The Architecture of Blue.

Street café... male model...

Unnaked man.

Anatomy of Love.

Coffeehouse.

It's a beautiful Saturday, 60°. We've got things to do, places to go. Back eventually, with pictures. But this post will be your coffeehouse. Talk about whatever you like.

Shorts.

Tort.

Friday... dusk.

Are you settled in for your blessed weekend?

Late last night on 5th Avenue.

An exercise in ignoring the obvious.

Judith Warner responds to the critics of her "Thelma and Louise" column -- which we discussed here, and has not one word to say about President Clinton. She says she was "quite shocked" at the response, but that what mostly surprised her was the reaction to the statistics showing a decline in the incidence of rape. Remember, she consigned the movie to the past: It no longer speaks to us, because the statistics show there's less rape than there was back then.

Most respondents felt the number was suspect. Some felt that I was being duped; others that I was naïve about the impossibility of gathering meaningful hard data on what remains, for the most part, a “silent” crime. Yet others still, I sensed, felt something more: that my mere mention of the number, and the great progress for women that I read into it, was a slap in the face to rape victims, a denial of their suffering, a Katie Roiphe-like brush-off of the tragic reality of their experience.

How could that response have surprised her? But it did. And she genuflects at length to those who gasped at her cheery citation of statistics.

But there isn't one word about what I thought separates us from the era of "Thelma and Louise":

What happened was that the Democratic President Bill Clinton got into trouble for sexual harassment, and those who had worked so hard for so many years to bring the subject of sexual violence and sexual harassment to the front of the national consciousness did a turnaround to preserve partisan power.

Warner does see fit to bring up Clarence Thomas:

[T]here still is a consensus right now among people who track the statistics that rape and sexual assault are on the decline. Sexual harassment complaints to the EEOC spiked following the Clarence Thomas hearings and the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which made it possible for plaintiffs bringing harassment suits to win compensatory and punitive damages in addition to back pay. Then the volume of claims flattened around the turn of the millennium and is now slightly in decline. Is this because of changed behavior, company crackdowns or fear of retaliation for complaining? The EEOC doesn’t have the data to say.

Hmmm.... so complaints spiked because of the Clarence Thomas hearings, but then flattened and declined. Warner speculates that men got the message about what they can and can't get away with. Maybe so. But as long as you're bringing up Thomas, you'd better bring up that other figure in the history of sexual harassment, Bill Clinton. Speculate about the effect he had. Maybe women got a message too.

ADDED: I just noticed that the column Warner wrote just before her "Thelma and Louise" column was about Bill Clinton's sex life. She wrote about how it made Hillary look:

As for Hillary – contemplating the Sarkozys this summer drove home to me the gender-bending aspect of her own unfortunate personal history. A formidable woman of real power and prestige, she emerged from the Monica affair much more cuckold than cuckquean. Her husband’s perfidy did, in a sense, disturb the natural order of things; in the post-feminist age, women like Hillary are not supposed to be subject to such indignities.

Hillary has never been, as she herself once put it, “some little woman standing by my man.” Perhaps that’s what made the spectacle of her public humiliation so unique and so unsettling and, ultimately, so unforgivable for the many women who came away from it all despising her.

I think I now understand that particular aspect of the Clinton conundrum in a way I never did before. It comes down to this: nobody likes a cuckold.

There are so many things wrong with that. I'll just point out the most obvious one: the Monica Lewinsky scandal increased Hillary's popularity.

"She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed. That's not the person I knew."

"She could defend herself, let's just put it that way... She did not take slights very kindly and anyone who did anything, she responded very quickly."

"Didn't take 10 years?"

"It didn't take 10 minutes."

Clarence Thomas talks about Anita Hill in his "60 Minutes" interview (to air this Sunday, leaked at Drudge).

5th Avenue glow.

I had to go into Manhattan this evening for a little event. Afterwards, I walked down 5th Avenue for a few blocks before hailing a cab back to Brooklyn. The stores were closed, but the windows were so much more dramatic than in the daytime:







And the cathedral made a very different impression:

"If it was any other president, honestly, I would go to court. I happen to be Albanian, and he helped my people."

Says Nino Selimaj.

An Italian-restaurant owner - who's in the soup for displaying a picture of him with Chelsea Clinton outside his Village eatery - said yesterday that he won't remove the photo.

"The picture stays - unless I hear from Chelsea directly," said Osso Buco owner Nino Selimaj.

Selimaj received a letter from former President Bill Clinton's lawyer, Douglas J. Band, this week, asking the restaurateur to remove the photo from an outside menu case because Chelsea, "a private citizen," never gave permission to have it displayed there.

The letter was stamped on top with a gold presidential seal and the letterhead Office of William Jefferson Clinton....

Selimaj said if he takes the photo down, it would set a bad precedent for all the pictures he has taken with bold-face names.

"We have Derek Jeter, we have Regis Philbin, we have Rudolph Giuliani, Danny Glover, Mariah Carey [and] 'Sopranos' [castmates]," said Selimaj.

Posting photographs like this is a longstanding restaurant practice. Are we really supposed to believe it's suddenly a tort?

The legal letter has now joined the photo in the display case.

Ha ha. I'll have to stop by and look at that. Let's all eat at Nino's restaurants and show some support for the small businessman whom a former President has seen fit to harass with a rude letter on stationery with the presidential seal.

Aren't there some limits to the proper use of the seal? I note that the "seal" on the stationery might not count as the seal, since it is only the central part of what I think is the full seal. Nevertheless, I question Clinton's use of the seal -- or what seems to be the seal -- for private interests of this kind. Here's the federal criminal statute about misusing the presidential seal. Am I accusing Clinton of a crime? I am simply reserving the right to express any and all opinions about the law that may be available to me.

ADDED: Eugene Volokh weighs in:

The restaurant owner's actions likely violate Chelsea Clinton's "right of publicity." This right is recognized in one or another form by most states, but for our purposes the specific law is N.Y. Civil Rights Law § 51, which gives any person the right to sue over unauthorized use of her "name, portrait, picture or voice ... used within this state for advertising purposes or for the purposes of trade without ... written consent." Here, it looks like the photo is being used for promoting the restaurant to its customers, which makes it "purposes of trade" or perhaps even "advertising purposes."

There are an awful lot of restaurants who do this. Are they all subject to tort suits? It's not as if the restaurant is using her in an ad. It's the decor of the restaurant. It seems to me that if someone eats in a restaurant that follows a tradition of posting photos of celebrities who ate in the restaurant and posed with the owner and then one goes ahead and poses for a photograph with the owner, one implies consent to have the photo hung on the wall along with the other photos pursuant to the tradition.

But Eugene notes that "New York law -- unlike the law in many other states -- provides that consent to use one's name or likeness for advertising or trade must be given in writing." I'd argue that this is a reason to narrowly construe what counts as a use for "purposes of trade."

Eugene also notes that there is a 1 year statute of limitations. The picture has been there for 5 years, according to the press reports.

Eugene also thinks that "failing to remove Chelsea's picture is pretty rude," but it's important to note that Chelsea herself has not said a word to the Selimaj. He got a letter written on behalf of "President Clinton," and he has said he'll take the picture down if he hears from her.

What is rude is posing for a picture under those circumstances and then not expressing your objection in a friendly way. And what's really sickening is to intimidate a small business owner with an ugly letter from a man who is parading pseudo-governmental authority about a private legal matter on presidential stationery.

I certainly think, however, that Selimaj should respond to a cordial request cordially and, as a matter of good business and ordinary manners, shouldn't want to do something to one of his guests that the guest perceives as abusive.

"George Harrison's music and his search for spiritual meaning is a story that still resonates today and I'm looking forward to delving deeper."

Says Martin Scorsese, who's making a documentary about -- making his camera gently weep for? -- the Quiet Beatle.

Oh, no! From the air the Navy building looks like a swastika!

So... do you want to spend $600,000 to soften the edges with trees and stuff?

The building has been around since the 60s, but no one noticed until the advent of Google Earth.

(Via Metafilter.)

Could your guilty pleasures be a little guiltier?

Jeez. Studying languages, landscape restoration, yoga toes.... The question wasn't now tell us how charmingly wonderful you are!

(Via Metafilter.)

Is this any way to treat...

... Juan Williams?

IN THE COMMENTS: Madison Man asks what Juan Williams thinks of this. The answer is here:

Williams said yesterday he was "stunned" by NPR's decision. "It makes no sense to me. President Bush has never given an interview in which he focused on race. . . . I was stunned by the decision to turn their backs on him and to turn their backs on me."

Jane says:

The comments at the linked site were unbelievably racist and demeaning. Evidently, Juan Williams is not so much a man as he is a black man and African-American. He is not allowed to hold (only a few) different opinions than the hard Left, lest he be an "Uncle Tom," a "House Negro," and I stopped reading the race-based insults after that.

The linked website is Crooks and Liars. Let's read the comments Jane won't read:

Williams is the Clarence Thomas of NPR, a sell out who lives for the favors of White Conservatives by legitimizing their positions by uncritically restating their talking points. Even the White House knows he’s a gutless suck up.

Why the hell would it be a surprise to anyone, why Bush insisted on Juan, to interview? It is very clear to black America why he would want a safe negro to speak to him about black issues, especially in today’s climate. Juan is not going to make that segment of white America uncomfortable as 90% of black America of today would not mind doing for them and nor would he want to raise up and slap the hate out of them so I would say that Juan is a safe bet for the Bush bigots of today.

Juan Williams is the newest of Bushit’s Field Negroes.