At the dog park today.

I took that one! Meade was photographing the same dog, so we'll see what he got later.

At the door...

... it's the plants.

"This might be the worst week in the history of the NFL, with another despicable act by a privileged player taking Roger Goodell’s league to an unfathomable low."

Writes Gary Meyers in The Daily News.

Goodell can begin to make up for his mishandling of the [Ray] Rice case by immediately suspending [Adrian] Peterson for the season and then throwing him out of the league....

The personal conduct policy does not require a conviction in order for Goodell to impose discipline. One of the circumstances that allows Goodell to punish Peterson is "conduct that imposes inherent danger to the safety and well-being of another person."...

Peterson reportedly called the tree branch a “switch,” and the [4-year-old] boy suffered bruises to his back, buttocks, ankles, legs and scrotum and defensive wounds to his hands... According to police reports, the child told authorities that “Daddy Peterson hit me on my face.” He also said he had been hit with a belt and “there are lots of belts in Daddy’s closet.”

The radio station reported that in an interview with police, Peterson appeared to believe he did nothing wrong. “Anytime I spank my kids, I talk to them before, let them know what they did, and of course after,” he said. Reportedly, Peterson regretted his son did not cry because he then would have known the switch had done more damage than intended.

The boy did not cry, and the boy calls his father "Daddy Peterson." Peterson smiles in the mug shot and claims to have experienced the same form of discipline when he was a child. The term "switch" — which Meyers treats as odd and deceptive — is traditional:

Switches are most efficient (i.e., painful and durable) if made of a strong but flexible type of wood, such as hazel... or hickory; as the use of their names for disciplinary implements...

Making a switch involves cutting it from the stem and removing twigs or directly attached leaves. For optimal flexibility, it is cut fresh shortly before use, rather than keeping it for re-use over time. Some parents decide to make the cutting of a switch an additional form of punishment for a child, by requiring the disobedient child to cut his/her own switch.

Here's Richard Pryor: "Anyone here remember them switches?"



And this was once the norm in school:

One of the most common punishments was getting a whipping with a hickory switch or a birch rod. Sometimes the strapping was so severe that students went home with red marks across their legs....

Are you too young to remember the ‘good old days’ when “Readin’ and writing’ and ‘rithmetic were taught to the tune of the hickory stick?”

That last line quotes the 1907 song "School Days" ("Dear old golden rule days...").

I'm not recommending or excusing disciplining children with switches or sticks, just observing that it is an old tradition. As a culture, we have abandoned that tradition, and it's hard to believe that Peterson hadn't noticed, but that's his story. It's a story that will be harder to sell coming immediately in the aftermath of the Ray Rice incident, and commentators like Gary Meyers are demanding that Peterson's punishment include punishment for what Ray Rice did.

Isn't it ironic that outrage at the unfair punishment inflicted by Adrian Peterson distorts thinking about how to punish him? Emotional overpunishment — it's the problem, not the solution.

"Call it hipster or call it art, rogue taxidermy’s popularity in New York and London is making its way to other urban locations in the United States..."

"... where young and creative people have taken to reinventing the centuries-old process of removing and rearranging the skin of a dead animal."

The Washington Post trend-spots.

No mention of the Dead Pals of Sam Sanfillippo. Madison, Wisconsin was so far out ahead of this hipsterism it isn't even funny.

I'm a male, in my mid-30s.

According to "Can We Guess Who You Are in Only 20 Questions?"

"The reliance on air power has all of the attraction of casual sex."

"It seems to offer gratification but with very little commitment. We need to be wary of a strategy that puts emphasis on air power and air power alone."

Blushing jowls...

... of Reggie. More Reggie at Puparazzo.

This is an open thread, within the concept of this blog, that is: a photograph and minimal content. So: express yourself.

"Does she think she’s Marilyn Monroe?"

Somebody said to somebody else about Bristol Palin that night in Anchorage when the police came.

Thompson, who is 56 years old... noticed two girls wearing sunglasses walking with an unusual amount of confidence around the yard. He only noticed them because of the sunglasses. That was odd, because it was at night.

This is just a test of your mind. Perhaps you thought:

The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright--
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.

Or:



Whatever... you are old. Marilyn Monroe is beyond old. The Palins-are-trash meme is old.

What hope is there? For the future... I mean.

"Turtles all the way down."

A Wikipedia entry. 

Found, just now, by me, after using the expression in the comments to the voter ID post, just below this one.

The "See also" section of the Wikipedia entry is a source of delight: "Cartesian theater, Cosmological argument, Discworld, God of the gaps, Kurma, Matryoshka doll, Münchhausen trilemma, Primum Mobile." I clicked on Münchhausen trilemma, because it was the least familiar. I'll just show you the illustration:

7th Circuit reinstates Wisconsin voter ID law.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

After blogging this morning about the impending oral argument — here — I listened to it — here — all the way to the end where the state asks the court to reinstate the law today, and I look and see that, in fact, has already happened.

The MJS reports that the court issued an order allowing Wisconsin to enforce the law for the upcoming elections. The court noted the way the Wisconsin Supreme Court's decision "reduces the likelihood of irreparable injury, and...  changes the balance of equities and thus the propriety of federal injunctive relief, and... the state's probability of success on the merits."

The judges on the panel were former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Diane Sykes along with Frank Easterbrook and John Tinder. At the oral argument today, they were quite skeptical of the power of the district judge to reject the importance of preventing in-person voter fraud.

In the 2008 case upholding the Indiana voter ID law, Crawford, the U.S. Supreme Court had accepted that the state had an important interest in preventing fraud and in promoting public confidence. In the current case, the district judge, Lynn Adelman, held a trial and listened to an expert witness who opined that it's unlikely that anyone would engage in this kind of fraud. Those who are challenging the Wisconsin law want the appeals court to defer to his factfinding, but Sykes and Easterbrook resisted the notion that hearing opinion witnesses could enable a trial judge to supersede the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court.

"With Sam I wanted to be the fun girl, the one who didn’t care if a guy ever spoke to her again after one night."

Nice foreshadowing, early on in one of those NYT "Modern Love" essays. Later: "... I was able to get beyond my fake fun-girl persona."

Did Stuart Taylor Jr. misidentify his unnamed source for his article impugning the motives of the John Doe prosecutor?

Here's yesterday's post, "John Doe prosecutor John Chisholm objects to what Stuart Taylor Jr. said about his anti-Walker vendetta." Taylor called his source a "longtime Chisholm subordinate" and "former staff prosecutor in Chisholm’s office":

Stuart Taylor quotes his unnamed source as saying "it was surprising how almost hyper-partisan [Chisholm] became." And:

Chisholm “had almost like an anti-Walker cabal of people in his office who were just fanatical about union activities and unionizing. And a lot of them went up and protested. They hung those blue fists on their office walls [to show solidarity with union protestors] … At the same time, if you had some opposing viewpoints that you wished to express, it was absolutely not allowed.”

Now, we have the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Daniel Bice purporting to reveal Taylor's source as a former police officer and current criminal defense attorney, who worked as an "unpaid special prosecutor for 5 1/2 months in the county office in 2011 [and] spent most of his time filling out grant applications for the community prosecution program."

Cool eyes hallucinating at the constitutional lawprofs of war.

"Obama attacked from the left" is a tag of mine, and I'm applying it to this NYT op-ed by Yale conlawprof Bruce Ackerman: "Obama’s Betrayal of the Constitution." Dateline — ominously! — Berlin. Excerpt:

President Obama’s declaration of war against the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria marks a decisive break in the American constitutional tradition. Nothing attempted by his predecessor, George W. Bush, remotely compares in imperial hubris....

That's a bold beginning, but it's actually weakened by seeming to open up a discussion of the need for a formal declaration of war, something that the United States hasn't had since WWII. But Ackerman proceeds to discuss the "authorization for the use of military force," which Congress gave to President Bush 3 days after the 9/11 attacks. That vote was practically unanimous.

Let me take a little detour of my own here. The "no" vote in 2001 was from Barbara Lee, who was called a "traitor" and a "communist" at the time, but whose words are strikingly prescient today.

Wisconsin voter ID law is up for oral argument in the 7th Circuit today.

The Cap Times reports:

[The federal district judge Lynn] Adelman found some 300,000 people in Wisconsin do not have IDs and wrote the voter ID law would "prevent more legitimate votes from being cast than fraudulent votes." He ruled there was no rational basis for the law because voter impersonation — the only kind of fraud the voter ID law would curb — is nonexistent or virtually nonexistent....

Friday's oral arguments come less than two months after the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the voter ID law in a pair of cases. One was decided 5-2; the other 4-3.

Later today, we should be able to get to audio of the argument here by hitting the "Today" button. The argument is the first of the morning, and the judges are Easterbrook, Sykes, and Tinder.

"Some developers are launching rental buildings with high-end culinary amenities, aimed at younger residents who grew up with the foodie movement."

The Wall Street Journal reports, and the part about Madison jumped out at me:

In Madison, Wis., Otto Gebhardt said he took a risk developing the Constellation, a 218-unit apartment building in a "non-glamorous" stretch just east of the state capitol and the University of Wisconsin. But he gambled on the area because the building is just a short walk from the city's restaurant hub and the Dane County Farmers' Market, one of the largest in the country. To burnish the building's foodie credentials, he turned down high-paying commercial tenants in lieu of a local gourmet coffee shop and a craft cocktail bar, he said. In late August, Madison's best-known chef, Tory Miller, opened a 2,700-square-foot Asian restaurant, Sujeo, in the building.

Have you gone to Sujeo yet? And here's the website for the Constellation, where you can get a look at what the "non-glamorous" side of Madison.

"Such respect for state courts is admirable, and 'federalism' is our middle name. But..."

"... the appellate judges are underestimating the harm this probe is doing to the rights of those who've been targeted. Judge Peterson quashed the prosecution's subpoenas way back in February because there was no evidence of a crime, but Milwaukee Democratic District Attorney John Chisholm has appealed and the case is sitting, and sitting, and sitting at the Wisconsin Supreme Court."

The Wall Street Journal editors push the 7th Circuit court to side with Eric O'Keefe and the Club for Growth in their pursuit of a federal court remedy against the John Doe prosecutors.

[T]he targets sit in limbo, forced to spend money on lawyers to defend themselves rather than exercising their First Amendment right to advocate for causes. The Wisconsin Club for Growth's political fundraising has been shut down and it hasn't run a single ad in this election cycle. This is precisely why the Club and director Eric O'Keefe sought relief in federal court.