In the Asian Art wing.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"European man... putting security on red alert... stripping down to tight shorts and dancing in the lobby of Wichita Airport."

What's the matter with Kansas? Don't they get HBO?

"Don’t listen to people when they tell you not to run anymore. That’s just political bigotry."

Listen to your own inner citizen First Amendment voice.

This is America.

Just like every other citizen, you have a right to run.

Whenever you like.

For as long as you like.

Sayeth Ralph Nader.

ADDED: He's talking to Hillary Clinton... not to himself. It seems...

Obama says the primary season is like "a good movie that lasted about a half an hour too long."

Is politics all about entertaining us and managing our moods and attention span? Does Obama more than Hillary Clinton think that it is? Or is he giving us something like the Janet Leigh perspective on "Psycho"? It was really great when I was doing so well, but then...

(I know there must be a more apt movie analogy. Can you think of something where an actor has a great role or plays the role very well, but is overshadowed or not up to the part in the last half hour?)

ADDED: You know if this campaign were a movie, Hillary would have to win... or at least "go the distance." She would be the central character, because the story is most interesting from her point of view. She's got a fabulous backstory, which includes suffering, but she starts out on top and full of hubris. Along come the one man who can block her path to fulfillment. She's torn down and laid low, humiliated once again. But she needs to learn to fight, and she's not going to give in. Come on, I'm getting chills just sketching it out. If the movie was about Obama, sure, it should have ended on Super Tuesday, with just an epilogue showing him in the White House. But if he's not the central character, we're still building toward the most thrilling climactic scenes.

"This wasn't Nikki over Tamyra bad, or certainly John Stevens and Jasmine Trias over Jennifer Hudson... bad, but..."

What can we learn about America's struggle over race through "American Idol"?

"It could spit out something called a 'strangelet' that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called 'strange matter.'"

Or it could create a black hole and swallow everything. But they spent $8 billion on the thing. Surely, judge, you're not going to tell them they can't turn on their little machine and play with it!

According to Newsweek, "it's only fair to conclude" that the Obama campaign is not trying to flip Texas county convention delegates.

Newsweek blogger Andrew Romano looks into the evidence I brought up in this post yesterday — that my son (who is a Clinton delegate) and the 2 Clinton delegates he happens to know about, were sent a mailing by the Obama campaign urging them to vote for Obama at the county convention. Romano writes:

So I did some digging. This morning, I finally got to the bottom of the brouhaha--or as close to bottom, it seems, as anyone can get.

This better be good! MSM does "some digging" and gets kinda close to "the bottom" of it. I was just blogging the facts that I knew, by the way. It was Romano who wrote: "Apparently, Obama has mailed these postcards to all Texas county delegates, not just his own." (Boldface added here and below.) Now, Romano has this:

Turns out that the Obama campaign was correct to claim that the Clinton delegate in question, Christopher Cohen, was misidentified on their working list as an Obama supporter. I have obtained a copy of the spreadsheet and double-checked his entry. Not only that, but three other Clinton supporters who have contacted me to complain about receiving Obama postcards are ALSO identified on the aforementioned spreadsheet as Obama delegates. So the Obama campaign was, in fact, working off a flawed list, and that explains why Cohen and his fellow Clintonites received Obama postcards, which the Obama camp maintains were intended only for their own delegates.

So you got a copy of a spreadsheet from the Obama campaign, and according to that, my son and those 2 other persons — just those 3! — are incorrectly coded. What are the odds?!

That said, Cohen and the two of the other delegates in question are listed correctly--that is, as pro-Clinton, not pro-Obama--on the website of the Travis County Democrats. Why the discrepancy? Blame the middleman. According to spokesman Hector Nieto of the Texas Democratic Party, "the information that we gave to the campaigns was information given to us by the individual precincts. We then sent that information to a contractor to key it in to a spreadsheet. There's a possibility that an error was made when the information was keyed in." In other words, the precincts reported the correct candidate affiliations to the state party, but an outside contractor likely screwed up when entering those affiliations into a single spreadsheet -- meaning that the Clinton and Obama campaigns received lists that incorrectly displayed at least a few Clinton delegates pledged to Obama (and perhaps vice versa).

So Nieto is just guessing.

I was basing my original item on the affiliations posted to the Travis County Democrats website, which list Cohen (and two other delegates who received Obama postcards) as Clinton supporters; at the time, it appeared that Obama was knowingly asking his rival's delegates for support. But now it's clear that the Obama campaign received a spreadsheet indicating that these three delegates were pro-Obama, and thus it's only fair to conclude that Obama is not, as my headline suggested, playing the passive delegate-'poaching' game. Only Clinton--with her robocalls, which started in Iowa and continue in Texas--is on the prowl.

How did we get from Nieto guessing to clarity? This is really the closest "anyone" can get to the bottom of things?

***

Relevant cautionary tale: "Los Angeles Times to Examine Its Report on Attack on Rapper."

From penetrating the world of prostitution to penetrating the prostitute.

Stephen Marche has this article in TNR rejecting the adjective "Shakespearean" as applied to the downfall of Eliot Spitzer:

Characters like Hamlet or Macbeth are destroyed by the virtues which lifted them to greatness in the first place. The most remarkable feature of the whole Spitzer debacle, his extreme hypocrisy, is maybe the one characteristic all Shakespearean tragic heroes lack. Macbeth may be a sociopath and Othello may be vicious, but they live out the consequences of their own characters with dignity. Exactly unlike Spitzer. His destruction is far more mundane--the guy who couldn't keep it in his pants.

Is Marche right? Think about it.

In this Bloggingheads clip, Bob Wright notes that the "average man" is deterred from using prostitutes out of morality, fear of discovery, or — and this is the most important — anxiety about entering "alien terrain." That is, you don't know how these things work, whether dangerous men might show up and hurt you and so forth. But because Spitzer prosecuted prostitution rings, he became "intimately familiar" with what this "alien terrain" is like. Moreover, in prosecuting these people, he probably gave a lot of thought to how they might have done things a little differently and gotten away with it. Being a smart, arrogant guy, he must have imagined how he would get away with it. It's not surprising, Bob says, that Spitzer behaved irrationally after he penetrated the world of prostitution, but what got him there in the first place? That's the difficult step that separates him from ordinary men. He got there by being a hardcore prosecutor.

Under Bob Wright's theory, doesn't Spitzer meet Marche's standard of Shakespeareanosity? Was he not destroyed by the virtues that lifted him to greatness in the first place?

By the way, at the end of the Bloggingheads clip, Mickey Kaus notes a Dick Morris connection. So if Spitzer really is a Shakespearean tragic hero, then Dick Morris seems to be Lady MacBeth or the ghost of Hamlet's father.

Big thanks to my son John Althouse Cohen for pointing to the way Bob Wright's theory undercuts Marche.

IN THE COMMENTS: Blake nails the Shakespearean point:

If Spitzer were a Shakespearean hero, a la Othello or Hamlet, his primary "virtue"--ruthless pursuit of the law--is what would be his undoing.

So, he'd end up having to prosecute his daughter for some wrongly perceived crime, and then she'd kill herself, and then his wife would go mad, and then he'd kill himself.

Take it back to Ancient Greece (where prostitution was the norm for men, though still disreputable for women), and he'd end up having slept with his daughter. Then Hera would blind him. Or something.

Mickey's Unified Obama Theory.

Video. Via Kausfiles.

Law and breasts...

You'd think I would have blogged this story, but no, I passed it up, yet here's Glenn Reynolds, blogging and displaying a whole Gloria-Allred-with-the-pliers photograph:



I have just 2 things to say:

1. Airport security people don't force you to do anything — e.g., rip out your pus-stuck nipple tacks with pliers — they give you a choice. You can go forward onto your flight by accepting the search or turn around and leave.

2. When I see Gloria Allred, the direction I feel like turning is to "South Park." What's that episode where they mock Gloria Allred? Well, their website is so fabulous that you can not only easily search using your key word, but you can watch the whole episode. It's "Cripple Fight."

"A morass that starts out as a quagmire, then morphs into a cesspool and finally turns into a slime pit on the road to its ultimate destination."

Joe Queenan explains — at some length — exactly what it takes for a movie to be the worst movie ever made. And by that standard, something like "The Hottie and the Nottie" isn't even in the running. To be truly bad, at the very least, important people had to have worked very hard making something that they believed was going to be quite profoundly wonderful.

Link via Dan Drezner, who thinks the worst movie he's seen, by Queenan's standard, is "Caligula." Queenan adheres to the "Heaven's Gate" school of thought.

ADDED: In other news: "Lindsay Lohan to star in new Charles Manson movie."

Frankly, I thought this AP story called "Scalia Criticizes News Media" was too dull to write about.

And when I noticed it again today while reading How Appealing, I was tempted to write a post about the existential angst of Howard Bashman — that poor man, writing a blog that flags each legal thing that makes the news, forced by his own chosen vision of the blog to post whenever the media-hungry justice lumbers out into the world and the Associated Press takes note. But I found the AP article just interesting enough to make me want to do this block and indent quote:

At a conference of [lawyers from the Food and Drug Law Institutea], Scalia said news organizations often fail to focus on the text of the laws the court interprets, citing accounts of last month's 8-1 decision that made it harder for consumers to sue makers of federally approved medical devices.

He singled out for criticism a New York Times editorial on the case headlined "No Recourse for the Injured."

Let's read an entire — and really cool — book right here on YouTube.

I love that. If you want to buy ABC3D by Marion Bataille — it's available in the fall — go here.

I found that via Drawn! where I'd forgotten to go for a while and where I saw plenty of other very nice things, like this street-art dog made of plastic bags that inflate and make the dog stand up when the subway passes below:

Let's contemplate Mitt Romney as McCain's VP.

Here's the picture Drudge has up (linking to this story):



(Enlarge.)

I think they look great together. They seem to loosen each other up. They're sort of a cute odd couple. Don't know why Mitt needs the airline blankie on his lap, but the two guys seem to complement one another, don't you think?

IN THE COMMENTS: While there is a fair amount of agreement that John and Mitt are nicely Oscar-and-Felix-y, everyone seems to think that's not his blankie that's his jacket. Do men drape their jackets over their knees? Is it a leg warming method or a trick for keeping the jacket from getting wrinkled? Whatever it is — blanket or jacket, leg-warmer or anti-wrinkle precaution — it seems a bit... well, it's Felix-y, isn't it?

"Were we looking at a new Jackie O or more of an Audrey Hepburn or perhaps, even, a touch of Diana."

The British press goes mad for Carla Bruni.

"I remember landing under sniper fire..."