A glamorous but slightly pervy rest stop on Route 90.

The Belvidere Oasis on Route 90 just north of Chicago is the most glamorous rest stop I've ever seen. It spans the highway, and you can get a Starbucks coffee and a Krispy Kreme doughnut and sit and watch the traffic stream underneath you:



They have two spiffy VW vans -- both with big Sponge Bob dolls in the front seats -- that each has four compartments filled with stuffed dolls to play that arcade game where you manipulate that gripper device to try to snag a prize before your time runs out:



Whoever loaded up the Flintstones compartment put the Betty Rubble dolls on top, face down, with their skirts pushed up so you could see their white underpants. And the one in front has a dirty fingerprint on the panties! (Click photo to enlarge.)



Oh, my!

Greetings from Cleveland.

The view from the window of my lovely hotel room:

Off to Cleveland.

I don't know about you, but I'm going to Cleveland. Why Cleveland? It's halfway to Ithaca, my destination. I'm going to toss a few things into my Audi TT Coupe, which has never been more than a hundred or so miles from home, and take it for its first long trip. I've booked hotels with WiFi, and I'll have my camera at all times, so you can expect to see some Cleveland blogging here this evening.

Exciting, isn't it?

And thanks to all the great commenters who gave me tips about things to do in Cleveland (and between Cleveland and Ithaca and in Ithaca)!

When the satire gets way out in front of its target.

Huffington's Toast is not only far better than than The Huffington Post, it doesn't even really need The Huffington Post to continue to exist -- either as a real site or as something anyone pays any attention to. The Onion initially based its format on USA Today, but is no longer at all dependent on USA Today as a subject of mockery. Similarly, the Toast doesn't need the Post. The format accommodates satire of all sorts of bloggers, celebrities, and politicos, and they can keep going on that material long after the Post is toast. The Post was useful to get a snappy look and a flood of attention, but these guys have already run right past it and become a general humor site.

Judge for yourself, because I'm a running joke over there, so I must be biased. But which way am I biased?

What could be more personal?

Let's check out The Huffington Post again. There's Arianna, tucked away, as usual in the upper left hand corner. She's effusing:

One of the things I’m loving about our inaugural week is the variety of subject matter and tone that we’re getting from our bloggers. From the unabashedly political to the deeply personal -- such as the new postings by Bruce Cohen and Cheryl Saban (after all, what could be more personal than witnessing your daughter give birth, then blogging about it?).

What could be more personal than witnessing your daughter give birth, then blogging about it?

How about: witnessing your daughter give birth and not blogging about it.

Watching my baby have her baby was like being a sous chef for GOD -- there was nothing I could do but observe in humility and awe.

Fabulous metaphor! Because you know how a sous chef just does nothing but stand there.

[ADDED: Yes, it's a simile, not a metaphor....]

I scrolled through all the current blog posts just now. Nothing caught my eye. Just a lot of dreary pedestrian blather. Laurie David's concerned about global warming. Gary Hart is concerned about security, not just "traditional military security" but "security of livelihood, security of community, security of the environment, security of energy, and the security of thoughtful politics."

And don't forget the security of knowing you don't really need to click over to the HuffPo, because it's going to be boooorrrrriiinnggggggg.

It's so much more fun over here.

UPDATE: N.Z. Bear is making fun of the eminently risible HuffPo User Service Agreement. That and their refusal to join the Ecosystem. And show us their Site Meter.

"What? There's another episode?!"

I wonder how many people across the country said that at the end of last night's "Apprentice." They left absolutely zero suspense about who would win. The whole episode was cut to make Tana look hilariously bad and even more hilariously delusional about herself. Meanwhile, there was almost nothing wrong with Kendra. The next thing we're shown will happen is that each woman's teammembers will talk about her behind her back, but we already know Kendra's people loved her and Tana had no rapport at all with hers. What's to watch next week?

I guess it might be funny to hear everyone tear into Tana and destroy her ridiculous, smug confidence. We've been prepped to find that amusing. How can anyone like Tana anymore after she said "I have a husband and children to go home to. Kendra has nothing"?

Fear of bloggers.

Making the rounds today is the story of an adjunct professor at SMU, who was not renewed, perhaps because of her blog, which included sharp observations about professors and students. Not surprisingly, she's writing a book. And she should: the writing's really good. Let's hope that, freed from her job, she'll write more and better stories about campus life.

The blog is The Phantom Professor. I'm putting her on the blogroll.

Did the school do anything wrong if it cut her because her stories disturbed faculty and students and their parents? It would be at least foolish, because there will always be another blogger to write about the school, and now those bloggers will be reacting to anti-bloggism. And since The Phantom Professor observed the basic decencies of changing names and identifying details, her telling descriptions and insights did no serious harm. And it's usually better to appreciate satire and laugh at yourself.

For example, I'm still laughing at this -- scroll down and keep scrolling, all the way down -- even though it makes me a little nervous sometimes.

UPDATE: Judging from the comments on this post, people think that last link actually takes them to The Huffington Post. It doesn't! And, really, look for my name, which appears about 20 times.

ANOTHER UPDATE: That is, about 40 times. (And, no, I'm not a secret co-author of that blog.)

Ten things I've never done.

Yesterday, I linked to RLC's list of 10 things about himself, and Tonya, in the comments, said I should write 10 things about myself. For some reason, I didn't find that immediately appealing, but it popped into my head to write a list of ten things I've never done.

I've never:

1. Gone camping.

2. Eaten egg salad, devilled eggs, or cold hard-boiled eggs.

3. Gone skiing.

4. Set foot on any continent other than North America and Europe.

5. Shoplifted.

6. Watched a pornographic movie -- other than in federal court, as part of a forfeiture proceeding.

7. Called anyone "sir" or "ma'am."

8. Used a computer that wasn't a Macintosh (unless you count things like dedicated LEXIS consoles and ATM machines as computers).

9. Seen the movie "Apocalypse, Now." (It was always "Apocalypse," later, for me, and now maybe it's "Apocalypse," never. )

10. Used cocaine or heroin.

UPDATE: Steven Taylor accepts my meme here. And, wow, it's amazing what he's never done. Never gone to New York City? And Stephen Bainbridge joins in here. Two of his are wine-related.

The "C.S.I. effect."

A criminology professor, Simon Cole, writes in the WSJ -- not the Wisconsin State Journal, the other WSJ -- about the much-vaunted "C.S.I. effect." Have the neatly packaged stories on the popular TV show reshaped jurors minds, causing them to hold prosecutors to unrealistically high standards?

[T]o argue that "C.S.I." and similar shows are actually raising the number of acquittals is a staggering claim, and the remarkable thing is that, speaking forensically, there is not a shred of evidence to back it up. There is a robust field of research on jury decision-making but no study finding any "C.S.I. effect."

There is only anecdotal evidence....

Cole argues that the media have fallen for the prosecutors' version of what the show has done to people's minds. There's a defendants' version too: it's made people think of "forensic evidence as unambiguous and more certain than it is."

Even without a systematic study, though, we can assume popular culture is always affecting how people think. Cole admits:

As Anthony Amsterdam and Jerome Bruner note in "Minding the Law" (2000), "judges and lawyers must inevitably rely upon culturally shaped processes of categorizing, storytelling, and persuasion in going about their business." TV has become our principal storyteller, transmitting legal norms or, arguably, creating them. It's been said that "NYPD Blue," like cop shows before it, educated the public about its Miranda rights. Other scholars talk about a "Perry Mason effect," which may cause juries to expect on-the-stand confessions like the ones Raymond Burr elicited week after week.

I've never seen "C.S.I." Surprised? I rarely watch any TV dramas (or movie dramas for that matter). I think I've come to dislike watching actors pretend to have problems and sitting around waiting for them to "solve" those problems.

But it seems to me that "C.S.I." would tend to sharpen a viewer's perception and attention to logical reasoning. I'm not that sympathetic to prosecutors' whining that they can't rely on jurors' fuzzy thinking anymore. Defense lawyers have always complained about the way jurors were dazzled by science and would defer to expertise. So what if everyone thinks he's an expert too now? That's an incentive for prosecutors to do their work well. The imperfection of real-life evidence is just one more thing they will have to get through to the C.S.I.-sharpened minds of the jurors.

"Now, again, we're going back to the 50s... Things were very, very different from how they are now."

So said Priscilla Presley -- through a painfully surgically stretched skin-mask that was once a beautiful face. She was on the Letterman show last night, describing her parents' concern when she, at the age of 14, started dating Elvis Presley, who was 24. After three dates, her father -- so old fashioned! -- insisted on meeting Elvis. They were "nervous" about her "visiting" him.

Letterman: "You... you... you were 14. Uh... uh... he was 21? 24. So that was... uh... I mean ... even today... that was ... it's unheard of ... I would think ... Isn't it? More or less?"

PP: "Well, I don't know about today. I mean, there's older ... well ... in Hollywood ... there's ... uh..." (Grimaces -- to the extent the face permits -- and the audience giggles.) "Little bit ... 30 years ... how about that one? Heh, heh."

The new Bench Memos blog.

Despite my general dislike for high-profile blog launches, I'm going call attention to Bench Memos, the new National Review blog entirely devoted to the current tussles over judicial nominations. (Pointed out by How Appealing.) This is going right on the blogroll. And I'd love to see a corresponding blog that would keep track of the Democratic side of things in an equally solid and very substantive way.

Ten things...

... about my ex-husband.

ADDED: #5 should also say he's been mistaken for Ozzy Osbourne.

Goodbye, Dennis.

CNN reports: "'Dennis Miller' will be replaced with a second airing of 'Mad Money With Jim Cramer' at 9 p.m. ET."

"Mad Money With Jim Cramer"? That's brutal. Poor Dennis.

His show never got to be as good as it could have been because -- I'm guessing -- Miller never got the support from CNBC he needed. And he deserved it. His past work on HBO was great, but the CNBC show was struggling on the edge all along. I suppose Miller never should have risked his reputation by venturing into that unsupported environment. There was a limit to how much he could do on sheer wits alone. And it was often painful to watch him sweating it out on camera.

He needed great writers and supporting actors and a sharp audience -- what Jon Stewart has on "The Daily Show." Now, he's the one stuck looking like a failure. And I blame CNBC for doing that to him.

I'm going to punish them by never -- never! -- watching "Mad Money With Jim Cramer."

WaPo on HuffPo and some blogging advice.

Howard Kurtz in the WaPo addresses HuffPo criticism in the blogosphere. He gives me some credit I don't deserve:

Ann Althouse begins with a bit of satire: "Hello everyone! This is my first post!! Ever. I've never posted before! Anyway. . . . . "

"Nothing particularly clever or pithy coming from the celebs, and there's too much verbiage to give them all a chance. No one seems to have given much thought to how to write a blog. Have they even read other blogs?

The italicized quote is not satirical writing by me, just quote selection from a real HuffPo blogpost.

Kurtz also quotes Kevin Drum:

"I guess I don't get it...250 contributors? And 65 posts on the first day? (83% by men, BTW, just to toss another match on the whole women-in-blogging thing.) Is anyone really going to plow through all that?...

"Maybe I'm missing something here. My taste is not everyone's taste, after all. But I read blogs because I enjoy the author's voice and enjoy seeing them engage with the rest of the blogosphere. An enormous dumping ground of miscellaneous paragraphs parachuting out of the sky, on the other hand, doesn't seem that appealing."

Exactly.

Drum links to Marc Cooper to note that HuffPo got 8 million hits on the first day. Ah! I bet it was all bloggers like me looking for stuff to make fun of. I'm sure I hit the site at least 20 times!

And I thoroughly agree with Cooper about the widely-linked Nikke Finke piece (which I haven't mentioned before because I thought it was too stupid to talk about): Who cares if David Geffen doesn't blog?

Another thing about that Nikke Finke piece -- now that I'm bothering to talk about it: It's ridiculous to compare a blog to a movie -- as she did -- and to judge it a "bomb." When a reviewer sees a movie, that's it, that's the whole movie. You can say if it's good or bad. But a blog is a continuing flow of material. It might develop into something good. It might start big and peter out. You can't make a final call on the first day.

In fact, I don't like when bloggers make a big thing out of their first day and say "Look at me, I'm launching a new blog!" Why not blog low-profile for a while and get a feel for what your voice is going to be, what makes a good post, how to mix up the subject matter? Then one day when you've got a particularly good post on a subject some prominent blogger would want to link to, send out an email on that post. Then if you get a link and people follow it, they'll see this is some kind of a real blog over here -- there's a whole flow going on -- and that link will have some potential to lead to a regular readership. That's what I did.

Why is the medical marijuana case taking so long?

Jim Lindgren speculates on the outcome of the medical marijuana case (Raich):

[T]he Supreme Court is in a bind in Raich. Either the Court has to follow the Constitution and strike down federal drug regulation of intrastate noncommercial uses of marijuana (a controversial decision to follow the rule of law), or it has to expand Wickard radically, rendering the Commerce Clause almost (though not quite) a dead letter. Stated another way, the Court either has to expand its federalism jurisprudence slightly (eg, Lopez & Morrison, but in the controversial drug area), or it has to limit Lopez & Morrison to their facts by radically expanding federal power under the Commerce Clause. It can't stand still. Perhaps that is why the Court has been so slow to render an opinion.

Here's my theory on why the Court is taking so long with Raich. The Court is going to uphold the application of the Controlled Substances Act, even to the users of homegrown marijuana California wanted to accommodate. It really is not such a difficult question because Congress is trying to regulate a commodity down to the very smallest components of a market, including the home supplying of a product that would otherwise be bought on the market.

The Wickard case, which Lindgren would discount as "weakly reasoned," establishes this principle, albeit in the context of a farmer, and a farmer is engaged in a commercial enterprise, even if the wheat the government regulated never left his farm. Lopez and Morrison support drawing a line between commercial and noncommercial, however, and a homegrowing, home-user belongs on the noncommercial side of the line.

But if you take that route, how do you treat medicinal home-users differently from recreational home-users? You have to say medical home-users are not the sort of persons who would use the illegal market as a substitute for homegrowing, and that recreational users are. Considering all the people who have been punished for the possession of homegrown marijuana, I find it very difficult to accept a constitutional line drawn between these two motivations for using the drug.

The distinction is entirely based on a speculative theory about how people in different situations behave. Somehow medical users are the sort of people who would refrain from seeking out an illegal seller? They'd switch to a legal drug of some kind? Why? Why isn't it more likely that recreational users would limit themselves to homegrowing if it was completely legal, and would switch to a legal substance if they'd neglected to grow their own? Aren't medical patients more in need of the substance than recreational users? They are the ones with the special need for appetite stimulation. Recreational users can just substitute alcohol. And medical patients are more likely to have difficulty doing their own gardening and to require a different source.

(But it’s easy to grow marijuana, isn’t it? No one really needs to switch to buying, do they?)

I simply don't understand any distinction between medical and recreational users that is relevant to the constitutional point. (I realize medical patients are more sympathetic.) Both groups must be treated the same under the Constitution.

Assuming the Court has to find for the federal government in Raich, the reason it's taking so long -- I'm speculating -- is that it is very hard to explain the Wickard concept in a way that will satisfy the general public, which finds it so easy to sympathize with the suffering cancer patients on the other side. The Court is just hung up crafting and recrafting its labyrinthine legalisms into a form suitable for public consumption.

Alternatively, the Court may have decided to give up on its recent effort to limit the Commerce Power. Maybe the line drawing it undertook in Lopez and Morrison is not worth the trouble, and one member of the majority from those two cases is willing to join the Justices who would re-introduce the simplicity of completely deferring to Congress about what "substantially affects interstate commerce" and thus falls within the Commerce Power.

Or maybe the Court will put all homegrown marijuana outside of the reach of the federal government, and we can all start tending our own little marijuana plants on our windowsills. I wonder how many people who never consider buying illegal marijuana would happily pursue the option of growing their own. A lot, I think. It's hard to imagine how much America would change if the Court made that little move -- one that is quite justifiable as a matter of constitutional interpretation.

We’ll find out soon enough.

UPDATE: Just to clarify on a point brought up by a commenter. If federal law for homegrowing home users were held unconstitutional, there would still be the layers of state and local law to deal with. We'd get a chance to see what the states would do in this newly cleared field of regulation. Some might choose to ban all possession, some would legalize only the medical use, but I think some would permit recreational uses. It would be quite interesting to see the states, those laboratories of democracy, "experiment with drugs."

Lear on how Democrats can feel good again.

Let's see how The Huffington Post is huffing along this morning. I see Norman Lear has posted:

I have had it with elected officials depending on polls and focus groups and fingers in the wind to instruct them as to what direction they should take us. We sent them "to the hill" from which, presumably, they are the ones with the 360 degree view. In their emotionally crowded lives, average working class voters should be able to rely on those they send to the hill to get the complete picture, and then have the courage to lead. To lead, not return to them for instructions.

I cringe for that great body of voters every time I hear them disparaged --"Can't they see they're voting against their own self-interest?"-- by us Democrats, liberals, progressives, whatever we are calling ourselves at the moment. We owe them empathy, understanding, leadership.

Translation: Stop hand-wringing about why the great mass of people can't understand things and just tell them how it's going to be. Then, instead of that nasty feeling you have now -- caused by thinking the American people are stupid -- you can start feeling good -- thinking what a fine, empathetic person you are for respecting the way ordinary people devote themselves to family and work and not to politics.

And I will give Lear credit: That was nicely written, in an appropriately readable, bloggy style.