Eugene Volokh and Jack Rakove debate Heller.

On Bloggingheads. How exciting! I'm just starting to watch it, but I'll try to pull out a good embed to add character to this post.

ADDED: On the shelf behind Rakove, there's a John Paul Stevens bobblehead.

What can you say about those atheists who believe in God?

I don't know. I can see the notable atheist Sam Harris is grappling with the contradiction.

Hmmm. I often click on WaPo front-page links that turn out to go to the "On Faith" page. As soon as I see that inside page, I reflexively decide I'm not going to read it! It's something about the way the front page of the Washington Post is journalistically black print on a plain white background, and then the "On Faith" page is various shades of blue. I've left the realm of reason and entered the squishy soft spot. All that blue — those words "On Faith" — those 2 smiling heads — it says: This is something for other people to read. This is some kind of specialized reading for people who want mainstream assistance in their earnest efforts to devote the appropriate amount of time to struggling gently with religion. I find that instantly off-putting.

So, you're on your own. Some atheists believe in God. Okay?

And speaking of my distaste for WaPo's "On Faith" aesthetic: I'm not buying cereal that is packaged like this:

Who is that supposed to appeal to? "Good Friends" cereal?

This high-fiber trio of flakes, twigs, and granola is absolutely delicious. For all the good things fiber does for you, it deserves to be loved.

First of all. Twigs? Second. Fiber deserves to be loved? I don't want relationship neediness from breakfast food.

And I don't like the way the paired up heads on the packaging symbolize the cereal's insistence on becoming my close friend.

If you're going to foist happy breakfast faces on me, don't be earnest about it. At least have the decency to be surrealistic:

It's time to turn the Webb page.

"Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for Vice President."

"Sorry to be crude, but does the NYT realize that we may be at the point where reports of military success in Iraq help Obama..."

"... (because stability enables the rapid pullout he seeks) while reports of contiuing turmoil and difficulty help McCain (by raising doubts that U.S. forces can be safely withdrawn in the next few years)?"

Mickey Kaus, wondering when the NYT will get around to reporting on the great success in Mosul.

What do we know about Barack Obama, the "community organizer"?

I'd really like to understand more about what Barack Obama did under the heading "community organizer," so I jumped to read the front-page NYT article by Serge Kovaleski, "In Organizing, Obama Led While Finding His Place."

The year was 1985 and Gerald Kellman, a community organizer, was interviewing an applicant named Barack Obama to work in the demoralized landscape of poor neighborhoods on this city’s South Side...

It is clear that the benefit of those years to Mr. Obama dwarfs what he accomplished. Mr. Kellman said that Mr. Obama had built the organization’s following among needy residents and black ministers, but “on issues, we made very little progress, nothing that would change poverty on the South Side of Chicago.”

The article calls attention to a deficiency in Obama's memoir:

Mr. Obama recounted that he helped arrange a bus trip to the housing authority headquarters where residents [of the Altgeld Gardens housing project] had demanded a meeting with the executive director and a pledge that residential units would be tested for asbestos. As television cameras rolled, the residents were promised testing and a meeting.

“I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way,” Mr. Obama wrote. It was the kind of action that “hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on.”

What Mr. Obama does not mention in his book is that residents of the nearby Ida B. Wells housing project, and some at Altgeld itself, had already been challenging the housing authority on asbestos. A local newspaper had also taken up the issue....

Hazel Johnson, an environmental activist at Altgeld, said that she started to raise the asbestos issue with the housing authority in 1979, but that it had failed to act. Ms. Johnson and [Linda] Randle pointed out that only some of the asbestos was removed from pipes at Altgeld, but not until 1989, a year after Mr. Obama left for Harvard. (An Obama campaign spokesman, Ben LaBolt, said, “The book is meant to be an autobiography about Obama’s experiences, not a history of social and environmental activism in Chicago.”)

Meanwhile, the residents’ meeting with the housing authority’s executive director was a debacle, an illustration of the setbacks faced by Mr. Obama and other organizers.

You can read the description of the debacle in the article.

Mr. Obama had risen to executive director of the Developing Communities group, but the demanding hours, small victories and low pay took a toll on him, and he decided to leave.

“ ‘We are not making large-scale change, and I want to be involved in doing that,’ ” Mr. Kellman said Mr. Obama had told him....

Mr. Obama had mused to friends in Chicago about one day working for unions or becoming a preacher, a journalist or even a fiction writer. While there, he wrote short stories based on people he had encountered. “The stories were beautifully crafted and evocative,” said Mr. Kruglik.

A preacher, a journalist, or a fiction writer? All of those things — along with politics — have to do with crafted and evocative language. It sounds as though Obama learned what he core skill was and — I'm guessing now — realized he operated better at some distance from the raucous, demanding people.

I'd love to see the transcript of Kovaleski's whole interview with Kellman. What details underlie the phrase "took a toll on him"?

Here's an article covering much of the same ground that ran in The Nation in April 2007:

After a transient youth and an earnest search for identity, Obama also found a home--a community with which he continued relationships, a church and a political identity. He honed his talent for listening, learned pragmatic strategy, practiced bringing varied people together and developed a faith in ordinary citizens that still influences his campaign message. He discovered the importance of personal storytelling in politics (and wrote short stories that refined his style).

Please, can we read the stories?

Often by confronting officials with insistent citizens--rather than exploiting personal connections, as traditional black Democrats proposed--Obama and DCP protected community interests regarding landfills and helped win employment training services, playgrounds, after-school programs, school reforms and other public amenities....

But Obama grew restless and eventually went to Harvard Law School. "He said you can only go so far in organizing. You help people get some solutions, but it's never as big as wiping away problems," says Michael Evans, a DCP organizer after Obama left. "It wasn't end-all. He wanted to be part of the end-all, to get things done."....

Obama's politics of transcendent unity, which has appealed to many voters, has its roots in his work as a "bridge builder," in the words of the Rev. Anthony Van Zanten, overcoming the gulf within DCP between Catholic and Protestant churches. But this vision of harmony also reflects Obama's distaste for conflict.

"Personality-wise, Barack did not like direct confrontation," Kellman says. "He was a very nice young man, very polite. It was a stretch for him to do Alinsky techniques. He was more comfortable in dialogue with people. But challenging power was not an issue for him. Lack of civility was."

Obama's organizing history may give few clues about what policies he would pursue as President, but Obama the presidential candidate still shows his roots--a faith in ordinary citizens, a quest for common ground and a pragmatic inclination toward defining issues in winnable ways.

ADDED: And here, literary critic Andrew Delbanco opines on Obama's writing style. (It was worth writing this article if only to use the great title: "Deconstructing Barry.") Quoting a passage from "Dreams From My Father," he says:

This is a young writer (he was around 30 when he wrote Dreams) strutting his stuff. Sometimes he overwrites, as when he describes police cars cruising past groups of sullen black teens in "barracuda silence" or compares a row of scrappy trees to "hair swept across a bald man's head." He has a habit--almost a tic--of throwing in a cinematic flourish when none is needed: "a spotted, mangy cat" runs among weeds with a crumbling housing project in the background; a torn poster-photo of the recently dead Chicago mayor, Harold Washington, tumbles down a windswept street.

Yes, reading the book, I was often distracted by the thought that it was "creative writing." But Delbanco likes the book, in which he detects "a theme... the fall from paradise." There is the race-blind childhood in Hawaii and the gradual detection of the role played by race.

Delbanco moves on to "The Audacity of Hope":

[T]he voice of the writer is fundamentally the same as the one we hear in Dreams. There is the same internal counterpoise in the sentences: "Most evangelicals are more tolerant than the media would have us believe, most secularists more spiritual" ... "most rich people want the poor to succeed, and most of the poor are more self-critical and hold higher aspirations than the popular culture allows." When he scans the human landscape, Obama tends to notice contradictory individuals more than coherent interest groups....

This is the writing of someone trying to map a route through a world where choices are less often between good and bad than between competing goods. Though it lacks the sensual immediacy of the earlier book, the language is open and unresolved, the sentences organized around pairs of sentiments or arguments that exert equal force against each other--a reflection of ongoing thinking rather than a statement of settled thoughts.

"Edwards is the white Barack Obama. He's an inexperienced, pampered, liberal wimp whose biggest assets are his charisma and how he looks."

Pithy assessments of 24 possible VP picks for Obama — with a sharp right-wing edge.

The pro-McCain argument that older is better.

Ronald Rotunda makes the pitch:

Older people can use both sides of their brain together, which gives them an advantage. As [Dr. Gene Cohen, director of the Center on Aging, Health & Humanities at George Washington University] notes, a 75-year-old historian can “run circles around” a 25-year-old Rhodes Scholar studying history. Older people continue to generate new brain cells if they are active and participate in events. Cohen says that age confers a “new senior moment—a creative moment.”

Of course, if the old person is vegetating on the couch, watching the Home Shopping Network, age confers no advantage, but that is not what John McCain has been doing. He has been exercising his brain and, like muscles, it improves with use. “Use it or lose it” applies to our brain as well as to our deltoids.

Older people can use both sides of their brain together, eh? I have some questions about that How do they know this happens? (Answer: MRI and PET scans.) Why is it better and not more like, say, needing to use 2 hands to carry something you find heavy?

I'm skeptical about these notions of right-brain creativity and left-brain analytical reasoning, but assuming the 2 sides of the brain do think differently and that some brain halves play better together, would it be better for a President to have a brain like that?

It's rather obviously that looking straight at the individuals — McCain and Obama — will give us better information about whose brain we want in the White House. But since there is a general prejudice against older brains and the people who think with them, it's helpful to know that they can be better.

"Man Flies To Idaho … In Lawn Chair."

All right. First off. I hate the headline. "Man Flies To Idaho"... but where did he start? Argentina? Florida? Indonesia? You have to read the article to find out. Answer: Oregon! Look at a map. A child could jump from Oregon to Idaho on a pogo stick. Second:

Using his trusty BB gun to help him return to Earth, a 48-year-old gas station owner flew a lawn chair rigged with helium-filled balloons....

Kent Couch created a sensation....

Now, this is really annoying me. His name is Couch and he chooses to fly in a chair. Fly in a couch.

"Maybe replace the whole paragraph with 'Sometimes, when people break up, they should say why.'"

I missed this the other day. Hilarious.

More watery images.

This is the Thai Pavilion, reflected and inverted:



Not the first time I've done that, I realize now. Here's the old one. And here's a picture of the pavilion undistorted by water.

This is the fountain, and the yellow in the reflection is the pavilion:

The Washington Post says the Supreme Court's mistake requires it to reconsider the ban on the death penalty for rape of a child.

It's absolutely right:

The majority determined that capital punishment for child rape was unconstitutional, in part because a national consensus had formed against it. As evidence, the court noted that "37 jurisdictions -- 36 States plus the Federal Government -- have the death penalty. [But] only six of those jurisdictions authorize the death penalty for rape of a child." Actually, only two years ago, Congress enacted a death penalty for soldiers who commit child rape, as part of an update to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Irony of ironies: The court has cast doubt on the constitutionality of an act of Congress based on the erroneous claim that the statute did not exist....

The Supreme Court's legitimacy depends not only on the substance of its rulings but also on the quality of its deliberations. That's why we think the court needs to reopen this case -- even though we supported its decision. The losing party, Louisiana, still has time to seek a rehearing, which the court could grant with the approval of five justices, including at least one from the majority. The court could limit reargument to briefs on the significance of the UCMJ provision. We doubt the case will come out much differently; we certainly hope not. But this is an opportunity for the court to show a little judicial humility. Before the court declares its final view on national opinion about the death penalty, it should accurately assess the view of the national legislature.

The opinion doesn't cohere as written. The dissenting opinion doesn't cohere. It's an egregious mistake that throws all the reasoning out of whack. Fix it!

ADDED: Has the Supreme Court case ever used the expression "out of whack"? No. The word "whack" only appears once in the Supreme Court's cases, in a one-sentence rejection of jurisdition in a case called Whack v. Maryland, 450 U.S. 990 (1981).

Is it "out of whack" or "out of wack"? If you go by Google hits, you'll think it's "out of wack" — but that's "out of whack." "Wack" means crazy. It's a back-formation from "wacky." As a noun, it means "a person regarded as eccentric." "Whack," as a noun, is a "a sharp, swift blow." I know, it makes little sense to say the reasoning is out of a person regarded as eccentric or out of a sharp, swift blow, but trust me, the standard, idiomatic expression is "out of whack."

Here's some history:

At one time, [whack] could mean a share in a distribution, a portion; this sense was originally thieves’ cant — Francis Grose, in his Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1785, has “Whack, a share of a booty obtained by fraud” (could physical violence have been involved in some cases?). British English has a couple of phrases that retain that sense. One is pay one’s whack, to pay one’s agreed contribution to shared expenses. Another is top whack, or full whack, for the maximum price or rate for something (“if you go to that shop, you’ll pay top whack”).

There are some other old figurative senses, including a bargain or agreement (which evolved out of the idea of a share), and an attempt at doing something (“I’ll take a whack at that job”). These are mostly American, and it was in the US that the sense you refer to first appeared, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. There seems to have been a phrase in fine whack during that century, meaning that something was in good condition or excellent fettle. (It appears in a letter by John Hay, President Lincoln’s amanuensis, dated August 1863, which describes the President: “The Tycoon is in fine whack. I have rarely seen him more serene and busy. He is managing this war, the draft, foreign relations, and planning a reconstruction of the Union, all at once”.) It doesn’t often turn up in writing, though, so there’s some doubt how widespread it was.

To be out of whack would then have meant the opposite — that something wasn’t on top form or working well.

"What do you think playground bullies grow up to be?" "Right-wing Republicans."

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich answers a question.

Actually, when I decided I was going to blog this little interview, I planned to feature this line about why our drilling for more oil isn't a good solution to high gas prices:

When you consider that the oil we pump goes into a global oil market, offshore drilling makes no sense. We take the environmental risk, but we’d have to share the negligible price gains with Chinese consumers and every other user around the world.

He's right about that, isn't he? I love the way lefties sometimes get bracingly chauvinistic. Suddenly, it's screw the rest of the world!

Oh, I know... the gains are only negligible anyway. But read the whole interview. Reich is obviously happy that the high gas prices are pushing people into mass transit at long last. If the environment is your primary concern, of course you don't want more domestic drilling, and, what's more, you welcome the high gas prices that make people consume less.

I'm calling Reich a lefty, but I note that he lives in Berkeley (where he's a professor of public policy) and he says "here I am on the right of most arguments."

And this is good. He's asked about whether he dated the college-age Hillary Clinton:

To call it a date is an exaggeration. She and I went out to see Antonioni’s “Blow-Up.” The only thing I remember is that she wanted what seemed to me to be an extraordinary amount of butter on her popcorn.

Yes, very tasty! Yes! I like it! I like it! Go on!



You know, if a woman indicates she wants extra butter, that means something:

Only an economist could go on a date and study trends in butter consumption. Isn’t that a kind of wonky thing to remember?

Yes, it is. I recall the extra butter costing more.

If the man balks at giving her extra butter on her popcorn, if he seems to calculate the expense, I think she can make some predictions about what any sexual relationship will be like. Later, when Bill took Hillary to the movies — maybe it was "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" — I bet Bill was all come on! Double extra butter! And Hillary fell in love. I wish I could find a clip of that scene where Julie Christie pigs out on eggs in front of Warren Beatty and he therefore knows she's quite the woman.

Now, Reich is also very short — 4-foot-10 1/2 — and he notes that he's "much more economically and environmentally sustainable."

I exhale less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I use up less space. I have a little house.

In the future, you will have to buy carbon offsets if you want to be tall or fat.

Anyway, it's at the end of the interview that we get to the quote that I highlighted above. Reich says that because he was short, he was bullied a lot as a kid.

People frequently tell me in interviews that they were bullied as children. But no one ever steps forward and says, “I was the bully.” They don’t want to admit to being a bully.

This provokes the questions-and-answer used as the title of this post.

As for Reich's answer, isn't it more likely that kids who were bullied grow up to be bullies themselves? You're very short and/or weak, but you're smart and you study... then you figure out how to crush your erstwhile tormentors by winning in business or politics. Right?

As my ex-husband used to say — maybe he's still recycling this line — "Life is 'Revenge of the Nerds.'"

John McCain says: "I hate the bloggers."

And John Amato says: "Hey right wing bloggers. I think he’s talking about you too."



Is hearing humor in tone of voice a lost art... among lefty bloggers?

And I remember the conference call McCain did with some of us bloggers on when he said:

"Listen, I'll never forget you. You were the only guys who would listen to me for a couple of months. Do you think I'd ever forget you?"

He said that spontaneously and sincerely after someone thanked him for continuing to do the phone calls with bloggers.

***

By the way, I've apparently been crossed off the list of McCain's preferred bloggers. Quite aside from anything like conference calls, I don't even get email from the campaign anymore. I used to get several emails a day (mainly pointing me toward favorable news stories and blog posts). And it's not as though the Obama campaign sends me anything. Have they all heard of my vow of cruel neutrality? I still like to get tips about bloggable things.

The Saturday vlog.

You gave me questions. I picked 4:

Obama backtracks on late-term abortions.

Does he think we won't notice? First, he limited the health exception to "serious physical" things:

Now, I don't think that "mental distress" qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term...

Then, he switched! He now wants a mental health exception!

Reporter: You said that mental distress shouldn't be a reason for late-term abortion?

Obama: My only point is this -- historically I have been a strong believer in a women's right to choose with her doctor, her pastor and her family. And it is ..I have consistently been saying that you have to have a health exception on many significant restrictions or bans on abortions including late-term abortions.

In the past there has been some fear on the part of people who, not only people who are anti-abortion, but people who may be in the middle, that that means that if a woman just doesn't feel good then that is an exception. That's never been the case.

I don't think that is how it has been interpreted. My only point is that in an area like partial-birth abortion having a mental, having a health exception can be defined rigorously. It can be defined through physical health, It can be defined by serious clinical mental-health diseases. It is not just a matter of feeling blue. I don't think that's how pro-choice folks have interpreted it. I don't think that's how the courts have interpreted it and I think that's important to emphasize and understand.

So as long as a woman can get her "blues" classified by a medical health professional as "depression," she has a right to a late term abortion no matter how strongly the majority of citizens feel about the immorality of destroying a fully viable human entity? And that's rigorous?

Incredible. That would be incredible even without the prior inconsistent statement.

Really. Does he think we are idiots?

ADDED: Jan Crawford Greenburg is dissatisfied because Obama didn't make the health exception big enough:

Obama is trying to restrict abortions after 22 weeks to those women who have a serious disease or illness. But the law today also covers some women who are in "mental distress," those women who would suffer emotional and psychological harm without an abortion.

This standard has long been understood to require less than "serious clinical mental health disease." Women today don't have to show they are suffering from a "serious clinical mental health disease" or "mental illness" before getting an abortion post-viability, as Obama now says is appropriate....

So Obama, it seems to me, still is backing away from what the law says—and backing away from a proposed federal law (of which he is a co-sponsor) that envisions a much broader definition of mental health than the one he laid out this week.

The Court has said the Constitution prohibits states from banning post-viability abortions unless those laws contain a broad mental health exception---one that includes mental distress and severe emotional harm. Abortion rights groups have fought for decades to preserve these exceptions, and I'm awfully curious what they will think about limiting them to women with mental disease or mental illness.

Obama is subject to a huge amount of pressure from both sides on the issue of abortion — and on the meta-issue of whether he's a flip-flopper. And then there's the question of Supreme Court nominations, an issue that comes into focus for a lot of people when the subject is abortion. Is Obama prepared to be hounded about all these things for the next 4 months?

The thirsty photographer.

I can't get enough water:



A closer dive:

You've seen face painting. This is amazing whole-head painting!

More here. (NSFW ads on there.) (Via Metafilter.) I love the inventive use of the features of the head. Check out the gumball machine and the pizza. The dog is the funniest one... and so true!

Coffeehouse and vlog.

I declare this post an Althouse coffeehouse. You can talk about whatever you want.

And I'd like to do a little vlog today, but the trouble is I've got nothing to say. So offer some ideas — preferably odd and as-yet-unblogged things.

Photographing water.

I'm continually amazed by the way water looks in photographs:



I love to enlarge details and am continually amazed at the painterly images that I'm utterly incapable of seeing in person:



That was there? I had no idea!

Religion, free speech, and license plates.

Here is a NYT op-ed about automobile license plates. The writer —Stefan Lonce, who has a book on the subject of vanity license plates — distinguishes 2 forms of religious speech via license plate. First, there are the specialty license plates. South Carolina has introduced a Christian-themed plate that looks like this:


Second, there are vanity plates, and the states sometimes reject the letter/word combinations a driver requests. There is, we are told, federal court lawsuit about Vermont's rejection of a vanity plate that would read JN36NT (which is a reference to a Biblical passage).

It seems obvious that the individual expression in the form of a vanity license plate is the preferable to the state's provision of the religious message on a specialty plate. The "I Believe" specialty plate is almost surely a state endorsement of Christianity that violates the Establishment Clause. (There's no array of specialty plates for different religions and no atheist plate. What would an atheist plate look like?)

But everyone knows that what's on a vanity plate is chosen by the car-owner and doesn't represent the state's point of view. Vermont seems to be overdoing a concern about Establishment Clause and blundering into a Free Speech violation (though, according to Lonce, the federal district court approved the state's decision). The trouble with vanity plates is that at least some of them do need to be censored — there are always some people who want "F**KYU" — so it won't work to have individual choice as the only filter.

Lonce thinks the problem of censoring vanity plates can be solved by setting up a national data base, pooling the efforts of all the states to identify the offending letter/number combinations. An alternative is just to get rid of vanity plates altogether, but states make a lot of money selling them, and people want to buy them.

About those Bloggingheads commenters.

Mickey's right about this:



IN THE COMMENTS: rcocean, the commenter whose comment Mickey printed out and taped to his monitor, comments here:

Just to beat a dead horse about BHTV commentators.

Currently, there are 111 comments on the Micky-Bob Diavlog "squishiness Edition". The comments were made by only 19 people. And of those 19, seven made 80 of the 111 comments.

You have one left commentator, (he boycotts Althouse) whose made almost 3,000 BHTV posts in the last 500 days!

Christy says:

And I think you've hit on one of the many reasons why I never bother to comment over there. They complain about the lack of female commenters and because I'm a fan of the site I want to help them out with the numbers. Inevitably, however, the comments already there make me think "why bother?" and I go away. I rarely even bother to read them anymore.

"Iced to meet you."

Some great photos here. That one almost made me cry.

"We played it straight and square. Nay, we simply are straight and square."

"We smiled at the idiotic questions and answered them patiently. We remonstrated that this was no way to help the youth of the world understand the depth and tragedy of our conflict."

How serious, intelligent people get taken in by Sacha Baron Cohen. I don't know what's funnier, the dialogue he — as Bruno — extracted from two experts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...

“Vait, vait. Vat’s zee connection between a political movement and food. Vy hummus?”

We exchanged astonished glances. “Hamas,” we explained, “is a Palestinian Islamist political movement. Hummus is a food.”

“Ya, but vy hummus? Yesterday I had to throw away my pita bread because it vas dripping hummus. Unt it’s too high in carbohydrates.”...

“Your conflict is not so bad. Jennifer-Angelina is worse.”

... or the fact that they were taken in because the producer who scheduled the interview "had a British accent and seemed serious and professional" and the crew arrived "with its three cameras and large coterie of assistants" and was "serious and very professional."

So the key to pulling a prank is not cracking up. And having a British accent. Cohen's comedy is based on his accents — Bruno has a ridiculous Austrian accent — and it works not just because his accents are funny, but because accomplices maintain that accent that people take so seriously – the old British accent.

2 couples on Picnic Point.

Here's charming couple, sitting in a willow tree on the edge of Lake Mendota:



(Enlarge.)

And look at this lovely couple, stretched out in clover, reading:



(Enlarge.)

Fireworks.

The NYT wants "change it can believe in" — and it can't believe this new Barack Obama.

It was all about believing! Don't wound our sensitive credulousness!

What if... what if... he's only a man?

Jesse Helms is dead.

The NYT reports.

ADDED: An obit:

During his 30 years in Capitol Hill, the North Carolina Republican became a powerful voice for a conservative movement that was growing both in Congress and across the country, and he used his position to speak out against issues like gay rights, federal funding for the arts and U.S. foreign aid.

"I had sought election in 1972 to try to derail the freight train of liberalism that was gaining speed toward its destination of government-run everything, paid for with big tax bills and record debt," Helms wrote in his 2005 memoir, "Here's Where I Stand."

"My goal, when my wife, Dot, and I decided I would run, was to stick to my principles and stand up for conservative ideals."...

In 1960, he moved to the executive offices of Capitol Broadcasting Co., the parent of WRAL, and he developed a strong following across eastern North Carolina over the next decade by appearing in editorials that ran at the end of each night's evening newscast. The editorials blended folksy anecdotes with conservative viewpoints that blasted the federal government, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and other entities he viewed as too liberal. In one noted editorial, he suggested building a wall around the UNC campus, which he called the "University of Negroes and Communists," so that its liberal sentiments could be contained.

Ugh. Mixing "conservative ideals" with racism.... I think that made millions of young people hate conservatism.

[H]e was accused of using racial politics to secure narrow victories. In the 1990 campaign against [former Charlotte Mayor Harvey] Gantt, for example, a Helms television ad showed a white man's hands crumpling a rejection notice from a company that had used an affirmative action program to hire a black job candidate.

His views on race relations – he opposed a national holiday honoring slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., led a filibuster against the extension of the Voting Rights Act and called some young blacks "Negro hoodlums" – and social issues sharply divided the public into those who viewed him as a champion of the common man and those who thought of him as a narrow-minded bigot....

"What is unique about Helms – and from my viewpoint, unforgivable – is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans," [David] Broder wrote shortly after Helms announced that he wouldn't seek re-election in 2002.

Did he really die on the 4th of July? The president of the Jesse Helms Center announced that the time of death was 1:15 a.m. on Friday. It has long been considered an important distinction to die on the 4th of July, as, most notably, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams did in 1826. And now Jesse Helms has that distinction.

But death is an end, and the 4th — though it is a famous death day — more properly represents a beginning. In the hope that the era of Jesse Helms is really dead, let's look at another closeup of the Declaration of Independence:

Madonna brainwashes A-Rod with Kabbalah.

She's making him believe they are soulmates. That's what his wife says, according to a friend. Wouldn't it be amazing if God spent his time — I know, God is beyond time, etc., but don't confuse me with that now — pairing up big celebrities?

Okay, Madonna with Sean Penn, that's funny. That's amusing. Now, I'm tired of that. I don't like Sean Penn as Mr. Madonna. Let's put her over here and have her screw Guy Ritchie up for a while. He's been annoying me. He needs some obstacles. Enough of that. That got boring. Wedding with kilts was good, but English estate, children's books, prissing around... blah! Put her with A-Rod now. That'll be hilarious.

Note: I don't really understand Kabbalah or the mind of God. I'm just guessing.

Let's see your best flag photographs.

Here are mine:



[ADDED: I posted this photograph on July 4, 2005, gave some background, encountered a dispute and responded with the next photo. There's a funny dispute in the comments there, something that relates to this post from yesterday.]



[ADDED: This next photo originally appeared here.]

***

Here are Jac's. I've always loved this one. Like my first one, it was done with a film camera. As he explains, it's a little display from a junk shop in Portage.



I probably have my own picture of that, somewhere amongst all my many unscanned film photographs.

Independence Day — a closeup.

***

To download a high-resolution copy of the Declaration of Independence here.

Read the transcript here.

The evening read.

The evening swim.

(Enlarge.)

"Obama Softens on Iraq Withdrawal Timeline."

Good. This is what I was expecting. Weren't you?

Should McCain be asked how his experience in Vietnam qualifies him to be President?

We're told he "recoiled" in "distaste" when asked. Jon Stolz says:

The fact of the matter is that General Clark was absolutely right. McCain's service, while heroic and honorable, is not very relevant when it comes to preparing him to be the military's ultimate commander. His experience didn't involve executive decision making in the military, or global strategy. Very few candidates for the presidency have had the experience in life that prepares them for that role. In fact, McCain said it himself in 2003, that some of our best Commanders in Chief had no military experience at all.

Jac says:

[I]s it true that McCain is "reluctant to talk about" his heroism in Vietnam? I don't know. But he hasn't been reluctant to say "I'm John McCain and I approve this message" in an ad showing footage of him as a POW, intercut with a closeup of McCain with the word "hero" emblazoned on his forehead....

No matter what your opinion is of Barack Obama, I think you have to give him this: he'd never approve an ad that was based on highlighting a specific argument for why he's qualified to be president, but then later try to shut down any rational discussion of that precise point.

I think there are some things that Barack Obama has tried to place beyond debate, such as the things his wife has said in political speeches on his behalf.

Recoiling, disgust, and outrage — it's a response of a kind. A gesture. An expression. It's a move in the debate. The question is whether it works as a good enough statement. You can ask someone a question to which they will respond with an icy "How dare you ask me that?" When are you going to feel chastened and apologize, and when are you going to call their bluff?

I think in the case of McCain's experience in Vietnam, he really is best off not attempting to articulate how it might be a qualification. It's something that he did, something that happened to him, and it is what it is. We all know it and can rely on it to the extent we see fit. There is nothing more for him to say about it. If he were to begin to talk about what it was like and how it has formed him as a man, it would seem immodest and extreme. He would have to put us all in our place, and he might seem like an angry old man of the past. The silence is eloquence enough.

ADDED: Jac has done an update and he links approvingly to this:



Oh, lord! That was such an offensive attempt at a gotcha! MSNBC is a piece of work.

The New York Times comes to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and finds that the radical professors are on their way out.

The radicals are old Boomers nearing retirement and being replaced by a younger generation:

[A] Wisconsin professor, Erik Olin Wright, a 61-year-old sociologist and a Marxist theorist, described it this way: “There has been some shift away from grand frameworks to more focused empirical questions.”

As for his own approach, Mr. Wright said, “in the late ’60s and ’70s, the Marxist impulse was central for those interested in social justice.” Now it resides at the margins.

“I was part of a new wave of hires,” Sara Goldrick-Rab said, peering over the top of her laptop at her favorite off-campus work site, the Espresso Royale cafe. She came to the University of Wisconsin in 2004....

Hey, weird! I'm sitting here reading this on my laptop at the Espresso Royale café.

“My generation is not so ideologically driven,” she said....

“Senior people evaluate us for tenure and the standards they use and what we think is important are different,” she said. They want to question values and norms; “we are more driven by data.”...

As for partisan politics, when she wrote an article in May for Pajamasmedia.com about welfare reform cutting off poor people’s access to higher education, some friends and co-workers were surprised by its appearance on that conservative blog. She said she didn’t know; she had not paid attention to its political bent.

Oh, New York Times? Pajamasmedia.com is not a blog.

When Ms. Goldrick-Rab speaks of added pressures on her generation, she talks about being pregnant or taking care of her 17-month-old while trying to earn tenure. The lack of paid leave for mothers is high on her list of complaints about university life.

If you have paid leave for mothers (beyond a few weeks to recover from childbirth), you have to have paid leave for fathers or it is unconstitutional sex discrimination. Nevada v. Hibbs.

Anyway, bottom line: It's great that the younger generation is more interested in data and science and less interested in political action and ideology. I welcome their contribution — to the University of Wisconsin and to the world.

There's not always a word for the thing you want to say.

But it's slightly maddening when you feel there's a word, and you just can't pull it out of your brain. A colleague of mine is looking for a word that expresses a phenomenon embodied in these 3 examples:

1. I go to the track and place a bet on a horse because its name is the same as my son's and the jockey is wearing #5, which is my son's hockey jersey number.

2. I can't decide what to order for lunch so I decide that I'll order whatever the person in front of me orders.

3. I'm not sure what color car to purchase so I decide to purchase the color of the next car that drives by my house.

Now, I think #1 is distinctly different from 2 and 3, because in #1, she knows what the answer is when she adopts the rule. In #2 and #3, she excitingly adopts the rule and locks herself into a result that is unknown. But all 3 are about adopting a rule to make a decision while knowing that there is nothing about the rule that will improve the quality of the decision. One could superstitiously believe that the rule would make the decision good or religiously believe — in examples 2 and 3 — that God knew you'd adopted the rule and was giving you a sign about what was the right decision. And one could think that the rule would generate randomness where somehow a nonrandom decision seemed bad. But basically, the decisionmaker is being playful or poetic.

So is there a word for this?

And do you have any good examples of using this sort of decisionmaking — colorful and exciting rules you've made for yourself? Obviously, there are a lot of standard ways approaches like rolling the dice or consulting the Magic 8 ball, but how about some weird stuff? Or why not make up a rule for yourself about something right now and do it? Got a decision to make? Make it based on something strange and as-yet-undetermined. And tell us about it.

***

This made me think of "Slacker" — one of my favorite movies. We see 2 women walking along the sidewalk. One says: "The next person who passes us will be dead within a fortnight." But that's not a case of the phenomenon my colleague means – not unless we're supposed to view the speaker as a murderer choosing a victim. The standard interpretation is that she's a psychic.

ADDED: Someone in the comments mentions Dadaism, and that reminds me of "A Book of Surrealist Games." I think example #3 could be seen as a sort of surrealist game. The more we talk about these examples, the more I think they are 3 different things. Several commenters have said that #1 is superstition, and I think it is either superstition — in the form of overvaluing a coincidence — or a sentimental delight in coincidence. #2 seems to be conformity or a rational bet based on a tiny amount of evidence. Someone who is eating here is eating that, so maybe he knows what's good. Only #3 is surrealist and dangerous — but nowhere near as much as if you'd chosen the color of your car based on something other than the color of someone else's car. Chances are it will be an ordinary car color, and at least someone else has seen fit to get a car that color. That said, I saw a bright purple car 2 days ago. It looked like hell. And I love the color purple. It just looks like hell on a car.

Is it a crime for a gay couple in Wisconsin to go to California to get married?

Maybe!

[A]n obscure state law ... makes it a crime for Wisconsin residents to enter into marriage in another state if the marriage would be prohibited here. The law imposes a penalty for those who enter into a marriage that's prohibited or declared void in Wisconsin of up to $10,000 and nine months in prison....

[The gay rights advocacy group Fair Wisconsin] sent an e-mail to about 10,000 supporters to see if anyone was making plans to go to California to get married. It heard back from two, and followed up to warn them about the law, said Glenn Carlson, executive director of Fair Wisconsin.

"We're telling people, especially if you live outside of Dane County, to be careful," Carlson said. After receiving the warning, one person wrote back that "I'd rather be prosecuted than persecuted."

Would anyone who supports the ban on gay marriage want this criminal statute enforced? Actually, yes:

Julaine Appling, chief executive officer of the Wisconsin Family Council, said the statutes are clear and the law should be enforced.

"If it were challenged and the courts decided to basically wink at it, and refused to enforce the law, we have a problem," she said, adding that the constitutional amendment clarified that no marriage other than between a man and woman is legal.

Oh, for crying out loud. It's one thing to have the gay marriage ban in the state and, based on that, for Wisconsin not to recognize the California-married gay couple as in fact married when they return to the state. It's quite another to criminally prosecute them!

I don't think Wisconsin prosecutors would waste public money and expose the gay marriage ban to such bad publicity, but the mere threat of prosecution is oppressive.

Does a woman's nudity in your presence make it legal to videotape her without her consent?

That is what Mark Jahnke — a former high school teacher — is arguing to a Wisconsin appellate court.

Sarah Stillwell, 42, of Stevens Point said it was a flash of a red light from beneath a pile of clothes in her bedroom that sparked the unsettling suspicion that Jahnke, a longtime friend she was seeing romantically for three years, might be photographing her....

Stillwell's complaint to Stevens Point police led to a search of Jahnke's house, where police seized a host of evidence, including 33 audio tapes of the couple having sex and three DVDs, one of the couple engaged in sex, and two of Stillwell nude in her home....

THE 2001 law under which Jahnke was charged makes it a crime for a person to "capture a representation that depicts nudity without the knowledge and consent of the person who is depicted nude while that person is nude in a circumstance in which he or she has a reasonable expectation of privacy."...

Because his girlfriend was knowingly nude in his presence, she did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy as the court itself has defined it, Jahnke argued.

The issue is the scope of a criminal statute. This is not a question whether she can sue him for committing a tort, but whether the state can prosecute him. Therefore the language of the statute — not our general ideas of what is right and wrong — is crucial, and ambiguities are traditionally construed in favor of the defendant. (This is called "the rule of lenity.")

Now, Jahnke, according to the article, did not distribute the videos, but the law is not about distribution. It's about taking the photograph — "captur[ing] the representation" — in a particular "circumstance." He captured the representation, but was she in the required circumstance to fit the statute?

What Jahnke was convicted of doing was despicable. (Can you possibly disagree?) But this is a question of statutory intepretation.

"I share Ann's affection for bloggers who are trying to observe and understand what they are writing about..."

Writes Jim Lindgren, commenting on my comment on Rush Limbaugh. (Ha ha.) He contrasts this trying to observe and understand what they are writing about — I would say thinking by writing —to "always writing op-eds with a thesis they are trying to prove" and is nice enough to say this is "one reason that I enjoy reading her blog." But he concludes:

Unfortunately, I find that many blog readers prefer strongly thesis-driven posts, which they can either echo or attack point by point.

Many... perhaps. But the best blog readers — and radio listeners — are the ones who want to experience thinking in real time.

Jim seems to be complimenting and critiquing me simultaneously. But I detect some wistfulness, some request for permission to cast aside those strongly thesis-driven posts — to live freely in writing.

What are the 2 words the eyes are saying in that photo?

Ha ha. It was pointed out that I have 2 posts in a row that begin with "Ha ha." So now I have 3. Ha ha. And I'm only saying that to take the edge off the the idiocy of having 3 posts in a row about that Rush Limbaugh article in the NYT. But I was just listening to the podcast of the show today and wanted to start a new conversation about the fact that Rush loves that cover photograph of himself. He said:

That's a great picture. You know, I've had some people say, "How come you let them take a picture of you where you look mean?" Hey, this is how the libs see me. You know what that picture says? That picture says dark, sinister, confident, dangerous; and if you look at the eyes in that picture, it also says something else, two words. (No, not "Tony Soprano.")

It's just a great picture.

He doesn't say what the 2 words are, not because he never gets around to it, I think, but because one of the words is one of the words you can't say on the radio, and the famous 2-word phrase is what he was trying to express to those terrible leftist readers of the New York Times. I'd said I thought the picture expressed the Times' feeling of intimidation. They portray him as sinister because they feel threatened by him. But his version of it is that he — and not the photographer and the photo editor — was the one doing the expressing.

Rush Limbaugh on Bill O'Reilly: "Somebody’s got to say it. The man is Ted Baxter."

Ha ha. I wanted to break that line out of the long post on the NYT article to make sure you wouldn't miss it.

Here's Ted Baxter:

"The cover photo of the TIMES Sunday magazine depicts Limbaugh 'dark and sinister' in a theme of THE GODFATHER."

Ha ha. Well, the Times is expressing its own entirely appropriate feeling of intimidation — for the man who likes to call himself "a harmless little fuzzball." And the hot news is that Limbaugh has signed a deal for $400 million to do his show through 2016.

UPDATE: The NYT has now made the whole article available. (It's from the Sunday Magazine.) I'll read it and write something more in a few minutes.

MORE: The article, by Zev Chafets, describes his entry into Rush's Palm Beach studio:

... I was met by Bo Snerdly — a very large man in a Huey Newton beret — who glared at me. “Are you the guy who’s here to do the hit job on us?” he demanded in a deep voice.

“Absolutely,” I said.

Snerdly, whose real name is James Golden, held my eyes for a long moment before bursting into emphatic laughter.

Chafets describes watching the show.

Unlike Howard Stern or Don Imus, he has no sidekicks with him in the room. He does, however, keep up a running conversation with an unheard voice. I always assumed that this was just imaginary radio shtick. Now I saw that the voice was attached to a human interlocutor, Snerdly, who banters with and occasionally badgers Limbaugh via an internal talk-back circuit.

Yes, you can tell when you listen to the show that someone is talking to him (or perhaps writing to him). Occasionally, it's like a Bob Newhart telephone routine where you have to imagine what is being said on the other end of the line, and that's part of why it's funny.

From the interview:

“I’ve never even met [John McCain], never spoken to him,” Limbaugh said. “I’m sure there are things about him I’d like if we meet. This isn’t personal.” He then delivered a litany of the presumptive nominee’s personal failings — too old, too intense, too opportunistic, too liberal. But, he assured me, he would be with McCain in the fall. “It’s like the Super Bowl,” he told me. “If your team isn’t in it, you root for the team you hate less. That’s McCain.”

It already seemed, when I made my visit, that McCain’s opponent might well be Senator Obama, and I was curious to know how Limbaugh planned to take on America’s first African-American major-party nominee. “I’ll approach Obama with fearless honesty,” said Limbaugh, who speaks of himself in heroic terms on air and off. “He’s a liberal. I oppose liberals. That’s all that’s involved here.”

I asked if he had any specific tactics in mind.

“I haven’t yet figured that out exactly,” he said. “You know, I’ve had a problem with substance abuse. I don’t deal with the future anymore. I take things one day at a time.”

That last line is self-deprecating and (I think) humorous, but I think he knows that doing things day-by-day keeps the show alive and makes it work. It's what works in blogging too. If you have a whole planned agenda and you just crank out the propaganda, people will get sick of you. It's when you are talking/writing to figure out what you think, to find out what you want to say, that you are interesting. (They didn't do that on Air America.)

More to come... I have to shut down this computer so I can unplug it. A thunderstorm is rolling it, and I want to survive.

MORE: Chafets shows some admiration for Rush:

But Operation Chaos was a triumph of interactive political performance art....

Such massive and consistent popularity makes Limbaugh a singular political force....

“Rush is just an amazing radio performer,” says Ira Glass, a star of the younger generation of public-radio personalities. “Years ago, I used to listen in the car on my way to reporting gigs, and I’d notice that I disagreed with everything he was saying, yet I not only wanted to keep listening, I actually liked him. That is some chops. You can count on two hands the number of public figures in America who can pull that trick off.”

Glass compares Limbaugh to another exceptional free-form radio monologist, Howard Stern. “A lot of people dismiss them both as pandering and proselytizing and playing to the lowest common denominator, but I think that misses everything important about their shows,” he says. “They both think through their ideas in real time on the air, they both have a lot more warmth than they’re generally given credit for, they both created an entire radio aesthetic.”

Glass — who is one of the public figures in America who should be counted on those 2 hands — is absolutely right about Limbaugh and Stern. That explains very well why I listen to all 3 men. (IMPORTANT NOTE: Rush, Howard, and I have the same birthday.)

There's some interesting material about his expensive lifestyle:

There are five homes — all of them his — on the property. The big house is 24,000 square feet. Limbaugh lives there with a cat. He’s been married three times but has no children.

Perhaps he'll leave a fortune to his cat.

A life-size oil portrait of El Rushbo, as he often calls himself on the air, hangs on the wall of the main staircase.

Remember, today's blog themes are: wealth, pets, and grotesque.

Unlike many right-wing talk-show hosts, Limbaugh does not view France with hostility. On the contrary, he is a Francophile. His salon, he told me, is meant to suggest Versailles. His main guest suite, which I did not personally inspect, was designed as an exact replica of the presidential suite of the George V Hotel in Paris.

Hmmm... Chafets should have listened to a few more shows! Liking the artwork isn't the same as liking the politics.

His staff lights fragrant candles throughout the house to greet his arrival from work each day.

So he wasn't lying when he was going on and on about jumbo-sized, gardenia-scented candles the other day.

There's some good stuff about Rush's father:

To this day, Limbaugh calls his father “the smartest man I’ve ever met.”

Certainly he was one of the most opinionated and autocratic. “On Friday nights my friends would come over to the house just to listen to my dad rant about politics,” Limbaugh recalls. “He was doing the same thing as I do today, without the humor or the satire. He didn’t approve of making fun of presidents. He didn’t think that sort of thing was funny.”

It's funny how his father's behavior became the idea for the show. Imagine taking your father's cranky rants, making them funny and getting the whole country for your equivalent of the living room. Think about it. Think about ways you can emulate and one-up Dad. Are you replaying your father's routine in your daily work? My father used to trap me into discussions of all the big issues and drove me to tears by applying the Socratic method — he called it the Socratic method. He was all about requiring that I define my terms, recognize that my answers were "semantics," and explain how I was going to get "from point A to point B." And now here I am, a law professor. These things happen.

Dick Adams, Rush’s boyhood friend and high-school debate partner, told me: “Mr. Limbaugh didn’t suffer fools lightly, let’s just put it like that. Many times I was over there when he called down Rush or David in harsh tones. There was usually a string of expletives attached.”

Yikes. Later:

He is less like his angry father than his mature role models, Buckley and Reagan, for whom sociability and fun were integral to their conservative world view.

This is interesting:

Jay Nordlinger, a senior editor at The National Review, watched Limbaugh’s tutelage under Buckley, and he takes Limbaugh seriously as a polemicist and public intellectual. “I hired a lot of people over the years, fancy kids from elite schools, and I always asked, ‘How did you become a conservative?’ Many of them said, ‘Listening to Rush Limbaugh.’ And often they’d add, ‘Behind my parents’ back.’ ”

This too:

Limbaugh works extemporaneously. He has no writers or script, just notes and a producer on the line from New York with occasional bits of information. That day, and every day, he produced 10,000 words of fluent, often clever political talk.

I thought he was reading off a script prepared by others much of the time. But he wants you to think this is just what bursts out of his head. It's damned impressive if it really does.

On Limbaugh's drug problem:

Being Limbaugh, he said he believes that most of these shortcomings stemmed from his inability to love himself sufficiently. “I felt everyone who criticized me was right and I was wrong,” he confided. But, he says, he left his insecurities behind in Arizona. “It’s not possible to offend me now,” he said. “I won’t give people the power to do it anymore. My problem was born of immaturity and my childhood desire for acceptance. I learned in drug rehab that this was stunting and unrealistic. I was seeking acceptance from the wrong people.”

How is that "being Limbaugh"? Isn't the need to love yourself stock advice in recovery programs? And doesn't Limbaugh usually ridicule the self-esteem movement?

On Bill O'Reilly:

He hadn’t been sure at the time that he wanted [his opinion] on the record. But on second thought, “somebody’s got to say it,” he told me. “The man is Ted Baxter.”

He likes Ann Coulter, Camille Paglia, Thomas Sowell, and Christopher Hitchens.

Nice article. A very positive, admiring picture of the man — not at all in keeping with the ominous cover photograph. There's some critique in there, but basically, it's obvious that the reporter had a great time hanging out with Rush Limbaugh.

Barack Obama "is supposed to be the tonic for the culture wars of the 60s."

But, Maureen Dowd says, "it’s Obama who seems trapped, sucked back into yesteryear" (i.e., Vietnam):

Wes Clark joined the growing ranks of troublesome Obama associates when he meowed that just “riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down” is not a qualification to be president. He made McCain sound like a drone aircraft....

Another renowned Marine grunt in Vietnam, Democratic Senator Jim Webb, chimed in on MSNBC, advising flyboy McCain to “calm down” on his promotion of his military service, saying we need to “get the politics out of the military.”

Calm down? The only point of saying that is to piss off McCain. There's nothing more irritating than being told to calm down. And McCain hadn't flamed up over Clark. Get the politics out of the military? It's Clark and Webb who are injecting all the politics into the military right now. Webb is pissing me off. I don't know how McCain can resist taking the bait. Do the Obama people have someone who can be even more annoying than Webb on this subject? They seem to be wheeling out the military men one after the other. Clark didn't do the trick, so up comes Webb. Can they top Webb?

Anyway, Dowd's point is that Obama wants to get us out of Iraq, but he can't even get us out of Vietnam.

ADDED: Instapundit links to this post, calls attention to Obama's "I can’t have fun anymore, it’s not allowed," and quotes Enigmaticore from our comments section:

I still cannot fathom what the thinking is with the Democrats on this one.

It's like they want to have this election fought on questions of character, patriotism, self-sacrifice, and integrity. Oh, and with the attack on McCain for having voted for confirmation of Ginsburg and other liberal judges, of bipartisanship.

This is playing out as if McCain has a mole inside the strategy sessions of the Democrats, guiding them to fight the campaign exactly where their candidate is weakest and their opponent is strongest.

Do they really want people, going into the 4th of July holiday, to be concentrating on the service and sacrifices of John McCain? Really?

The NYT notices that pro-Obama bloggers are mad at Obama over his flip on telecommunications immunity.

James Risen writes:

During the Democratic primary campaign, Mr. Obama vowed to fight such legislation to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. But he has switched positions, and now supports a compromise hammered out between the White House and the Democratic Congressional leadership....

“I don’t think there has been another instance where, in meaningful numbers, his supporters have opposed him like this,” said Glenn Greenwald, a Salon.com writer who opposes Mr. Obama’s new position. “For him to suddenly turn around and endorse this proposal is really a betrayal of what so many of his supporters believed he believed in.”

Jane Hamsher, a liberal blogger who also opposes immunity for the phone companies, said she had been flooded with messages from Obama supporters frustrated with his new stance.

“The opposition to Obama’s position among his supporters is very widespread,” said Ms. Hamsher, founder of the Web site firedoglake.com. “His promise to filibuster earlier in the year, and the decision to switch on that is seen as a real character problem. I know people who are really very big Obama supporters are very disillusioned.”...

“I will continue to support him,” [said Markos Moulitsas, a liberal blogger and founder of the Daily Kos.] “But I was going to write him a check, and I decided I would rather put that money with Democrats who will uphold the Constitution.”

You can't please everybody, and if you want to be President, you really can't please Greenwald, Hamsher, and Kos. Obama is taking the right position now, and he should defend it frankly.

"The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face."

Christopher Hitchens has himself waterboarded.

Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

He has a second go at it:

Steeling myself to remember what it had been like last time, and to learn from the previous panic attack, I fought down the first, and some of the second, wave of nausea and terror but soon found that I was an abject prisoner of my gag reflex. The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it....

Hitchens concludes: "[I]f waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture." But if Hitchens is willing to submit to it as an experiment, it can't be the worst torture. We can easily think of many tortures that he would not have accepted for journalistic purposes and that no one friendly to him would have perpetrated.

Hitchens doesn't deprive us of the pro-waterboarding argument:

[A] man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

But Hitchens nevertheless concludes that it is torture and that Americans should not torture, and his argument is chiefly a practical one premised on American interests.

ADDED: Video of the Hitchens waterboarding.

What if federal law allows the death penalty for raping a child and the Supreme Court analyzed "evolving standards of decency" without noticing?

It happened!

A military law blog pointed out over the weekend that Congress, in fact, revised the sex crimes section of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 2006 to add child rape to the military death penalty. The revisions were in the National Defense Authorization Act that year. President Bush signed that bill into law and then, last September, carried the changes forward by issuing Executive Order 13447, which put the provisions into the 2008 edition of the Manual for Courts-Martial.

Anyone in the federal government — or anywhere else, for that matter — who knew about these developments did not tell the court. Not one of the 10 briefs filed in the case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, mentioned it....

Dwight Sullivan, a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve who now works for the Air Force as a civilian defense lawyer handling death penalty appeals.

Mr. Sullivan was reading the Supreme Court’s decision on a plane and was surprised to see no mention of the military statute. “We’re not talking about ancient history,” he said in an interview. “This happened in 2006.”

What an immense shame and embarrassment for everyone involved in this case — especially for all of the Justices of the Supreme Court!

Grotesque faces are highly favored by the very rich.

Click here to see the paintings that brought the highest prices.

A 1967 portrait ["Study for Head of George Dyer,"] by Francis Bacon fetched $27.4 million at Sotheby's here on Tuesday night...

... "Untitled (Pecho/Oreja)," a 1982-83 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat... acquired by members of the band U2 in 1989... sold for $10.1 million....

I'm not knocking these paintings, by the way, just noting that both depict grotesque faces and finding it interesting that people with lots of money enjoy ugliness. I'm always jealous of successful painters — and I painted many grotesque faces in my failed-artist days. Reading articles like this one, I have to fight back the delusion that those millions should be mine.

Leona Helmsley has left $5+ billion dollars to minister to the needs of the dog community.

All that money for dogs? People didn't like her, and apparently, she didn't like people. Or do you think she just loved dogs that much? There must have been many days when she looked at her little dog and thought: Only a dog can love me. Only a dog knows what real love is.

Her instructions, specified in a two-page “mission statement,” are that the entire trust, valued at $5 billion to $8 billion and amounting to virtually all her estate, be used for the care and welfare of dogs, according to two people who have seen the document...

It is by no means clear, however, that all the money will go to dogs. Another provision of the mission statement says Mrs. Helmsley’s trustees may use their discretion in distributing the money, and some lawyers say the statement may not mean much anyway, given that its directions were not incorporated into Mrs. Helmsley’s will or the trust documents.

“The statement is an expression of her wishes that is not necessarily legally binding,” said William Josephson, a lawyer who was the chief of the Charities Bureau in the New York State attorney general’s office from 1999 to 2004.

Will the lawyers and judges be able to wheedle their way out of of this? Will the force of mega-money and sheer public outrage at spending it all on dogs open a loophole where there is none? Read the linked article, and you'll see that the judge has already been "flexible" about the will that left $12 million to Helmsley's dog Trouble. The dog is only getting $2 million!

[L]ongstanding laws favor adherence to a donor’s intent, and the mission statement is the only clear expression of Mrs. Helmsley’s charitable intentions. ...

... Mrs. Helmsley signed it in 2003 to establish goals for the multibillion-dollar trust that would disburse assets after her death.

The first goal was to help indigent people, the second to provide for the care and welfare of dogs. A year later, they said, she deleted the first goal.

What thoughts went through her head as she deleted the goal of helping poor people? What happened that made her snap?

Now, let's assume the trust stays the way it seems she wanted it, and the money must be all spent on the dog community. How to spend it?

There are many ways the trustees could spend the Helmsley money on dogs. National groups like the Humane Society and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have programs dedicated to dogs, and many smaller local groups rescue abandoned and abused dogs.

Make sure the cats don't get any of it! Why not stop putting the dogs to death? Build huge dog care centers for all the stray dogs. House their caregivers — luxury style — and pay them well. Now, it's a nice jobs program for the best people — the dog-loving kind.

Or the trustees could use the trust’s money to finance veterinary schools or research on canine diseases.

Found schools of dog medicine. (The cats get nothing! Farm animals? Zoo animals? Wild animals? No money for them!) Very generously fund all the professors of dog medicine at these schools.

You know, being a people doctor isn't so great anymore. So all the best students will want to go to dog medicine school — where tuition is free. Make room and board free too. And make it luxury hotel style.

Found dog hospitals. Provide free care to dogs. Cancer surgery — free. Intensive care units — with the best paid nurses. The hospital food? Hire the best chefs.

Build dog cemeteries. Ornate, grand — have the best sculptors carve marble dog statues for the monuments. And let people walk their dogs in in the cemetery and piss on the monuments all they like. Pay some human beings to clean up after the dogs constantly.

Construct beautiful parks dedicated to dogs on the most expensive city real estate. At the gate, post a sign: No human beings unaccompanied by dogs.

IN THE COMMENTS: Pogo looks for loopholes:

1. The University of Georgia. Go Dawgs!

2. Footwear for the working poor.

3. Plastic surgery for homely girls.

4. A tuition-free Rap school, founded by Snoop.

5. The world's biggest block party, with weiners by Milwaukee's own Usinger's.

6. Fireplace andirons for everybody!

7. Fund the study of parhelions.

"Liberals are more interested in listening to opposing points of view than are conservatives."

Says Jonathan Chait, interpreting this study and appropriately and humorously checking himself: "I'm going to wallow in smug self-satisfaction for a few minutes, then go over to the Corner to see if anybody has a rebuttal."

McCain and Obama both criticized the Supreme Court for rejecting the death penalty for the rape of a child, but McCain points to the real distinction.

WaPo reports:

McCain emphasized that he would seek out Supreme Court appointees along the lines of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, saying they're the kind of jurists who will rule in favor of crime victims.

"They will be the kind of judges who believe in giving everyone in a criminal court their due: justice for the guilty and the innocent, compassion for the victims, and respect for the men and women of law enforcement," he said. "In all of criminal justice policy, we must put the interests of law-abiding citizens first -- and above all, the rights of victims."...

While McCain noted that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) criticized [Kennedy v. Louisiana], he suggested that Obama would back the same kind of liberal justices who overruled the Louisiana law this month.

"More to the point, why is it that the majority includes the same justices he usually holds out as the models for future nominations?" he said. "My opponent may not care for this particular decision, but it was exactly the kind of opinion we could expect from an Obama Court."

This is exactly the point I wanted to see made. What is Obama's counterattack? From the WaPo piece:

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor questioned why McCain would suggest only "an Obama Court" would produce rulings like the kind the Court just issued concerning child rapists, when the GOP senator backed four of the five judges who just ruled the death penalty was not appropriate for such crimes.

"Senator McCain voted for 4 of the 5 judges who supported this flawed ruling, which is why this attack is particularly disingenuous and nothing more than the same old Bush-style politics that the American people are tired of," Vietor said....

What's disingenuous is Vietor's argument. The role of the President and the role of a Senator are very different when it comes to Supreme Court appointments. The President's nomination identifies one person from the pool of possible nominees and therefore has a tremendous amount of latitude in searching for someone who he thinks will decide cases to his liking, who shares his ideology.

A Senator can only question this one individual and vote up or down. When someone with the qualifications of Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, or Stephen Breyer is nominated, it is very hard for a Senator to justify voting no, even if he would not have nominated that person. In fact, he should vote yes — out of an understanding of the President's role and respect for the people who elected that President.

Indeed, as I said at the time of his confirmation, it was outrageous to vote against the spectacularly qualified John Roberts:

As to those 22 Democrats who voted no, they have openly embraced an ideological view of the Court from which they can never credibly step back. For them, appointing Supreme Court Justices is a processes of trying to lock outcomes in place, and we shouldn't believe them if in the future they try to say otherwise.

Of course, Barack Obama was one of the 22.

A year ago, Obama talked about why he rejected John Roberts. Roberts said "he saw himself just as an umpire":

“But the issues that come before the court are not sports; they’re life and death. We need somebody who’s got the empathy to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom.”

Obama said that 95 percent of cases can be judged on intellect, but that the other 5 percent are the most important ones.

“In those 5 percent of cases, you’ve got to look at what is in the justice’s heart, what’s their broader vision of what America should be."

If you really believe that about the cases that are determined by "heart," wasn't Kennedy v. Lousiana a heart case? Writing for the majority, Anthony Kennedy said:

It is an established principle that decency, in its essence, presumes respect for the individual and thus moderation or restraint in the application of capital punishment....

[We] insist upon confining the instances in which capital punishment may be imposed....

As it relates to crimes against individuals, ... the death penalty should not be expanded to instances where the victim’s life was not taken....

Surely, this is what Obama wants from a Justice. How can he credibly assert otherwise?

"This image stands in stark contrast to the fairy-tale image of the famous face and chestnut hair that made her modeling's next big thing."

"Geraldo at Large" and at loathsome.

Things you shouldn't say on TV.

"Jesus Christ."

Planning a Chicago shopping trip? The sales tax is now 10.25%!

That's the highest sales tax in the country. I've driven to Chicago many times just to shop. Many of us in Wisconsin do that. And this really makes that trip much less appealing. When things get more expensive, we compensate by buying less or going somewhere else.

"'Mongol' might as well be called 'Braveheart in a Yurt.'"

Ha ha. So writes Michael Phillips. That's what I thought: This is like "Braveheart," right down to the deep, minimalistic love story.

There's a lot in this war movie — the coming of age of Genghis Khan — that women can love. Beautifully photographed landscapes. Fabulous fashion. (Those hats!) Horses galore. Feisty kids. Manly men who sing in that amazing overtone voice. Beautiful women who make the first move, stand their ground, and accomplish daring feats. Lovers separated and united. Bondage. (Do you know what a cangue is?) Tribal customs from the 12th century. Lots of eating and drinking. (Meat carved off the bone and eaten from a knife and endless bowls of (occasionally poisoned) liquid). Also a lot of knives, arrows, and blood.

"Mongol" should count as a law movie too. Temudgin (Genghis Khan) comes up with the big idea: "Mongols need laws." And that related idea: "I will make them obey, even if I have to kill half of them." He also happens to say: "Mongols have the right to choose."

Here's Stanley Kauffmann:

... Immediately we think of... John Ford's The Searchers ...

Other reminders of Ford abound, as well as reminders of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia... Olivier's Henry V and Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky must also be tucked away in [the director Sergei] Bodrov's head...