Driving in Colorado and crossing the Mississippi from Iowa into Wisconsin.

Blogging from a McDonald's in Charles City, Iowa.

We're almost home, having left Denver yesterday at 10:30 p.m. Mountain Time. We drove through the night, smoothly taking turns driving and sleeping.

I put up that "Airplane Sunset Café" last night to give readers a place talk while we were off line and on the road. I didn't think I was revealing anything about where we were, but FedkaTheConvict showed up and said:

KAPA Centennial Airport, about 20 miles southeast of Denver. I've flown into that airport countless times and the view is unmistakeable.

Ha. And here I was trying to hide that we were away. But we're almost home now, and I'll have some Colorado pictures soon. I mean, I've already posted some, closeups of flowers, and no one went all FedkaTheConvict on me and said Betty Ford Alpine Gardens, Vail, Colorado. The view is unmistakeable.

Here's one mountain pic, the view from above Beaver Creek:



UPDATE: Home!

"Obama is not a flaccid Jimmy Carter... He is instead a Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- but a bizarro FDR."

David Sirota strains to understand and characterize the President.

In forging such bipartisan complicity with what were once exclusively right-wing Republican objectives, Obama has achieved even more than what he fantasized about when he famously celebrated a previous bizarro FDR. In an illustrative 2008 interview with a Nevada newspaper, Obama lauded Ronald Reagan for "chang[ing] the trajectory of America" and "put[ting] us on a fundamentally different path."

Reagan was a truly strong executive -- but the Gipper was nothing compared to our current president.

Got that, wingers?

Taliban shoot down helicopter and kill "30 Americans, most of them belonging to the same elite unit as the Navy SEALs who killed... bin Laden."

"It was the deadliest single loss for American forces in the decade-old war against the Taliban."

"Meanwhile, I have to say that I care less and less about law reviews."

"Increasingly it feels to me like the article is published when it’s posted on SSRN, and the actual publication in a law review later seems kind of anticlimactic. Based on casual conversation, I’d say that a lot of other legal academics feel the same way. I still submit to law reviews, but I wonder if that will be true in five years."

Instapundit says.

"Widener Law School goes Soviet, demands law professor undergo psychiatric evaluation."

The continuing saga of Lawrence Connell, who "was vindicated on a wide range of charges," but found to have violated a policy against "retaliation" for the way he responded to the accusations that had been made against him — for defending himself. The remedy sought by Widener Law School Dean Linda Ammons?

Professor Connell will undergo a psychological evaluation by a psychiatrist or psychologist of his choice selected from a list of four individuals provided to him by the University. The purpose of this evaluation will be to determine his fitness for his teaching position, particularly in view of his retaliatory response to the student complaints lodged against him.... Professor Connell will comply with all conditions and recommendations issued by the psychiatrist/psychologist, including, without limitation, appropriate counseling and anger management, prior to the lifting of the suspension and his return to teaching duties. Not earlier than sixty (60) days prior to the end of the term of Professor Connell’s one year suspension, his psychiatrist/psychologist must send to the Dean and Vice Dean an evaluation assessing Professor Connell’s fitness to return to duties, completion of courses or training, if applicable, and a follow-up treatment plan. if any.

Plus he's supposed to apologize.

ADDED: David Bernstein withdraws from "a Widener-sponsored project," saying "I can’t in good conscience have my reputation associated in any way with Widener Law School."

"He made a big mistake, but really somewhere in his heart he (is) funny, lovable, caring and a great father."

"Everybody in my family ... is giving him a second chance... Will you?"

Said the 11-year old boy whose father tortured him:

He ripped the pre-teen's clothes off, beat him with a spatula and burned both his hands on a hot stove.

With the skin peeling from Christopher's hands, his father then punched the naked kid in the face and forced the screaming boy into the oven.

"I'm going to burn you alive!" he howled, according to law enforcement sources.

Moss eventually relented and let Christopher out of the oven - only to throw the nude child with the burned hands into the front yard.

When he let the injured boy inside, Christopher was ordered to sit on the floor "like a dog," court documents show.

But the boy cuddled with his father inside the courtroom before taking the witness stand to plead for his dad's release.

"Dear judge, I will fight so hard (for) my dad to live with me," the little boy began.

The judge gave the man "four months of weekends in jail and five years probation" instead of a 7-year sentence. 

"It was an absolute bloodbath."

The stock market.

"Why, then, is [John] Marin so underappreciated by the art-world elite?"

Asks Terry Teachout:

The standard explanation is that even though he marched to the edge of abstraction, it seems never to have occurred to him to turn his back on the visible world. "The sea that I paint may not be the sea," he wrote, "but it is a sea — not an abstraction." After the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s, his deep-rooted belief in representation came to be seen as old-fashioned, even quaint.

But there may be a deeper reason. Americans have long had an equivocal relationship with their own art.... To this day there is a noticeable reluctance on the part of native-born art lovers to admit that a quintessentially American composer like Aaron Copland might actually be great, or that a stage actor need not have an English accent to perform the plays of Shakespeare or Stoppard. Could it be that the reputation of Mr. Marin, whose subject matter is as American as his briskly improvisational brushwork, suffers from our nagging sense of cultural inferiority?

I think Marin was originally overrated, and he's just not that good. Check out some images if you don't know the work.

At the Airplane Sunset Café...

... you can land here for the night.

At the Wisconsin State Fair: A man shouts "sic semper tyrannis" at Governor Scott Walker.

Captured by the MacIver News Service:



Back in February, I caught that phrase on a protester's sign:

The problem of absentee voting in the Wisconsin recall elections.

If any of the elections in the next 2 weeks are close, I think we'll be hearing a lot about the students sending in ballots from out of state.

“The absentee ballot provisions are there for permanent residents, to make sure those otherwise occupied have the ability to cast a vote in elections where they live,” said State Senator Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend). “A dorm contract that expires in May or a lease that begins in September does not qualify you to vote on August 9. The law is not there to simply make things easy to cheat.”

Summer elections are unusual around here.

"Point 'em out, knock 'em out."

"Police have said a number of the recent attempted muggings and muggings in the city this summer are being committed by young men engaged in a strategy called 'point 'em out, knock 'em out,' where a victim is singled out by the muggers then attacked."

The city is Madison, Wisconsin.

ADDED: Meanwhile, at the Wisconsin State Fair (near Milwaukee):

Police said the group of young people attacked fairgoers who were leaving the fair grounds. Police said that some victims were attacked while walking. They said others were pulled out of cars and off of motorcycles before being beaten.

"Students Urged to Sell Kidneys to Repay Student Loans."

Hmm.

At the Pink Poppy Café...

... I haven't disappeared from the face of the internet. Talk about whatever you like. I'll have some posts for you soon.

"Stocks plunged, driving the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 300 points..."

"... as investors appeared to lose faith in the ability of the world's policy-makers to revive the global economy and stave off a rolling debt crisis in Europe... Investors across the globe have been buffeted by economic and political turmoil in recent days. In the U.S., fears have turned from worries about a possible default by the U.S. government to a weakening economic outlook."

"You've got a weak economy, the aversion of a debt crisis but not a solution, and you've got the rest of the globe starting to implode in a lot of areas, especially Europe," said Barry James, president and chief executive of the James Advantage Funds. "It's natural that people would react with fear."

Wall Street Journal.

"Ice? I don’t hate ice."

"It’s just that when these Americans hand you a can from the freezer, and it is already so cold that just touching it practically turns your hand into a claw, I don’t really see the need to add ice."

Are we Americans too into the cold, or is it the rest of the world that has a problem? Or just the Russians?

"KFC leaves Fiji amid crumbs row."

Perplexing headline of the day. It's "row" as in dispute, and Kentucky Fried Chicken is having a row in Fiji that involves, literally, crumbs. Often people fight over figurative crumbs. "We're fighting over crumbs!" — meaning there's little left to fight over. But KFC uses real crumbs in the making of the famous chicken, and it thinks the treatment it's getting from Fiji is... crummy.

At the Water Iris Café...

... you're in a place where you can talk about whatever you want.

"Ann — Every day, I see Barack make choices he knows will affect every American family."

"That's no small task for anyone — and more proof that he's earning every last one of those gray hairs. This has been a busy week in Washington, but today happens to be Barack's 50th birthday...."

Michelle emails me. The subject line is "Gray hairs." Don't you see? That gray hair? He's gone gray for us.

Anybody who runs for President is committing to working extremely hard and getting old at a faster rate than they would if they'd refrained from volunteering to work on all our problems all the time for 4 years. We the people are more concerned with whether we like your work product. You can't really get any pity for pointing to your graying hair. We're a pitiless bunch, because you stepped up to the big job and there's too much at stake.

But happy birthday, anyway, Mr. President.