The Saturday vlog.

You gave me questions. I picked 4:

Obama backtracks on late-term abortions.

Does he think we won't notice? First, he limited the health exception to "serious physical" things:

Now, I don't think that "mental distress" qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term...

Then, he switched! He now wants a mental health exception!

Reporter: You said that mental distress shouldn't be a reason for late-term abortion?

Obama: My only point is this -- historically I have been a strong believer in a women's right to choose with her doctor, her pastor and her family. And it is ..I have consistently been saying that you have to have a health exception on many significant restrictions or bans on abortions including late-term abortions.

In the past there has been some fear on the part of people who, not only people who are anti-abortion, but people who may be in the middle, that that means that if a woman just doesn't feel good then that is an exception. That's never been the case.

I don't think that is how it has been interpreted. My only point is that in an area like partial-birth abortion having a mental, having a health exception can be defined rigorously. It can be defined through physical health, It can be defined by serious clinical mental-health diseases. It is not just a matter of feeling blue. I don't think that's how pro-choice folks have interpreted it. I don't think that's how the courts have interpreted it and I think that's important to emphasize and understand.

So as long as a woman can get her "blues" classified by a medical health professional as "depression," she has a right to a late term abortion no matter how strongly the majority of citizens feel about the immorality of destroying a fully viable human entity? And that's rigorous?

Incredible. That would be incredible even without the prior inconsistent statement.

Really. Does he think we are idiots?

ADDED: Jan Crawford Greenburg is dissatisfied because Obama didn't make the health exception big enough:

Obama is trying to restrict abortions after 22 weeks to those women who have a serious disease or illness. But the law today also covers some women who are in "mental distress," those women who would suffer emotional and psychological harm without an abortion.

This standard has long been understood to require less than "serious clinical mental health disease." Women today don't have to show they are suffering from a "serious clinical mental health disease" or "mental illness" before getting an abortion post-viability, as Obama now says is appropriate....

So Obama, it seems to me, still is backing away from what the law says—and backing away from a proposed federal law (of which he is a co-sponsor) that envisions a much broader definition of mental health than the one he laid out this week.

The Court has said the Constitution prohibits states from banning post-viability abortions unless those laws contain a broad mental health exception---one that includes mental distress and severe emotional harm. Abortion rights groups have fought for decades to preserve these exceptions, and I'm awfully curious what they will think about limiting them to women with mental disease or mental illness.

Obama is subject to a huge amount of pressure from both sides on the issue of abortion — and on the meta-issue of whether he's a flip-flopper. And then there's the question of Supreme Court nominations, an issue that comes into focus for a lot of people when the subject is abortion. Is Obama prepared to be hounded about all these things for the next 4 months?

The thirsty photographer.

I can't get enough water:



A closer dive:

You've seen face painting. This is amazing whole-head painting!

More here. (NSFW ads on there.) (Via Metafilter.) I love the inventive use of the features of the head. Check out the gumball machine and the pizza. The dog is the funniest one... and so true!

Coffeehouse and vlog.

I declare this post an Althouse coffeehouse. You can talk about whatever you want.

And I'd like to do a little vlog today, but the trouble is I've got nothing to say. So offer some ideas — preferably odd and as-yet-unblogged things.

Photographing water.

I'm continually amazed by the way water looks in photographs:



I love to enlarge details and am continually amazed at the painterly images that I'm utterly incapable of seeing in person:



That was there? I had no idea!

Religion, free speech, and license plates.

Here is a NYT op-ed about automobile license plates. The writer —Stefan Lonce, who has a book on the subject of vanity license plates — distinguishes 2 forms of religious speech via license plate. First, there are the specialty license plates. South Carolina has introduced a Christian-themed plate that looks like this:


Second, there are vanity plates, and the states sometimes reject the letter/word combinations a driver requests. There is, we are told, federal court lawsuit about Vermont's rejection of a vanity plate that would read JN36NT (which is a reference to a Biblical passage).

It seems obvious that the individual expression in the form of a vanity license plate is the preferable to the state's provision of the religious message on a specialty plate. The "I Believe" specialty plate is almost surely a state endorsement of Christianity that violates the Establishment Clause. (There's no array of specialty plates for different religions and no atheist plate. What would an atheist plate look like?)

But everyone knows that what's on a vanity plate is chosen by the car-owner and doesn't represent the state's point of view. Vermont seems to be overdoing a concern about Establishment Clause and blundering into a Free Speech violation (though, according to Lonce, the federal district court approved the state's decision). The trouble with vanity plates is that at least some of them do need to be censored — there are always some people who want "F**KYU" — so it won't work to have individual choice as the only filter.

Lonce thinks the problem of censoring vanity plates can be solved by setting up a national data base, pooling the efforts of all the states to identify the offending letter/number combinations. An alternative is just to get rid of vanity plates altogether, but states make a lot of money selling them, and people want to buy them.

About those Bloggingheads commenters.

Mickey's right about this:



IN THE COMMENTS: rcocean, the commenter whose comment Mickey printed out and taped to his monitor, comments here:

Just to beat a dead horse about BHTV commentators.

Currently, there are 111 comments on the Micky-Bob Diavlog "squishiness Edition". The comments were made by only 19 people. And of those 19, seven made 80 of the 111 comments.

You have one left commentator, (he boycotts Althouse) whose made almost 3,000 BHTV posts in the last 500 days!

Christy says:

And I think you've hit on one of the many reasons why I never bother to comment over there. They complain about the lack of female commenters and because I'm a fan of the site I want to help them out with the numbers. Inevitably, however, the comments already there make me think "why bother?" and I go away. I rarely even bother to read them anymore.

"Iced to meet you."

Some great photos here. That one almost made me cry.

"We played it straight and square. Nay, we simply are straight and square."

"We smiled at the idiotic questions and answered them patiently. We remonstrated that this was no way to help the youth of the world understand the depth and tragedy of our conflict."

How serious, intelligent people get taken in by Sacha Baron Cohen. I don't know what's funnier, the dialogue he — as Bruno — extracted from two experts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...

“Vait, vait. Vat’s zee connection between a political movement and food. Vy hummus?”

We exchanged astonished glances. “Hamas,” we explained, “is a Palestinian Islamist political movement. Hummus is a food.”

“Ya, but vy hummus? Yesterday I had to throw away my pita bread because it vas dripping hummus. Unt it’s too high in carbohydrates.”...

“Your conflict is not so bad. Jennifer-Angelina is worse.”

... or the fact that they were taken in because the producer who scheduled the interview "had a British accent and seemed serious and professional" and the crew arrived "with its three cameras and large coterie of assistants" and was "serious and very professional."

So the key to pulling a prank is not cracking up. And having a British accent. Cohen's comedy is based on his accents — Bruno has a ridiculous Austrian accent — and it works not just because his accents are funny, but because accomplices maintain that accent that people take so seriously – the old British accent.

2 couples on Picnic Point.

Here's charming couple, sitting in a willow tree on the edge of Lake Mendota:



(Enlarge.)

And look at this lovely couple, stretched out in clover, reading:



(Enlarge.)

Fireworks.

The NYT wants "change it can believe in" — and it can't believe this new Barack Obama.

It was all about believing! Don't wound our sensitive credulousness!

What if... what if... he's only a man?

Jesse Helms is dead.

The NYT reports.

ADDED: An obit:

During his 30 years in Capitol Hill, the North Carolina Republican became a powerful voice for a conservative movement that was growing both in Congress and across the country, and he used his position to speak out against issues like gay rights, federal funding for the arts and U.S. foreign aid.

"I had sought election in 1972 to try to derail the freight train of liberalism that was gaining speed toward its destination of government-run everything, paid for with big tax bills and record debt," Helms wrote in his 2005 memoir, "Here's Where I Stand."

"My goal, when my wife, Dot, and I decided I would run, was to stick to my principles and stand up for conservative ideals."...

In 1960, he moved to the executive offices of Capitol Broadcasting Co., the parent of WRAL, and he developed a strong following across eastern North Carolina over the next decade by appearing in editorials that ran at the end of each night's evening newscast. The editorials blended folksy anecdotes with conservative viewpoints that blasted the federal government, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and other entities he viewed as too liberal. In one noted editorial, he suggested building a wall around the UNC campus, which he called the "University of Negroes and Communists," so that its liberal sentiments could be contained.

Ugh. Mixing "conservative ideals" with racism.... I think that made millions of young people hate conservatism.

[H]e was accused of using racial politics to secure narrow victories. In the 1990 campaign against [former Charlotte Mayor Harvey] Gantt, for example, a Helms television ad showed a white man's hands crumpling a rejection notice from a company that had used an affirmative action program to hire a black job candidate.

His views on race relations – he opposed a national holiday honoring slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., led a filibuster against the extension of the Voting Rights Act and called some young blacks "Negro hoodlums" – and social issues sharply divided the public into those who viewed him as a champion of the common man and those who thought of him as a narrow-minded bigot....

"What is unique about Helms – and from my viewpoint, unforgivable – is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans," [David] Broder wrote shortly after Helms announced that he wouldn't seek re-election in 2002.

Did he really die on the 4th of July? The president of the Jesse Helms Center announced that the time of death was 1:15 a.m. on Friday. It has long been considered an important distinction to die on the 4th of July, as, most notably, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams did in 1826. And now Jesse Helms has that distinction.

But death is an end, and the 4th — though it is a famous death day — more properly represents a beginning. In the hope that the era of Jesse Helms is really dead, let's look at another closeup of the Declaration of Independence:

Madonna brainwashes A-Rod with Kabbalah.

She's making him believe they are soulmates. That's what his wife says, according to a friend. Wouldn't it be amazing if God spent his time — I know, God is beyond time, etc., but don't confuse me with that now — pairing up big celebrities?

Okay, Madonna with Sean Penn, that's funny. That's amusing. Now, I'm tired of that. I don't like Sean Penn as Mr. Madonna. Let's put her over here and have her screw Guy Ritchie up for a while. He's been annoying me. He needs some obstacles. Enough of that. That got boring. Wedding with kilts was good, but English estate, children's books, prissing around... blah! Put her with A-Rod now. That'll be hilarious.

Note: I don't really understand Kabbalah or the mind of God. I'm just guessing.

Let's see your best flag photographs.

Here are mine:



[ADDED: I posted this photograph on July 4, 2005, gave some background, encountered a dispute and responded with the next photo. There's a funny dispute in the comments there, something that relates to this post from yesterday.]



[ADDED: This next photo originally appeared here.]

***

Here are Jac's. I've always loved this one. Like my first one, it was done with a film camera. As he explains, it's a little display from a junk shop in Portage.



I probably have my own picture of that, somewhere amongst all my many unscanned film photographs.