.

The Royal Family has a YouTube channel now — here's the BBC report — but it's really not much fun at all. Too controlling. I can understand keeping us from messing up your site with comments, but embedding is key. I want to mess up my own site with your video, but you'll have to relinquish some control.

I did watch Queen Elizabeth's first TV Christmas message from 1957, and fortunately there's a link to the transcript, so I can quote something (and correct a bad typo):

Twenty-five years ago my grandfather broadcast the first of these Christmas messages. Today is another landmark because television has made it possible for many of you to see me in your homes on Christmas Day. My own family often gather round to watch television as they are this moment, and that is how I imagine you now....

That it is possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us. Because of these changes I am not surprised that many people feel lost and unable to decide what to hold on to and what to discard. How to take advantage of the new life without losing the best of the old.

But it is not the new inventions which are the difficulty. The trouble is caused by unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery.

They would have religion thrown aside, morality in personal and public life made meaningless, [honesty] counted as foolishness and self-interest set up in place of self-restraint.

So even as YouTube is now new, television was once new. And just as television was part of a world that tempted people to throw out religion and live a life of meaningless immorality, we've got the internet making us feel lost and unable to decide what to hold on to and what to discard. We're still worrying about whether we're throwing out all religion and morality, and it's got to be a little heartening to see the Queen wringing her hands about it 50 years ago.

"Is Bill a loyal spouse or a subconscious saboteur?"

The Bill and Hillary psychodrama.

Is Bill torn between resentment of being second fiddle and gratification that Hillary can be first banana only with his help? Their relationship has always been a co-dependence between his charm and her discipline. But what if, as some of her advisers suggest, she turned out to be a tougher leader, quicker to grasp foreign policy, less skittish about using military power and more inspirational abroad? What if she were to use his mistakes as a reverse blueprint, like W. did with his dad?

When Bill gets slit-eyed, red-faced and finger-wagging in defense of her, is he really defending himself, ego in full bloom, against aspersions that Obama and Edwards cast on Clintonian politics?

Maybe the Boy Who Can’t Help Himself is simply engaging in his usual patterns of humiliating Hillary and lighting an exploding cigar when things are going well....

Hillary advisers noted that when Bill was asked by a supporter in South Carolina what his wife’s No. 1 priority would be, he replied: C’est moi! “The first thing she intends to do is to send me ...” he began.

He got so agitated with Charlie Rose — ranting that reporters were “stenographers” for Obama — that his aides tried to stop the interview...

Maureen Dowd sounds absolutely right to me. I note that she's reacting to the Matt Bai article that appears in this week's NYT Magazine. I reacted to it on Wednesday and said something similar:

If you were writing a novel about the 2008 presidential campaign, wouldn't you want Bill Clinton as your main character? What a complex situation he is in. He stands to gain power, but his time is also over. He can help his wife, but he can also hurt her. He is supposed to fight for her, but he's continually tempted to justify himself. He has the more creative mind, but he cannot outshine her.

This too. (About that priceless quote: "Everything I'm saying here is my wife's position, not just mine.")

So: Loyal spouse? Subconscious saboteur? Frankly, I think he's too smart for it to be subconscious. I think he's devoted to her, but he's a dominant male, and the situation is inherently complex. Perhaps he wants conflicting things, but he must primarily want her to win, and assuming that's so, he needs to get control of himself in public so that we never see the part of him that wants her to lose.

"You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us."

"Is that so, Spirit?"

For the annals of unflattering photographs.

The NYT presents Mike Huckabee:



Go to the link for the full size version of the photo by Spencer Tirey.

Doesn't he look like he's morphing into Dennis Kucinich?

"It is unclear whether Flew has lost the desire to reason effectively or whether he no longer cares what is published in his name."

Atheists wonder how believers can believe such things, but when atheists themselves turn into believers, can you believe them? When Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris are raking in so much money writing about their atheism, what's an old atheist to do? Where's the publishing niche? Ah, there!

I love that key clues are the words “beverages,” “vacation,” and “candy.”

Depression blogging.

The Top 10. (Via Culturite, via Metafilter.) Would you read a "depression blog"? Are you depressed? Would anyone answer "yes, no"?

"A 13 shot venti soy hazelnut vanilla cinnamon white mocha with extra white mocha and caramel."

In search of the most expensive Starbucks drink. "And me, wincing at the first sip."

(Via Metafilter.)

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..."

Oh, really? You saw them naked? Come on, Allen. Don't tell us that somehow you "figuratively" saw them. You said you saw them, and either you saw them or you didn't. Facts are stubborn things.

Nah, nah, he said it and it wasn't true. Or oops, maybe it was true.

How to visit a grave.

Do you visit a grave? Do you have a tradition? Pebble on the headstone? Something else? I saw this yesterday, done precisely the same for each of 4 or 5 graves in a line:



A small fire had burnt out. Each grave had bright flowers, a peeled banana, an opened tinfoil packet of rice and some other food (possibly chicken), and an opened can of some drink that had what looked like corn pictured on it.

MEANWHILE: "Decorations can be an impediment to backhoes, and there are liability issues in tripping over candy canes."

MYSTERY SOLVED: The canned drink is Yeo's Soybean Milk.

About those Christmas graveyard photographs.

I take fewer photographs in winter. It gets dark early, walks are shorter and quicker, and there's much less happening. I could make a practice of looking harder and forcing myself to see photographs, but I mostly I don't. Sometimes, things look photographable, but I'm driving. I could stop, but maybe a dog or a man will come at me to see what trouble I'm causing. In winter, there are fewer dogs and men to worry me, but who stops the car in a snow bank? Photographs go untaken.

Yesterday I stopped. I was driving, as I often do, on the road called the Speedway, that runs between the two cemeteries, Resurrection and Forest Hill.



Was it a joke, naming the road between the cemeteries the Speedway? You are alive, but not for long. Earlier in the day, I'd driven over 100 miles on I-94, and the fog had been much worse. I think I was the only driver on the road who was constantly thinking: This is how 50-car pile-ups happen. I drove so I could stop without crashing if I saw an accident ahead, and no one else did. People are crazy. So the graveyards in the fog called out to me. I stopped and stalked through knee-deep snow to get my pictures.

What first caught my eye were all the wreaths in Resurrection Cemetery:



Resurrection is flatter and less beautiful than the historic Forest Hill on the other side of the Speedway. Perhaps you know that Chris Farley is buried there. He died 10 years ago last Tuesday.



Where are you on the Speedway?

Snow fog.

Very foggy today... in the midst of much snow...



I was driving around...



Shopping for Christmas...



But the graves were standing still...

"Look, I don't comment on other people's comments. I don't have time, all right. I really don't have time to worry about this."

Condoleezza Rice does not have time to worry about Mike Huckabee, who probably thinks that sounds "arrogant."

"These people are coming after me personally, something I have not done. They're coming after me personally the way the libs do."

Rush Limbaugh versus Mike Huckabee.

The continuing travails over talking about race in the classroom.

Here's the latest news story about my colleague Leonard Kaplan, who — you'll remember if you're a regular reader — offended students in the course of teaching his Legal Process class by saying something that was taken as insulting to the Hmong people:

The UW-Madison rejected a complaint by Law School students who asked for discipline against Professor Leonard Kaplan for remarks allegedly insulting the Hmong, according to a document obtained by The Capital Times from an open records request....

"My clients are entitled to a learning environment in which they are not subjected to hostility for defending their beliefs, cultural heritage and desire for a truly diverse academic classroom environment," attorney Daniel Ye said in the complaint....

Even if Kaplan's views of the Hmong were wrong, ill-informed or hurtful, they were not properly a subject for disciplinary action under the rules of the university, [Provost Patrick] Farrell wrote, adding that Kaplan's statements were delivered as part of a regular class lecture in his Law School course, and they appear to have been germane to the topic covered that day.

Should Nickelodeon cancel "Zoey 101" to teach young kids a lesson about teen pregnancy?

The star, 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears, has gone and gotten herself pregnant by her boyfriend, the 19-year-old Casey Aldridge. (There's also the question whether you think society would be better off if the baby's father were imprisoned for 10 years for statutory rape.) David Hinckley writes:

[I]f Nickelodeon keeps Spears on its airwaves, the network will seem to be saying that unmarried teen pregnancy, a major American problem, is negotiable if the unmarried teen is a good earner....

It's not that Nickelodeon has ever lived in some '50s sitcom world where kids never face tough issues like sex. Spears' character in "Zoey" has faced them herself.

But Nick, unlike many other media, doesn't wink at ill-advised behavior or ignore its potential consequences, and that's what the current Spears flurry is really about: consequences.

All 16-year-olds make mistakes. They all need forgiveness, from others and themselves. But forgiveness does not erase consequences, and Jamie Lynn doesn't get a pass because she was unbelievably stupid, even allowing for the fact brains don't run in her family.

Wait. What's "unbelievably stupid" here? Having sex when only 16, not acing birth control, or failing to have an abortion?

It also doesn't excuse her that she has little experience with consequences, though it's true. First, there's her sister. Second, there's her mother, who got a contract from a Christian publishing house for a book on parenting while her older daughter was turning into an international poster girl for lunatic hedonism.

Is this a moral principle you want to apply across the board? Extra punishment for offenses committed by individuals whose family members have committed similar offenses? Why not extra forgiveness?

Speaking of forgiveness, a Christian virtue, it is the Christmas season, when we celebrate the birth of a child to a 14-year-old girl.

ADDED: Lots of comments inside. Let me add a few things. First, you don't know how careless she was about birth control (or whether she chose to get pregnant). Pregnancy can happen to any fertile woman who does not practice abstinence. If you insist on harsh consequences, what are you doing? You may push some young women into abstinence, but you will push others toward abortion. I'm all for teen abstinence, but I also believe in looking at the world that is and being practical and compassionate. They made some mistakes. So did you. So did your kids.

Bill Clinton on Hillary Clinton: "Everything I'm saying here is my wife's position, not just mine."

Bill Clinton is out and about, burnishing his image, basking in the glow of attention. By the way, his wife is running for President. When he's not referring to that woman as "his wife," he likes to refer to her as "she":

"The reason she ought to be president, over and above her vision and her plans is that she has proven in every position she has ever had in life, whether it was in elected office or not, that she is a world-class genius in making positive changes in other people's lives."

Making positive changes in other people's lives.... It sounds so presidential so wifely.

World-class genius... Must we talk about that too? Two thoughts:

1. A man calls his wife a genius. Does it mean anything, even if he charges it up with the 90s modifier "world-class"? "World-class" actually detracts from it. If a man tells you his wife is a "great cook," are you more likely to believe it's anything more than the guy's preening about his own stature if he makes it "awesomely great"? If he tells you his wife looks like a model, does your mental image of her improve if he says she looks like a "super model"? A man is bragging about his woman: That places her ever more firmly in the position of his woman.

2. Remember the way people talked about John Kerry in 2004? Supposedly, he had a brilliant mind, full of "nuance" and "complexity." But, as I wrote at the time, the evidence was lacking. There was also some discussion back then about whether smarter actually is better for a President. But some people — dare I say, especially on the left? — are susceptible to the argument that the most intellectually brilliant candidate ought to win. And right now, these poor souls are being massaged by statements like Bill's about Hillary. So where's the evidence?

I've been reading Carl Bernstein's book "A Woman in Charge." Here's a passage:

By tenth grade, Hillary had realized that she was by no means the smartest member of her class, and that to compete at the top level of academic achievement she would have to work harder than others. She was an honor roll student by force of will, intense preparation, and dutiful study. Even with such extraordinary effort, her grade point average was too low to be among the top ten students in her class.

Meanwhile, Alan Greenspan's book "The Age of Turbulence" lavishes praise on Bill Clinton for his intellect (especially for his grasp of economics and his perception of how things would change in the future). Greenspan classes Bill Clinton with the smartest of all the Presidents he has known: Richard Nixon. Which brings us back to the point that "smartest" doesn't encapsulate what you really want in a President.

ADDED: I love found humor. I was just Googling around for some talk about the irritating adjective "world-class" — the usage panel does not accept it as "as a vague way of emphasizing magnitude or degree" — and I found this 2005 blog post from Brad Feld:

I heard the phrase "world class" three times today. I've decided to toss it on the scrap heap of "phrases that mean nothing to me anymore." I'm finishing up Friedman's The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century(which is awesome BTW - definitely a world class book – I’ll be done on my SF to Chicago trip Thursday night.) It dawned on me that the phrase "world class" isn't indexed against anything. No one ever says, "that's not world class, it's American class."...

In my first company, we talked briefly (I think about 60 seconds) about creating a mission "to be the best software consulting company in the world." After all the MIT / Brown / Wellesley people in my company laughed (“hey Brad, who gives a damn about a stupid vague unattainable mission like that?"), I / we realized that vapid phrases didn't inspire anything (except internal contempt). It took more than 60 seconds to come up with our mission, which was "We suck less."...

We delivered more often then not. So - while we never achieved that elusive "world class" status, we definitely sucked less most of the time. And - when I wandered down the hallways saying "guys - focus on sucking less - that's the key to our success", people rallied a lot more than if I had shouted "we are going to be world class" from the rooftops.

Of course, Bill Clinton can't be saying of Hillary, "She sucks less." But the truth is that's all most of us expect from a candidate, for them to suck less than the others.

I want the government to give me more presents.

I would have thought this was a parody attacking Hillary Clinton, but she's Hillary Clinton, and she approved of this message.

(Via Instapundit.)

ADDED: Isn't this like when you get presents from family members and you know they charged it on your credit card?

"What is astonishing to me is that the fashion industry is allowing these people to become important."

"These people," meaning bloggers.

Idiot.

Meanwhile, Manolo loves Manolo.

"I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim."

So said Bob Kerrey:

"It's probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim... There's a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal."

Underhanded? Should he apologize for saying that? He did:

"What I found myself getting into in Iowa - and it was my own fault - it was the wrong moment to do it and it was insulting... I meant no disrespect at all."

It was the "wrong moment" because he was in the middle of endorsing Hillary Clinton. So whose idea was it for him to say it? His own?

Kerrey's mention of Obama's middle name and his Muslim roots raised eyebrows because they are also used as part of a smear campaign on the Internet that falsely suggests Obama is a Muslim who wants to bring jihad to the United States....

The Clinton campaign has already fired two volunteer county coordinators in Iowa for forwarding hoax e-mails with the debunked claim. Last week, a national Clinton campaign co-chairman resigned for raising questions about whether Obama's teenage drug use could be used against him, so Kerrey's comments raised questions about whether the Clinton campaign might be using another high-profile surrogate to smear Obama.

Joe Gandelman writes that to take him at his word, you have to believe that Kerrey is terribly naive. It makes more sense to think he deliberately "injecti[ed' info and innuendo into the press and key news cycles," both with his original statement and with the apology.

To some voters, the image of the Clintons as political victims is being replaced by the image of the Clintons as political predators.

If there’s another “mistake” by a major Clinton supporter, it will mean there is a clear cut strategy to hit hot button issues and drive up Obama’s negatives no matter what the risk is to the campaign.

Do you need one more "mistake" to convince you that it's a Clinton campaign strategy?

ADDED: "Dropping the phrase 'Islamic manchurian candidate' in the midst of his 'apology'? C’mon."

"We believe Sondra is especially deserving of this honor because of the spirited way she campaigned for the title."

Oh, really? That's what divas do now? Campaign for recognition?

"Son, I would tell you what I bought you for Christmas if I thought we weren't going to make it."

"My kids were relying on me, and I'm scared, but you can't tell them you're scared."

"What breaks my heart are the really useful things that are now everywhere. A suzani can totally rock a bedroom..."

"... but if someone saw it on the edge of your bed they’re not going to gasp and say, ‘Where’d you get that?’ Which they would have last year."

From a NYT article that doesn't define "suzani". And I realize I don't care what a suzani is, only what amusing definitions for "suzani" you can make up. Remember a suzani can totally rock a bedroom. And last year if saw one on the edge of your bed last year they'd have gasped and been all "Where’d you get that?" But this year, no one cares, and the fact that no one cares is breaking someone's heart.

ADDED: Actually, the article defines "suzani." I just didn't care enough to read the next sentence. That was unfair to the NYT, and I apologize.

"There's a big relationship between this marvelous time of year and living in a one-party state."

Christopher Hitchens scrooges about Christmas.

IN THE COMMENTS: John wrote:

How can you get him to go home? He drank everything on the buffet, including the little sternos underneath the meatballs, pilfered the Irish whisky in your top cabinet, smoked his smelly fags in the kitchen, and passed out on the couch making his 31st North Korea joke. Everyone else left the party hours ago.

Trooper York:

Linus Van Pelt: Charlie Brown, you're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem. Maybe Lucy's right. Of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you're the Charlie Browniest.

Charlie Brown: No I'm not. Look at Christopher, he hates Christmas too!

Linus Van Pelt: What is doing over there?

Lucy Van Pelt: I think he is vomiting on a picture of Mother Theresa.

Linus Van Pelt: Is he sick?

Charlie Brown: No he is a political commenter. They do this all the time.... Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?

Linus Van Pelt: Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about.

[moves toward the center of the stage]

Linus Van Pelt: Lights, please.

[a spotlight shines on Linus]

Linus Van Pelt: "And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, 'Fear not: for behold, I bring unto you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.' And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.'"

[Linus picks up his blanket and walks back towards Charlie Brown]

Linus Van Pelt: That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

Charlie Brown: Mr. Hitchens what are you doing with that gun?...

Charlie Brown: Oh my god, Christopher Hitchens just shot Linus. And the little Christmas tree. Two shepherds. A donkey. And the partridge in the pear tree.

Lucy Van Pelt: Thank God Snoopy was packing and laid down a covering fire.

Christopher Hitchens: God had nothing to do with it you fools. There is no god. Only a stupid dog with a luger.

Linus Van Pelt: Thank god for the second amendment. And dogs with guns. God bless us all! Even you little Christopher Hitchens.

Christopher Hitchens: (vomits)

(A Charlie Brown Christmas starring Christopher Hitchens, 2007)

Rudolph the red-vested presidential candidate.

The vest is burning my retinas, but I laughed. And no it's-not-a-cross floating cross:

"He stood by what he knew was right."

John McCain's new ad:



Not many candidates are talking about Iraq these days, are they?

ADDED: McCain is also eschewing the holiday theme. No Christmas tree (or cross) in the background for him.

You say the beating of your hearts is the only sound, but I hear crickets.

Tommy James is confronted with an inconsistency in the 4-decades-old recording of "I Think We're Alone Now." He doesn't really have an answer to this fabulous pop-culture gotcha — which I heard a few minutes ago on XM radio "60s on 6" — so he drifts over into telling the story how he got his first hit, which wasn't "I Think We're Alone Now" but the almost equally sublime "Hanky Panky." This story has fascinating resonance with the issues we're facing today with illegal uploading and downloading on the internet. It turns out that Tommy and his band were stuck as a local band somewhere between Detroit and Chicago. Then one day he got a phone call telling him his song had hit #1 in Pittsburgh. How could that be? Someone had made 80,000 bootleg copies of the single and they sold right out. And that's how he got his start.

Can I infer that Tommy James and the Shondells will appreciate my embedding this here?



ADDED: Here's the group's official site. Buy some of their stuff.

AND: Fans of the old — defunct? — Audible Althouse podcast will remember — episode #64 — what my personal favorite Tommy James song is. Hey, I want to suggest it as a campaign song. Maybe for Barack Obama.

Mike Huckabee on his pardon record and Romney's.

Extremely well handled in this video clip from "The Today Show."

Also in the clip: denying that cross in his Christmas video was meant to be a cross and coming out strongly against Wall Street and those who want the votes of the evangelicals but not to see them in the seat of power.

IN THE COMMENTS: People want me to say he's lying about the cross. Based on what I said about it on Monday, you already know I do, but okay. I'll come right out and say it: I think he's lying about the cross.

The absence of...

... news.

Well, it was there before....

And the blogosphere goes wild.

UPDATE: When I originally posted, the first link came up with a picture of John Edwards, and no story. But now the story is clearly up and featured on the National Enquirer's home page. The paper may be trashy, but they are as susceptible to a libel suit as anyone. Edwards is a public figure, which limits his capacity to bring a lawsuit, but the paper also names another person. Read it for yourself.

ADDED: "Edwards' lawyer called The ENQUIRER and denied the well-coiffed Democratic candidate is the...." The well-coiffed candidate...

"Hillary doesn’t have to worry about her face. She has to worry about her mask."

It was inevitable that Maureen Dowd's column today would be about that picture of Hillary looking old that Matt Drudge put up for us all to talk about.

Exploiting Bill Clinton.

How can Hillary exploit Bill's popularity without opening up all the complexities of judging his Presidency? Matt Bai writes in the NYT Magazine:

When I asked Bill Clinton about this issue, during an informal meeting in South Carolina, he readily agreed to sit down for a longer interview on his legacy’s role in the campaign. A few weeks later, however, and at the last minute, Hillary’s aides canceled the interview. Famously controlling, they would not even allow the former president to talk about his record.

Interesting. You know, I was just watching the Charlie Rose interview with Bill Clinton, and I thought Bill Clinton seemed really angry about something. I had the impression that something was nagging at him that he couldn't talk about. I also noticed that he used the words "she" and "her" to great excess and rarely voiced his wife's name.

Here's Bai:

On those rare ocasions when the former president hasn’t been able to resist defending his wife or burnishing his own record, the results haven’t been especially helpful. Unlike Hillary Clinton and her team of advisers, who are relentlessly on message and disciplined, Bill Clinton is a more instinctual politician, given to improvisational moments that must torment his wife’s obsessive-compulsive aides. In November, Clinton suddenly asserted during a campaign appearance in Iowa that he opposed the invasion of Iraq from the beginning — an aside that he needn’t have offered and that clearly contradicted not only his wife’s Congressional vote but his own statements in the build-up to the war.

If you were writing a novel about the 2008 presidential campaign, wouldn't you want Bill Clinton as your main character? What a complex situation he is in. He stands to gain power, but his time is also over. He can help his wife, but he can also hurt her. He is supposed to fight for her, but he's continually tempted to justify himself. He has the more creative mind, but he cannot outshine her.

ADDED: You know, things like this — "Elder Bush nixes Clinton trip idea" — make me think Bill secretly wants Hillary to lose:

Former President George H.W. Bush has shot down his successor Bill Clinton’s idea of a diplomatic mission under a Hillary Clinton presidency that would send him and other notables abroad to assure other nations that “America is open for business and cooperation again.”

The move came one day after Bill Clinton made the suggestion on the campaign trail in South Carolina, in response to a question from a supporter about his wife’s “number-one priority” upon reaching the White House.

Why did Bill say that? It enlisted Bush 41 in what sounded like a plain insult to Bush 43.

MORE: Bill's way of talking about Hillary reminds me a bit of the way George Bush talked about Harriet Miers just before she withdrew:

Harriet Miers is -- is an extraordinary woman. She was a legal pioneer in Texas. She was ranked one of the top 50 women lawyers in the United States on a consistent basis....

Harriet Miers is a fine person....

Time's Person of the Year.

It's Vladimir Putin!

No one is born with a stare like Vladimir Putin's. The Russian President's pale blue eyes are so cool, so devoid of emotion that the stare must have begun as an affect, the gesture of someone who understood that power might be achieved by the suppression of ordinary needs, like blinking. The affect is now seamless, which makes talking to the Russian President not just exhausting but often chilling. It's a gaze that says, I'm in charge.

He's not just the Person of the Year, apparently. He's the Eyes of the Year. Time Magazine looked into them, and saw no soul. (Compare: "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy...I was able to get a sense of his soul.")

The Madison meetup.

I was talking about doing a meetup with readers here in Madison. Now, there's a plan, but you have to email me to get the time and place.

ADDED: There's some possibility of an Austin, Texas meetup. Email me at may gmail address (annalthouse) if you'll be in Austin in the next couple weeks and are up for this.

"It appears that GOP evangelicals see Mormons as second-class Christians."

"What a sad and incredibly ironic lesson for the Nation of Zion."

Letter published in today's Salt Lake Tribune, written by Jerry Boorda, anguishing over the Christian evangelical preference for Mike Huckabee over Mitt Romney.

But speaking of ironic... is the expression "Nation of Zion" helping Romney's cause?

Rubberbandjo.

I just noticed it would be really easy to become the #1 Google search result for "rubberbandjo." But if you really want to make a rubberbandjo, this looks like a plausible method. Or do you think "rubberbanjo" is a better spelling? Might as well capture the #1 for that too. Aw, come on. Don't tell me you're not fiddling with the office supplies as we wind down toward Christmas. Hmmm.... fiddling.... what have we got here....

IN THE COMMENTS: There's an effort to assemble the Alt House Band with everyone playing instruments concocted out of various items. I mention the washtub bass, and then matthew points us to the gas tank bass:



Loved it! Let me offer up one of my favorite songs with some of my favorite washtub bass:



AND: Let's have some whamola in this band:



MORE: Here.

Do even more difficult aesthetic standards apply to the male candidates?

Yesterday, we were talking about that picture of Hillary Clinton that appeared on Drudge. My son John Althouse Cohen emails:

I read the Dr. Helen post you linked to, which was basically my reaction to your post. A couple additional points along those lines:

(1) What's the simplest explanation for why Edwards and Obama are the only serious male contenders for the Democratic nomination, even though Biden, Richardson, and Dodd are so much more impressive on paper?

(2) At least a woman is just supposed to look good and then there will be no further discussion. In a sense, men have a higher standard to meet: first, they're supposed to look good ... but then they need to somehow convince people that they haven't put any effort into looking good. At least the complaint about that Hillary photo -- she looks bad -- is a clear problem with a clear solution: look better. But the complaints about Edwards -- he cares too much about his appearance -- could only be addressed by letting his appearance go ... which isn't politically viable either (considering the demands that are placed on all candidates to be visually appealing).

(Preemptive response to blog commenters: I know someone's going to say, "But he was only criticized for spending $400 on a haircut, which no reasonable person would do!" Well, a price that seems inexplicable for ordinary citizens might actually be reasonable for a national politician who has to constantly worry about looking good on TV. Also, even if it was an unreasonable expenditure, there is still an unfair gender disparity in how much something like that will hurt a male vs. a female candidate.)

McCain's...

... momentum.

"I will on no account vote for a smirking hick like Mike Huckabee, who is an unusually stupid primate...."

I was quickly glancing at an article I thought might interest me enough to be bloggable, and the first thing I saw was this:

However, what Article VI does not do, and was never intended to do, is deny me the right to say, as loudly as I may choose, that I will on no account vote for a smirking hick like Mike Huckabee, who is an unusually stupid primate but who does not have the elementary intelligence to recognize the fact that this is what he is.

The first thing I thought was: Oh, somebody is trying to write like Christopher Hitchens. Let's see who. Oops! It is Christopher Hitchens. Hummph. That's odd. Clearly, when I know it's Christopher Hitchens, I have a much more positive reaction to his writing. In fact, even now, as I reread that, knowing it is Christopher Hitchens, I feel my hostility soften.

ADDED: LOLHitchens.

own it.""> "The great thing about America, is that once you own property, you own it."

"Am I right? You can do anything you want with with that property. You can build a house on it, a business, you can plant flowers, grow daisies. Whatever you want to do with it. It's your property. You own it."

So says Drew Carey — obviously overstating it — but nicely capturing the emotional significance of ownership, in a well-made Wall Street Journal video about eminent domain. It's worth putting up with the intro commercial for the opening segment alone, where various men on the street are flummoxed by the question what is eminent domain. ("I don't know. I'm a tourist.")

Forget politics in this season of joy: Here's Huckabee's Christmas message.

It's not political, you big cynic:



I got this from Drudge, who says "HUCKABEE AD FEATURES FLOATING 'CROSS'... DEVELOPING..."

Well, I don't know what he's "developing" there, because the whole thing is a Christmas message. Huckabee tells us Christmas is "a celebration of the birth of Christ," and "Silent Night" is playing in the background. It's not like the cross is a sneaky, subliminal intrusion.

Let me confess that while I approached this video with an absolutely cold, clear view of how political it was for the Huckster to say he was setting politics aside, somewhere toward the end I got chills. In spite of myself.

OpenID commenting.

Have you noticed? It's gotten easier to sign in as a commenter here on Blogger. You can now sign in using your blog URLs from WordPress.com, LiveJournal, and AOL Journals, or with their AOL/AIM accounts.

This was totally...

... predictable. (Via Instapundit.)

That picture of Hillary on Drudge right now.

Have you seen it?



Caption: "The Toll of a Campaign." It seems so cruel. Immodest Proposals writes:

[T]his is the most significant photo taken in the year 2007. Think it will win a Pullitzer? Whichever photog snapped this photo effectively ended Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

There's no recovering from that, image isn't everything, but it counts for a lot, and her image in that photo isn't the image most Americans would want us to project as a nation. You don't have to be wrinkle free to be president, but you can't look haggard and bedraggled, either.

My first reaction to that picture is simple disbelief. How can she suddenly look that much older? I know Presidents age horribly in their few years in office, but she's not President yet, and this seems to have happened overnight. Did some treatment wear off?

But here's my second reaction, on reflection: We make high demands on women. A picture like this of a male candidate would barely register. Fred Thompson always looks this bad, and people seem to think he's handsome. We need to get used to older women and get over the feeling that when women look old they are properly marginalized as "old ladies." If women are to exercise great power, they will come into that power in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. We must — if we care about the advancement of women — accommodate our vision and see a face like this as mature, experienced, serious — the way we naturally and normally see men's faces.

ADDED: A reader (and regular commenter [Reader_Iam) emails this photo of Hillary taken Davenport, Iowa early this year: "I was literally inches from Clinton... I suppose it's possible that she's aged so much this year, but frankly I doubt it. I think she looked quite good in person (better than my photo captured). I think that Drudge photo is a little unfair, and perhaps--perhaps--a little suspect."



(The photo was done with an iPhone. I used iPhoto to crop the picture and to turn up the exposure to brighten the image. I didn't adjust the contrast or touch it up in any other way.)

CORRECTION: That last photo was sent to me by iPhone, but taken on a Nikon Coolpix 4600.

MORE: Eugene Volokh likes the Drudge photo:

I think it just makes her look more down-to-earth: Less carefully put together and more lived-in, an older professional woman on whom time has taken its toll — as it does on us all — but who has acquired the advantages of experience in exchange.

So, good. Eugene has the advanced vision I'm recommending for everyone.

YET MORE: Both Dr. Helen and The Anchoress note that men get attacked for their looks too.

Do voters worry that Bill Clinton will be a "'shadow president,' effectively circumventing the constitutional limitations on presidential service"?

Douglas W. Kmiec thinks this is a real worry that will dog the Hillary Clinton campaign. I know it bugs the hell out of me.

Anyway, Kmiec is talking about Bill receiving a formal position and comes up with the idea that H could appoint him to the Supreme Court! He mainly speculates about whether Bill would do it. In that regard, I note that Bill Clinton was always trying to appoint a politician to the Court (and only turned to Ginsburg and Breyer when his choices turned him down).

But isn't Bill spectacularly unsuited to the Court? His age and medical history alone would normally exclude him. And he'd have to recuse himself in some of the most important cases, it seems, as long as HC is Prez. But I'm sure he could handle the job, and it would be interesting to see how someone with his talents would transform the Court. The Justices are always so sober and scholarly. It seems to be a gray little world — for all its importance — but we all love a fish out of water story.

And imagine the hilarious turnabout when the Judiciary Committee calls in the witnesses to give him the Clarence Thomas treatment.

"It said my house is pink. I would not have a pink house, I assure you."

Says Mitt Romney. Context:

MR. RUSSERT: This was The Boston Globe back in December of '06. "As Governor Mitt Romney explores a presidential bid, he has grown outspoken in his criticism of illegal immigration. But, for a decade, the governor has used a landscaping company that relies heavily on workers like these, illegal Guatemalan immigrants, to maintain the ground surrounding his pink Colonial house." That was a year ago. A year later, The Boston Globe came back and the same company and illegal immigrants doing the same work. Did you report that company to authorities saying--a year ago--saying they're using illegal immigrants?

GOV. ROMNEY: Oh, it was, it was on the front page of The Boston Globe; a reporting was not necessary. But I have to clear up the most egregious error in that article. It said my house is pink. I would not have a pink house, I assure you. In an effort to--let me, let me describe the circumstance. And that is the very issue I just mentioned, which is we need an employment verification system in this country. I hire a landscaper to take care of my leaves and, and mow the lawn, and, and the landscaping company hires people to work for them. We're certainly not going to have an America where a homeowner is expected or even thought of going out and saying, "Gosh, I see some workers here who have an accent. I want them to bring papers so I can inspect them." As a matter of fact, I think that's against the law in this country. And so, in this case, the, the landscaper, or the contractor has a responsibility to ensure that their workers are legal.

Watch him say it here (at 5:17). He laughs. It's a joke. (Planned?) But why is it funny?

The last time we talked about the meaning of pink, it was that locker room at the University of Iowa which was painted pink to taunt or weaken the visiting team. It was subject to feminist critique:

After protesting the pink locker room at a Hawkeye home game in November, Jill Gaulding plans to file a complaint under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972...

"This [is] understood as a funny version of the slur that goes on in athletics about playing like a girl, playing like a sissy"...

"It’s based on a concept of gender hierarchy that says not only are boys and girls different, but more important it’s better to be a boy than a girl; it’s shameful to be a girl," said Gaulding, who is researching a book on cognitive bias and gender discrimination. "Anyone who’s not deeply in denial understands and acknowledges that the pink locker room taps into this very long tradition of using gender as a put-down."

So what does it mean to say I would not have a pink house, I assure you? It was a joke that he planned and inserted into the interview. He laughed to make sure you understood that it was a joke. But how are we to understand it as a joke? What is he trying to say?



IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian offers up the perfect film clip:



Glorious. I was picturing Mitt singing that song. Or maybe some Mitt impersonator on "Saturday Night Live." (I bet Giuliani would do it.)

TerriW said...

I guess he's not afraid of alienating the John Cougar Mellencamp fanbase.

Not to mention The Band.



AND: Commenter and New Orleans resident Beth thinks Mitt doesn't know that he's losing New Orleans.

The smart money is on Obama.

If by smart, you mean academics.

"Hryhoriy put his long life down to the fact he never married."

The world's oldest man dies.

In accordance with his wish that there should be no crying, a hearty meal was served of his favourite dishes: warm potato and herring, and cabbage with home-made sausage....

Oksana, one of the relations with whom he lived, said he had led an active life to the last, helping around the house, whether it was making dumplings or tending the chickens....

"He didn't find himself a mate because he was a short man and never had money," Oksana believes.

ADDED: Commenter ricpic writes another poem (and wins the title — it's been fought over you know! — of Poet Laureate of the Althouse Blog):

The commies came, the commies went,
Hryhoriy hardly noticed;
Earthbound, barefoot, his life was spent
Sausage, not Stalin, focused.

Live-blog it with me: the "Survivor" finale.

Come on. You're watching, aren't you? Let's talk in the comments. I'm for the mean girl. The eye-roller, who doesn't mind saying what she thinks of people. Did she have a strategy, or was she just horsing around? I don't know, but it was unconventional, and I'd like to see her get a million dollars for it. So, go Courtney. No, I'm not for the "lunch lady," Denise, because she never figured out why it was in her interest to support Peih Gee. And I'm not for Amanda, because I've seen too many contestants like her win. She's too boring. Todd is just too ridiculous with his endless pronouncements about what a clever player he is. The most attractive thing about him is his bitchy edge. But Courtney did bitchy better, so I'm for Courtney.

ADDED: The consensus on the Television Without Pity discussion board is that Amanda lost it at the final tribal counsel. There's some interesting gender critique:

[Orion7} I think she lost because she didn't step up and take responsibility. She needed to say, "Yes, I lied, and it bothered me to hurt people's feelings, but I wouldn't change a thing, because it's what got me here." Instead, she hemmed and hawed and looked timid. She looked as if she rode in on Todd's coattails, instead of the other way around. Todd admitted that he'd lied, and that it was strategic, not personal....

[Miss Alli] Colby and Tina notwithstanding, when men and women from the same alliance face each other before a jury, the jury generally says, "He was a spirited, awesome imp; you were a backstabbing phony." At final tribal councils, boys rule and girls drool. So it was and ever shall be.

She continued her niceness routine, which worked to avoid elimination, into the final council where she needed to claim credit. She thought she could win by being likable. It's funny to read the TWoP discussion and see how many people were disgusted by her "doe eyes." Is this anything like real life? Does it say anything about the glass ceiling? Perhaps not. In real life, you don't have to win favor specifically from a group of people you've harmed and with whom you have no ongoing relationship.

"You know who I love?"

"Sherlock Holmes."

"Don’t bogart the time, Barack. I’d like a hit...."

"... Carolyn, shouldn’t there be some timing device to let my young friend know when he’s going over, something that would go 'BONG!'"

Mitt Romney on "Meet the Press."

I'll write more when I can quote from a transcript, but I wanted to say that I thought Romney was excellent on "Meet the Press" just now. (And so was Tim Russert. Russert rules.)

Romney's voice was much improved over the high-pitched piping I've heard in the debates. Is it the one-on-one setting, the special TV microphones and computer processing, or is someone giving him lessons in how to sound like Ronald Reagan? I was multitasking so most of the time I was listening and not looking, and I thought he sounded really Reaganesque — the tone, the pauses, the personal warmth.

Warmth? From Romney?

I'm not kidding. Russert questioned him about his Mormonism. How could he accept a religion that did not abandon discrimination against black people until he was well into adulthood (age 31)? Romney carefully avoided saying anything negative about Mormons and instead concentrated on his family. His father, George Romney, walked out on the Republican convention in 1964 because of Barry Goldwater's position on civil rights. This chimes nicely with his repeated use of the phrase "faith of my father" or "faith of our fathers" when talking about his religion.

(Like most people, he's in the religion he's in, most likely, because it was his parents' religion. He doesn't come out and say: Oh, come on, don't needle me about the details of Mormonism; I'm just following a family tradition. But I think most of us understand that's how religion works, and that's why we don't bully people about why they believe (or "believe") the various odd doctrines of their sect.)

At this point in his story, he says that he still remembers when he heard that the Mormon church announced that it was abandoning its belief in discrimination. He was driving his car, he says. I am moved to tears. He then says, after I've started to cry, that he pulled over to the side of the road and wept. Now, that was well done. I felt the emotion in the story and cried before he says he cried. I don't normally cry at anything a politician says. I tend to laugh at anything sentimental, especially when it's at all self-aggrandizing. So I'm going to say he showed some fine — Reaganesque — skill.

Russert began the hour by asking Romney about his Mormon speech and focused in particular on the statement that "Freedom requires religion." Romney said a lot of things at this point that were designed to appeal to religious conservatives, but he finally got around to saying atheists and agnostics have their place in America too and that the key is to judge everyone as an individual. In his elaborate response, he kept invoking John Adams and George Washington, and I don't think most listeners understand the classic debate about religion and government that this refers to (which had James Madison and Thomas Jefferson on the other side). So it may have either sounded garbled or impressively grounded in history — perhaps depending on whether you like a good dose of religion in your government. It's the old debate about whether, generally, people need religion to be good citizens. Romney is trying to strongly ground himself in religion, while avoiding saying anything terribly offensive to those who think religion belongs in a separate realm from politics. Some of this felt a little off to me, but I understand what he was trying to do and that it's an immensely difficult task, so I still give him high marks as a candidate (for his party).

On abortion and health care, Romney relied heavily on federalism. He was especially persuasive talking about relying on the states to experiment with different solutions on health insurance. Here, he was able to confirm his belief in the value of the mandatory approach he instituted in Massachusetts, without saying he's ready to impose it nationwide. Conditions in Texas are different, but in the end, he hoped we might learn that what he did in Massachusetts was best. This was nicely moderate.

On abortion, he was clear that he wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, and this says a lot about the kind of Justice he would appoint to the Supreme Court. Russert tormented him with questions about his change of position on abortion, and he clearly conceded that he'd changed. He has a huge problem dealing with this issue, but I thought he handled it well, under tough questioning. I don't agree with him on this issue (as he presents himself now), so I'm only talking about his skill as a candidate here. I think it is very strong.

An excellent performance.

ADDED: Here's the transcript. Here's the key passage with the phrase "faith of my fathers" and the story of his family's commitment to civil rights:

I'm very proud of my faith, and it's the faith of my fathers, and I certainly believe that it is a, a faith--well, it's true and I love my faith. And I'm not going to distance myself in any way from my faith.

What went through his mind here? He's got a commitment not to criticize his church. But he's said enough for it to mean: I have criticisms and I could voice them, but part of my religion is not to voice them. Or part of my political strategy is to behave as if I'm taking the higher ground by leaving my sect uncriticized.

But you can see what I believed and what my family believed by looking at, at our lives. My dad marched with Martin Luther King. My mm [sic] was a tireless crusader for civil rights. You may recall that my dad walked out of the Republican convention in 1964 in San Francisco in part because Barry Goldwater, in his speech, gave my dad the impression that he was someone who was going to be weak on civil rights. So my dad's reputation, my mom's and my own has always been one of reaching out to people and not discriminating based upon race or anything else. And so those are my fundamental core beliefs, and I was anxious to see a change in, in my church.

I can remember when, when I heard about the change being made. I was driving home from, I think, it was law school, but I was driving home, going through the Fresh Pond rotary in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Rotary.

I heard it on the radio, and I pulled over and...

Here's where I am moved to tears.

... and literally wept. Even at this day it's emotional, and so it's very deep and fundamental in my, in my life and my most core beliefs that all people are children of God. My faith has always told me that. My faith has also always told me that, in the eyes of God, every individual was, was merited the, the fullest degree of happiness in the hereafter, and I, and I had no question in my mind that African-Americans and, and blacks generally, would have every right and every benefit in the hereafter that anyone else had and that God is no respecter of persons.

Russert asks a near-perfect follow-up: "But it was wrong for your faith to exclude it for as long as it did." Answer:

I've told you exactly where I stand. My view is that there--there's, there's no discrimination in the eyes of God, and I could not have been more pleased than to see the change that occurred.

Again, we see that commitment not to criticize his religion.

ADDED: "Tears have always been viewed as non-presidential."

"Hey Clinton, Stop Telling Young Voters to Stay Home."

The Facebook Group. (Via Politico.)

We created this facebook group to send a message to Senator Biden, Senator Dodd, Senator Clinton and Gov. Richardson.

We targeted the candidates above since they gave conflicting comments about student voters in the press and at rallies.

We wanted each of them to encourage students that are enrolled in a college in Iowa to caucus, even if that means they are not "from" Iowa.

When we say "from" Iowa we mean students who chose to move to Iowa to attend school. Richardson, Biden, Clinton and Dodd seemed to be saying those students should not caucus.

Why pick on Hillary Clinton with the name of the group? They say that's the name they started with, and there's no way to change it. But really, if you're going to put a candidate's name in the title of your Facebook group, are you going to put Biden, Dodd, or Richardson? Of course not. Frontrunners deserve special scrutiny.

Here's the page with the relevant candidate quotes. For Hillary:

"Hillary wants every student who lives in Iowa and wants to caucus in Iowa and is eligible to caucus in Iowa to do so. We hope that they will and we hope that they will caucus for Hillary. The Iowa caucus is special because it is based on Iowa values. We hope and trust that every campaign is making sure that potential caucus goers have all the information they need, and in no way explicitly or implicitly encourages anyone to break the law by participating in two places. Not only is it okay to engage students in Iowa, but it is critical to ensure that they are active participants in the process, and we are doing everything we can to get them out to caucus." –Howard Wolfson, Communications Director

The Iowa caucus is special because it is based on Iowa values. What does that mean? It sounds nativistic. Why do we start with Iowa, anyway?

Let's read Politico:

The argument centers on whether to encourage Iowa college students from out of state to caucus in Iowa — as the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is doing — or to frown at it, as the Clinton and Dodd campaigns have hinted at.

Drawing an implicit contrast with the Obama campaign, Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee said, "We are not systematically trying to manipulate the Iowa caucuses with out-of-state people; we don't have literature recruiting out-of-state college students.”

So, the Clinton campaign is accusing Obama of using underhanded tactics?

And Dodd’s Iowa state Director Julie Andreeff Jensen accused Obama of “scheming to evade either the spirit or the letter of the rules that guide the process.”

Scheming... manipulating...

Dodd declared that students who did not grow up in Iowa should not caucus, saying, "If you're from Hartford, Conn., and you're going to school at the University of Iowa, and you're paying out-of-state tuition, you're [unfairly] casting yourself as an Iowan."

Interesting that the rougher statements are coming from Dodd. Trying to help Hillary?

And what is he saying? Young people who go somewhere to live for years ought to go back home where their parents raised them if they want to participate in politics? The fact that a state school makes them pay more tuition imposes additional burdens?

David Yepsen, the influential Des Moines Register columnist, criticized the Obama campaign Dec. 1 for distributing a pamphlet informing student supporters that even if they are out of state on Jan. 3 they can return to Iowa and caucus at their school precinct.

Yepsen wrote, “These are the Iowa caucuses. Asking people who are 'not from Iowa' to participate in them changes the nature of the event.”

Yepsen himself admits that it’s legal for any student at a four-year college in Iowa to vote. The Iowa secretary of state posts information on how students can caucus from their campus address.

They scheduled the caucuses during the holiday break to drive you kids out of town. How dare you be so interested in politics that you'd come back early! Stay away, you bastards! Shouldn't you be hungover from New Year's partying or snowed in somewhere in New England or hiding from the winter somewhere in the South? You seem like just the nasty little idealists who'd be motivated by that damnably inspiring character Barack Obama.

[O]n Monday former President Bill Clinton [said:] “If this is your primary political identity then you should vote, but if it isn’t and you’re going to turn right back around and vote in a primary the next day then you shouldn’t because it means that your primary identity is not in Iowa.”

He's stuck 2 things together: participating twice (which actually is wrong) and having a "primary political identity." Toward the end of that (manipulative, scheming) sentence he suggests that participating in 2 states' processes is the definition of a "primary political identity." But he's creating a bad feeling that if you came to Iowa to be a student you're doing something wrong by participating without having the requisite "identity." And he's assuming that if you participate twice, the one that's wrong is Iowa. Why isn't it the other one?

A core American value is the right of citizens to move from state to state. If you want to talk about "identity," American identity includes an entitlement to relocate in another state. Now what is Iowa identity? What are Iowa values? What does it mean to ask young people to question whether they have Iowa identity and Iowa values?

The Hillary campaign has since issued a statement encouraging students to vote provided they don’t fraudulently participate in both their home state primary and the caucuses.

Okay, so they got caught, it hurt, and they backed off.

ADDED: And speaking of inadequate hyperlinking at the NYT... Glenn Reynolds notes that a NYT book review has a hyperlink on "N.R.A.," in a discussion of Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration, that sends us to a list of articles about the National Rifle Association.

It's not as if the Web were invented yesterday. Get up to speed! I'd be mortified if I'd made a mistake on my little one-person operation here. The NYT should be proving to us constantly that mainstream media has a professional quality that puts independent bloggers to shame. Instead, we bloggers have to write posts shaming mainstream media.

Two top 10 lists.

What is true about the persons on the first list is the opposite for those on the second list. Try to guess what it is before clicking on the link.

The first list:

1. Johnny Depp
2. Matt Damon
3. George Clooney
4. Jack Nicholson
5. Rosario Dawson
6. John Travolta
7. Katherine Heigl
8. Jay Leno
9. Dakota Fanning
10. Russell Crowe

The second list:

1. Will Ferrell
2. Tobey Maguire
3. Joaquin Phoenix
4. William Shatner
5. Renée Zellweger
6. John Malkovich
7. Julie Andrews
8. Bruce Willis
9. Teri Hatcher
10. Scarlett Johansson

Clarence Thomas: "I do not intend to answer articles I didn't read and most of which I consider extremely irrelevant."

What does he think about the New York Times calling him "the angriest justice"? He's not answering. Because it makes him angry? No, because it's irrelevant. Extremely irrelevant.

"I can't afford to be angry," he added several minutes later. "When you're struggling, you can't afford to carry that millstone of anger with you. You gotta let it go. I say that to younger kids who have issues with their parents: let it go."

He was also asked about his famous silence on the bench:

[H]e said that historically members of the court did not engage in "this sort of chattering," especially since much of a case has already been hashed out at the appellate level. "The real question should be, 'Why the sudden change?'" he said....

I wish he'd answer the "real question," then. Perhaps a complete transcript would show he did. Presumably — as the word "chattering" indicates — the answer would show disrespect to his colleagues.

IN THE COMMENTS: ricpic offers a poem:

If Breyer would stop his interminable chattering
And Ginsburg her incessant nattering
(Their excessive verbosity does so dismay)
I could think of something shattering
To say.

Two vlogs about my Amazon Kindle.

1. First, I review the Amazon Kindle and compare it to books, audiobooks, and the Rocket Book.



2. The second vlog is not a review but a quiz, consisting of readings from the various books I've loaded into the Kindle. You can guess the titles.

"I'm biased, sure, but I think that the illos I did brought a little something extra to the column..."

Rob Ullman tells how he lost his long-time gig illustrating Dan Savage's "Savage Love" column:

Anyway, if you're one of the people who likes your seedy sex advice served with a little graphic blandishment, you should make your voice heard, and contact [the Washington City Paper] here.

(Via Drawn!)

Are we experiencing a decline in the appreciation of illustration? Have you noticed, as you click around on line, how nearly all of the pictures are photographs?

ADDED: Here's a story (about internet advertising) that has a very nice illustration to go with it. But the illustration is displayed so poorly that it hardly seems worth it. You can click to enlarge it, but then it's disembodied and so small that I felt defrauded by the term "full image."

AND: Ullman's "illos" transformed Savage's column, making it seem unsleazy and rather cheerful. They helped us see Savage's humor and basic decency and kept us from feeling too put off by the often-ugly subject matter.

"The most important model of masculinity for a generation of Americans."

"He had transformed his persona from that of a skinny, boyish, even androgynous heartthrob with Brylcreemed curls, too-big jackets, sailor suits (!), and floppy bow ties into that of a suave man of authority and sensitivity in crisp, slim-line suits."

Obligatory Althouse info: My father looked just like him. See?

"Does your mom still teach here? Because I heard that she's REALLY easy... Best wishes trying to avoid learning in law school."

NYU Law School email, exposed.

"Come on. We live for that stuff."

"[W]e love it when designers can't keep their inner rage off their faces."

How to draw a female in proportion.

Updated.

The trend in baby boomers offing themselves.

"It's having been native to an era and a culture in which self (and sex) was almost ideologically paramount, which, unless you've gotten over it, doesn't leave you too well provided for when self (and sex) begins to fail."

Yikes! So, what are you saying, Amba? Get over sex, lest suicidal urges overwhelm you as you approach old age?

"Sending people to prison for five or 10 or 15 years for looking at pictures is killing an ant with a sledgehammer."

"These people are being put on sex-offender registries, they are being ostracized from the community, for looking at pictures."

"There are a large group of individuals whose lives and families are absolutely being devastated because they looked at these images. They had absolutely no idea how severe the consequences would be and had no interest in doing anything other than viewing images."

"The deeply dispiriting Romney-Huckabee religion showdown."

Here's an excellent piece by Kenneth Anderson — a former Mormon — in The Weekly Standard). It's quite long, but well worth reading. Conclusion:

The exchange between the Huckabee bigots among the evangelicals, on the one hand, and Romney-the-opportunist, on the other--between assertions of a "Christian presidency" and the dismaying response of "conservative multiculturalism"--might seem to many to be a struggle merely within the loopy, irrational religious backwoods of the Republican party. It is not. It is about this country and the rest of us and our long-term relationship to liberal toleration at its hour of grave need--and that is why Romney's wrong answer to the wrong question is so very, very dispiriting.

"Leonard Kaplan, victim of a pretty clearly bogus political-correctness scandal in Wisconsin."

Glenn Reynolds links to a speech by my colleague (on a subject I've written about a lot here). I think the story is more complex, a strange intersection of two liberal/left trends. Look at how Kaplan explains himself. He's teaching a left-wing critique of law:

Is our talk about rights really meaningful or merely rhetoric? Though we pay lip service to universal rights, non-citizens in the United States may get something less. Even citizens may get less than a “right to happiness” if the state does not establish the material conditions necessary to make such a right possible....

My class discussion on February 15 was intended to be sympathetic to the Hmong people. I intended to illustrate the inadequacy of legal formalism. My examples of cultural practice were directed against the legal system, not against any immigrant group. My examples were intended to show the disorientation that new immigrant groups can feel when confronting a formalist legal system. My point was that if our formalist legal system treats everyone as if they are the same, new immigrant groups from very different cultures could suffer a form of injustice. The resulting controversy lost this point entirely.

It got disoriented. Ironically.

Kaplan said some things about the Hmong that he intended "to illustrate the inadequacy of legal formalism," but the Hmong students (it seems) were taken aback because the characterization of the Hmong felt insulting. (Kaplan said something — we don't have an exact text — about problems Hmong people have fitting into American culture.) Yet the students have been given reason to think that they should enjoy a welcoming and comfortable "climate" at the university. Kaplan's critique — which includes making students uncomfortable — belongs to the ideological left, but so does the message that students from diverse backgrounds should feel good about their experience at the university. It's a fascinating clash of two left-wing themes.

Much as I support academic freedom for the teacher (and hate to see any punitive action toward Kaplan), I feel sympathetic toward young people who go to law school for the purpose of acquiring the tools to use toward the ends they select and who then encounter a complicated critique of the law. I think law students expect us law professors to give them things they can use. They may feel outraged if we tear apart the system they are devoting themselves to learning how to work within. We need to respect their autonomy, even as we challenge them.

There is insight to be gained at the intersection of two left-wing ideologies (diversity and critique). So don't be too quick to choose sides. The best answers my lie beyond thinking in terms of two sides in this controversy.

American Idol flunky Chris Daughtry has been named the bestselling artist of the year on The Billboard 200 chart...""> "American Idol flunky Chris Daughtry has been named the bestselling artist of the year on The Billboard 200 chart..."

I was a big supporter of the guy when he was in on the trashy pop TV contest, but... what the hell? Is this actually what's happening in music today?

"It's a privilege to sit in the front row. I reserve those seats for people who appreciate music. Get the f--- out!"

Watch Tori Amos kick two girls out of her show. And they deserve it. I love the way the way they hunch over as they experience The Expulsion.

It's so:

"The Freak Show Comes to Life."

Don't you love when a headline becomes the URL and remains the URL even if you change the headline? Some funny stuff can happen that way. It can be real "Mush From the Wimp," if you know what I mean. (If you don't know, read this.)

So here's the blog post, sedately headed: "Hillary's New Pitch: 'No Surprises.'" The title says one thing, but oh, that URL:

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_stump/archive/2007/12/14/the-freakshow-comes-to-life.aspx

It's from Michael Crowley at TNR's blog The Stump.

Let's read and see what's up with the unsurprising freak show:

Hillary just held an extraordinary press conference here after taping an interview with Iowa public television in which she introduced a provocative new theme to her candidacy...

"I’ve been tested, I’ve been vetted," she said. "There are no surprises. There’s not going to be anybody saying, 'I didn’t think of that, my goodness, what’s that going to mean?'"

So she's saying "no surprises." Not Crowley. Crowley may look on and think the freak show comes to life. But will he tell us?

Hillary smiled with the patience of a grandmother stuck babysitting bratty kids as reporters barraged her with breathless questions about whether Obama's drug history is the sort of surprise she's talking about and whether she thinks general-election voters might punish him for it.

But Hillary wasn't biting. "I am only talking about myself," she insisted, looking unusually resplendent in a dark suit with a red blouse and multicolored necklace....

Hillary's cool mien only really wavered once, when she was asked about her own experiences with drugs and--given that we already know she avoided them--the basis for her decision-making about them. A peevish look crossed Hillary's face as her press secretary, Jay Carson, audibly chortled with disdain. Hillary said she had already answered those questions: "I refer you to everything I've said in the past."

Ugh. I can't wait for the next 4 years of press conferences. I refer you to everything I've said in the past. Great phrase. I can picture myself using it with students. Got any questions? I refer you to everything I've said in the past. Try it in your next fight with your spouse or partner. I refer you to everything I've said in the past. It's quite the catchphrase. It could be the "Let me make one thing perfectly clear" of the next administration.

After forcing Billy Shaheen out of her campaign, Hillary has now pivoted to a "no surprises" argument which at least seems to spring directly from the Obama-cocaine talk--and is certain to keep that talk alive...

Hmmm.... keep that talk alive... freak show comes to life.... no, I really can't figure out what Crowley may have had that justified the headline memorialized in the URL.

Readers, help me out in the comments. Take Crowley's post and rewrite it so that it would fit the headline: "The Freak Show Comes to Life."

Losing weight...

... by thinking really, really hard.

"The issue related to cocaine use is not something the campaign is in any way raising."

Said Hillary Clinton's chief strategist, Mark Penn, on TV last night after Clinton apologized to Barack Obama and after Bill Shaheen resigned as her campaign's New Hampshire co-chair. [ADDED: Do I really need to add that I'm scoffing at Mark Penn for saying he's not talking about what he's talking about?] 

Does anyone really think Shaheen was off on his own, reminding people that Obama wrote about his use of marijuana and cocaine when he was a teenager?

Clinton officials said she was personally distressed by the incident and had sought out Obama on the tarmac at Washington's Reagan National Airport before they flew to Iowa for the debate. Though the senators' interactions have been frosty since the start of the campaign nearly a year ago, Clinton wanted, her aides said, to make it clear that she had not approved Shaheen's approach.

Here's a focus-group of Democratic primary voters reacting to the story about Shaheen:

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's desperation. It's like you can't find anything wrong with him now, so you have to go back to when he was -- something he did when he was a teenager.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm not fully convinced that Hillary was aware that that was going to happen. I'm not fully convinced. I think it might have been a loose cannon in her campaign, because I think that was just stupid.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't see how she could not know. I think anything regarding her campaign, I think that's something should she know, which will affect her.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm sort of surprised that she would use those tactics, given what happened to her husband.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If she didn't know, she should have known.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If indeed he used drugs or didn't -- whatever -- I think it shouldn't be held against him, because he was just flexing his muscles on his way to adulthood.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't believe that Hillary Clinton was aware of this, because I don't think she's that stupid.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He was trying to derail the express train that Barack Obama is on right now. He's fast tracked himself to a possible lead that can over-take Hillary right now in the Iowa caucuses. That's why they had no alternative but to resort to these tactics.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It just didn't accidentally happen the day before the caucus. You think about, I mean, you've got the debate, and then this distracts the voters from voting.

No one lets her off the hook.

Speaking of sincerity, let's judge the sincerity of Hillary Clinton's mother. (No, it's not wrong to judge a mother talking about her offspring, when the offspring is running for President and is pushing video of her mother vouching for her.)



"She never was envious of anybody." Even written as text, that's unbelievable. But listen to it. If this were a parody commercial, I'd praise the actor for the hilarious inflection on the word "never."

"I'm not doin' hand shows today."

Fred Thompson in an amusing display of adulthood:



Or do you think he was too disrespectful to the moderator? She had no back-up solution and ended up looking like a substitute teacher. The "hand show" device is spiffy and efficient when everyone goes along. But this was a moment waiting to be seized, and Thompson seized it well. Will demands for a show of hands ever work in a debate again?

Obama's ease and Hillary's nervous laugh.

How much can we read from this little exchange? I love the way he pauses, giving her a chance to cackle (as if to say "gotcha"). After he utters his witticism, it's plain that the pause worked as comic timing. He used the pause to word the witticism perfectly, thus creating this delectable YouTube clip, which ends with more of that laughing of hers. Now, she's both laughing at his joke, which was a joke at her expense, and sounding nervous when he's being especially cool.

About that Bloggingheads redesign.

It's so very odd to drop by Bloggingheads.tv and not get slammed in the face with that color — Bloggingheads Green. But Bloggingheads Green is still there, in a few discreet strips and highlighting a small bit of the text. It's there to remind you of what once was: a pool of horrific green. Asked to appear on Bloggingheads, you had to rack your brain, wondering: Do I look good in green, weird green? Well, maybe Mickey Kaus didn't ask. But some of us did. And now, the greenness is gone.

There are many non-color improvements too, and you can discover them for yourself. At first, I didn't know why they had a list of links to YouTube clips taking up the whole bottom center. But look liker very well chosen clips — if you want the latest political stuff — which makes the site a smart jumping-off point for your morning news browse. Or so I'm guessing. I'm going to start there and you'll see if it produces a post or two here, which is my test of what makes a good jumping-off point for a browse.

"If we went back to the obesity rates that existed in 1980, that would save the Medicare system a trillion dollars."

Said Barack Obama at today's Democratic debate. That sounds absurd to me. But let me be fair. He prefaced that assertion with the phrase "it's estimated." Oh, estimated. Well, then. He wants to "emphasize how important prevention and cost savings can be." I get it. The plan is to get the government to pay for all sorts of routine health care for everyone, and we're supposed to think it will actually save money. But the truth is that going to the doctor more is not going to solve our fatness problem. If it did, we'd be paying now for the treatment (not that we wouldn't like the government to reimburse us). The false hope of a solution to obesity and a promise of illusory savings is being used to soften us up for massive spending on health care. I'm estimating.

Then Bill Richardson tells us that 33% of Medicare costs are "related to" diabetes. Conclusion: "We've got to have an elimination, as I did in New Mexico, of junk food in schools. We need to have mandatory phys ed." He's waggling his pudgy fingers at us and his blubbery neck wobbles all over the place while he speaks. He's wearing an elegant blue-gray tie that slopes way out over his big belly. The seniors are soaking up too much money, so... quick take those potato chips away from that kid. Make him do some pushups! Like we did in New Mexico.

ADDED: I'm getting a kick out of watching the graph at the side of the screen that shows the instantaneous reaction of liberals and moderates. It's most fun when the lines suddenly diverge, like when Richardson said "mandatory phys ed." Here's my instantaneous reaction to that (from an IM conversation):

it's like... oh, no, he wants to make me do pushups...

dems are: great, make that kid do pushups

moderates hear: he wants to tell me what to do

liberals hear: he's going to improve things

Cancel all your baseball memories.

They were all on steroids.

John Mellencamp, The Ventures, Leonard Cohen and The Dave Clark Five....

... and of course, the sure thing: Madonna.

Spiro Agnew.

Somewhere in the halls of the University of Wisconsin Law School:



ADDED: Spiro explores my office:

A Madison meetup?

There's an effort afoot to have a meetup here in Madison for readers of this blog. Email me at my annalthouse gmail address if you're interested. If I end up doing it, you have to email to get the time and place.

UPDATE: Email to go out soon. If you didn't get the email, email me again for the time and place.

FURTHER UPDATE: I've emailed those who've emailed me. If I missed you, email again.

Golden Globe nominations.

Here. Any opinions? I especially like the recognition for Ricky Gervais and "Extras." I find it weird that all "The Sopranos" got was a nomination for Edie Falco. It's as if it's a conscious strategy to force all "Sopranos" support to go to her. I like the nomination of Julie Christie for "Away From Her," but I haven't seen enough of the movies to know who was really the best actress of the year. I see Cate Blanchett got nominated in two categories — and plan to catch "I'm Not There," the one where she plays Bob Dylan, very soon if not today. And this is giving me some other good ideas for movies to see while I'm in Madison, with easy access to many nice theaters. "No Country for Old Men." "Atonement." What else?

In which Mike Huckabee reminds me of Jimmy Carter.

About a year ago, when Gerald Ford died, I explained how it happened that I voted for him:

I was all set to vote for Jimmy Carter in 1976. I'd voted for Carter in the New York primary when he was still a face in a crowd of candidates. But the day before the election, I saw a TV interview in which a reporter asked Carter what he would do if he didn't win. He said he'd go back to his peanut farm. This answer -- does it seem innocuous to you? -- gnawed at me overnight, and, as I was walking to my polling place, I sat down to talk about it with someone who was also planning to vote for Carter, and the two of us changed our vote to Ford. It wasn't so much Ford. It was Carter. I'd decided he was a small man. He didn't fit the Presidency. Did Ford? But Ford was already President. In truth, no one deserves to be President. But Ford did not select himself as President. He had only selected himself to represent one legislative district. I found that appealing.

Today, I read an email from my son John with the following quote and the question: "Remind you of anyone?"

‘‘If you aren’t for some reason elected president, what cabinet position would you be suited for?’’ I asked. Huckabee paused, considering. ‘‘Secretary of health and human services would be one,’’ he said. ‘‘Secretary of transportation, or the interior.’’ Perhaps aware that this wasn’t a Mount Rushmore self-evaluation, he quickly added that he doesn’t really want a cabinet position or any other government job. ‘‘I’d be just as happy to go back to Arkansas and open a bait shop on a lake,’’ he said.

It's Grande Conservative Blogress Diva time again.

Vote for me if you're so inclined. Vote every day for a week if you really care. Now, maybe you're thinking: "Grande Conservative Blogress Diva," what is it, and is it really Althouse? You could discuss that here. I recommend devising a definition that will make it crushingly obvious that I should win. You know, it can't possibly mean: Who's the most conservative female blogger. It's more like: Who's the biggest diva blogger for conservatives? Think about it.

I get pissed off at TNR.

So the New Republic editors are getting all pretentious about book-reading:

[I]t is neither sentimentality nor snobbery to insist that what we mean by the experience of reading may be singularly indebted to the printed book, to its physicality and its temporality.

Oh, please.

The breathless, Bezos-loving man from Newsweek says that he is reading Boswell's Life of Johnson on his iPhone. No, he isn't. All reading is not the same. It takes more than the apparition of words to constitute a book and its inner forms.

No, you're not a snob. Oh, no, no, no.

Bleak House is not e-mail (even if it once was serialized) and Atonement does not deliver information. "Search" is not the most exciting demand that one can make of a text. So let us see how many conversions to literacy's pleasures these gadgets make, and let us be grateful for them; but let us also recognize that we toy with the obsolescence of the book at our mental peril.

And we read a TNR editorial at our peril. Hey, it's a dangerous world.

The scanting of the prestige of books by the print media is a different matter.

The scanting of the prestige.... Could you possibly sound a little more desperate to display your erudition?

It is a kind of betrayal from within. In recent years, in-house book reviewing has been eliminated, abridged, or downgraded by the Atlanta Journal- Constitution, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Cleveland's Plain Dealer, The San Diego Union-Tribune--the list goes on. The same cannot be said about management's enthusiasm for, say, sports, or food. "Committing resources" is not least a philosophical exercise: A newspaper discloses its view of the world clearly by what it chooses to cover and not to cover, and with what degree of rigor and pride. When you deprive the coverage of books of adequate space and talent, you are declaring that books are not important, even if you and your wife belong to a book club and your Amazon account is a mile long.

You and your wife? All right, you were already pissing me off with your pretentious locutions, rank nostalgia, and over-the-top snootiness, but now I have to completely redirect my anger. How dare you write you and your wife? Here I am, reading your magazine, thinking you are trying to talk to me, and I run into that phrase you and your wife. You assume your reader is a man (and a straight man at that). I love when a pompous know-it-all falls flat on his — yes, I assume you're a man — face. Was it something about writing like a twit from the 19th century that made you forget that women expect to be treated as equals?

ADDED: "Bleak House is not e-mail (even if it once was serialized)...." Shouldn't the editors have stopped and thought a little more when they realized that parenthetical was needed? Here they are, fulminating about the wonders of a great novel, remembering how they felt decades ago when they read through thick paperback versions of the great Victorian novels and thinking this — my experience! — is the way it should be, and then they realized that the Victorians were reading these novels in bits in the newspaper!

[Charles Dickens] was the first to transform serial suspense into a large-scale social event. In the mid-1800s, it was the fate of a fictitious legal case — Jarndyce v. Jarndyce that had everyone so engaged...

What Dickens had in common with such successors as Aaron Spelling (Dynasty, 90210), Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue), Mark Burnett (Survivor, The Apprentice), and Stephen King (online serial The Plant), was a new wave of technology to ride, a huge potential audience to tap, the temperament to exploit the opportunity, and a business model to drive it....

[M]any who might never have read did read, and the audience for substantial literature grew. On the business side, writing fiction became a truly viable profession because profits increased....

Wouldn't Charles Dickens be laughing at you — with your reactionary twaddle and your meager profits?

"You women have heard of jalopies/You heard the noise they make/Let me introduce you to my Rocket '88."

Ike Turner — one of the originators of rock and roll — has died.

"Rocket 88" — according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — "is widely considered the first rock and roll record."

ADDED: Jon Pareles writes a nice, full-scale obituary for the NYT. One issue, but only one issue, is the way he treated Tina Turner:

Ms. Turner’s [autobiography, “I, Tina”] describes domestic violence, infidelity and drug use; his [autobiography, “Takin’ Back My Name: The Confessions of Ike Turner”] does not deny that, although he wrote... “Tina and me, we had our fights, but we ain’t had no more fights than anybody else.”

Tina walked out on him in 1975. Mr. Turner, already abusing cocaine and alcohol, spiraled further downward during the 1980s while Ms. Turner became a multimillion-selling star on her own. A recording studio he had built in Los Angeles burned down in 1982, and he was arrested repeatedly on drug charges. In 1989 he went to prison for various cocaine-possession offenses and was in jail when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Very sad. A flawed man. But he's just died, and he was a great musician.

I'm in Madison.

Very deeply in.

"Never having done this with Bill."

What does that mean?

ADDED: The Daily News says:

Alarmed by his wife's slide in the polls and disarray within her backbiting campaign, a beside-himself Bill Clinton has leaped atop the barricades and is furiously plotting a cure - or coup....

Another Democrat with close connections to the Clinton campaign describes Bill Clinton as "very engaged and very agitated. He's yelling at [chief strategist] Mark Penn a lot."...

One post-Thanksgiving meeting erupted into finger-pointing over the loss of her advantage.

"They all want to kill each other," said a source aware of the closed-door meeting.

The backstabbing involves several high-level people in the campaign, including Penn, Mandy Grunwald, Ann Lewis and Howard Wolfson, sources said.

I wonder who's going to get coupée.

"This isn't the worst thing that will happen to you today."

Said to me by a woman working behind the counter for a major airline as I checked my bag today and complained that the instructions on the self-check-in screen were confusing and flashed off before I could figure out what I was supposed to do next.

Think about it. As I'm checking in for a flight, someone working for the airline predicts that something bad is going to happen to me today. I assume I'd be arrested if I told her something bad was going to happen today.

In any case, checking a bag around here is a ridiculous procedure. If you decide you don't want to pay the curbside employee $2 + tip to take your bag, you have to go inside and find a computer to fiddle with, then see that you are to proceed somewhere else to get the tag. But where? Oh, the counter that you used to be able to go to when there were no computers. Then, though there is a conveyor belt of the sort that counter employees have always put bags on, you have to take your bag over to another place to hand it over to the screeners.

It's as if they are deliberately tormenting you so that next time you'll see why you ought to have forked over $3 to check a bag. What a ridiculous system! They ought to be making you feel good about the switch-over to self-service computers. Instead, I felt like they were trying to humiliate me for my unwillingness to use the old-fashioned skycap service. Actually, I'd have used it and tipped the skycap, but the $2 does-not-include-gratuity charge rubbed me the wrong way.

American Airlines, either modernize efficiently or be graciously old-fashioned. If you want to be modern and old fashioned at the same time, at least be efficient and gracious about it. But this set-up, at La Guardia Airport, is ugly and awkward.

And telling me it's not the worst thing that will happen to me today is beyond belief.

Here's what the woman working at the counter could have said: I'm sorry. We don't mean for it to be confusing. We're still working on perfecting the new system. I hope you'll give us another chance.

Or she could have told what I think is the truth: Why are you even trying to check a bag inside? You had your chance with the skycaps, but you were too cheap to pay $3. Three damned dollars, and now you think that I will lift your crap onto a conveyor belt or give you any information you could find yourself on the computer screen? And you dare to complain? I hope this is just the start of a terrible day for you, bitch.

ADDED: Some sympathy. And a film clip.

"Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"

Mike Huckabee asks the NYT reporter. The reporter, Zev Chafets, portrays Huckabee as rather sly:

Romney, a Mormon, had promised that he would be addressing the subject of his religion a few days later. I asked Huckabee, who describes himself as the only Republican candidate with a degree in theology, if he considered Mormonism a cult or a religion. ‘‘I think it’s a religion,’’ he said. ‘‘I really don’t know much about it.’’

I was about to jot down this piece of boilerplate when Huckabee surprised me with a question of his own: ‘‘Don’t Mormons,’’ he asked in an innocent voice, ‘‘believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?’’

Earlier in the article, Chafets also references the devil — who, I think, appalls most NYT readers not because they fear Hell but because they fear those who concern themselves with the famous old supernatural malefactor. The context is that Huckabee is glowing over the endorsement of Tim LaHaye, author of the ‘‘Left Behind’’ series:

Recently [LaHaye] donated a hockey rink to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, although some members of the faculty there deride ‘‘Left Behind’’ as science fiction. Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, has no such reservations. He considers the ‘‘Left Behind’’ books, in which the world comes to a violent end as Jesus triumphs over Satan, a ‘‘compelling story written for nontheologians.’’

Is Chafets trying to get readers to think that Huckabee is more benighted than a Liberty University professor? What actually is the difference between viewing the books as "science fiction" or as a "story for nontheologians"? Is it that those faculty members "deride" the story while Huckabee finds it "compelling"? But those unnamed faculty members don't stand to benefit from the endorsement of a very popular author, and there's actually nothing inconsistent between ridiculing the scenario in those books and acknowledging that the story works very well to engage some people in thinking about religion.

Satan horns his way into the article again when Chafets sits down to lunch with Huckabee:

Lunch with Mike Huckabee is a study in faith-based dieting. He has lost 110 pounds in recent years, a feat he chronicled in a book, ‘‘Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork.’’ This has given Huckabee something to talk about on daytime television. More important, it has lent him evangelical street cred. An important part of the evangelical narrative is overcoming the devil. But Huckabee was seemingly born born-again. Luckily for him, gluttony counts as a sin, Crisco as a Christian chemical dependency. By the time he reached 40, Huckabee had packed more than 300 pounds onto his 5-foot-11 frame. Then he began wrestling, calorie by calorie, with Satan.

Huckabee ordered soup and a sandwich without drama or comment and began talking about rock ’n’ roll.

Damn! Why won't Huck give Chafets the religious nuggets he so craves?

This is his regular warm-up gambit with reporters of a certain age, meant to convey that he is a cool guy for a Baptist preacher. Naturally I fell for it...

... but not hard enough to resist adding Satan! to the text of the article even though Huckabee apparently hadn't even mentioned religion at this point.

... and asked who he would like to play at his inaugural. ‘‘I’ve got to start with the Stones,’’ Huckabee said. The governor regards 1968 as the dawning of ‘‘the age of the birth-control pill, free love, gay sex, the drug culture and reckless disregard for standards.’’ The Rolling Stones album ‘‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’’ provided the soundtrack for that annus terribilis.

Satan again! Is Satan tempting Chafets? And why not tell us about "Sympathy for the Devil"? That came out in 1968. "Satanic Majesties Request" was released in 1967 and contained candyass songs like "She's a Rainbow." Maybe the editor decided it was high time to strike one Satan reference.

But Mike Huckabee wanted me to know that he believes in the separation of church and stage.

"Church and stage"? Oh, so that's not a typo? It's a Huckabee joke that's been processed into near imperceptibility.

You put all that Satan into the article and then you don't let us get the feeling for how he really talks about Satan? And the big quote everyone's going to get from the article is the one I've put in the title to this post, which leaves Huckabee — perhaps a kindly and humorous guy — looking... devilish.

I hear...

... you too.

"Mr. Straatman said the crack was modest in its width and depth, hardly the sort of gaping abyss into which you might plummet to your doom."

Art crack.

"More than the other primary candidates, Romney has President Bush’s virtues and avoids his flaws."

National Review endorses Mitt Romney:

His moral positions, and his instincts on taxes and foreign policy, are the same. But he is less inclined to federal activism, less tolerant of overspending, better able to defend conservative positions in debate, and more likely to demand performance from his subordinates. A winning combination, by our lights. In this most fluid and unpredictable Republican field, we vote for Mitt Romney.

In Tartu.

With statues.

And trees, birds, and food.

"WHAT DI DHE DO AFORE HOW LONG AND WITH WHO ?? PLS TELL BOB HELLO BOB."

Nice to see Hillary Clinton has some top-flight people working for her.

IN THE COMMENTS: I ask "Is her deputy campaign manager a LOLcat?"

IM IN UR CA