"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 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.