"Please God, I Have So Little: Don’t Take Scrabulous Too."

That's the name of a Facebook group, mentioned in this NYT article about what is a difficult problem for the Hasbro and Mattel, which own the rights to the board game Scrabble. Scrabulous plainly rips off Scrabble, so the companies could use the law to crush Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, who created Scrabulous (and make $25,000 a month on advertising). But the Agarwallas have made Scrabble popular among huge numbers of young people, and they are now: 1. motivated to buy the board game, and 2. primed to hate any bad corporations that take away their fun.

“If you’re Hasbro or Mattel, it isn’t in your interest to shut this down,” said Matt Mason, a consultant to the entertainment industry and author of “The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism.”

The board game industry will be forced to adapt, Mr. Mason predicts, just as the music industry has adjusted to unauthorized downloads of songs. “If something’s already out there and proven, the companies should go with it,” he said.

The Obama response to Hillary's sleeping children ad.

AND: Here's the story on Hillary Clinton's appearance on "Saturday Night Live," which I didn't watch.

A few more thoughts about the Clinton ad with the letters "NIG" on the sleeping child's pajamas.

Writing about the letters "NIG" on the child's pajamas in the Hillary commercial yesterday provoked a lot of comments, and unfortunately, Blogger seems to have a glitch that makes it hard to get to any comments after the 216th one. It's not enough to click on "comments," you have to click on "comments," then "post a comment," then scroll down to the bottom of the page and find the tiny word "newer" and click on that. There are some very good comments beyond 216, so let me front page some of them here.

Alan adds a layer of interpretation:

I would go further. The child in question is shown just when the voice-over asks whom we would want in the White House when that crucial phone callcomes through. I think he's meant to represent Obama.

Who would we want in the WH? A sleeping (lazy) black (good nig) child (inexperienced)? Or Hillary Clinton?

The sleeping child is black, so I would agree that if the image was deliberately created, this was part of the idea.

Theo Boehm wrote:

"NiGERO"

That's what my lizard brain saw when I looked at that commercial full-sized on a 19" computer screen.

Seeing it on a better screen is important, since it is meant to show on television, and the YouTube version has much poorer resolution. Note that Theo is still watching the YouTube version, and what goes on TV will be clearer. He goes on:

I saved it from YouTube and watched it repeatedly. I tried to forget about the image and imagine I was looking at it with fresh eyes. I'm sorry, but it was pretty blatant to me. The letters from the word "good" above begin to look like "ero" in this context, at least to my brain, conditioned as it was in the days of blatant racism in this country.

First of all, the image is visible for nearly three seconds. It starts at second 10 and fades at the end of second 13. This is hardly some single frame flash measured in milliseconds. This image sinks in.

We are friends with a mixed-race couple who have a couple of kids, one of whom looks (or at least used to look) quite a bit like the child in the commercial. If I were truly paranoid, I'd say Hillary's campaign is at once infantalizing a possibly bi-racial kid by showing him depending on the National Parent Hillary for protection, and at the same time fear-mongering about blacks, as dissected ad nauseum upthread. Looks like a double-whammy to me: Here's little Obama asleep in his wittew beddy-bye needing a grown-up to protect him; but at the same time you gotta watch out for those pickaninnies.

I think Alan has just beat me to it with this interpretation.

In any event, I agree with Althouse. This is either incredibly foul or unbelievably stupid. I know a lot of people won't see it that way, including my wife, but my kids picked up on it instantly. I showed them the commercial after dinner and asked what they saw. My youngest piped up immediately, "That kid had the N-word on his pajamas." They then had a lot of fun making up variants, thankfully all non-racist. Not trying to congratulate ourselves too much, but my kids have NEVER heard the N-word in this house outside of watching "Roots," "Glory," and possibly a few other movies, but they know what it represents. FWIW, they have also NEVER said it themselves to my hearing.

In his most recent comment in a thread about shoe shopping, Sir Archy called the Presidential candidates, "Wretches." It thought that was a cute faux-18th century rhetorical flourish, but in reality going too far.

I'm now beginning to think he's on to something.

(I've added the link to the Sir Archy comment.)

Ralph asks 2 questions:

Can you imagine the response someone would get if they suggested this in a campaign strategy meeting?

Can you imagine the response if this were a McCain ad in October? I suspect few of the commenters above would dismiss it as coincidence.

On the second question, I think McCain would be pilloried.

Let me vary the first question. Assume the lettering has found its way into the footage either intentionally or quite by accident. (As some commenters are saying, it could be stock footage.) Then, campaign strategists are reviewing the ad and deciding whether to approve it or have it re-edited. Wouldn't they notice the lettering and freeze frame it to make sure it doesn't say anything that might be used to hurt the candidate? And once you do that and try to read it, aren't you going to see "NIG"? Now, try to imagine the scenario at this point.

Scenario #1: They feel a little guilty, but they know their candidate is desperate, and they think they might stimulate the anti-Obama vote and decide to run with it. If anyone tries to talk about it, we'll trash them. They're crazy!

Scenario #2: Great! Let it go out like this. It's bait. If the Obama campaign says we're going racial, we'll paint him as one of those nuts who sees racism in nothing. He's staring at a kid's pajamas? Shouldn't he be looking at the real problems in this world? Either it will have no effect, it will have a subliminal effect, or it will create opportunities for attack.

Scenario #3: ???

IN THE COMMENTS: I love this, from ace commenter Meade:

Scenario #2.1:

Great! Let it go out like this. It's bait. If the Obama campaign says we're going racial, we'll paint him as one of those nuts who sees racism in nothing. He's staring at a kid's pajamas? Shouldn't he be looking at the real problems in this world? Either it will have no effect, it will have a subliminal effect, or it will create opportunities for attack.

No effect? Can we really afford to take that chance?

Good point, "Tom." Say, that gives me an idea. You know a few things about those - what do they call them... blogs? - don't you? What if you were to plant a comment here or there? Whaddaya think? Doable?

LOL. I've thought that the commenter who prompted me to write the first post could be a campaign insider. His name, "Tom," doesn't connect to a profile page.

And now for a pro-Obama video.

I've given Clinton a tough time today, but please don't think that means I'm promoting anyone else. I'm not. I've been tough on McCain and on Obama — more than once — in the last few days. I write about what happens to come my way, and I hope I'm playing it straight.

In any case, I didn't go looking for this next video. I saw it on the Bloggingheads site. It's an independent pro-Obama video — similar to the "Yes We Can" video of a few weeks ago. But unlike that video, it's quite awful. Have a look:



Chanting the candidate's name? The people in this video are — most of them — swooning and sleepwalking. "I just want this war to end" — they sound like children. Nice, polite, pretty children. Much sweeter than back in the days when I was young and it seemed like a good idea to yell "We want the world and we want now," but just as juvenile.

Today's sunset.

Cloudscape with city.

New York right now.

"If there is a bear."

John Dickerson writes about Hillary Clinton's children sleeping ad:

The new Clinton ad tries to ... [expand] the group of voters who care most about experience. Remember, it's a dangerous world.

The Bush campaign never ran an ad like this when it was accused of scare-mongering during the 2004 campaign. (They preferred using animals.) Perhaps that's why Clinton campaign staffers have to insist they are not trying to frighten voters. While coyness is annoying, the essential question the ad asks is a fair one: Which of the candidates do you trust to keep his or her head when everyone around them is lighting theirs on fire, and at a time when your kid's safety could be on the line?

At "animals," Dickerson links to this Bush ad:


YouTube wisely serves up this other ad:



I wonder how dangerous the world would need to be before I wouldn't laugh at "If there is a bear"?

Anyway, it's interesting, isn't it? Democrats try to scare you with children and Republicans try to scare you with animals.

"Why are the letters 'NIG' on the child's pajamas?"

Asks a commenter — "Tom" — on my post about the new Hillary Clinton commercial, the one that shows several children sleeping and then Clinton taking a national security phone call in the middle of the night. You can see the commercial at the link, and the pajamas in question are on display during seconds 11 and 12. On pausing, staring, and thinking, I believe these are pajamas that say "good night" all over them, but the letters "NIG" are set apart by a fold in the fabric.





Is the campaign responsible for sending out a subliminal message to stimulate racist thoughts in the unsuspecting viewer? It is either deliberate or terribly incompetent. There is no other writing on screen until the very end of the commercial, and if letters appear in any place in a commercial, they should be carefully selected letters. Certainly, each image is artfully composed and shot and intended to deliver an emotional impact. Could this be a mere lapse?

In 2000, there was a much-discussed commercial for George W. Bush that displayed the letters "RATS":

The announcer starts by lauding George W. Bush's proposal for dealing with prescription drugs, and criticizes the plan being offered by Vice President Al Gore. Fragments of the phrase ''bureaucrats decide'' -- deriding Mr. Gore's proposal -- then dance around the screen.

Then, if the viewer watches very closely, something else happens. The word ''rats,'' a fragment of the word ''bureaucrats,'' pops up in one frame. And though the image lasts only one-thirtieth of a second, it is in huge white capital letters, larger than any other word on the commercial.

The advertisement then declares, ''The Gore prescription plan: bureaucrats decide.''

But as one might be expect in a tightly contested presidential race, the Democrats have given the 30-second advertisement more than a quick glance.

After being alerted by an eagle-eyed Democrat in Seattle, aides to Mr. Gore examined the advertisement frame by frame, spotted the suspicious word and gave a copy of a slowed-down version to The New York Times.

Those aides said they had no comment and preferred that the advertisement, which has appeared in 33 markets nationwide since August, speak for itself.

Alex Castellanos, who produced the commercial for the Republican National Committee, insisted that the use of the word was ''purely accidental,'' saying, ''We don't play ball that way. I'm not that clever.''

Asked when he had first noticed the word in the commercial, Mr. Castellanos said, ''That's all I want to say.''

But several Republican and Democratic advertising consultants who were told of the commercial, as well as many independent academics, said they were startled that such a word would appear and said it appeared to be a subliminal attempt to discredit Mr. Gore.

Mr. Bush's chief media consultant, Mark McKinnon, said he had not noticed the word ''rats'' when he reviewed the advertisement before it was broadcast. Most people probably have not noticed either, although some people who watched a tape of the commercial at normal speed today -- albeit very carefully -- said it was visible.

After being told of the word, Mr. McKinnon said the commercial should be corrected because it ''certainly might give reporters or anybody else who looked at it'' a reason to stir up attention.

But after taking another look at the advertisement, he amended his comment.

'' 'Rats' is not a message,'' Mr. McKinnon said. '' 'Bad plan' or 'seniors lose' might be. But 'rats?' We're just not that clever. I just watched it five times in a row. Hard as I looked, couldn't see 'rats.' ''

Almost every advertising professional interviewed said that given the technology by which commercials are assembled frame by frame, it was virtually impossible for a producer not to know the word was there.

''There is no way that anything Alex Castellanos does is an accident,'' said Greg Stevens, a veteran Republican advertising consultant here.

The intense scrutiny of the "RATS" ad heightens the assumption that presidential candidates these days pay close attention to any incidental lettering that appears in their ads. "RATS" as part of the word "bureaucrats" in an ad criticizing Gore's prescription plan is nothing compared to "NIG" isolated on a sleeping child's shoulder in an ad intended to create doubts about a black man's ability to take an urgent phone call at 3 a.m., an ad authorized by a candidate who has already heard accusations that her campaign is slipping racial material into its attacks on her opponent.

This is either a revolting outrage or shocking incompetence.

IN THE COMMENTS: Some controversy, of course. I know this is hard to take. But let me front page this one, from Mortimer Brezny, who is responding to a commenter who said: "[F]or subliminal messaging to be effective, I think it has to be intelligible. In this case, you really have to fill in the dots (reconstruct the right-half of the G) to make it so. If it had said NIC, would there be an issue, because you could imagine C => G?"

Oh, that is incorrect. The way the mind makes closure is by filling in the blanks. You don't need to see an entire face to envision what the other half of it looks like. That is not a conscious activity of the brain, it is neurological, like seeing the color red.

Certainly, Ann is correct that you activate associational networks in the brain. NIG is quite obviously in the same area of the brain as NIGGER, just as both words are nearby in the dictionary. And the commercial is about Obama. Associating those two neural pathways (Obama, Nig__) at the same time may create the subliminal message Ann is talking about. In that case the real fear being exploited here is "Do you really want a nigger in the White House?"

This is not bunk. Drew Westen has done a good amount of empirical work on it. And political hacks use such research in crafting their ads.

You may disagree with Ann's conclusion. But her analysis explains why the commercial -- incoherently -- focuses on kids in bed. No one is scared that terrorists will break into their home late at night and harm their children. The threat depicted does not correspond to the threat described by the narrator. But the threat depicted does prey on fears of criminals breaking into your home. And it is a persistent stereotype that black people are the source of crime. Indeed, being tough on crime has been a GOP code word for being tough on blacks. Longtime Republican strategist Lee Atwater himself admitted that.

"So if, with our subconscious, we actually notice these 2.5 letters, and our subconscious assumes that this is a G and not a C, then this forms a fragment of a racial slur, which some of us might subconsciously pick up on, and associate, naturally, with Obama."

Yes. The mind does this everyday, as when you see a sign behind Obama's head that reads "CHANG". You don't think Obama has chosen a Chinese running mate. You think Obama's head is obscuring the E because you have seen a "CHANGE" sign before. It does not require conscious thought and it takes less than a second to process.

It's funny that Ann often dithers around for fun to mass appeal, but when she writes a post that clearly demonstrates she's a genius, the claws come out.

Feel free to observe the claws out on many other websites, where personal attacks on me take the place of any serious effort to engage on the merits. For example, the usually serious blogger Kevin Drum calls me harebrained and a glue sniffer. The vicious attack on the messenger bespeaks fear of the message and lack of a substantive argument against it.

NOTE: I've added a link to the video in the first paragraph of the post and two screen captures from the video, taken at 0:11. The first capture is the full screen, with no digital editing. The second capture is a closeup of the lettering, and I've turned up the contrast, saturation, and sharpness. There's no question that there are letters on the pajamas. The letters N and I are very clear. The third letter, G, appears only partially, but it is definitely a G. You can see the center line slightly, and the other letters in the area make it likely that the words "good night" appear as a pattern on the pajamas.

MORE IN THE COMMENTS: Pastafarian wrote:

You must be kidding, right? The G is partially obscured, on the side of the screen and slightly out of focus, written sideways, and present for a second or so; I wouldn't even have guessed that it was a G, had I not been told. I would have assumed a C, had I even noticed this.

Amba aptly responds:

That's exactly how a subliminal-advertising genius would do it. With deniability, with doubt, right on the edge of intelligibility. If it was even a little more obvious, it wouldn't work. This way, anyone who brings it up can be called paranoid and crazy; it can be reflected back on the hypersensitive Obama campaign. We'll never know for sure if it's real, but one way to check would be to find out who made the ad and check out some of that person's other work.

By the way, the sleeping child appears to be black. Mere coincidence?

MORE: In this new post.

AND: If you've mocked me for this post, read this and then send me your apology.

A break in the clouds.

My makeshift radio studio.

Doing that radio show today, I had to use a wired land-line phone. That forced me to do the call in the kitchen, so here's how I set up in there:

The crafty Obama finds a way to look magnanimous while actually casting aspersions on McCain.

Noam Scheiber falls for an Obaman rhetorical trick. In a post titled, "Obama to McCain: You're Presidential Material in My Book," Scheiber notes what he calls "a very shrewd response by the Obama campaign to questions about McCain's 'natural-born' status." He links to this:

Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, a prominent backer of Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama, introduced legislation Thursday that would define a "natural-born citizen" as anyone born to any U.S. citizen while serving in the active or reserve components of the U.S. armed forces. Obama's campaign announced late Thursday that he will co-sponsor the bill.

"Those who serve and sacrifice for their country, like John McCain and his father deserve every honor and privilege that our nation can possibly provide, and that includes the ability to run for the highest office in the land," Obama said in a statement.

Here's Scheiber's comment:

There was just no way McCain was going to be denied the presidency on the grounds that he was born in the Panama Canal Zone while his father was stationed there for the military. You might as well take the high ground here, and Obama's done so pretty gracefully (and with some political savvy).

Actually, Obama found the only possible low ground and made it look like high ground.

The argument that McCain isn't a natural born citizen within the meaning of Article II of the Constitution is an obvious loser, both as a matter of constitutional interpretation and as something that an opposing candidate would want to say. But Obama, co-sponsoring the bill, is acting generous, as though he is forbearing making an attack. But since there is no attack to make, he's not actually being magnanimous. He's only putting on a show.

What is more, offering a statutory solution sends the message that there is a problem to be fixed. So in fact, it's a crafty way of saying that McCain is not now currently qualified!

Finally, if one believed the statute were needed to solve a problem of disqualification, there would be 2 reasons why it would not be effective:

1. A statute can't change the meaning of a constitutional term. Congress can no more re-define who is a "natural born citizen" than it can deem persons younger than 35 to be qualified for the presidency.

2. Even if a statute could successfully re-define who is a citizen at birth, McCain was born 71 years ago. Anyone who believed that this new statute conferred status as a natural-born citizen would be plunged into confusing questions about whether it could have a retroactive effect as it related to the constitutional clause.

Thus, fooling with this bill now is a way of creating phony doubts about McCain's qualification. That Obama can also receive plaudits for magnanimity should startle us awake. This is a man with amazing rhetorical skills, so we need to raise our game. I'm not saying Obama shouldn't be President. Indeed, I'd like to see skills like this wielded in our favor on the world stage. But pay attention and sharpen up so you can see what he's saying!

ADDED: In the email:

Are you sure you're not misoverestimating him? I think Bush played the lowered expectations games brilliantly [his strategery was to be misunderestimated] and the Bush/Rove jujitsu is legendary. Obama might be too smart by half.

UPDATE: The Washington Post joins the gullibility club.

"No one wants to miss 20 6-year-olds in red cowboy hats tapping to 'These Boots Are Made for Walkin'."

Says Michelle Obama, referring to the one dance recital of his daughter Sasha's that Barack Obama missed.

Here are the lyrics of that kinky dominatrix song. Which line do you consider least appropriate for 6-year-old girls to sing?

Radio alert.

I'm going to be on "At Issue with Ben Mehrens," a Wisconsin Public Radio show, from 4 to 6 PM Central Time today. This is one of those call-in shows where we talk about the news of the past week. You can stream the show or, later, listen to the show from the archive.

UPDATE: We're at the news break now, at 4:30 CT. If you're listening, you may notice a trend in many of the callers: antagonism to free markets.

More blue.

Pre-Columbian art (seen with the fisheye at the Museum of Natural History):



The color is the museum's lighting, not my digital tweaking.

Let's watch the YouTubed Hillary ad that the NYT has frontpaged right now.

A commenter at the NYT blog post (where a click on the front page picture takes you) compares this ad to the famous 1964 ad for LBJ:



The Clinton ad is much mellower, lacking the drama of the child's daisy petal counting becoming a nuclear countdown and explosion, but it makes the same connections between our love for children, our desire for security, and a purportedly reliable candidate. I thought Clinton's ad was quite effective, even though I knew I was watching a Clinton ad, and it's the kind of ad that is supposed to work by drawing you in and only at length revealing what is being promoted. I am entirely jaded and not susceptible to believing what the ad is trying to tell me, but I still experienced the emotional impact. When the candidate was shown in the end, looking earnest answering the phone at night, I cried a real sob, for a tiny fraction of a second (before laughing at myself).

ADDED: And score one point for feminism if you didn't have a sexist reaction in the end when you saw Hillary Clinton on the phone. In fact, I'm impressed that this image wasn't nixed on the ground that too many people will see a woman on the phone and think: Women! Always yakking on the phone!

AND: The Hillary campaign deserves credit for getting everyone talking about this. And from our own comments here, Palladian:

Amazing, the last image of Hillary on the phone produced in me a quick pang of positive feelings for her. A moment of love for her. Notice how the whole commercial up to that point is colored in blues, almost monochromatic. Then Hillary pops onto the screen, all warm tones, lit by a warm yellowish light. We connect with the only other warm tones in the commercial, those of the lights on the outside of the home that begin the commercial, the warm windows and porch lights of home. Hillary is a beacon in a shadowy world of blue, just like home.

And she's damn well put together at 3 o'clock in the morning, isn't she?!

AND: A lot of you are noting that she's wearing glasses, but this is a nice touch of realism. Hillary wears contact lenses, and at 3 AM, she'd probably have taken them out for sleeping and would quickly put on glasses. Now, that doesn't explain the perfect suit jacket, gold necklace, and neat coiffure, but wouldn't it be hilarious if they showed her wearing a granny nightgown and sitting on the edge of the bed to take that phone call?

"Well, there's something known as American conservatism, though it does not even call itself that."

"It's been calling itself  'voting Republican' or 'not liking the New Deal.' But it is a very American approach to life, and it has to do with knowing that the government is not your master, that America is good, that freedom is good and must be defended, and communism is very, very bad."

Peggy Noonan, paraphrasing William F. Buckley, Jr.