"Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband made at least $30 million over the last 16 months..."

"... mainly from giving paid speeches to corporations, banks and other organizations, according to financial disclosure forms filed with federal elections officials on Friday."

Also: "Clinton Foundation donors include dozens of media organizations, individuals."

"I don't actually think the federal government will be executing people in 50 years."

"But if Barack Obama’s Department of Justice not only didn't stop using the federal death penalty, but also actively sought Tsarnaev’s execution, what are the odds that another, more liberal president will come along to do so in, say, the next 15 or 20 years?"

Asks lawprof Noah Feldman, who thinks that if Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is actually put to death, "it will be a signal event in the history of" Massachusetts, "where I was born and have lived most of my life" and where "the death penalty has... come to seem distant, foreign and unfamiliar."

Even though "[a]lmost certainly, the execution won’t actually take place here."

"Salad is a necessity, a type of proto-Soylent... it says, 'I’m taking care of a basic bodily need, but it’s just crunchy water!'"

"Salad, at its best, feels like a strategically good choice without being truly satisfying to the soul, like dating someone who’s not that smart, but has a beach-adjacent timeshare. Salad has its faults, and it knows it. It’s healthy, but it will never win the popularity contest against your Chipotle burritos, or even your Quizno’s subs. So the one thing salad should really never be is less healthy than a Big Mac.... And yet, a new report from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine points out 100 restaurant salads that are 'worse' than a Big Mac."

"When Avijit Roy was murdered, the police were standing nearby and watching the spectacle. The murderers left unscathed after their act..."

"When the murderers were escaping after killing Oyasiqur Rahman Babu, the police had been standing by then too... The police were paper tigers when women were being molested one by one before an audience of thousands at the new year celebrations. They were engaged primarily in not neglecting their duty. They were busy clearing the way for the sexual offenders to escape...."

From the last blog posts of Ananta Bijoy Das, who was hacked to death by masked men with machetes in Sylhet, Bangladesh.

"How do you reconcile your avoidance of computers and iPads, when you signed on to create a TV series for Amazon’s streaming service?"

Deadline asked Woody Allen. He said:

I don’t even know what a streaming service is; that’s the interesting thing. When you said streaming service, it was the first time I’ve heard that term connected with the Amazon thing. I never knew what Amazon was. I’ve never seen any of those series, even on cable. I’ve never seen The Sopranos, or Mad Men. I’m out every night and when I come home, I watch the end of the baseball or basketball game, and there’s Charlie Rose and I go to sleep. Amazon kept coming to me and saying, please do this, whatever you want. I kept saying I have no ideas for it, that I never watch television. I don’t know the first thing about it. Well, this went on for a year and a half, and they kept making a better deal and a better deal. Finally they said look, we’ll do anything that you want, just give us six half hours. They can be black and white, they can take place in Paris, in New York and California, they can be about a family, they can be comedy, you can be in them, they can be tragic. We don’t have to know anything, just come in with six half hours. And they offered a lot of money and everybody around me was pressuring me, go ahead and do it, what do you have to lose?...

So he agreed.  "And I have regretted every second since I said OK."

"Within minutes, Star Wars enthusiasts and Walker non-enthusiasts alike descended like locusts, parsing every syllable of what was clearly a joke..."

"Questions from these people flooded Twitter — who is 'that boy?' Who is 'another?' In the original quote, wasn't Yoda referring to Princess Leia? Or alternately, Anakin Skywalker? And what does a woman look like in person? It was just the latest example of a phenomenon that has gripped society in the Internet age. Once an oxymoron, social media has given rise to the 'nerd bully.'"

From "The nerd uprising is upon us," by Christian Schneider.

"I am an American Airman in the most powerful Air Force in the world, and you made me into a helpless whore.”

"You made me untouchable, and by doing that you made me a target... You are the reason I room alone when I deploy. You are the reason that wives are terrified that their husbands are cheating on them when they leave, and I leave with them. When I walk into a room and people are laughing and having a good time, you are the reason they take one look at me and either stop talking or leave. They’re afraid. They’re afraid of me, and it’s because of you. They are afraid that with all of this 'power' I have, I can destroy them. They will never respect me or the power and the authority I have as a person, or the power I have as an Airman, because I am nothing more than a victim. That I as a victim, somehow I control their fate. With one sentence, I can destroy the rest of their lives..."

A letter published under a pseudonym that is allegedly from a female Airman. "Kayce Hagen" is critical of the Sexual Assault Response Coordination program.

This reminded me of that story from a couple days ago — in The National Journal — "Why Some Male Members of Congress Won’t Be Alone with Female Staffers/Numerous women who work on the Hill say they've been excluded from solo meetings and evening events, a practice that could be illegal."

Male staffers said they'd also seen some female aides barred from solo meetings with the boss, and that they benefited in some instances from the exclusion of their female colleagues in high-level meetings, at receptions with major Washington powerbrokers, and just in earning a little more face time with their bosses.

And to go way back to WWII and the Women's Army Corp — which I did last Sunday as I was thinking about my mother, who was one of the earliest WACs — it reminded me of the 1943 slander campaign:

In 1943 the recruiting momentum stopped and went into reverse as a massive slander campaign on the home front challenged the WACs as sexually immoral. Many soldiers ferociously opposed allowing women in uniform, warning their sisters and friends they would be seen as lesbians or prostitutes. Their lewd humor and snide comments betrayed a fear that if women became soldiers they would no longer serve in a masculine preserve and their masculinity would be devalued.... Critics outside the military included religious fanatics with wild imaginations, reactionaries who wanted to prevent social change, and right-wing critics of Roosevelt's social programs. Other sources were from other women — servicemen's and officer's wives' idle gossip, local women who disliked the newcomers taking over "their town", female civilian employees resenting the competition (for both jobs and men), charity and volunteer organizations who resented the extra attention the WAACs received, and complaints and slander spread by disgruntled or discharged WAACs. All investigations showed the rumors were false, but they had originated with American soldiers, not with enemy agents.

"A coalition of more than 60 Asian-American groups filed a federal discrimination complaint against Harvard University, claiming racial bias in undergraduate admissions."

"Asian-American students with almost perfect college entrance-exam scores, top 1 percent grade-point averages, academic awards and leadership positions are more likely to be rejected than similar applicants of other races, according to their administrative complaint, filed Friday with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights," Bloomberg reports.

Harvard denies any discrimination....

Robert Iuliano, the school’s general counsel said in a statement that the college’s admissions policies comply fully with the law and are essential to the school’s mission. "The college considers each applicant through an individualized, holistic review having the goal of creating a vibrant academic community that exposes students to a wide range of differences:  background, ideas, experiences, talents and aspirations," Iuliano said.

That idea has worked when traditionally discriminated-against applicants are given a plus factor, but it should be much harder to sell when explaining a minus factor. We're used to white applicants losing a few positions at Harvard each year to give a boost to some applicants from traditionally discriminated-against groups. The compelling interest that has worked in the court cases is the school's idea of diversity in the classroom — as Iuliano put it: "creating a vibrant academic community that exposes students to a wide range of differences: background, ideas, experiences, talents and aspiration." That's a "trust us" abstraction that has allowed schools to avoid what it perceives as the problem of too many white people, but there will be more skepticism when it means not enough white people.

I got to that article via David Lat on Facebook, where he begins by wondering "if the objection to a 70 percent Asian student body... is, to put it bluntly, 'aesthetic.'" Later, he clarifies:

What I was trying to suggest is that maybe Harvard isn't "racist" against Asians in some kind of animus-driven or "we think you are inferior" way, but instead has an "aesthetic" issue with, well, too many people of one group running around... not wanting "a student body that's 70% anything." But I'd suggest that a student body that's 70% white, which Harvard had at some point -- and might still have, I haven't checked the current stats -- is really not any "worse" than a student body that's 70% Asian, except perhaps from an "aesthetic" perspective. (I will concede -- and I can do this as an Asian-American -- that we have less "aesthetic" diversity than whites, because whites have greater differentiation in hair color and eye color. So if you're thinking in terms of what makes admissions brochures look like Benetton ads, you don't want 70% Asians -- but you can get away with more whites because you can have blondes, brunettes, and redheads, with brown eyes, blue eyes, and green eyes. That's what I mean by "aesthetic" diversity -- or "visual diversity," as admissions consultants for fancy private schools here in New York like to say. My Filipina cousin was trying to get her white-looking son into one of these schools and asked if his being half-Asian would help from a diversity perspective. The consultant said no, because "he doesn't offer visual diversity.")

That might help us understand why people who are not racist would do it, but I don't see how it fits the classroom diversity idea that has been the only compelling interest that has supported affirmative action in the Supreme Court cases. "Aesthetics" is a word Clarence Thomas used in dissent, criticizing the classroom diversity idea:

A distinction between these two ideas (unique educational benefits based on racial aesthetics and race for its own sake) is purely sophistic — so much so that the majority uses them interchangeably. Compare ante, at 16 (“[T]he Law School has a compelling interest in attaining a diverse student body”), with ante, at 21 (referring to the “compelling interest in securing the educational benefits of a diverse student body” (emphasis added)). The Law School’s argument, as facile as it is, can only be understood in one way: Classroom aesthetics yields educational benefits, racially discriminatory admissions policies are required to achieve the right racial mix, and therefore the policies are required to achieve the educational benefits. It is the educational benefits that are the end, or allegedly compelling state interest, not “diversity.”

Harvard's lawyer spoke of the "vibrant academic community that exposes students to a wide range of differences: background, ideas, experiences, talents and aspirations" — that is, an environment that provides educational benefit to everyone who attends the school. That doesn't translate too well into the need to see enough blond hair. And nobody, not even David Lat, wants to get caught saying you people all look alike.

"George Stephanopoulos Gave to the Clinton Foundation. So What?"

Yeah, that's what I've been thinking, and I tend to not agree with Jonathan Chait. He says:

Rand Paul... accuses Stephanopoulos of harboring a “conflict of interest.” But donating money to a charitable foundation is not an interest. His money is gone regardless of what happens to Clinton’s presidential campaign.... In the absence of a material conflict, is there some symbolic conflict? It is hard to imagine what.... Stephanopoulos’s defense — that he just wanted to donate to the Foundation’s work on AIDS prevention and deforestation — seems 100 percent persuasive....

The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple does make an argument, but not much of one. “The problem with Stephanopoulos’s donations to the Clinton Foundation is that it gives him a stake — even if it’s a small one — in the operations and success of the charity,” he writes, “Like any donor, Stephanopoulos wants his money put to good use and, all else being equal, wants the foundation to prosper as it invests his money in good works.” But how does this bias Stephanopoulos’s campaign coverage?...

I've always assumed Stephanopoulos is biased toward the Clintons. Why should I care about his charitable contributions? Failed disclosure? Bleh. The Foundation is in all sorts of trouble? George isn't linked to that. The Republicans shouldn't accept him as a debate moderator. That was already true. This new thing? I don't see what it adds to the already-existing disqualification.

"The pseudo feminists, the pseudo Marxists, the pseudo power-and gender-freaks... I call them all, in capital letters, the School of Resentment."

"I always get nasty reviewers. I couldn’t care less," said Harold Bloom, asked by Time Magazine whether he "anticipate[s] flak" because his "new book, The Daemon Knows, features 12 American writers touched by genius – only one of whom is a woman."

I don’t even bother anymore. I’m always being denounced.

I assumed I knew who the one woman is, and I was right. Here's the book, in case you want to check the list (encourage old man Bloom by buying it).

Death for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

The jury's verdict is in: death.

With death sentences, an appeal is all but inevitable, and the process generally takes years if not decades to play out. Of the 80 federal defendants sentenced to death since 1988, only three, including Timothy J. McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, have been executed. Most cases are still tied up in appeal. In the rest, the sentences were vacated or the defendants died or committed suicide.

The Tsarnaev verdict goes against the grain in Massachusetts, which has no death penalty for state crimes and where polls showed that residents overwhelmingly favored life in prison for Mr. Tsarnaev. Many respondents said that life in prison for one so young would be a fate worse than death, and some worried that execution would make him a martyr.

Hello, my name is Sadie!

That's my 2014 name. That is, that would be my name if I were born last year and my parents gave me the name that was as popular as my name was in the year that I was named. Ann was 46th most popular girl's name in 1951. My 1940s name is Josephine!

What's your 2014 name?

Denying Shirley Abrahamson an injunction that would restore her to the position of Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court...

... U.S. District Judge James Peterson found no irreparable harm because the new Chief Justice Patience Roggensack is "not consolidating power in any ruthless way."

"After that sweet birthday fling, I was to have no sex for the next 35 years."

Writes Oliver Sacks in his new memoir "On the Move," reviewed in the NYT by Andrew Solomon, who complains that Sacks's "transition into celibacy is presented without explication." Sacks has known that he is gay since at least when he was 18 (in 1951), when he told his father the news. His father told his mother, and his mother "came down with a face of thunder, a face I had never seen before. 'You are an abomination,' she said. 'I wish you had never been born.'"

Then she left and did not speak to me for several days. When she did speak, there was no reference to what she had said (nor did she ever refer to the matter again), but something had come between us. My mother, so open and supportive in most ways, was harsh and inflexible in this area. A Bible reader like my father, she loved the Psalms and the Song of Solomon but was haunted by the terrible verses in Leviticus: "Thou shall not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination."

That's from the book. Solomon wonders why Sacks was celibate for 35 years:

He explains only that he had trouble with “bonding, belonging and believing.” Sacks has cared for many people — especially his patients — but the kind of love on which marriages are based seems to have been not merely elusive, but bewildering to him (though he has been seeing the same psychoanalyst for nearly 50 years). Sacks did not so much avoid convention as fail to notice it; he understands difficult facets of the human experience with singular clarity, but emotional rules that are legible to most people seem to bewilder him.

By the way, the word "celibacy" (or "celibate") does not appear in the book. Nor is there "sexless." And "no sex" only appears that once (quoted in the post title). Is Sacks really as bewildered as Solomon seems to think? I'm looking at the book — which I just bought — and I see that Sacks says that he "regarded [his] sexuality as nobody’s business but [his] own, not a secret, but not to be talked about" and that one closest friends when he was a young man told him he thought Sacks was "asexual."

We are all creatures of our upbringings, our cultures, our times. And I have needed to remind myself, repeatedly, that my mother was born in the 1890s and had an Orthodox [Jewish] upbringing and that in England in the 1950s homosexual behavior was treated not only as a perversion but as a criminal offense. I have to remember, too, that sex is one of those areas— like religion and politics— where otherwise decent and rational people may have intense, irrational feelings. My mother did not mean to be cruel, to wish me dead. She was suddenly overwhelmed, I now realize, and she probably regretted her words or perhaps partitioned them off in a closeted part of her mind.

But her words haunted me for much of my life and played a major part in inhibiting and injecting with guilt what should have been a free and joyous expression of sexuality.

I think that's some explication of what Solomon calls the "transition into celibacy." But many readers — including me — would like to see the subject of celibacy examined by someone with such a fine mind and such long experience with the condition. There must have been some good in it, to stay with it for 35 years.

"If elected president, I will have a litmus test in terms of my nominee to be a Supreme Court justice."

"And that nominee will say that we are all going to overturn this disastrous Supreme Court decision on Citizens United because that decision is undermining American democracy. I do not believe that billionaires should be able to buy politicians."

On Thursday, Clinton also reiterated her support for a constitutional amendment that would overturn Citizens United, a long-shot effort that is nonetheless popular among Democratic activists.

"She said she is going to do everything she can," the attendee said. "She was very firm about this – that this Supreme Court decision is just a disaster."

My thoughts:

[ADDED: FIRST, let me be clear that quote that begins this post is something Bernie Sanders said on one of the Sunday talk shows. The blocked and indented quote is from Hillary, and it's something she said to donors at a closed meeting that was leaked by an attendee whom the Washington Post is keeping anonymous. The Post relates that Hillary "got major applause when she said would not name anybody to the Supreme Court unless she has assurances that they would overturn" Citizens United and calls this a "pledge to use opposition to Citizens United as a litmus test for Supreme Court nominees." I don't know that Hillary ever used the term "litmus test," and it sounds as though she's under pressure because of what Sanders had said.]

1. I don't believe this pledge. I think she's saying this because she thinks it's politically advantageous, so: Why does she think that?

2. Normally, what Presidents and presidential candidates say is that they don't have any "litmus test." It's been considered politic to act as though you are choosing Justices in a soberly meritocratic fashion, posing as if you value judicial independence and cases decided according to the law. These Presidents and presidential candidates may nevertheless have a litmus test, of course. They just choose not to say so.

3. Citizens United! is an incantation, but who is it for, who responds to it and why? Very few people have much understanding of what the case was actually about, so incanting Citizens United! is a pretty idiotic approach to politics. I suspect Hillary Clinton has a good deal of contempt for the little people of America whom she needs to like her and who did not find her likable enough last time.

4. One thing Citizens United was about was a movie about Hillary, "Hillary: The Movie":

"Let them eat crab-cake."

Punchline.