"With her attitude to the President, who was, like, a Harvard law professor, I'm like, take it down a notch, bitch."

It's Kathy Griffin, critiquing an Elisabeth Hasselbeck performance on "The View." The President had dropped in to share the couch with the ladies. The link goes to Donald Douglas's blog, where the big point is that Obama was not a Harvard law professor, and in fact, he wasn't even — technically — a law professor; he was a senior lecturer; and it wasn't Harvard, it was the University of Chicago; and so Kathy's a fine one to call Elisabeth a "stupid bitch." Video at the link.

All right. First, Kathy Griffin has a comic style. You either like it or you don't. She's all about bitchily ragging on celebrities. Second, "stupid" is not the key criticism from Griffin to Hasselbeck. It's that Hasselbeck is coming at the President with too much of a sassy, challenging edge. And Griffin is actually right about that. You need to treat the President — any President — with respect, even when you intend to give him a hard time and even when he deserves it.

Third — and here's where it gets really interesting to me — he was a Harvard law professor. Put aside the mistakes. This notion that you've got to pay special respect to law professors... as a law professor, I'm fascinated. Now, maybe it's just Harvard law professors that command this odd obeisance. Who knows how far down the U.S. News "Best Law Schools" list you go before Kathy's Etiquette of Respecting the Law Professor peters out? Maybe there's a gentle gradation of decreasing respect as you slide down through the top five, into the basement of the top 15 and beyond. I don't know if there are any shreds of servility to be strewn before those of us in the 30s. But the whole idea amuses me.

And, really, this is one of the great benefits to being a law professor. No, not that I get respect — to the extent that I do. (I mostly get haters who use the phrase "you, a law professor" somewhere in the middle of an attempted push-back.) What I like is that, as a law professor, I'm free of the awe of law professors. And yet, if any of them dropped by for a visit and sat down on my couch for a conversation, I'd be nice to them. But if that couch were really part of a TV set, and I owed my first duty to the people who were bothering to watch, I might go all Hasselbeck on them.

But the President... well, why is the President doing a show like this? Probably because everybody on that couch except Hasselbeck wanted to boost his reelection campaign — slathering the home viewers with amorphous feelings of love for the man who is so wonderful for women. He was there for a super-cushy time on the cushions. Hasselbeck was the only potential edge. Obama supporters would love to dull that edge. Show respect. They're kind of right, of course, as noted above. It's a problem built into the show, "The View." It's a view, all right, but from where? From deep in the cleavage of the mommy party.

"Scott Lemieux's Spencer Ackerman moment."

Actually, I think this is unfair, but I'm not going say why or distinguish Scott Lemieux from Spencer Ackerman, because I swore off linking to Lawyers, Guns and Money when they deleted all Meade's comments. I'm not going to interact with people who have deliberately and finally cut of my channels of interaction with them.

Restore everything and apologize and I will.

"When Ann Althouse Gets Ahold of Those Archives..."

Hmm. Yeah. Thanks for reminding me of that incident. I would be curious to see what was said about me then. Was there jubilation that this video clip could be used to attack me? A plan to pick a spin and stick to it? An agreement to deprive me of links forever and ever? I'd like to know. I mean, I can imagine it on my own, but it would be fascinating to have the transcript.

I need more text! The internet is withholding the texts I want to blog. And I know those texts are longing to be free.

***

Did you know the phrase "Information wants to be free" has its own Wikipedia entry?

The expression is first recorded as pronounced by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984, in the following context:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Ah, but now that Andrew Breitbart is offering $100,000 for the full Journolist archive, the paradoxical desire of information can finally be fulfilled! It can be both free and expensive!

"Check Althouse's comments if you want sex talk..."

Conservative polisci prof got himself into a bit of a jam with his readers and now tries to talk his way out of it.

And besides, as noted yesterday, Althouse is a notorious breast blogger, and she's instigated some of the web's greatest flame wars with...

Ha ha. I'm not going there again.

Note: Regular Althouse readers will be amused — I think! — that he quotes Titus (and my response thereto).