What are we to think of Websites that hide their religious mission behind home pages full of pop culture, sports, and mundane advice?

To illustrate how beauty tips might be used to spread the gospel, Mrs. Schenk noted that the most popular article on Women Today Online has been an advice column about frizzy hair. Before reading advertisements for L'Oreal, readers see a link that reads, "Are you happy with your body?" If they click on that, they get the life story of a model who battled bulimia but then found success after becoming a born-again Christian. "You can receive Christ right now by faith through prayer," she writes.

Anything wrong with that?

"We're just being sensitive to where people are at and inviting them in. We don't have spinning crosses on Women Today."

Thanks for eschewing the spinning crosses, but isn't trying to get someone to click on "Are you happy with your body?" to put over a religion message awfully similar to an email message line saying that says "Hi" to get me to open a sales pitch?

Not really. At least you had to actively go to the website, and there is a complete disjunct between "Hi" and the product, whereas the connection between feeling unhappy with your body and needing spiritual help has real substance. Clicking on that question and getting the surprising answer is a communicative event in itself: the process of being misdirected from beauty tips to religion is a message with some bite.

UPDATE: I'd say the same thing if the link from the beauty tips page took you to an article about feminism.

We really should scrutinize John Edwards’ great success as a trial lawyer in medical malpractice cases, while the decision whether he will be the nominee is being made. As Adam Liptak and Michael Moss describe in today's NYT, Edwards was especially successful suing obstetricians; he faulted them for failing to perform Caesareans when the fetal heart monitor showed signs of distress. His lawsuits, and the lawsuits they inspired, have led doctors to respond to signs of distress more quickly, and there is a debate now about whether this change is good, whether lawyers like Edwards rely on “questionable science,” and whether there should be new laws to make it harder for plaintiffs’ lawyers to win these cases.

Based on this article, it appears that Edwards will do quite well standing up to criticisms about his past. First, he attributes his high level of success to his skill and effort selecting the cases that deserved to win:

"I took very seriously our responsibility to determine if our cases were merited," Mr. Edwards said. "Before I ever accepted a brain-injured child case, we would spend months investigating it."

This is the negative side of the same point:

"He took only those cases that were catastrophic, that would really capture a jury's imagination," Mr. Wells, a defense lawyer, said. "He paints himself as a person who was serving the interests of the downtrodden, the widows and the little children. Actually, he was after the cases with the highest verdict potential. John would probably admit that on cross-examination." ….

"For the one or two who got a substantial jury verdict," said George W. Miller Jr., a former state representative in North Carolina who practices law in Durham, "there were 99 that did not get anything, either because they were not able to finance litigation or their claim was questionable."

Second, he easily makes the charge of unnecessary Caesareans seem weak:

"The question is, would you rather have cases where that happens instead of having cases where you don't intervene and a child either becomes disabled for life or dies in utero?"

What odds would you accept for your child before you would decline the Caesarean? Would you have the Caesarean if there was one chance in 100 that the baby would be brain damaged without it? There are people on the other side of the debate:

Dr. Karin B. Nelson, a child neurologist with the National Institutes of Health, says the notion that paying greater heed to electronic monitoring will prevent brain injuries remains just that, a notion. "Evidence of high medical quality contradicts the assumption that the use of electronic fetal monitoring during labor can prevent brain damage," Dr. Nelson said.

The medical debate ought to take place, but I can’t see how doubts about Caesareans will play well served up as an attack on Edwards in the political arena:

Mr. Edwards's colleagues in the plaintiffs' bar do not accept that analysis. "You find me a low C-section rate," said Daniel B. Cullan, a doctor, lawyer and co-chairman of the trial lawyer association's birth trauma group, "and I'll show you children in wheelchairs."

What does seem to have some power as a political weapon is the charge that “[h]is campaign is disproportionately financed by lawyers and people associated with them.” This article about Edwards runs on the front page of today’s NYT, right under an article headlined “Democrats Assail, and Tap, ‘Special Interests.’” (That sounds like an Onion headline!) Here’s the key paragraph about Edwards in that article (written by Glenn Justice and John Tierney):

Mr. Edwards tells audiences, "I've never taken a dime from a Washington lobbyist and I never will." That might be literally true — not many lobbyists give dimes these days — but Mr. Edwards has accepted at least a few contributions from current and former lobbyists, and his campaign manager was a registered Washington lobbyist in 2002. Mr. Edwards has also accepted millions of dollars from lawyers, including members of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, a trade group that wields enormous influence on tort reform. An ex-president of the group, Fred Baron, is a financial co-chairman for Mr. Edwards's campaign. The new president of the group and all four executive officers, have each given $2,000.

So look for generalized carping about personal injury lawyers. But I think Edwards will brilliantly and elegantly come back with vivid details about real cases that will make him look good and his critics uncaring.

Speaking of Google, I got all excited the other day when I discovered that this blog came up first when the word "Althouse" alone was Googled. I sent my sons an email message with the subject "Goal reached today!"

John emailed me back, saying no, some outfit called "Art-N-Glass" is coming up first. They don't even have the word "Althouse" on their page! They're using some scheme, some Google-fraud, to claim words as if they were on their page. Responding to my outrage, here's John Althouse Cohen:

They are practicing Googlefraud, and in doing so they're preventing you from maintaining the feeling you had earlier today: what the Germans call Googlefreude (joy derived from Google).

Since beginning this blog on January 14th, I have dropped a lot of names. Whatever names I dropped, I dropped because I was thinking about the person already or because I saw them in a news article or on TV and they appealed to me personally in some way that made me want to take note of them here. I was not at all considering that people put names into Google and will therefore come visit your blog if you've dropped the name that they've gone searching for. I figured out how to use Sitemeter to get a list of "referral" pages, to see where my visitors come from. That means I can see what the Google search was if people come here from Google.

I have dropped a lot of names in my seventeen days of blogging--movie stars, artists, political figures. But there is one name that leaves them all in the dust, that leaves Tom Cruise and Andy Warhol and John Kerry behind. There is one name that caused the visitation rate here to spike in the last two days. I am writing about law and politics and culture and a wide range of topics that I would be happy to think people are enjoying reading about. But I must face the strange reality that most people are coming here because they want to read about one person.

That person is William Hung.

Here's Pop Life on the subject:

My students have seen him around campus at Berkeley since he's an engineering student here. I'm sure a William Hung Fan Club is just moments away from being created with people wearing T-shirts that read "He Bangs!: I Hang With Hung."

So William, if you're out there, Googling your own name and arriving here, you should know, you've got a lot of fans. You're the Frenchie Davis of American Idol 3, but you've outdone Frenchie, because you've done it without having to go to the trouble of being a good singer. You've accomplished it all with one magnificant, comic performance, and the world loves you!

UPDATE: I see from Metafilter that there is now a William Hung website. The Metafilter discussion includes a comment by someone who knows someone who knows him and who says Hung was deliberately doing a comic performance and some back and forth about whether knowing it was an act makes us like him more or less than if we thought he was clueless.

"And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank," by Steve Oney is reviewed by Marshall Frady in the New York Review of Books. Federal courts professors like me often talk about the United States Supreme Court opinion about the scope of habeas corpus that arose out of Frank’s case, but here are the stark details of Frank’s horrific ordeal. In 1913, Frank, the Jewish superintendent of an Atlanta pencil factory, was accused of murdering a thirteen-year-old girl, Mary Phagan, who worked in the factory and had gone in to pick up her $1.20 paycheck. You’ll have to find the paper copy of the NYRB to see the heart-wrenching photographs of Frank—“a slight, bespectacled figure, … endowed with an unremittingly shy and self-contained reserve”— at his trial and Frank, lynched, hanging from a tree.

... Mary Phagan ... had been strangled to death, the twine still wound around her neck, her face battered, and her underdrawers ripped and bloody. Soon discovered in the debris beside her were two curious notes, scrawled on company paper, that seemed a crude, barely intelligible effort at pretending to have been written by the victim herself:

he said he wood love me land down play like the night witch did it.... he push me down that hole ...i wright this while play with me.

...[P]olice suspicions quickly settled on Leo Frank, principally owing to his behavior when they arrived at his house early Sunday morning to notify him of Mary Phagan's murder. It was a time when much melodramatic import was placed on particulars of manner, and police would later testify that Frank paced about his front parlor "nervous" and "excited," blurting questions as he twisted his hands, his voice "hoarse and trembling."…

The murder notes, though, remained something of a puzzle until the factory's twenty-nine-year-old black sweeper, James Conley, was also arrested when seen at the factory's water cooler trying to wash out red stains from a work shirt. ... Conley ... finally professed that Frank, after killing the girl on the factory's second floor in a ravishment attempt gone awry, had enlisted his aid in transporting her body in the elevator down to the basement, and then dictated to him the murder notes, with the rather improbable remark to him, Conley claimed, "Why should I hang, I have wealthy people in Brooklyn."

Read of the trial and the press hysteria. The case became "a tournament of competing racisms":

... Conley was characterized by the defense, "a plain, beastly, drunken, filthy, lying [epithet] ...fired with lust...." In fact, the racial derision of Conley was heartily participated in by all parties, including the press, one reporter pointing out, "Conley isn't a cornfield negro. He's more of the present-day type of city darkey," and even The New York Times would eventually describe him as a "drunken, lowlived, utterly worthless...black human animal." But the prosecution as well concurred in the racist caricaturing of its central witness, Dorsey declaring, about Frank's reluctance to directly confront Conley before the trial, "never in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race...did an ignorant, filthy negro accuse a white man of a crime and that man decline to face him."

The telling difference in that formulation, of course, was that Frank didn't happen to be of the Anglo-Saxon race. And as if in acknowledgment of that liability, a defense lawyer insisted, "Frank's race don't kill. They are not a violent race," and later, the defense felt it had to stipulate that one of its witnesses was, "it's true, a Jew, but she was telling the truth." The defense finally risked arousing exactly what it was protesting by claiming that Frank had only invited prosecution because he "comes from a race of people that have made money." To counter that suggestion, Dorsey intoned that while "this great people rise to heights sublime...they sink to the depths of degradation, too," mentioning among a list of Jewish malefactors Judas Iscariot, "a good character and one of the Twelve" who nevertheless "took the thirty pieces of silver and betrayed our Lord Jesus Christ."

Here is Frady's description of the lynching:

[Frank] sat between two men in the back seat of a car, his nightshirt "luminous among the galluses and wool hats," mutely resigned now to his doom, as the caravan took back roads through moonlit cottonfields, coming into the outskirts of the town just at dawn, where it stopped at a stand of woods by a cotton gin. Frank was hauled out, blindfolded, tied at his hands and feet, lifted up on a table; the rope was slung over the limb of an oak tree and the noose dropped around his neck. The circuit judge then kicked the table from under Frank's feet. It was not from a snapped neck, though, that Frank died, but a slow strangulation, as he twisted about desperately.

There is much more here to read. Read of William Smith, the lawyer, "driven by an idealism to protect [Conley,] the 'penniless and friendless' black man caught up in the coils of the case." Smith eventually realized that Conley must have written the notes alone. In an oxygen tent, dying of "Lou Gehrig's disease, on his last day of life he slipped a note to his son through the plastic sheeting: 'IN ARTICLES OF DEATH, I BELIEVE IN THE INNOCENCE AND GOOD CHARACTER OF LEO M. FRANK. W.M. SMITH.'"

I see Prof. Yin is blogging last night's "The Apprentice." Ah, big surprise, the women win again by what the New York Times once referred to as "using their gender." My conspiracy theory is still in play.

I have this episode TiVo'd, and I can't be positive I won't give in and finish watching it, but I can tell you exactly where I hit the pause button, and where, if I know what's good for me, I will leave it.

It was right when Trump dangled the big prize for winning the new challenge in front of the contestant/sycophants: a visit to "the best golf course in New York State"--Trump National Golf Club. Is this show not the most revolting, grandiose infomercial ever?

Is this a picture of John Kerry or Donald Sutherland at the end of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"? (Thanks, Chris.)

Hey, isn't it way past time to remake "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" again?

The Dean-o-Phobe retires:

... Dean is finished as a potential nominee. He's blown all his money, his campaign is in disarray, and he's turned to an inside-the-Beltway Democrat to run his campaign. ...

... Deanism is dead as well. By "Deanism" ... I mean ... the belief that some combination of technology and Dean's charisma can somehow suspend all the known laws of politics ... It's apparent to just about everybody--except, perhaps, the die-hards on the left who always believed it--that neither Dean nor anybody else has the ability to conjure millions of new voters out of thin air merely by making the differences between Republicans and Democrats sufficiently stark. ...

... John Kerry takes all the fun out of Dean-o-phobia. Indeed, if there's anybody who could make Dean attractive, it's Kerry. Kerry is a miserable candidate, bereft of political skills, and possessing of a record and a persona tailor-made for Karl Rove. The Republicans will merely have to say about Kerry what they said about Gore--that he wants to be on every side of every issue, that he's culturally out of touch with mainstream America, that he's a pompous bore--and this time the sale will be easier, because all these things are far more true of Kerry than of Gore. ....

Is Kerry like Gore? Chris Suellentrop has this:

I don't want to overstate Kerry's flaws. He's not Al Gore. He comes across as good-humored, decent, and likable rather than phony. And he doesn't pander mindlessly on every subject.

Yes, why not kick around Al Gore a little more, as we struggle to avoid dying of boredom trying to find a way to talk about Kerry for the next nine months?

Guy Coq has an op-ed in today’s NYT defending the proposed French law banning Muslim schoolgirls from wearing head scarves in class. He cites the long French history of religious strife to justify the ban, as if the historical problem of religious strife did not underlie American ideas about religious freedom.

By separating church and state — instituting a republic that was neutral toward all religions, and without a national religion — France finally realized the aims of the Revolution. This is laïcité, and it has worked well.

But the laïcité of schools has been eroded by the intrusion of religious symbols, prompted by an excess of individualism, that philosophy so revered by Americans. … More than ever, in this time of political-religious tensions, school secularism is for us the foundation for civil peace, and for the integration of people of all beliefs into the Republic. If the French hold laïcité so dearly, it is because that principle, as much as the republic and democracy, is essential for a cohesive society. ... They no longer have a base of common religious tradition. Instead, they are constructing social guidelines built around ethical, universal values like justice and liberty of conscience.

The question that France is posing to the world is this: Can one progress toward true respect of these universal values without relying on some sort of "laicity"? To disarm fundamentalism, notably Islamic fundamentalism, can we give up laïcité, which builds a neutral space for all of us?

It isn't a lack of understanding of history that makes the French head scarf ban seem wrong to Americans, it is respect for individual freedom. Coq's "neutral space for all" benefits those whose religion imposes no clothing requirements, just as enforced silence benefits those with nothing to say. Bans on articles of clothing might still be justifiable, but this attempt to convince us by insulting our knowledge of history and invoking superficial neutrality is quite feeble.

So Nina got Tonya and me to start blogging, and Tonya thinks she was blog-empted by my post about bad eBay spelling, and Nina's blogging about the NYT article about the horrible germ infestation of the common kitchen sponge, which I was this close to blogging about. But dialogue--diablog--is possible. Just as the internet teems with misspellings and the kitchen teems with bacteria, so there is room for all to blog all they want about about spelling and sponges.

Read Tonya's discussion of the NAACP's giving an "Image Award" to the Dave Matthew's Band for its "dignified representation of people of color"--including lots of comments gleaned from fan sites ("DMB has the most obsessed, devoted, protective, over-analytical and hyper-critical fanbase in the music industry").

Check out Nina's blog too: she neatly connects the horrible sponge to the Oscar race, which is the kind of connection blogs live for.

Has there ever been a more beautiful movie poster than the one for "Big Fish"?

Wow! Visual Thesaurus! Language will never be the same.

Janet Frame, 1924-2004, "spells history hiss-tree to make an unsettling connection to Eden's serpent."

After a suicide attempt she spent eight years in mental hospitals in New Zealand, receiving 200 electroshock treatments. She was about to have a lobotomy when a hospital official read that she had won a literary prize. She was released.

See her story in the brilliantly acted film, "An Angel At My Table." Click on this link to see how to express interest in its release in DVD format.

My car's thermometer reading this morning as I drove to work: - 8 degrees.

Here's a new entry for my modern Dictionary of Received Ideas:

Weather. When cold, make wry comment about global warming.

The John Kerry and Botox issue.

Wonkette quips:

Our politicians owe it to us to be hot. We're the ones who have look at them all the time. So, from us to you, John Kerry: Thank you. You once risked your life for your fellow Americans, and now you've risked your nerve endings. There is no greater price -- and no greater reward.

I'd say, if people are talking about your face too much, they're distracted from talking about something else about you. If there's something you can do to remove the distraction, go ahead and do it! You will be helping us turn our thoughts to substantive things.

This is especially important for the candidates because they are coming at us in our TV rooms, where we are relaxed and talking to close friends and family. Everyone in that setting feels free to just call out "Look at his face" or "He looks like [whatever]." That is basic, casual, I'm-just-watching-TV humor. Jon Stewart feels free to use that kind of humor on "The Daily Show" all the time, because he's decided to become our TV-watching pal, showing us clips and helping us laugh, pretty much the way we could do on our own, if we were just a tad more motivated and had someone isolating the most ridiculous TV-clips for us.

Obviously, there's also the fear of getting caught and then being called vain or metrosexual or effeminate. People were talking about the cragginess of Kerry's face way too much, and now maybe they'll switch not to substantive matters but to talking about the Botox issue instead. But the wiser course is to do what you can to make yourself telegenic. It's the Nixon lesson--described here by Richard Rodriguez:

Nearly forty years ago, the debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon became -- as the television lens saw it -- a debate between earnestness and sophistication, between pale skin and a tan. Kennedy wore the tan. He looked easy, cosmopolitan.

Poor Richard Nixon, in a manly burst, refused makeup before the debate; he looked sickly. Then, to make matters worse, he started to sweat. You're not supposed to sweat on television. It means that you're guilty. It means that you are a liar. It means that we can't trust you to become President.

All the political candidates wear makeup on TV now. Presumably, before long, they will all use Botox too. The problem is not using such things, it is using them badly. A political candidate that Botoxed his face into an inhuman mask would run into problems similar to those Al Gore had when he wore too much makeup in one of the debates four years ago.

Here's a nice account of working for Jack Paar on The Tonight Show by Dick Cavett. Interesting revelation: Paar was very intelligent, but not well schooled, and he was especially conscious of his lack of schooling and envious of people who had what he lacked.

That was true of two other great comedians: Groucho Marx and Woody Allen. I wonder if that quality--self-conscious, unschooled intelligence--is the best source of humor.

Did you ever just "Create a New Post" in Blogger, not meaning to hit the "Publish" button, then later, maybe the next day, notice that you must have hit the button at some point, because there it is on your blog? I did that here.

It's pretty hypocritical of me to complain about too much filler verbiage on TV while simulblogging that verbiage.

I love Jeremy Freese's cool, colorful pie charts depicting what he should be doing instead of blogging and what he actually would be doing instead of blogging.

By the way, if anyone ever feels inclined to think I'm spending too much time blogging, I'd like to assure them that I'd be watching TV passively, instead of watching it and writing about it, and reading things passively, instead of reading and writing about it. Well, maybe not entirely passively, in that I would entertain a few thoughts about what I was taking in, hazard a comment if anyone is around, and occasionally email a link to someone with a comment. Hence, the exciting transition to blogging.

One thing about blogging, though, is that you do think of a lot of things in terms of blogging. You scan the paper looking for the bloggable. You hear a snippet of conversation or see a stray sign and think of blogging it. I seriously considered blogging the topic of email spam that uses the word "hi" as the subject line and what that is doing to my sense of trust in humanity. But I do exercise some restraint.

Go read Jeremy's blog.

So we did finally get around to watching "American Idol" last night? I see Prof. Yin did a simulblog of the event, or at least of his tape of it. (No TiVo?!)

how would you like to be Rodrigo, the guy who was told he did "all right" but who lost out when Simon didn't like his answer to the question, "What would you do with the $1 million if you won?" He babbled about giving some to charity, investing some, donating more to charity, and something else.

Yeah, poor Rodrigo, doomed to feeling bad about charity for the rest of his life! The people who go on the show famously resist interpreting their rejection as any kind of information about deficiencies of theirs. But the problem with the answer was that it was boring, conventional, and lamely babbled. We saw a woman succeed with an answer to the question: she wanted to buy a classic Thunderbird to go with her retro style. That was clear and specific. Given a chance to speak, she instantly set to work on constructing her public persona. The success of her answer wasn't that she was more honest than Rodrigo, but that she had aptitude for being a TV personality. The show isn't really about picking the best singer, or even the best overall singer-product, but to entertain us one way or another. The contestants have to engage us somehow: they cannot be boring!

How much imagination did it take for the producers to find a nerdy looking engineering major from Cal-Berkeley to humiliate?

If he's smart enough to go to Berkeley, he's smart enough to know how the show works and to know what he's risking by not asking a friend for a brutally honest assessment of his singing before he set out to get on TV. Maybe he had a great time. I'd like to think the wonderful William Hung was sitting home with his (nerdy-looking) friends last night, watching the show and laughing hysterically.

I note that the other conspicuously smart contestant--a Harvard student--was also one of the most ridiculously bad singers. I think one reason that happens on the show is that it seems less meanspirited to make sport of a person who we don't have any reason to feel sorry for. Conversely, we would not have seen Jasmine Arteaga, a young woman with dwarfism, if she hadn't done an excellent audition.

UPDATE: Another theory on why the Thunderbird answer worked, from the astute and funny Shack at Television Without Pity, is that Ford is a sponsor!

Draeh can sing fairly well, and she's willing to shill spontaneously for [product-placed car company] with her imaginary American Idol winnings, so she's invited on. Rodrigo is really hot and ... nearly gets through to Hollywood, but then he gives some stupid Miss America speech about using his money to heal the world and gets rejected for being too lame for words.

I can remember the elementary school teacher, one who pursued the “whole language” approach to learning to write, who scoffed at a child’s interest in spelling. The kids would always have computers to spellcheck for them. The poetic justice is that the very computers that lured people into thinking they didn’t need to bother to learn to spell anymore are now taking their revenge. Diana Jean Schemo writes on the front page of today’s NYT of the hapless bad spellers who end up selling their goods for next to nothing on eBay. Most buyers never find these folks, but there are people trolling eBay for “bycicles, telefones, dimonds, mother of perl, cuttlery, bedroom suits and loads of antiks.”

David Scroggins … operates his entire business by laptop computers, having bought three Compaqs for a pittance simply by asking for Compacts instead.

Why don't people selling on eBay use the computer spellcheck? They are obviously on the computer when they make their mistakes. Consider the woman who wanted to sell a pair of chandelier earrings:

[S]he knew she was on shaky ground when she set out to spell chandelier. But instead of flipping through a dictionary, she did an Internet search for chandaleer and came up with 85 or so listings.

She never guessed, she said, that results like that meant she was groping in the spelling wilderness. Chandelier, spelled right, turns up 715,000 times.

According to Schemo--I love that name--people are getting used to seeing misspellings, because of the Internet:

[E]xperts say the Internet — with its discussion boards, blogs and self-published articles — is a treasure trove of bad spelling.

(Thanks, experts!)

How do we learn how to spell right? Mostly by seeing words spelled right as we read. Some words we make a point of learning, and some we look up, but our sense of what looks right is created by looking at things--in the case of words, by reading. But if you're reading that chaotic mass of words that is the Internet--and you are--you are getting a distorted sense of what is right. And Scroggins is waiting for you to trip up.