"You’re about to find out who I am."

What famous person with a seemingly clean reputation was pulled over for drunk driving and sassed a cop like that?

Oh, does it really matter? Isn't it what they'd all say if they were too dumb/drunk to hold their tongue? (This one isn't dumb, by the way. She went to Stanford.)

"Q. What’s the biggest public misconception about you?"

"A. It takes a lot of time to answer a question like that. At the moment, I’m not that interested in myself."

Does it really matter which famous person whom we think of as being full of himself/herself gave that answer? Wouldn't they all give that answer if they were clever enough to think of it?

ADDED: Confession.

Purchase of the day.

From the April 20, 2013 Amazon Associates Report:

Back Rake (the world's best back scratcher) Oak and Walnut
by J Farnsworth Woodworks

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want, pay nothing extra, and make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And only if you blurt it out loud will we know it's you.

The Althouse Amazon portal: 14" long 4" wide 2" thick.

The man in the trench coat and clown makeup "carrying a big piece of glass shaped like a sword" tries to cash a check.

"The creepy clown-man was later reported sitting at a U.S. 93 South bar talking to himself with the piece of glass sitting next to him. The caller from the bar also noted the man was wearing a dress." And:

A customer service manager at a U.S. 93 North business reported a problem with a threatening customer who had used a threatening tone. He said the woman “made his skin crawl” and that he didn’t trust her....

A youth who accidentally called police while trying to call Pizza Hut was extremely rude and not forthcoming with information, eventually saying “what the (expletive), is this a new (expletive) law or something?”...

A man who shared with the Whitefish Police Department his belief that youths at the beach who were being loud were also possibly getting in his truck told a dispatcher that someone needed to investigate before he got out his .45 and handled it himself.

A tiny three-legged dog not wearing a collar or tags — but wearing a brown and white sweater — followed a woman to her Park Avenue home and wouldn’t leave for some time....

A man who was either ignorant or apathetic of the law was arrested for resisting arrest and having an open container on Central Avenue.

"Obama hates selling. He thinks people should just accept the right thing to do."

Says Maureen Dowd, who thinks that Obama "doesn’t know how to work the system" and "doesn’t want to learn, or to even hire some clever people who can tell him how to do it or do it for him." He's just too good to be good.

Dowd says Obama should have left "the high road," put on "brass knuckles," and clobbered North Dakota Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp with these lines: “Heidi, you’re brand new and you’re going to have a long career. You work with us, we’ll work with you. Public opinion is moving fast on this issue. The reason you get a six-year term is so you can have the guts to make tough votes. This is a totally defensible bill back home. It’s about background checks, nothing to do with access to guns. Heidi, you’re a mother. Think of those little kids dying in schoolrooms.”

Heidi, you’re a mother. Think of those little kids dying in schoolrooms. Give me a break! A powerful female politician would find that incredibly patronizing. I don't believe Dowd really thinks that's what a President would say in a private conversation with a female Senator. That's just pap for NYT readers.

Dowd began with something that sounded slightly tough: "Heidi, you’re brand new and you’re going to have a long career. You work with us, we’ll work with you." Why not make it actually tough? You’re brand new and you’re not going to have much of a career if you don't work with us. But Dowd — even while recommending violence-against-women-y brass knuckles — can't bring herself to invent truly bullying lines for Obama. And then she switches to the same policy arguments Obama used publicly. Finally, Dowd dribbles to such a soft landing that it's inadvertently sexist.

I presume Heitkamp figured out on her own what would play in North Dakota.

A student finds major mistakes in a famous paper by 2 Harvard economics professors.

Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff "Growth in a Time of Debt" supposedly showed that "economic growth slows dramatically when the size of a country's debt rises above 90% of Gross Domestic Product, the overall size of the economy." 

Some key figures tackling the global recession found this paper a useful addition to the debate at the heart of which is this key question: is it best to let debt increase in the hope of stimulating economic growth to get out of the slump, or is it better to cut spending and raise taxes aggressively to get public debt under control?

EU commissioner Olli Rehn and influential US Republican politician Paul Ryan have both quoted a 90% debt-to-GDP limit to support their austerity strategies.

But the calculation was wrong. 

Why wasn't Tamerlan Tsarnaev on the FBI's watch list when he returned after 6 months in Russia?

On Today's Fox News Sunday:

CHRIS WALLACE, host: What do you make of the fact, because of a Russian request, the FBI interrogated the older brother Tamerlan back in 2011 about his ties to radical Islam. They found out he was not a threat.... [W]hat do you make of the interrogation? And what about the fact that when he returned after six months in Russia, he apparently was not on an FBI watch list?

CONGRESSMAN PETER KING: ... [W]here the FBI is given information about someone as being potential terrorists, they look at them, and then they don't take action. And they go out and carry out murders after this. So, again, I'm wondering, again, is there something deficient here? What was wrong? Again, there was nothing they could find in 2011. He goes to Chechnya in 2012. He has statements up on his Web site. He's talking about radical imams. Why didn't the FBI go back and look at that?... [I]s far as getting information in advance and not seeming to take proper action, this is the fifth case I'm aware of where the FBI has failed to stop someone who ultimately became a terrorist murderer....

Later in the show, Wallace interviews Philip Mudd, a terrorist expert with experience in the CIA, the National Security Council, and the FBI.

WALLACE: Was there any kind of a breakdown here in our national security operation, and specifically with regard to the FBI? Are you troubled by the fact that they were alerted by the Russians to the older brother, they interviewed him, decided he was not a threat, he goes to Russia, he comes back, and they don't seem to have him on a watch list?

At the Sunlit Café...

... bloom already.

Is this how we get FCC rulings nowadays?

David Ortiz spoke from the heart at today's Red Sox game. I stand with Big Papi and the people of Boston - Julius

— The FCC (@FCC) April 20, 2013

Via The Hollywood Reporter:

After thanking Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick and the city’s police department, Ortiz yelled “This is our f---ing city!” Ortiz added: “And nobody's going to dictate our freedom. Stay strong.”

The game against the Kansas City Royals was broadcast nationally on MLBN, as well as regionally on NESN. It was also carried on local radio stations WEEI 850 and WUFC 1510.

But Ortiz’s f-bomb isn’t going to land him in hot water with the FCC, with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski tweeting his blessing from the government agency’s official Twitter account.

If you're trying to remember what the current state of the law is on "fleeting expletives" and broadcasting, here's an NYT article from last June: "Can You Say That on TV? Broadcasters Aren’t Sure." Photo of Genachowski at the link.

"I can't believe he had the balls to come back and act like nothing happened."

"I thought as it was just regular old Jahar. We had a typical conversation, he was not startled, he was not scared, he was not anything. He was just the same old Jahar."

Chip's dog GIFs.

First, "At the Yellower Café," Chip — opining about Zeus — says "He's a bit of a modeling primadona."



Second, on the subject of George Bush sending Laura stick figure drawings. ("At the same time, George had gotten an app on his iPad where he could draw pictures. And he communicated with me if I was on the road, or with Barbara and Jenna, with these very funny stick figure drawings of him in bed with Barney: 'Good night.' Then, the active stick figure in the morning: 'Good morning.'")

Chip says "What? Like this?



"Yo no lo comprendo. Well find me an art instructor."

"On Reddit, the Tripathi speculation... soon received its own, massive thread... full of the worst of crowd-sourced message board investigations...."

"... from ridiculous total certainty ('The facial structure is almost exactly the same') to incredibly irresponsible mistakes ('Except that isn't Sunil, it's his brother').... The entire case was based on vague physical resemblance in low-quality photos, bolstered by the fact that one Twitter user claiming to have gone to school with Tripathi said she thought it looked like him."

"I sort of panicked. I thought I was going through an anxiety thing because so many people were coming after me."

Said Ian Bay, a skateboarder and wearer of headphones at the 4/20 marijuana celebration in Denver, who suddenly saw hundreds of people running toward him.

A story told by the YouTube account of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

WaPo perceives.

After returning from Dagestan, Tsarnaev appeared to be constructing his own religion-based ideology, moving between often contradictory ideas as he explored different Web sites....

His own...

Young Muslims from the former Soviet Union often have only the haziest notion of their religious and cultural heritage after 70 years of communism.

In the company of 1.6 billion, he was — in this story — a loner.

Among Tsarnaev’s earliest YouTube postings, which include a selection of secular dance mixes, is a video of Timur Mutsuraev, the bard of Chechen separatism....

Starting a playlist as soon as he returned to Boston, with an independence song by Mutsuraev, suggests that Tsarnaev could have been thinking about his ethnic roots and perhaps a recently stoked antagonism toward Russia...

But as the playlist developed, videos of the puritanical Sheikh Feiz Muhammad, an Australian, appeared....

"In the past, people never asked for help unless they needed it."

"My grandmother was offered a pension and she was offended. She did not need it. But now people do not have that mentality. They think of these benefits as their rights. The rights have just expanded and expanded. And it has brought us a good quality of life. But now we need to go back to the rights and the duties. We all have to contribute."

Denmark reconsiders the welfare state. 

"I ask you for violence, in the nonsense, and you, you give me grace, your light and your warmth."

"I’d like to paint you, but there are no colors, because there are so many, in my confusion, the tangible form of my great love."