Time-lapse painting, parkour, blasphemy, and fat rants.

The video response phenomenon in YouTube.

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

"They like to walk around with it and hold it."

Science for Americans.

Steven Pinker, reviewing Natalie Angier's "The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, notes the American aversion to scientific knowledge:

People who would sneer at the vulgarian who has never read Virginia Woolf will insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics. Most of our intellectual magazines discuss science only when it bears on their political concerns or when they can portray science as just another political arena. As the nation’s math departments and biotech labs fill up with foreign students, the brightest young Americans learn better ways to sue one another or to capitalize on currency fluctuations. And all this is on top of our nation’s endless supply of New Age nostrums, psychic hot lines, creationist textbook stickers and other flimflam.

But Angier's book is for the adult who missed the chance to go into science but might read a snazzy enough popular book on the subject:

Every author of a book on science faces the challenge of how to enliven material that is not part of people’s day-to-day concerns. The solutions include the detective story, the suspenseful race to a discovery, the profile of a colorful practitioner, the reportage of a raging controversy and the use of a hook from history, art or current affairs. The lure that Angier deploys is verbal ornamentation: her prose is a blooming, buzzing profusion of puns, rhymes, wordplay, wisecracks and Erma-Bombeckian quips about the indignities of everyday life. Angier’s language is always clever, and sometimes witty, but “The Canon” would have been better served if her Inner Editor had cut the verbal gimmickry by a factor of three. It’s not just the groaners, like “Einstein made the pi wider,” or the clutter, like “So now, at last, I come to the muscle of the matter, or is it the gristle, or the wishbone, the skin and pope’s nose?” The deeper problem is a misapplication of the power of the verbal analogy in scientific exposition.

A good analogy does not just invoke some chance resemblance between the thing being explained and the thing introduced to explain it. It capitalizes on a deep similarity between the principles that govern the two things....

But all too often in Angier’s writing, the similarity is sound-deep: the more you ponder the allusion, the worse you understand the phenomenon. For example, in explaining the atomic nucleus, she writes, “Many of the more familiar elements have pretty much the same number of protons and neutrons in their hub: carbon the egg carton, with six of one, half dozen of the other; nitrogen like a 1960s cocktail, Seven and Seven; oxygen an aria of paired octaves of protons and neutrons.” This is showing off at the expense of communication. Spatial arrangements (like eggs in a carton), mixed ingredients (like those of a cocktail) and harmonically related frequencies (like those of an octave) are all potentially relevant to the structure of matter (and indeed are relevant to closely related topics in physics and chemistry), so Angier forces readers to pause and determine that these images should be ignored here. Not only do readers have to work to clear away the verbal overgrowth, but a substantial proportion of them will be misled and will take the flourishes literally.

Pinker is writing about writing: What makes a science book great literature? Pinker holds up Richard Dawkins's "The Selfish Gene" as exemplary and gets very specific about what works on a deep level to explain scientific ideas. Angier, he says, uses superficial flourishes, while Dawkins finds an analogy that invites and deserves contemplation.

"I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose."

Andrew J. Bacevich contemplates the accusation -- "a staple of American political discourse" -- that his vocal opposition to the war caused his son's death. You might expect him to say the accusation is repulsive, and he was, in fact, trying to stop the war, which might have saved his son. But he goes beyond that:

After my son's death, my state's senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son's wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don't blame me.

To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove -- namely, wealthy individuals and institutions....

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics....

I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same. In fact, while he was giving his all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.

That is, his anti-war activism couldn't have had any causal relationship to the death of his son because American politics are so beholden to the rich that it has no effect. These are dark, despairing thoughts by a man whose son has died. Is he finding some comfort in his own ineffectuality? But he still writes. It's not nothing, though it is powerful writing to say it's "nothing." That your arguments have not persuaded powerful individuals to abandon their deep commitments does not mean that they never listen and never respond.

"If the United States withdrew its forces from Baghdad’s streets this fall, the murder and mayhem would increase."

According to a NYT study:

The New York Times interviewed more than 40 Iraqi politicians and citizens and consulted recent surveys of public opinion in Iraq. The views of a broad range of senior military officials, American intelligence experts, politicians and independent analysts who have recently returned from Iraq were also solicited....

Sheik Ajmi al-Mutashar, an agricultural engineer and businessman from Salahuddin Province in central Iraq and a Sunni, said he worried that an American troop pullback would lead to the collapse of the Iraqi government. “If the government falls it will be impossible to form another one,” he said. “We will have small emirates or cantons divided on sectarian and ethnic lines.”

Several Shiites also agreed that an American pullback would severely weaken the already fragile Iraqi government and lead to an upsurge of fighting among armed factions. “Without a strong and visible American presence, the government would collapse,” said Abu Fayad, an aide to a leading Shiite member of Parliament. “Of course there will be many different wars. Basra, Diwaniya, Baghdad. Everyone will try to control Iraq’s fortune. The Americans failed, but they should stay.”

Salah Sultan al-Obeidi, 39, a government employee who lives in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City but says he holds secular views, says he worries that moderate elements of Iraqi society would be even more vulnerable if the Americans were to leave. “In Baghdad there will be fierce fighting between Sunni and Shiite extremists. Sunni terrorists will kill all the Sunnis who took part in the political process.”...

“I think the Sadr tide will rule the country,” said Muhammad Qasim Ali, a suitcase salesman in the predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Karada. “They are the majority and they have a good background, and that gives them a chance to take control. Once we take power, we will be merciful with Sunnis. Our way is to kill somebody only when we suspect he has a link to insurgents.”

"Clinton, Giuliani in a strange way may be helping each other."

Writes Marc Humbert:

While the [New York] endorsements came as no real surprise, the Giuliani camp made it clear there was a multilayer agenda at work. Besides demonstrating to other GOP contenders that he probably had New York locked up and they should keep their distance, Giuliani was also sending a message to Republicans nationwide that he was the one GOP contender who could put New York and other states in the Northeast in play for the party.

"This time we are not giving up on New York. This time we are going to win New York, and we are going to win California, and New Jersey, and Connecticut and Pennsylvania," he said in Syracuse. "We are going to contest this election in every state and not give away half the states before the election even begins."...

Such numbers, according to a top Clinton ally, show not why Republicans should pick Giuliani, but why Democrats need to pick her.

"You cannot win the White House as a Democrat without New York. It would be like trying to win the White House as a Republican without Texas. It just can't happen," said David Pollak, co-chairman of New York's state Democratic Committee.

"I don't think you could make the case that the others are bad candidates, I just think Hillary is by far in the best shape right now against Giuliani if he is the nominee because he does put New York in play," Pollak added. "I'm not saying he wins New York, but he puts it in play."

I realize she's the Senator from New York, but that doesn't mean she's all that much stronger than the other Democratic candidates in New York. Clearly, Giuliani is the only Republican candidate that has a chance in those big blue states. This has been one of Giuliani's big arguments. The question is whether Hillary can take that argument -- which is a good one -- and leverage an argument of her own -- which is not so obvious.

[Clinton and Giuliani] were opponents in the 2000 Senate race in New York until Giuliani dropped out in the face of prostate cancer and a disintegrating marriage. Polls at the time showed the two running about even.

That was also, of course, the year that saw the disputed presidential election being decided by court rulings that gave the Electoral College victory to Republican George W. Bush after Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote.

"It would be a twisted version of 2000 if Barack Obama won the presidential vote by a million votes, but lost the Electoral College because he didn't win New York," said Pollak.

Thanks for reminding us of Al Gore, who would not have lost in 2000 if he had won his home state.

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

Nazi raccoons.

Snowclones.

A timeline.

The term "snowclones" was coined 3 seconds before 10:57 p.m., January 15, 2004, in Northridge, California.

"In the future, it could get wrapped around a lamppost or a person's wrist, even worn as clothing. Perhaps it can be put up like wallpaper."

You want thin screens? Yes, we want the surface of everything to come alive with video.

"What is the single strangest thing I can do with ketchup?"

Well:

[A] teenage boy rubs ketchup over his face like acne cream, then puts pickles on his eyes. One contestant chugs ketchup straight from the bottle, while another brushes his teeth, washes his hair and shaves his face with Heinz’s product. Often the ketchup looks more like blood than a condiment.

Screwphemisms.

"When you say redploy, you mean withdraw." That's an interesting typo, by Andy McCarthy, over at National Review. "Redploy" ≈ communist plot.

The context:

Senator Obama says: "It is time to end this war so that we can redeploy our forces to focus on the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 and all those who plan to do us harm."

Senator Obama, are you proposing that we move U.S. troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, where you guys keep saying the "real" War on Terror is?

There is also a very good chance that bin Laden and some al Qaeda hierarchy are in Pakistan. When you say "redeploy," are you suggesting that we invade Pakistan?

Folks, let's not let these guys get away with this. By "redeploy," they don't really mean move the troops to where they say al Qaeda is. They don't want to fight al Qaeda. If they wanted to fight al Qaeda, al Qaeda is in Iraq — that is indisputable. Bin Laden has said repeatedly that Iraq is the central battle. ...

If you really believe al Qaeda is not in Iraq — that the real al Qaeda is only in Afghanistan and its environs — then you're on drugs. But, sure, fine, "redeploy" our troops ... to Afghanistan. But can we please have five seconds of honesty? You guys don't have the slightest intention of doing that. You don't want to go to Afghanistan. You want to go home.

When you say redploy [sic], you mean withdraw.

Quite aside from the Freudian typo -- and isn't it funny that the communist plot reference comes from a guy named McCarthy? -- he's right about this. "Redeploy" is such an obvious euphemism -- like "ethnic cleansing" -- that it has -- or should already have -- lost its power to gloss over what is really being said.

There should be a term for this. Maybe there is, but since I don't know what it is, I'm going to call it a screwphemism. This is a euphemism gone bad. Not only do we see through it and know that you're saying the thing you were hoping to downplay, but we know you were trying to manipulate and deceive. So we know what you're really saying, and we mistrust you for not saying it straight.

"Yes!!! I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me..."

"... and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it … and some that don't."

Those are words which may or may not have been written by Dr. Laura's son Deryk, who is in the Army and stationed in Afghanistan.

Matthew D. LaPlante, the Tribune reporter who broke the story about the Army investigation, had drawn a rebuke from Schlessinger for an earlier article in which he quoted her as saying Army wives should stop "whining."

She posted a reply on her website stating that her position was taken out of context. As a "military mom," she added, she whines to her husband about how scared she is for her son, but "I never whine to my son when he is able to call between missions" for fear of distracting him from his life-and-death duties.

Here's LaPlante's story about the whining wives:

Raging radio human relations guru Laura Schlessinger, in Salt Lake City on Friday to speak to Army families at Fort Douglas, said she was tired of hearing the complaints of lonely and overwhelmed military wives whose husbands are deployed.

"He could come back without arms, legs or eyeballs, and you're bitching?" Schlessinger asked before taking the stage at the base theater to host her daily program on ethics, morals and values. "You're not dodging bullets, so I don't want to hear any whining - that's my message to them."

Schlessinger boasted that she once talked a young woman out of marrying a soldier, noting that "warriors need warrior wives" and that she felt the girl was unprepared.

What a tangled mass of hostility.

ADDED: What did I mean by "What a tangled mass of hostility"? Well, Dr. Laura was hostile to the military wife, and LaPlante was hostile to Dr. Laura and her son. As for the son, there is an ongoing investigation, and it's unfair to say much about what was written at a website that may not be his. But the website expresses hostility, and if it really is Deryk's, then there are some deep things in that mother-son relationship. She has built a public persona around her grandiose vision of her excellent motherhood. This gives him awesome power to hurt her if he is so motivated.

Uh-oh, I made Eugene Volokh talk about ladies' periods and look what happened!

So he's all:

[C]oncerns about long-term health effects are quite sensible. But [after quoting one of my commenters] I don't see any justification for the feeling that it's not "right to sidestep" something that's "part of being a woman." I suppose it could be some esthetic judgment that argument won't much drive; but setting aside esthetics, why on earth should we want to accept natural but painful or unpleasant things?

Screetch. I have an aesthetic judgment. Please, use the spelling "aesthetic." Humor me on this one, Everyone in the World. Back to Eugene:

Disease is a part of being a human. Headaches are part of being a human. Excruciating pain in childbirth is part of being a woman. They are bad parts.

And to mention the most obvious: death.

A good part of being a human is being able to prevent disease and to ease pain. Why embrace the harmful, painful, or uncomfortable parts of human nature, and reject those parts of human nature — our species' intelligence and resulting scientific acumen — that diminish harm, pain, and discomfort?

Then, Eugene makes a post out of one of the comments, some doofus who conflates pregnancy and menstruation:

It's been amazing seeing my wife and other women deal with her first pregnancy. Immediately upon announcing to the world she's pregnant, my wife was part of the "in crowd." Every mother--whether she knew my wife well or not--could smile and talk about morning sickness, or finding out the baby's gender, or feeling bloated, etc.

So, it is not aesthetic. Humanity derives meaning from shared experiences, and deleting one of the most universal and central of all female experiences can subtract perceived meaning from people's lives. In that regard it is very important.

Oh, for the love of.... like it's a big, fun sorority. I'd rather be able to use my own body to write my name in the snow. You know, you can't do that with menstrual blood. Not too damned easily anyway. So Eugene responds to this Human Meaning expert with:

Humanity does derive meaning from some shared experiences — but not all. Shared experience that you bond over: pregnancy. Shared experiences that you don't bond over: hangnails, nearsightedness, tooth decay. Shared experiences that people sometimes seem to bond over, but that I'm sure they'd be much better off without: various illnesses or operations that some elderly people stereotypically discuss with each other, but which they'd be glad to avoid without any worry about lost "meaning."

My sense is that menstruation falls within the second (or, less likely, third) category of experiences rather than the first. To many women, pregnancy is a harbinger of their joy in becoming a mother, an affirmation of their fertility (something many women worry about before they become pregnant), a sign of a growing bond with their husbands, and more. Menstruation, it seems to me, is far removed from that...

But let's hear from some people who actually menstruate, and have been pregnant. When you menstruate, do you feel that you're part of the "in crowd"? If you chose to stop -- not because of menopause, which is a marker of age and of lost fertility, but voluntarily and reversibly -- would you feel "out"? Do you smile and talk to your friends about the cramps, the mood swings, and the like?

Aw, come on, that's typical smartest-guy-in-the-blogosphere Volokh getting it as right as any guy should even want to get it. But screw him, right? He's a guy.

Hey, all you law students writing the parody lyrics for next year's law revue shows, start here:



... and just let it... flow....

Anyway....

So, the women -- I mean the people who actually menstruate -- hear the call and go after our Eugene. I'm tracking this down via Robert J. Ambrogi, because he linked to me (though he did also go on to confuse me with another Ann). So over at Feminist Law Professors, Ann Bartow is being mean to Eugene:

I think Eugene needs to be educated gently and incrementally...

Yikes!

Somehow I picture him showing up for the first class wearing one of these...

Wow! What's with the violence? Eugene is the one who thinks it's okay not to have your period. Why aren't you PMSing after the pregnancy-jealous, out-crowd doofus?

Taking a more gentle approach is the -- inaptly named -- Christine Hurt:

[P]regnancy and childbirth make women part of a very large club whose members have something very important in common.... Menstruation is similar. When girls begin to menstruate, they do join sort of a club, but it's much more underground....

I do think that the natural end of menstruation usually comes with some sadness. It is an end of an era. Some women may be liberated by the end of that era....

I don't think this pill is really about discomfort, hygiene or convenience. I think it's about casual sex....

Oh, good lord. I think the pill is about liberation. If there's a health issue, it should be taken seriously. But if there is no health problem -- and consider whether all this excessive menstruation in the modern world is itself a health probem -- then go ahead and free yourself from all the pain and mess and inconvenience.

I have more to say, already recorded on video. Oh hell, I'll just give it to you, to be contextualized later:



ADDED: Eugene tries to understand why Bartow got so pissy:

What sort of feminism is it that faults people for asking actual women about their experiences, and for trying to start a public conversation in which women's opinions are actively solicited, on the grounds that the questioner should instead have gone to the library or taken up the time of his colleagues?

Dr. Helen thinks Bartow is violating her own research-before-blogging principle. And what a repressive principle that is!

UPDATE: To see the video clip in context, watch this segment of the new Bloggingheads.

"When painting there is a point u must step away from the canvas as the work is done."

That's Rosie O'Donnell's way of saying she's leaving "The View" before her contract expires. She just can't deal with that vicious harpy, Elisabeth Hasselbeck. If you've seen the video of their supposedly gigantic collision, that you know it all started when Rosie said: "655,000 Iraqi civilians have died. Who are the terrorists?" and then, when some right-wingers had the gall to read that as calling our troops the terrorists, Hasselbeck did not step forward and defend her.

"You said nothing and that's cowardly."

Eh. If Rosie's ready to light into dear sweet Elisabeth and tar her as "cowardly" for the mere failure to speak, that only makes it more likely that she'd slap the label "terrorists" onto our troops for the civilian deaths. She's wielding her big brush with Abstract Expressionist fervor. She steps back, admires her painting and declares it a masterpiece.

In case you missed the video:



Okay, let's go check Rosie's blog. Here's her own post about the original "Who are the terrorists?" dialogue with Elisabeth. She provides the transcript:

O’DONNELL: …… I just want to say something. 655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists?

HASSELBECK: Who are the terrorists?

O’DONNELL: 655,000 Iraqis — I’m saying you have to look, we invaded –

HASSELBECK: Wait, who are you calling terrorists now? Americans?

O’DONNELL: I’m saying if you were in Iraq, and the other country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed 655,000 of your citizens, what would you call us?

HASSELBECK: Are we killing their citizens or are their people also killing their citizens?

O’DONNELL: We’re invading a sovereign nation, occupying a country against the U.N.

Oh, for the love of Baba. She's obviously calling the Americans terrorists. How mindcrushingly absurd it is for her to come back and bully Hasselbeck for holding her tongue. Hasselbeck should be credited with bending over backwards to be nice to Rosie.

Hillary Clinton and Obama on the Iraq vote.

The Democrats and the war:

Democrats looked to the upcoming votes after losing a bruising battle with Bush on an emergency war spending bill. Lacking the two-thirds majority needed to overcome another presidential veto, Democrats dropped from the legislation a provision ordering troops home from Iraq beginning this fall.

Congress passed the revised $120 billion spending bill on Thursday, providing $95 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through September. The House voted 280-142 to pass the bill, followed by a 80-14 vote in the Senate.

Democratic leaders said they hoped to ready the bill for Bush's signature by this Memorial Day weekend.

Democratic presidential rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama both voted against the bill.

''I fully support our troops'' but the measure ''fails to compel the president to give our troops a new strategy in Iraq,'' said Clinton, D-N.Y.

''Enough is enough,'' Obama, an Illinois senator, declared, adding that Bush should not get ''a blank check to continue down this same, disastrous path.''

Their votes continued a shift in position for the two presidential hopefuls, both of whom began the year shunning a deadline for a troop withdrawal.

Should I avert my eyes so that I can preserve some chance of voting for Clinton or Obama in 2008? Both candidates have calculated that this is the position they must take to go forward toward the primary. I'd like to think they both know they are wrong but are doing what they need to do as a means to an end. And I believe that at least Clinton does. Obama, I suspect, is simply weak on national security (which is why he was against the war all along).

"You're referring to the Notorious Greenhouse Effect."

David Lat has notes on a law firm lunch talk given by Linda Greenhouse.

She discussed various predictors (attributed to various scholars) regarding ideological movement, including whether the justice is new residents to the DC area (those who have prior DC experience are less likely to change their positions in the context of DC culture), whether the justice has prior executive branch experience (those with prior experience are less likely to change their ideology), and any life-changing events that the justices have experienced (e.g. Justice Thomas's confirmation hearings). She indicated that Justice Thomas is unlikely to become more liberal over time because his defenders on the right during his confirmation hearings so firmly anchored him to that ideology. Her conclusion seemed to be that Justices Roberts and Alito are unlikely to change their ideological stances over time based on the first two tests (both have prior DC experience and both worked in the executive branch)....

On the idea that justices become more liberal as they get older because they're tired of being criticized in the media and they want people to write nice things about them: "You're referring to the Notorious Greenhouse Effect." "This is the idea that justices become more liberal as they get older because they want the east coast liberal media, such as the New York Times, to write nice things about them in their obituaries." She was skeptical of this as an explanation for ideological movement.

Maybe it's for the law professors.

Are real-life lawyers starting to think they can act like those lawyers on TV?

Yesterday we were talking about that lawyer who told a judge she was "a few French Fries short of a Happy Meal." Beldar wonders if television has warped their minds. Beldar says he's been a big fan of the lawyer show "for a long, long time, all the way back to Perry Mason days," but you've got to realize these shows are fiction and that they've got to concoct endless dramatic spectacles. How incompetent to lose your bearings and think that because these TV lawyers mouth off to the judge and suffer no serious sanctions that you can too!

Me, I don't watch the TV lawyer shows. I didn't watch "Perry Mason" back in the 60s, and aside from a couple of episodes of "L.A. Law" -- enough to see I didn't like it -- haven't watched any in the last 30 years. I accept that the shows exaggerate and overdramatize to entertain people, but it just doesn't work on me.

But there was once a TV show about lawyers that I loved: "The Defenders."

The series concerned the cases of a father-and-son team of defense attorneys, Lawrence Preston (E.G. Marshall), the sharp veteran litigator, and his green and idealistic son Kenneth (Robert Reed)....

As Rose pointed out a 1964 article, "the law is the subject of our programs: not crime, not mystery, not the courtroom for its own sake. We were never interested in producing a 'who-done-it' which simply happened to be resolved each week in a flashy courtroom battle of wits." Rose undoubtedly had in mind CBS's other celebrated defense attorney Perry Mason (1957-66) when he wrote these words. Although both were nominally "courtroom dramas" or "lawyer shows," Perry Mason was first and foremost a classical detective story whose climax played out in the courtroom, while The Defenders focused on the machinery of the law, the vagaries of the legal process, and system's capacity for justice. Although the Prestons took on their share of murder cases, their aim in such instances was to mount a sound defense or plead for mercy, not unmask the real killer on the witness stand.

Certainly The Defenders exploited the inherent drama of the courtroom, but it did so by mining the complexity of the law, its moral and ethical implications, and its human dimensions. Rose and his writers found much compelling drama in probing the psychology of juries, the motives of clients, the biases of opposing counsel, the flaws of the system itself, and the fallibility of their own lawyer-heroes. The series frequently took a topical perspective on the American justice system, honing in on timely or controversial legal questions: capital punishment, "no-knock" search laws, custody rights of adoptive parents, the insanity defense, the "poisoned fruit doctrine" (admissibility of illegally obtained evidence), as well as immigration quotas and Cold War visa restrictions. The Defenders avoided simple stances on such cases, instead illuminating ambiguities and opposing perspectives, and stressing the uncertain and fleeting nature of justice before the law.

Can we get a show like that now?

Two new books about Hillary Clinton.

Anything new?

"A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton," by Carl Bernstein, reports that Clinton as first lady was terrified she would be prosecuted, took over her own legal and political defense, and decided not to be forthcoming with investigators because she was convinced she was unfairly targeted. While in Arkansas, according to Bernstein, she personally interviewed one woman alleged to have had an affair with her husband, contemplated divorce and thought about running for governor out of anger at her husband's indiscretions.

"Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton," by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr., reports that during her husband's 1992 campaign, a team she oversaw hired a private investigator to undermine Gennifer Flowers "until she is destroyed."...

According to Gerth and Van Natta, even before the Clintons were married they formulated a "secret pact of ambition" aimed at reinventing the Democratic Party and getting to the White House. The authors cite a former Bill Clinton girlfriend, Marla Crider, who said she saw a letter on his desk written by Hillary Clinton, outlining the couple's long-term ambitions, which they called their "twenty-year project."...

The authors report that the Clintons updated their plan after the 1992 election, determining that Hillary would run when Bill left office. They cite two people, Ann Crittenden and John Henry, who said Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer prize-winning historian and close Clinton friend, told them that the Clintons "still planned two terms in the White House for Bill and, later, two for Hillary."

I'm not troubled that a husband and wife would discuss their shared ambitions, but putting a "secret pact of ambition" in writing seems really disturbing. But is it true? Unless I see the document, I'm not going to get any more exercised over it than I already am about the prospect of a President who's already had his two terms getting back into the White House through his wife.

There's some interesting material at the link about Bill Clinton's affairs, which you'd think would be a very tired subject by now. Bernstein writes about Marilyn Jo Jenkins, "a power company executive he fell in love with and almost left his wife over":

Jenkins ... was spirited into the governor's mansion at 5:15 a.m. for a final, furtive meeting with him the day he left for Washington to assume the presidency -- [and] Bernstein's account makes clear her pivotal role.

Bill Clinton wanted to divorce his wife to be with Jenkins in 1989, Bernstein reports, but Hillary Clinton refused. "There are worse things than infidelity," she told Betsey Wright, the governor's chief of staff.

The key question now is what these things about Bill mean about Hillary. It's not a hard question to answer, though, it seems. The narrative is ambition, and Bill Clinton is what he is. On balance, he's quite useful to an ambitious plan. But who knows the real truth? Who knows what the two of them have said to each other? We can't know, and yet we must form opinions about her.

Volatile Republicans.

In the 2008 campaign there's a way in which the Democrats and Republicans are alike (according to William Kristol, writing in Time):

[T]here's a top two—Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democrats, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain for the Republicans. There's a third-place candidate on the edge of the first tier—John Edwards and Mitt Romney. There's a big jump down to the next tier of declared candidates, none of whom seem to have much of a chance. And there is a possible late entry (Al Gore) or two (Fred Thompson and Newt Gingrich), any of whom would join the first tier.

And a way in which they are different:

The Democratic campaign has been amazingly stable. In late February, if one averaged half a dozen national polls, Clinton was at about 35%, Obama had about 25%, and Edwards and Gore trailed with about 13%...

The Republican race has been more volatile....

[W]hereas three-fifths of the Democratic vote now goes to the two front-runners, fewer than half of Republicans support Giuliani or McCain.... The door is open far wider for Thompson—and perhaps Gingrich—to enter the G.O.P. race than it is for Gore to join the Democratic contest.

And the G.O.P. race features real differences among the candidates on important and salient issues [like abortion and immigration].

Kristol wants to think the more volatile condition is better. But is it?

Blog survey.

If you have a few minutes, please take this survey about blog reading. It's for academic purposes and has no questions about commercial products (like the last one I linked to). It's mostly trying to find out why people read blogs. (Warning: I don't think it works in Safari. I had to use Firefox.)