Veterans Day, Madison, Wisconsin.

An American woman:



The Korean war veteran:



The Young Marines:



The Patriot Guard Riders:



After taking these pictures, I go to my usual café, find a table, and start working on getting them uploaded. I hear a middle aged woman talking to the barista:

What is it? Veterans Day? There are soldiers everywhere.

Her voice drops a note on the words "veterans" and "soldiers." She's got a slight sarcastic tone as if she thinks she's saying something funny.

Imagine. Soldiers. In Madison.

IN CASE IT ISN'T OBVIOUS: To all the veterans, thank you. My parents were WWII veterans. I do not exist except as something that came from veterans. We all owe our world to the service of veterans. Your world is more real than ours. Today, I saw a veteran carrying a banner that said, "Freedom is not free." We know we owe that to you. And we are all humbled by your service. I feel that especially, because I know that I would never have lived if my mother had not felt an insipiration to join the Army and met my father there.

Remember, the Democrats have a special obligation to please people like me.

Seeing the letters to the editor today, I realize I missed David Brooks's column "The Middle Muscles In" (which I think you'll be able to get to during TimesSelect free access week):

On Tuesday, 47 percent of the voters were self-described moderates, according to exit polls, and they asserted their power by voting for the Democrats in landslide proportions....

Their disaffection with the G.O.P. was not philosophical. It was about competence and accountability....

So voters kicked out Republicans but did not swing to the left. For the most part they exchanged moderate Republicans for conservative Democrats. It was a great day for the centrist Joe Lieberman, who defeated the scion of the Daily Kos net roots, Ned Lamont. It was a great day for anti-abortion Democrats like Bob Casey and probably for pro-gun Democrats like Jim Webb. It was a great day for conservative Democrats like Heath Shuler in North Carolina and Brad Ellsworth in Indiana....

Realignments are achieved by parties that define big new approaches to problems (see F.D.R.’s Commonwealth Club speech), and neither party has done that yet. In the meantime, if I were a Democrat I’d be like Lee Hamilton, the former Indiana congressman and serial commission member. The country is hungering for leaders like him: open-minded, unassuming centrists who are interested in government more than politics. If the Democrats are smart, this could be the beginning of a new Hamiltonian age.

I said it back here:

If [the Democrats] win because they found moderates to run in key districts, I think they'll have a special obligation to please people like me. I'm going to hold them to the bargain.

Go ahead, lefty bloggers. Throw a fit. Curse me out again. You know it makes you mad because it's true.

Naive? Hateful? Planted like a solid oak tree against the winds of perversion?

When small-time entrepreneurs "choose not to work for homosexuals."

What's wrong with a parent?

Why would a parent allow her child to be photographed and discussed by name in a conspicuous article about psychiatric problems?

Why I love the new Democratic Congress!

Yay! $$$ for meeeee!!!!!

ADDED: Those damned Republicans only want to help the super-rich, while the Democrats' beneficence concentrates on the humble folk in the $100,000 to $500,000 range. Finally, someone's looking out for the working man.

AND: Please, nobody read this mockery to mean that they shouldn't eliminate the AMT. I really want them to do it. How they're going to replace all the money they lose, I don't know. And let me just add that the reason the AMT hurts me so much is that the income and property taxes in my state are so high. Those are the big tax deductions I lose the benefit of. What the AMT does -- certainly in my case -- is to make sure that people who suffer from a really high state and local tax burden still pay their share of federal taxes. Getting rid of the AMT makes it easier for state and local government to maintain high taxes because these taxes will lower our federal taxes. Anyone in a state with low taxes should probably be pissed off at this, because their states do with less revenue while their citizens fork over more to the feds. But presumably those states vote Republican, so who cares? My state votes Democratic, and it's got a lot of people who could really save a lot -- and contribute generously to the Democrats who have tended to us so well. In short: $$$$$$$$$$$$$!

SPECIFICALLY: Last year, the AMT cost me $4900.

"How have students become these self-righteous ‘young authoritarians’? "

Wendy Kaminer talks about free speech on campus (via A&L Daily):

Far from being a site of free thinking and free exchange of ideas, the university seems to have become a laboratory for new forms of censorship and conformism. ‘Kids come to college, and for the first couple of weeks of freshman year they’re in a sensitivity course, where they’re told what they’re allowed to say and what they’re not allowed to say’, says Kaminer. ‘They are subjected to thought-control programmes the minute they arrive. That is not a very good start.’...

How have students become these self-righteous ‘young authoritarians’? For Kaminer, ‘it is partly because they have been brought up in today’s victimised, intolerant culture’. She argues that restrictions on free speech are made not only by the right seeking to quell dissent among their left-leaning or liberal critics, but also by liberals themselves, who have bought into ideas of ‘hate speech’ and ‘harmful speech’....

Kaminer traces it back to the American feminist anti-porn movement of the 1980s, to authors such as Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. They, and others, were among the first, says Kaminer, to articulate the idea that ‘you have a civil right not to be offended or “arguably harmed”, even metaphorically, by somebody else’s speech’. Indeed, Kaminer points out that some of these feminist theorists made little distinction between words and actions: they argued that porn is violence, that to watch porn is to commit a violent act and that watching porn often directly encourages men to commit violent acts. According to Kaminer, this idea has spread widely, so that many more forms of hate speech – from racist speech to anti-Semitic speech, misogynist speech to xenophobic speech – are now seen as being potentially harmful, as encouraging listeners to hate and act violently towards others.

It's been my impression that the MacKinnon/Dworkin way of thinking fell out of favor when the need to support Bill Clinton conflicted with the interest in heightening awareness of things that fell under the rubric "sexual harassment." But there is still a core group of students that shops ideas like this to university administrators, and there are university administrators who feel they need to cater to them.

‘Words have power, of course they do. If they didn’t, why be a writer? Why be an activist? But words don’t cast spells over people. When feminists argue that giving a man porn is like saying “kill” to an attack dog, it implies that men are just dogs on short leashes...

Or cats...

...that they have a Pavlovian response that they cannot control. It ignores the fact that speech is a two-way exchange. The speaker is not Svengali: the audience hears what he says, interprets it, and they make their minds up. The way you combat bad speech is with good speech. You don’t combat it with censorship. That just doesn’t work, and it demeans debate.’

This should be such dogma -- or catma -- by now that it should seem too tedious to mention, but, sadly enough, it's not.

Still reminiscing about that CNN blog party....

I'm just noticing how funny the captions on the photos over here are. ("It was weird, even when the cameras weren’t on her, Jacki Schechner kept talking into the big CNN mic and throwing it back to Wolf.")

And I talk about it a lot in this segment of the new all-female, non-male edition of Bloggingheads.

It's me and Amy Sullivan...

... on Bloggingheads!

ADDED: The volume discrepancy between me and Amy has been fixed. What caused it? I think she actually was speaking in a louder voice to overcome the sound of air conditioning in her room, and I had adjusted the volume on my phone so it wouldn't hurt my ear. So it wasn't really a technical problem. I was using a quieter voice because I had a quieter room. The real solution is to turn off the ventilation in the room before recording.

IN THE COMMENTS: Simon says with two women, we shouldn't be saying "diavlog" but "divalog."

ADDED: Simon has a lot of trouble with what I've said and written about the abortion case, and he's written about it here.

"But what does a woman of great power look like?"

Robin Givhan asks:

Does she choose her own version of camouflage and, as Hillary Rodham Clinton famously did during her first campaign for the Senate, wear a black pantsuit as a personal uniform? Does she wear stiffly tailored suits and a lapel festooned with patriotic brooches in the manner of former secretary of state Madeleine Albright? Or, like current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, does she mix professorial reserve with a hint of confident sex appeal?

Pelosi had to decide how a woman who will be second in line of succession to the presidency should look. And what she came up with is someone who wears a neutral-colored, softly tailored power suit. One that is accessorized with style rather than rote references to love of country. She looks dignified and serious. And in this case, she also happens to look quite good.

Face it. They all wear suits. Say what you want about how one woman's suits are softer and another's are stiffer. The fact is the main reason they look different is that these women actually look different.

"This defeat is actually an obvious victory for the Iranian nation."

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei interprets the American election.

"With the scandalous defeat of America's policies in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Afghanistan, America's threats are empty threats on an international scale."

What will the Democrats do to push back against that?

"She mimicked McGreevey in the act of trying to govern amid a miasma of male genitals."

That's a description of the funniest part of Margaret Cho's act here in Madison last night.

The gag combined the two most prominent motifs of Cho's act: Hilarious, gleefully smutty riffing on gay themes, and political riffing that was pointed but, at moments, altogether less funny. Indeed, the show's least comedically satisfying moments came as Cho served up shrill, humor-free barbs that, in drastically tempered form, could have been delivered by a pandering liberal politician. On President Bush: "I don't know why he hasn't been impeached yet." On Benedict XVI: "The new pope fucking sucks." On right-to-lifers: "Anti-abortion people are fucking idiots, and they're wrong."

Thought you'd like to know. (Note my distinct history of defending Margaret Cho.)

IN THE COMMENTS: In the spirit of "An Exaltation of Larks," readers offer alternative "nouns of multitude" for "a miasma of male genitals."

"Couldn't she see the simple beauty and Dali-esque artistry of the lone Cheeto stuck in a mashed-up cube of Snickers?"

Ha ha.

Did you watch "Top Chef" this week? Unlike Otto, this week's cheaters wriggle off the hook:

As the judges try to decide who should be knifed, Sam lets it slip that there may have been some cheating -- in the form of recipe-twiddling, post-nutritional analysis -- going on. However, Sam won't say who he thinks was getting happy with olive oil squeeze bottles. BUT Mia steps up and points out how St. Betty, the Patron Saint of Teeth and Screaming, made her cookies with sugar instead of the approved Splenda recipe.

Did you buy Betty's claim that she didn't understand the rules? Do you accept them not cutting her? Or do you accept it only because the oil drizzlers were bigger cheaters and they managed to fly under the radar. The only reason they did is because Sam is "not that guy" -- not the guy who identifies the cheaters even though he is the guy who cries cheating in order to save his own skin.

I don't like it when no one is eliminated. I'd have accepted cutting Sam for attempting to balance on the knife's blade of being that guy and not being that guy.

"She walks, talks, sings, smells like Bob Dylan."

Heath Ledger raves about Cate Blanchett's "incredible transformation" into the character of Bob Dylan, whom she plays in the new movie "I'm Not There." Cate is one of a bunch of actors -- Ledger, included -- who play Dylan in the film. But Cate's the best -- "beyond astounding."

I can believe that. If you assemble a lot of actors in a film that's kind of a big acting competition, she wins. I observed this in "Coffee and Cigarettes":

When a movie is broken into a series of vignettes as this one is, critics usually can't resist saying which vignette is the best and grousing that some vignettes are better than others. With an ordinary movie, it doesn't seem worth saying that some scenes are better than others! But with each vignette, you get a new set of two or three actors, so it's hard not to single out, for example, Cate Blanchett. Patty Duke style, she plays two cousins who have the same face, but different hair, clothes, mannerisms, attitudes.

She was utterly fascinating and brilliant.

Listening for the gloat.

Howard Kurtz surveys liberal commentary on the the election, asking "whether they are being magnanimous in victory. Answer: Not."

(Am I giving Kurtz extra credit for ending his column with a quote from me? Yeah, probably. But I still like it for doing something I would have liked to do myself: Listening for the gloat.)

I guess I'd better rake my leaves tomorrow.

It was about 70° on Thursday, but they're saying there will be 4 inches of snow tomorrow, starting at noon. The gap between my first sleep and second sleep tonight is really long, but I can't go out in the middle of the night and do the leaves. That would be crazy!

Why haven't I done them yet? I've been really busy. Doing the leaves is not high on my agenda. It's just: Do them before the first real snow. Those minor dustings don't count. Damn. I do not have time for this tomorrow.

Why don't I hire someone? It's more trouble to do that than to do the leaves, and doing the leaves can be sort of fun if you do them when you're in the mood. But if the mood doesn't strike you before the real snow forces the task on you, then it's not cool at all. And it's not good coming on a day when I'm busy and when I can't sleep in the middle of the night.

In my middle-of-the-night alertness, I'm furiously trying to think of a solution, and I'm attracted to the idea that the predicted snow will turn out to be rain. I can't slot in the raking tomorrow. Certainly not before noon. It's going to simply have to be rain. And if it's not, my back-up attractive idea is: What does it matter if the leaves stay on the ground all winter? I've been here more than 20 years without letting that happen. Isn't it about time I let one thing go like that? And if the leaves ruin the lawn, that's a sign that I should hire people to completely redo the lawn next year. It would be a good thing. They can make it thickly plush, satisfyingly level, and shockingly green.

In my middle-of-the-night furious thinking, I see I've got a whole ambitious set of ideas about the failure to rake.

Outed and out.

Unrelated, presumably. Maher outs Mehlman. Mehlman to step down.

I've always liked Mehlman, but I thought he looked awfully worn out on election night.