In the NYT.

Here.

"Possibly not since Renaissance Italy has there been such a gathering of creative minds in one locale as there has been in Los Angeles County during the past half century."

"While enriching the community with their presence, they have brought with them the manners and mores of their native lands which in rare instances have been at variance with those of their adoptive land."

Bilge from the probation report for Roman Polanski, written in 1977, when, the NYT writes, the cultural climate was much warmer toward moviemen and their interest in young girls.

The view from my sofa.

"No serious leader in Kabul is asking us to leave. Instead we are being asked to withdraw by American leaders who begin their analysis with the presumption that victory is not possible."

"They seem to want to ensure defeat by leaving at the very moment when our military leader on the ground has laid out a coherent and compelling strategy for victory. When it comes to foreign policy, almost nothing matters more then your friends and your enemies knowing you will keep your word and follow through on your commitments. This is the real test of presidential leadership. I hope that President Obama—soon to be a Nobel laureate—passes with flying colors."

Bob Kerrey.

"The minutiae of legal drafting is not necessarily related to understanding the concepts in the bill."

It would be perfectly easy to put the health care bill up on the internet, but we can't have you reading the legislation. Please accept our representations about what's generally in it. Why don't you just think of it as the Fix the Problems bill and leave the complicated stuff to the experts. Mmmkay?

"Why do they give Peace Prizes to pussies?"

(Via Insty.)

You can't arrest me. I'm naked!

The news from Sheboygan:

The criminal complaint alleges [Julia E. Laack, 36] stole a bag of beef jerky and a lighter at a convenience store Thursday afternoon. Police went to her home. The complaint said she refused to come to the door and began screaming and swearing at three children in her house, telling one that the incident was all his fault.

Police entered and tried to calm her down. With her children present, the complaint said, she stripped to her underwear and told the officers they couldn't arrest her because she would be naked.

Laack struggled with the officers as they tried to arrest her, the complaint alleged, kicking one in the groin and spitting in the mouth of another.

While in the squad car on the way to the police station, the complaint said, Laack exposed her buttocks against the rear window.

The brochure said you'd move beyond "self-imposed and conditioned borders" and "learn (and apply) the awesome power of 'integrity of action.'"

And was that really puffery? What was delivered was... death!

Shortly after 5 p.m. Thursday, a man and a woman, reportedly in their 50s, lapsed into unconsciousness during a simulated Native American sweat-lodge purification ceremony led by a self-help guru and inspirational speaker at a Sedona retreat. They were pronounced dead at Verde Valley Medical Center, and 19 others were hospitalized for as-yet-undetermined causes....

64 people were taking part in the sweat-lodge ceremony, which lasted about two hours and was being hosted by James Arthur Ray, an author and spiritual self-help entrepreneur....

The victims were attending the ceremony during the final day of a five-day program called "Spiritual Warrior," which Ray has conducted at the resort annually since 2003. Ray's Web site lists the cost for next year's program at $9,695 per person.

This all happened in Sedona, which the linked newspaper article calls "an international mecca for New Age beliefs and purportedly the site of numerous 'vortexes,' or natural energy confluences thought to enhance spirituality and well-being."

It seems to be a money vortex. $9,000+ to be packed into a very hot stuffy room with 63 other people who saw fit to pay $9,000 for such abuse — rendered subjectively beautiful via soppy thoughts about "Native Americans."

At the Your Obsession Café...

... it's where you can go to talk about what's been on your mind, which, one hopes is neither Andrew Sullivan nor the Nobel Peace Prize.

I respond to those 2 posts Andrew Sullivan wrote about me yesterday.

In Sullivan's first post, he quotes me saying that if his blog had comments, it too would collect some homophobic comments, just as mine does. He called this "disingenuous," because his readers, according to his polls, have said they don't want comments. That's irrelevant. I'm not criticizing him for not having comments. I'm just saying that if he did have comments, some of them would be nasty.

He also accuses me of having comments so that I can get "vile ad hominem, anonymous hate-speech" which he thinks, I "rel[y] on for traffic." What proof does he have that that is my reason for having comments or that it helps my traffic? I'd be very surprised if the ugliest comments brought more traffic. I think they hurt traffic, so I certainly am not relying on them for traffic. I do think a vivid, flourishing comments section keeps readers coming back to this blog, but not because of the ugliness. I think that drives people away.

This is more serious:

[T]hese were not just homophobic comments. They were vicious personal attacks on a specific human being, using both my sexual orientation and my illness as targets.

But generic attacks on gay people as a group are much worse than attacks on a specific person who is a public figure, like Andrew Sullivan.  They are still mean, but they are more like the anti-Bush material that goes on about how he was an alcoholic or used cocaine or whatever. I'm not saying it's good, just that it's different from general bigotry. And I would like Andrew Sullivan to acknowledge that I have a good number of active commenters here who are gay men. (Lesbians too.) So there is plenty of pushback against homophobia, and anybody who hates gay people is not going to be happy in my comments section.

Sullivan goes on to criticize me for not deleting the comments that attacked him:

I am glad she does not deny that she engaged in this thread herself, and she did so long after many of the references to my HIV were published. It seems to me that if you are actually contributing to a comment thread, you tend to have read the thread leading up to that point.

Well, try it some time. There are hundreds of comments. I skim. I look for spam. I stop at the names of commenters I know and like. I have a free speech policy and ignore stuff that looks like low-quality junk. I have a lot of idiosyncratic strategies for getting through it all, and it's still a lot of work. I'm telling you: Your assumption is wrong.

So the idea she had no idea what was afoot is ludicrous.

I may know what's "afoot," but only in a vague way, and not oriented toward finding things to delete. My working strategy is not to delete. From that I have exceptions. One is to look closely if someone emails me and points to something specific. Sullivan never did me that behind-the-scenes courtesy. He just made a post attacking me — and reprinting the ugly stuff. If he really wanted it excised, he wouldn't have reprinted it. He wanted to expose it and air it out. And there you see the value of my non-deletion policy. The ugly stuff is self-destructing! It argues against itself. Why drive it underground? Why empower the haters by letting them see they got to you? They are their own worst enemies.

She has already accused me of being a racist, a heterophobe and a misogynist...

I appreciate those 2 links, because I wouldn't have remembered what I'd said. Go ahead and read those old posts of mine. I didn't generically call him a racist. I found racism in the way he talked about Bobby Jindal. As to heterophobia and misogyny.... well, frankly, I do think Sullivan has a problem with women. Does he ever write positively about women? For the most part, women barely exist in his world. And when one comes into prominence — notably Sarah Palin — he seems to feel a special antagonism.

[E]ven if everything Althouse says in her defense is true, it says a lot to me that she is unable even to offer a word of apology or regret, or to remove any of the vilest personal attacks in that thread. I offended her a while back with a post on her announcement that she was getting engaged to one of the commenters on her site... I subsequently apologized for any offense she subsequently felt.

Did he really apologize? I emailed him about his outrageous insult and he posted something, but it wasn't really to the point.  And anyway, "I subsequently apologized for any offense she subsequently felt"... that's what's called a nonapology. Okay, if it's really that easy then: Andrew, I am subsequently sorry if anything on my blog subsequently offended you.

I was too glib, and insensitive, but it's in a different universe from the hate speech she publishes.

It's different all right. The difference is, what was said about me, you wrote. I didn't write any of the the offensive comments. I just have an open forum and a free speech policy. To say I "published" it makes it sound as though I pre-screened it. Ironically, you published those comments. You chose to copy and paste them on your blog.

If Althouse had not partially built her traffic on this kind of stuff for years, and if she weren't a big blog, and a contributor to bloggingheads and other MSM outlets and a professor at a university, I'd let this slide as I usually do....

Since I didn't respond yesterday, he may have thought I was letting it slide, because he came up with this second post:

Just check out Ann Althouse's reaction to Garance Franke-Ruta's rather anodyne reference to Jessica Valenti breast controversy on bloggingheads....

Oh, for the love of God.

I have no idea what the reference is....

Don't worry. It has to do with breasts. It would only bore you.

... she threatens to hang up and tells Garance that she is involved in character assassination. But she is happy to post the vilest attacks on my being gay and having HIV and refuses to apologize.

Again, jeez, I don't post the comments! I have an open comments section and a policy against deletion. In the Bloggingheads, I was in a one-on-one conversation with someone who was quietly sticking a dagger in and I called her on it. Where is the contradiction? I don't like crap said about me — and believe me, the breast controversy was a shitstorm — and I completely understand that you don't like crap written about you. Do you realize that my free speech policy includes leaving hundreds of insults against me in my comments section?

Finally, Sullivan restates my asserted free-speech position and then quotes something I wrote in 2005, when I was annoyed by the trend in the comments and said "I'm adopting a new, more activist form of supervision." He then says:

Maybe I missed a post after that where she expressed her willingness not just to accept but to participate in threads that accuse an HIV-survivor of AIDS dementia because they disagree with him.

Let me use his word, "disingenuous." It's disingenuous to assume that a policy I stated 4 years ago is the policy I maintain and employ today. Obviously, it's not. Digging up the old defunct policy is a lame device that Sullivan is using to push the point he's been tying himself up in knots trying to make, that the insulting remarks came from me. They did not.

Why antagonize me over this? My inclination is to be sympathetic to anyone with an illness, and I like substantive argument (or funny snark) and not mean-spirited trash.

And, Andrew, if you ever want to go on Bloggingheads and talk about it one-on-one, let me know.

Am I really as interesting as Sarah Palin's womb?

Yesterday, in what I hope you appreciated as a gesture of bloggish artistry, I adhered to a day-long theme — President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. I therefore declined to jump to my own defense when Andrew Sullivan took a shot at me here. This morning, despite that first post, the theme is over. I go over to Sullivan's to find the post against which I know I need to defend myself. And what's this? He wrote 2 posts about me yesterday!

Am I really as interesting as Sarah Palin's womb?

Amusingly mean headline in the Daily News email gets me to click... over to a warm fuzzy place.

"GOP split on whether to cudgel Obama with Nobel Prize." The song that immediately played in my head was "Vicious, you hit me with a flower." That's enough of a hook for me to think something's bloggable, so I click....

And what the hell?



It's all rainbows and unicorns. Our sweet prezzident peeps at us through green and gold raindrops, under the sticky-sweet birthday-present headline: "Great Expectations: Nobel Peace Prize will be whatever President Barack Obama makes of it."

"We have to bow down to our President, Obama."

I say it:

It's the Bloggingheads Nobel Prizapalooza.

Ha ha ha ha. And you thought I had done enough with my all-Nobel-Prize-all-the-time blog theme of the day.



Enjoy!!!!

"George Bush liberates 50 million Muslims in Iraq, Reagan liberates hundreds of millions of Europeans and saves parts of Latin America. Any awards?"

"Gore, Carter, Obama, soon Bill Clinton. See a pattern here? They are all leftist sell-outs... Obama gives speeches trashing his own country and for that gets a prize...."

More from Rush Limbaugh.

Leave Bill Clinton alone. The poor guy. It must really hurt to have Gore and now Obama getting the prize and not him. It was just a blowjob. Don't they understand that in Europe at least? Or are they waiting for the day when they can give the prize to him and Hillary at the same time. And what about Hillary? Why must she too suffer, seeing Obama collect the prize — and overshadow her in foreign affairs — overshadow her by doing nothing. The indignity of it all!

Let's let Bill speak:

"Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo's birthday."

"Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up."