"I feel your pain. And have you ever seen The Wizard of Oz?"

"It’s about this sweet little nobody who gets to pay a brief visit to the glittering Emerald City before being swept back to the reassuring familiarity of the poor thing’s broken-down windswept economically devastated monochrome dustbowl. You’ll love it!"

I hate hate hate hate hate what they've done to Blogrolling.

I don't even want to talk about it. Just try using my blogroll now if you want to know what is pissing me off.

UPDATE: I've taken Blogrolling out of my template. I'll make a list of links by hand, and I apologize to all the bloggers who've temporarily lost their links.

I've seen that road before.

A day in the life of the greatest crossing-the-street photo-op on the face of the earth:



Via 10,000 Monkeys & a Camera.

Reference photograph.

"While pouring syrup on your Eggo waffles, you note that you missed a few voxels."

Jokes for brain scanners.

"[T]he Obama administration may be attempting to appease its antiwar base ... or trying to look good for the chattering classes."

John Yoo defends his memos:

Imposing Fourth Amendment standards on military action would have made the Civil War unwinnable -- combat occurred wholly on U.S. territory and enemy soldiers were American citizens. The military does not have the time to obtain warrants before soldiers fire upon enemy targets and personnel; the battlefield does not provide the luxury to collect evidence needed to meet probable cause standards in civilian courts. Even if the Fourth Amendment applied, we believed that courts would judge military action under a standard of "reasonableness" -- as they might review a police officer who fires in self-defense -- rather than demand a warrant to use military force to stop a terror attack....

But if the administration chooses to seriously pursue those officials who were charged with preparing for the unthinkable, today's intelligence and military officials will no doubt hesitate to fully prepare for those contingencies in the future. President Obama has said he wants to "look forward" rather than "backwards." If so, he should not restore risk aversion as the guiding principle of our counterterrorism strategy.

"I already paid the tax. Why do I have to pay it again just 'cause I died?"

Lots more Whoopi-and-taxes links and discussion here.

Ötzi, the Iceman, is ready for his closeup.

Tattoos and all.

(Via Metafilter.)

"President Obama told the Interior Secretary, a comical desert elf in a bolo tie, to review the Bush administration’s removal of the gray wolf..."

"... from the federal endangered species list for certain areas of the US. The Interior Secretary Salazar reviewed and decided to uphold the decision. So basically, the answer is that Barack Obama hates gray wolves because they do not stimulate the economy."

"First, I wanted people to see that the Supreme Court isn't all male."

"I also wanted them to see I was alive and well, contrary to that senator who said I'd be dead within nine months."

Senator Bunning won't be contradicted until November, but good luck.

"Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is trying to stabilize the nation’s banking industry..."

"... implement a housing rescue plan and prop up a plunging stock market – all with about 18 vacant senior positions, virtually the entire upper echelon of his department. The staff is so faceless that lobbyists have begun trading jokes about a 'ghost' bureaucracy, given the many empty picture frames hanging on the department’s walls."

Just give him a big plastic button labeled "fix everything."

So Hillary Clinton gave Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a large plastic button with the word "overcharge" on it.

Oops.

Got to give her credit though. She was drastically ill served by her people. What? Did they Google for a translation (of "reset")? Yet she handled the screwup gracefully:



I'd love to see her behind the scenes afterwards with whoever came up with that stupid button.

And then there are those screwups she can't blame on anyone else. "High Reprensentative Solano" and so forth....



AND: Don't touch it! It's the history eraser button!



IN THE COMMENTS: Peter V. Bella said:

Hillary's people screwed up? She gives the guy a stupid button like some college kid would do? She screwed up and big time.It is her fault. She is way out of her league. This is more serious than serving tea, being Bill's doormat, and being a junior Senator.

This is some administration. The Prime Minister of England gets some cheap DVS and the Russians get a stupid toy button. I wonder what Oprah got from her visit?

You're right. The button is incredibly stupid. I wrote this post in the middle of the night, between sleeps, and I was impressed that she weathered the incident at all. But in the cold light of morning the stupidity of it all is glaring.

AND: They should have asked Volokh:

Unless I'm unfamiliar with some alternative meaning — and one that the Russian foreign minister was unfamiliar with, too — "peregruzka" doesn't remotely mean "reset." "Gruz" means "load," and "pere-" means "over-"; "peregruzka" means "overload." (I take it that "overcharge" is used in the story to mean an excess of an electric charge, which is to say an electrical overload, not "overcharge" in the more common English sense of charging too much money.) Doesn't the State Department have fluent translators to do such things?

We see this one mistranslation. How many unseen mistranslations are there? Is it the same as the ratio for vermin sighting to vermin population? Or is it much, much worse? And also, why hasn't nuclear war killed us all yet?

"A woman in an airport bathroom who, I felt, had addressed my daughter Julia with an unforgivable tone of officiousness and disdain..."

Oh, the things that have become unforgivable.

Gratuitous bathtub scenes.

Back on December 15th, I wrote:

I'm slightly obsessed with the prominence of bathtubs in the movies. You'd think the most interesting thing in the world was a woman in a damned bath. "Australia" has the conventional lead actress taking a bath for no good reason. Hmm... 2 characters have to have a conversation. Let's put the woman in the bathtub. Depending on what rating you want, it will either be a bubble bath or it won't. It's embarrassing.

Ever since then, Trooper York has had a daily gratuitous bathtub scene. And, really, I'm flattered. But how does he get all those hilarious photographs? I tried a Google image search for "bathtub," and got a lot of empty bathtubs. So I tried a search for "bathtub woman" — yes, I know, not very creative — and this came up first. I mean, come on!

What's the trick? "Bathtub movies"???

Professor John McGinnis on originalism.

Here's the audio from yesterday's event at the UW Law School, which was sponsored by The Federalist Society. McGinnis speaks for about 20 minutes, then I do a 10 minute commentary, and the rest is questions and answers. McGinnis contends that judges should interpret the Constitution according to its original meaning because this kind of interpretation will produce better consequences than other approaches to interpretation. He depends heavily on a belief in the superiority of a text produced by a supermajority — i.e., the Constitution — as understood by that supermajority. He chooses an interpretive methodology based on what is most likely to work out for the best even as he would exclude judges from thinking in normative or pragmatic terms as they decide particular cases.

"Courage is not solely for men, but it is mainly for men."

"The Greek word for courage is andreia, which comes from he-man and also means manliness. The Greek philosopher Aristotle was, however, critical of the implication in his language that courage was for men only. He said something not so definite: men find it easier to be courageous than women, and women find it easier to be moderate than men.... Giving women equal opportunity for displaying courage does no obvious harm if the need for courage remains clear. It would not be good to measure the amount of courage we need from the willingness of women to produce half of it. Less obvious harm might result from the loss of tenderness, and the loss of esteem for tenderness, in women. Do we really want two tough, aggressive sexes instead of one tough, the other tender? And do we want to dispense with gallantry in men, which is related to protectiveness in husbands?"

Harvey Mansfield is at it again.

(Via A&L Daily.)

"These memos I wrote were not for public consumption. They lack a certain polish." Said John Yoo.

Polish?

"I think [it] would have been better to explain government policy rather than try to give unvarnished, straight-talk legal advice. I certainly would have done that differently, but I don't think I would have made the basic decisions differently."...

"One thing I sometimes worry about is that lawyers in the future in the government are going to start worrying about, ‘What are people going to think of me?’ ... Your client the president, or your client the justice on the Supreme Court, or your client this senator, needs to know what's legal and not legal. And sometimes, what's legal and not legal is not the same thing as what you can do or what you should do."

Any sympathy for the lawyer? For lawyer-client confidentiality? The need for harsh, straight-talk without the verbal lubrication of public speaking.

UPDATE: More here.