A peace vigil.

Today, I went down to State Street to sit in a café and do a bit of exam-grading. Afterwards, I set out to do a little shopping.



Oh, but what is this about? "Hate America Rally"?



The upper layer of signs is a response to an earlier set of signs, promoting a "peace vigil." [ADDED: Yes, I did realize when I originally posted this that the signs came from protestwarrior.com. The URL is readable in the photographs of the signs.]



Hmmm... it seems the peace vigil is going on right now, at the Lisa Link Peace Park, which is just the next block up, Let's get some pictures. What sort of a group has assembed?



A little group in the center is huddled together singing "Oh, President, oh, President" to the tune of "Oh, Christmas tree." I can't make out any other words to the song. There are more signs than people:



The signs are a bit short on clever rhetoric ("No to military stop loss orders/Yes to stopping the loss of our democracy").



This was not a rally, but a vigil, a small group of people set on establishing what the flyers called an "alternative holiday presence."

"The best shows force people who hate one another to work together."

Alessandra Stanley reviews the "Apprentice" finale.

[T]he calm, purposeful Kelly, a former Army Ranger and a West Point graduate, was up against Jennifer Massey, a pretty, fierce and unpleasant lawyer who attended Princeton and Harvard Law School. But the show backed off the more intriguing undercurrents. Jennifer repeatedly accused Kelly of being a manipulative penthouse gossip, and there was plenty of videotape to support her. Instead, at the end, the show demonized the blonde and framed Kelly as the quintessential brave American soldier: a semper fi kind of guy who could lead a Trump company into glory (though a battle with creditors could be just as likely).

It was obvious from the start that Kelly would win. The only suspense came when Mr. Trump's chief operating officer, Matthew Calamari, got up to explain his vote and got stage fright instead. "I'm not doing too good," he said, mid-flop-sweat.

Well put.

UPDATE: "Semper fi" may rhyme with "guy," but isn't that the Marines' motto? The Army Rangers' motto is "Sua sponte" -- or is it "Lead the way"? -- right?

"Whores' lives are human lives."

The NYT describes the state of the sex workers movement:

Such a movement has long existed in liberal urban centers like New York and San Francisco, where there is an infirmary for prostitutes named for Margo St. James, the founder in the 1970's of one of the best-known prostitute groups, Coyote (for Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics). But the Internet, coupled with a younger generation of women willing to speak out as current or former prostitutes and tougher federal law enforcement are giving momentum to a more broadly based movement, some of the women said. ... [There was a] national Day of Remembrance yesterday to honor murdered prostitutes. In New York, former and current prostitutes gathered outside Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square Park to read the names of the dead. After each speaker read her segment, the crowd of about 20 people, some holding candles, said "whores' lives are human lives."

The article also describes the oppostion to the movement: "It's not just women's rights... We really haven't talked about what it means to increase the demand and legitimize the buying and selling of human beings."

"The leading cause of death on death row is old age."

If the death penalty is really the death penalty, why is California solving its problem of too many prisoners on death row by spending $220 million to build a new death row prison? It seems to me that if you are going to use the death penalty, you should carry it out reasonably quickly. But maybe what California has is not actually a death penalty:

Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a book on capital punishment, said a bigger prison at San Quentin would be an appropriate metaphor for a state that values law and order but seems to have little appetite for Texas-style justice. Texas leads the nation in executions, with 336 since 1976. Its death row now houses 444 inmates.

"What we are talking about looks like an inefficiency, but it may function to give us exactly what we want, which is a death penalty without executions," Professor Zimring said. "When people are ambivalent and not very honest about their priorities, it is very difficult to distinguish between ingenuity and inefficiency."

He said that what was most remarkable about capital punishment in California was that even with strong public support for it - a Field Poll in March showed 68 percent favored the death penalty for serious crimes - there was scant outrage over the courts' slow-paced application of it.

The suspicion is that Californians want to be able to express their condemnation, to say "you deserve to die," but they also want to say "we should not kill." It seems incoherent, but perhaps it is quite coherent. Thinking about it, I realize it is about the way I think of the death penalty.

UPDATE: Rick Garnett, at Mirror of Justice, agrees and frames the idea in Catholic terms:

I guess I have concluded that we are foreclosed from giving some criminals what they truly deserve (and don't Catholics often pray that we will not receive what we truly deserve?) by a moral prohibition on unnecessary, intentional killings.

Fathoming the mind of the computer.

I don't have the time or the inclination to solve computer problems. You have to think, how would the computer be thinking about things to be coming up with this? In my "Milwaukee landmarks" post (scroll down one hop), with Safari as my browser, the photo of the lobby doesn't show up. All the other photos that appear on my photo album page show up in the blog, and there is nothing different about the html coding for that photo. The most puzzling thing is that photo does show if I use a different browser. Mozilla and Explorer both work! Why would Safari selectively shun one of the photographs? It has a psychotic aversion to lobbies?

Here's another Milwaukee photo, shot from the rooftop of a parking garage:

A 2-disc special edition?

A 2-disc special edition of "Bringing Up Baby"? Great old movie, but what's to put in a special edition?

Milwaukee landmarks.

I had to go to Milwaukee today:





I arrived at the appointed address -- 225 E. Michigan Avenue -- and discovered a beautiful building with a "National Register of Historic Places" plaque. This is the Mackie Building -- also called the Chamber of Commerce Building. It's a late Victorian style building, designed by Edward Townsend Mix, from 1879.

The sculpted facade is quite grand:





The lobby is elegant:



The three-story Grain Exchange Room is eye-popping:





Next to the Mackie Building is another National Register building by Edward Townsend Mix, the Mitchell Building. It's in the French Second Empire Style, from 1876, and has some pretty cool light fixtures:



As a break from all this grandeur, at street level, there's this homey eatery:

Milwaukee.

This morning, I'm driving 80 miles, to Milwaukee, to do a roundtable with some Wisconsin lawyers for the Wisconsin Law Journal. We're going to talk about federal jurisdiction, the old questions: when can you go to federal court and how do you know when you should want to go to federal court? This is a subject I've been teaching for twenty years, and yet somehow I wonder whether I'll have anything to say. I'll be interested to hear what the practicing lawyers have to say on the subject, at the very least. I'm there to play the role of The Professor.

So I'm off. I'll be back later (with any luck). Perhaps I'll have some Milwaukee photographs or Milwaukee stories.

"A fully abstract style based on tight grids and repetitive linear marks."

The painter Agnes Martin has died, at the age of 92. She was loved for her "fully abstract style based on tight grids and repetitive linear marks."

Ah, how well I remember in the 1970s, when a prominent magazine -- I've forgotten which -- analyzed the essential difference between male artists and female artists and declared that women's art tended to use a grid. Some key women like Martin did work with a grid, but to say that women used grids! As if it were biological! What a putdown! Without a grid, unlike a man, you'd be lost. You need a regimented structure to constrict you -- an artistic corset! And consider it, you younger women (and men): this is how major magazines wrote about women even after the great victories of the women's movement. This was considered a big step up from saying women simply could not be great painters. When I went to art school in the early 1970s, the school had a professor who told his students, year after year, that women could not be sculptors, and therefore the best grade a women could get in his class was a B.

None of this takes anything away from Agnes Martin, of course. Goodbye to the grand old painter, and thanks!

Martin seems also to be the patron saint for artists who give up their work:

In 1967, when her New York career was taking off, she abruptly left the city, wandered the country for months in a pickup and camper, and stopped making art for seven years. She finally settled in New Mexico, building an adobe house with her own hands on a remote mesa where in winter she was snowed in for weeks at a time...

Before leaving [New York] she gave away all her paint and canvas rolls, hoping young artists would use them. Once she starting painting again in 1974, however, she worked solidly until the end of her life, in a format that seldom varied: six-foot-square canvases on which she drew horizontal graphite lines and painted bands of color with subtly vigorous strokes. She changed her palette from series to series, using pale colors one year, and black, white or gray the next.

Everyone who has ever painted, then given it all up -- and I include myself -- might take inspiration from this grand old woman. Who knows if the day may come when you can find your way back to picking up the brush again?

Line that made me shout "Liar!"

"I think for me it's really not so much about the money as about the opportunity just to interact with Mr. Trump."

Yes, I'm watching the finale of "The Apprentice."

UPDATE: Beth Mauldin writes that the show was scripted. Yes, it was. And quite badly so. The part with Regis Philbin (ugh!) running around in the audience interviewing people was horrid. You could tell these people were reciting lines. They were wooden. Their syntax was not normal speech. And it was so not entertaining. The choice between Kelly and Jen was just not a matter worth talking about for so long. Jen, you were a little abrasive and people didn't like you -- as Trump would say (and say and say) -- but we were rooting for you at my house.

A Capitol Christmas.

Now that the lights are on and the decorations up, let's get another look at the holiday tree – Christmas tree, if you prefer – at the Capitol Building here in Madison.





Local schoolkids made the decorations:





Groups of schoolkids were getting a tour of the building today.



Do you think it's wrong to have a holiday/Christmas tree in the State Capitol? Well, that's the Wisconsin Supreme Court right there:



Clearly, they are aware of the situation. And I'm sure they've noticed our little Ten Commandments display up here, in one of the Capitol's four central mosaics:

<

But the Capitol is teeming with imagery. Not the least is our own little totem animal:



I hope you don't mind.

You've made it!

Congratulations to my son John for finishing the last exam of the first semester of law school... and to everyone else who's just made it to the end of the amazing, intense, once-in-a-lifetime experience that is the first year of law school.

UPDATE: I mean semester, of course. The year is only half over. But in a way, you first year students are already junior-2Ls. The big mystery is over. You've passed through the initiation ritual. Law school is a normal thing now. I don't teach in the first semester. Only once in twenty years of teaching have I done so. So I'm only really familiar with the broken-in students. I teach second semester 1Ls, and I know it's not the same. The dramatic part of law school is that first semester, culminating in the exams you've now finished.

Have a great holiday everyone!

Comments.

La Shawn Barber is wondering if she should get rid of the comments on her blog. In fact, she's asking people to comment about whether she should get rid of the comments. I read a lot of the comments, and it got me thinking about the possibility of putting my comments back. La Shawn holds me up as one of the examples of bloggers who don't have comments. I had comments last spring, and most of them were great, but dealing with nasty comments was a big drag. Here's my post from last May explaining why I turned off the comments.

Writing this post, I started to feel like turning the comments back on. I saved this post as a draft last night, then had to leave the house for an appointment. By the time I got to my car, I had come to my senses. I remembered a thought that went through my head back in May: I don't want to live like this.

Surely, if I turned the comments back on, one or two people would make a project out of ruining them again. Some of what would otherwise be great reader comments becomes email, and I often update posts to quote the email. That's the way it's going to have to be.

If Lincoln was gay...

If Abraham Lincoln was gay, what would it change about the way we think about things today? The NYT has an article by Dinitia Smith about C.A. Tripp's book "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln." The book, published next month, will stir debate about the evidence, and you can prepare to hear repeated assurances about how men slept together all the time back in Lincoln's day, the era of a dire bed shortage that forced all manner of heterosexual men to sleep together. And sure, afterwards they raved to other men that their bedmate's thighs "were as perfect as a human being Could be." From what I've read so far, I assume Lincoln was gay. I assume Carl Sandburg believed Lincoln was gay when he wrote:

"Month by month in stacks and bundles of fact and legend, I found invisible companionships that surprised me. Perhaps a few of these presences lurk and murmur in this book." Sandburg also wrote that Lincoln and Joshua Speed had "streaks of lavender, spots soft as May violets."

So, assume Lincoln was gay. Now, what else do we think? Should we conclude gayness made him do the things he did as President?

[Mary Todd Lincoln biographer Jean H.] Baker said that his outsider status would explain his independence and his ability to take anti-Establishment positions like the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation. As a homosexual, she said, "he would be on the margins of tradition." "He is willing to be independent, to do what is right," she said. "It is invested in his soul, in his psyche and in his behavior."

Will it -- should it -- change arguments about politics today?

Larry Kramer, the author and AIDS activist, said that Mr. Tripp's book "will change history." "It's a revolutionary book because the most important president in the history of the United States was gay," he said. "Now maybe they'll leave us alone, all those people in the party he founded.

More important that the question whether Lincoln was gay is the question of what use we will make of that piece of information. UPDATE: Betsy Newmark writes: "I would respond to Ann Althouse that such discussions say a lot more about people today than they do about Lincoln." I agree.

If Time had picked bloggers as Persons of the Year.

I see there's a lot of talk about the prospect of Time picking bloggers as the Persons of the Year, and apparently, it's been considered and rejected. But if Time had picked bloggers over President Bush (the obvious, obvious choice), I would have suspected it of shamelessly trying to get talked about forever in the blogosphere.

From blogs to books.

Here's a piece in today's NYT about bloggers writing books. Why shouldn't a serious author begin with a blog? It proves to publishers that there are people who want to read your writing. Did you know Ana Marie Cox received a $275,000 advance for her first novel?

But maybe bloggers won't write good books. The Times found an assistant professor of new media studies to naysay: "The style of blog writing is more oriented towards short form one page, set in the moment ... The sense of immediacy is quite important in blogs."

So maybe all the magic will be gone if you saddle a blogger to a long project. I think it would be disconcerting just to have to write putting the new material on the bottom of the page instead of piling on top.