New York night.

We stop for a coffee/tea before walking the rest of the way to the theater. Two days of Broadway shows...

Is Jack Balkin more subversive than Eugene Volokh? Am I?

Yale lawprof Jack Balkin is in China, checking out which lawprof blogs are blocked:

I was able to reach Volokh Conspiracy, SCOTUSBlog, How Appealing, Election Law, Instapundit, Mirror of Justice, Concurring Opinions, Becker-Posner, PrawfsBlawg, Feminist Law Professors, Business Associations Blog, Lessig Blog, and Black Prof. I was not able to reach Balkinization, Althouse, U Chicago, Leiter Law School and The Conglomerate.

There is almost no reason to believe that, from the standpoint of the Chinese government, Balkinization is more subversive than Volokh Conspiracy or Becker Posner, or a number of other blogs on this list. It is likely that, as with most Internet filtering schemes, the results are some combination of overblocking technology, arbitrary decisionmaking, and simple luck of the draw.

I can think of plenty of reasons why the Althouse blog is more subversive!

A Saturday coffeehouse.

It's up to you to make this post interesting. Carry on.

UPDATE: Your humble blogger has returned from my daylong sojourns in the material world. Thanks for upholding life here in virtual reality.

Bow down, Chris Matthews!

You cannot be disrespectful to Hillary Clinton, the woman.

AND: Here's the pithy statement that he was blabbering about:



IN THE COMMENTS: Ruth Anne Adams writes:

So now Hillary and the Intern-ment problem are equivalent with John McCain and his Vietnamese internment? I think he owes McCain an apology, too.

MORE IN THE COMMENTS: Meade writes:

Tyra Banks to Chris Matthews:

Are you embarrassed to be such a pussy? I would be embarrassed.

"Were you embarrassed? I would be embarrassed."

Tyra Banks asks Hillary Clinton about Monica Lewinsky.

ADDED: Video disembedded.

Should a 10-year-old be permitted to go hunting?

There's a proposal to lower the hunting age from 12 to 10 in Wisconsin, something we talked about on "The Week in Review" on WPR this morning. Go here and scroll to the 43:45 point. I have something to say about it.

ADDED: Let me transcribe the key part of my comment:

A young boy who's 10 is very different from a young boy who's 12. I have two sons, and I think you go through a lot of changes in those years, and somebody who's 10 might be really open to bonding with a parent and learning how to do something new and something technical. I think being able to include a 10-year-old boy — a 10-year-old girl too (I mean, I don't have a girl, so I don't know) — but a boy who's 12 is more in his adolescence and more rebellious, and it may be a lost opportunity to really do something with your child....

I remember the way I was able to share activities with [my sons] when they were pre-adolescents. It's a wonderful time — I don't know if you have boys — but it's a wonderful time to do things with boys right before they go into adolescence... when they change... their emotions, their atttitudes... the things they want to do with you change. And so, I think that 10 should be seen as a very special age.

"Because I'm an ordinary person, I thought..."

I'm not declaring favorites in the presidential campaign, but I've got to say that stuff like this makes me love Obama, at least on a personal level:

Obama began by recalling a moment in Tuesday night's debate when he and his rivals were asked to name their biggest weakness. Obama answered first, saying he has a messy desk and needs help managing paperwork - something his opponents have since used to suggest he's not up to managing the country. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards said his biggest weakness is that he has a powerful response to seeing pain in others, and Clinton said she gets impatient to bring change to America.

"Because I'm an ordinary person, I thought that they meant, 'What's your biggest weakness?'" Obama said to laughter from a packed house at Rancho High School. "If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. And then I could have said, 'Well, ya know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don't want to be helped. It's terrible.'"

In the Monica Lewinsky scandal — 10 years old now — "Everybody lost, with one exception, or possibly two."

Writes Timothy Noah in Slate. I had to stop and think who that one person was and decided it must be Matt Drudge. But he's not even one of the two:

The only unambiguous victor I can identify is Jonah Goldberg... [B]y making himself very available to the braying jackals of cable news, Goldberg was able to parlay a job as TV producer for conservative think-tank bore Ben Wattenberg into a contributing editorship at National Review, a columnist gig at the Los Angeles Times, and a measure of respectability thus far unsullied by his authorship of a best-selling book alleging significant connections between fascism and contemporary liberalism.

Another possible net winner is Hillary Clinton....

"If somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole; that’s what we’d do."

Mike Huckabee, working the South Carolina flag issue.

"People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with."

Christopher Hitchens rails about "identity politics":

Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think "first woman president." We think -- for example -- "first ex-co-president" or "first wife of a disbarred lawyer and impeached former incumbent" or "first person to use her daughter as photo-op protection during her husband's perjury rap."...

Here again, the problem is that Sen. Obama wants us to transcend something at the same time he implicitly asks us to give that same something as a reason to vote for him. I must say that the lyricism with which he does this has double and triple the charm of Mrs. Clinton's heavily-scripted trudge through the landscape, but the irony is still the same....

I shall not vote for Sen. Obama and it will not be because he -- like me and like all of us -- carries African genes. And I shall not be voting for Mrs. Clinton, who has the gall to inform me after a career of overweening entitlement that there is "a double standard" at work for women in politics; and I assure you now that this decision of mine has only to do with the content of her character. We will know that we have put this behind us when -- as with the vowel -- we have outgrown and forgotten the original prejudice.

ADDED: My son John IMs:

I'm sick of Hitchens's writing style!!

"I shall not vote for Sen. Obama..."

Are we supposed to take him more seriously just because he uses the word "shall"?

I can't imagine any other writer making such a pompous announcement of who they're supporting for president.

COMMENT FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE:

To Professor Althouse.

Madam,

I shan't trouble You or your Readers with my Opinions on Mr. Hitchens, except to say that, were he to stand Time on its Head and return my Century, he would be a welcome Citizen to the Republic of Letters. Mr. Hitchens's Passport would be that he refuses to write Cant, right or wrong as he may be in the Issue.

I should also say that safe arrival upon the Shores of this Republic in my Day, would not have protected Mr. Hitchens from many a Knock. An Author may have written what he would in the Papers; but he should have found that the Love of the Publick was as much a Dweller of the Rocks as that known by the Shepherd in Virgil.

As a Ghost these 250 years and more, I should, indeed, wish to stand Time on its Head and return to my Life; were that it would be concluded better than it fell out. I shall not, however, use this Occasion to make Complaints of my Fate, for 'twas that which all Men share.

Writing in Haste, and puzzl'ing over the Tense to be used if Time were to run backwards,

I remain, Madam,

Your most humble & obt. Servant,

Sir Archy

"I was a little disturbed by my anger..."

"Because of the way Daddy behaved when he was angry and drunk, I associated anger with being out of control and I was determined not to lose control. Doing so could unleash the deeper, constant anger I kept locked away because I didn’t know where it came from."

Bill Clinton's anger. Is it problem anger?

Why Barack Obama is "authentically black."

"He is being black by choice. That is more authentic."

Radio alert.

I'll be on the "Week in Review" show on Wisconsin Public Radio at 8 AM Central Time this morning. That's 9 AM in the Eastern Time zone where I'll be on the phone.

Go here to listen on-line live. You can call in.

You'll be able to listen to the archived show here, later.

The other guest — on the left — is Ed Garvey.

AFTER-SHOW UPDATE: Ed makes no bones about his lefty politics, and it's fun sparring with him. Here's his blog, Fighting Bob. And I've got the archive link fixed, so go listen if you want.

"What the Hell is Mitt Romney Talking About?"

Video.

ADDED: Video disembedded.

Are you one of the 40 million Americans who live in a sexless marriage?

According to experts, your marriage is "sexless" if you have sex 10 times a year or less. So please, people, make the effort. That 11th time is crucial. Or are you choosing celibacy? Click on the link if you want to delve into all the details. Me, I didn't read much of the linked article. I'm not married and haven't been since the 1980s. It's not my question, but maybe it's yours. You have total access to a sexual partner, yet you don't bother most of the time. Is it a mystery, or is it obvious?

"It was on a blog, so I don't know if it's actually true..."

Said Rush Limbaugh, quoting something that some blogger said came from David Brooks of the New York Times. (Subscriber link to the radio show transcript.) This set up an interesting discussion, which I'll get to in a minute, but what's with "It was on a blog, so I don't know if it's actually true"?

Now, it's attributed to Brooks, but I don't know if it's true. Some blog post by a guy named Ezra Klein, who I don't know, and don't interpret this as a criticism of anybody.

I Googled some of the text and easily found Ezra's post, which contained a link to the NYT site to a piece written by David Brooks. Maybe Rush just wanted to take a gratuitous swipe at bloggers, but it doesn't say much about his level of fact checking, and since his point was to go after Brooks, why leave any question about the attribution to Brooks?

Anyway, here's what Brooks wrote:

[T]he Republican prospects in the fall just got even dimmer. I say this not only because a weak general election candidate won a primary, but because Mitt Romney’s win [in Michigan] pretty much guarantees a bitter fight for the nomination. If you doubt that, here is what Rush Limbaugh said about McCain and Huckabee on his program today: “I’m here to tell you, if either of these two guys get the nomination, it’s going to destroy the Republican Party, it’s going to change it forever, be the end of it.” This week, Rush and his radio mimics have been on the rampage on the party’s modernizers, from Newt Gingrich on over.

And here's Rush's response:

I am personally trying to destroy the party's modernizers?... It is literally fascinating to hear that people who are not conservatives, or who have abandoned a lot of their conservatism, are now the party modernizers?... I am happy to be labeled and targeted as the guy who's targeting the modernizers of the Republican Party.