Dubious Drudge headline: "Hillary Pollster: Clinton Victory 'Inevitable.'"

Thinking that was rather an unfortunate thing to declare, I clicked on the link, and it goes to Politico. Here:

Obama strategist David Plouffe released a memo last week arguing that Hillary Clinton's advantages were essentially those of incumbency, that her support was thin, and that Obama should actually be considered the front-runner.

Mark Penn, Clinton's chief strategist, responded today with a memo that seemed designed to bludgeon all opposition into senselessness through the sheer power of numbers (links to 40 polls showing Hillary in the lead!)

Penn strongly implies another i-word is the best description of Hillary -- not "incumbent," but "inevitable."

Did the quotes around "inevitable" confuse Drudge, is he just entranced by the strength of Politico's powers of inference, or does he really want to hurt Hillary? The full Penn memo appears on Politico, so there is no confusion there. You can see that Penn never uses the word, and that Politico is using quotes the way you do when you want to refer to, for example, the word "word." [UPDATE: Drudge has now removed the quotes and put the word in italics.]

The presentation on Drudge completely makes it look as through the Clinton camp is saying "inevitable," and that sounds incredibly arrogant. She's proclaiming that resistance is futile. It resonates with the negative image of Hillary Clinton as power-mad and controlling -- exactly the image we saw here:



That hurts.

[ADDED: And look at the picture Drudge is running:



Yikes! Scarily authoritarian. [IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian says, "That tiny, scary hand!"]]

Let's check the tone of Penn's memo:

....Hillary’s electoral strength has grown in the last quarter... Voters yearn for change and they say that Hillary has the strength and experience to actually bring about that change. Hillary’s message: that her strength and experience will bring real change that America needs, is resonating strongly with voters.

Let's see. Strength... strength... strength... strongly... I'm strongly getting the impression that you want me to strongly think that Hillary is strong -- strongly strong -- and experienced.

... So far the debates have been the key moments where the voters get to see all the candidates side by side and they have shown just how ready Hillary is to be president and how she has the strength and experience to make change happen.

I'm beginning to get it. She's has strength and experience ... for change.

There will be another debate every month from now until the end of the year, and each debate provides Hillary with another opportunity to demonstrate her experience, talk about her record on the issues, and show voters why she is the person best qualified to be president.

So you say she has experience?

The reason for Hillary’s growing support is that voters want change, and they know that only Hillary has the record of fighting for the kind of change they want, and the experience to execute it.

Let me get this straight. Are you trying to say she has experience? And is there some sort of theory that the people want change?

Anyway, the memo is full of polling data that amply supports Politico's interpretation of the idea Penn is trying to plant in your head, but "inevitable" is not the campaign's own word, and thinking that it is hurts Hillary.

Madison...

... blogs.

"Clarence Thomas Is Right" about "Bong Hits 4 Jesus."

This goes on the top 10 list of TimesSelect frustrations. We lawbloggers -- yeah, sometimes I'm a lawblogger, when the Spirit of the Laws moves me -- really would love to talk about this Stanley Fish piece. I'll skip all his background on the case. You can refer to my old post or -- better -- to the original source, the case of Morse v. Frederick. The key thing is that Justice Thomas looked back to the historical model of public schools:

Teachers instilled [a core of common] values not only by presenting ideas but also through strict discipline. Schools punished students for behavior the school considered disrespectful or wrong.... Rules of etiquette were enforced, and courteous behavior was demanded. To meet their educational objectives, schools required absolute obedience.... [I]n the earliest public schools, teachers taught, and students listened. Teachers commanded, and students obeyed. Teachers did not rely solely on the power of ideas to persuade; they relied on discipline to maintain order.

Fish's calls Thomas on his exclusive reliance on the traditional understanding:

Although Thomas does not make this point explicitly, it seems clear that his approval of an older notion of the norms that govern student behavior stems from a conviction about how education should and should not proceed. When he tells us that it was traditionally understood that “teachers taught and students listened, teachers commanded and students obeyed,” he comes across as someone who shares that understanding.

In Fish's eyes, Thomas doesn't just have a theory of original intent, he has substantive values that he believes in personally.

As do I. If I had a criticism of Thomas, it would be that he does not go far enough. Not only do students not have first amendment rights, they do not have any rights: they don’t have the right to express themselves, or have their opinions considered, or have a voice in the evaluation of their teachers, or have their views of what should happen in the classroom taken into account. (And I intend this as a statement about college students as well as high-school students.)

Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone! Fish sounds like one severe disciplinarian. I've opposed the too-liberal notion that the classroom should be all about student self-expression. (See my NYT op-ed disagreeing with "Paper Chase" author John Jay Osborn Jr.) But Fish is way ahead of me here. Fish writes that people are confusing education and democracy. And schools are not "democratic contexts."

They are pedagogical contexts and the imperatives that rule them are the imperatives of pedagogy – the mastery of materials and the acquiring of analytical skills.

Fish won't accept the Supreme Court's idea of free speech rights weighed against disruption (which meant that, for example, the students in Tinker had a right to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War). Like Thomas, he says students should have no rights other than "the right to be instructed by well-trained, responsible teachers who know their subjects and stick to them and don’t believe that it is their right to pronounce on anything and everything." Wait! That's a huge right! Isn't it worth much more than the piddling Tinker right? ADDED: Bonus "Mysteries of the Althouse house" photo:

Voters of the corn.

I love the photograph the NYT uses for its article about how voters are getting tired of all the early presidential campaigning.

Let's get the most nondescript middle-aged woman in Iowa and pose her embedded in corn that grows above her head and out of the picture frame. And have her wear a shirt with a block pattern of green, blue, and white so that she appears camouflaged in the sunlit corn. And let all the east coast readers take one look and sigh that peasants like this are deciding things for us.

We're informed that this woman, Kathy Shaffer, voted for Bush twice, but now -- now! -- realizes how bad he is. (“I did vote for him twice, but I’m very disappointed in him... I have switched completely from pro-Iraq to ‘I want them home.’") You know what to think: Thanks a lot for imposing your inferior judgment on the whole country, corn lady!

Don't like it? Impeach him!

Bush invokes executive privilege:

President Bush invoked executive privilege Monday to deny requests by Congress for testimony from two former aides about the firings of federal prosecutors....

In a letter to the heads of the House and Senate Judiciary panels, White House counsel Fred Fielding insisted that Bush was acting in good faith and refused lawmakers' demand that the president explain the basis for invoking the privilege.

Don't like it? Impeach him! Or just bitch about it and try to obstruct whatever you can as you drive your ratings toward the single digits after sweeping into office in January promising to deliver all sorts of accomplishments. Your choice, Congress.

ADDED: Marty Lederman looks at how Congress might go about seeking the prosecution of the witnesses who won't testify or using a civil suit to get the matter into a court. The witnesses would, of course, assert the defense of executive privilege, and if the court got to the merits of the case -- an iffy proposition -- it's rather obvious that the privilege would be upheld. Is it in Congress's interest to force that decision and obtain that precedent? I think not. So let the bitching rage on. Or were you hoping for impeachment?

Good morning, starshine. The earth says "Hello!"

You twinkle in the banner...



After tinkling below...



... in the comments.

UPDATE: This was a temporary joke, but so you can keep getting it, in case you come back to this moldy old post, let me cut and paste this:

"Okay, if I'm being used to sell tickets to this intellectual trainwreck of a blog, I'm outta here for good." — Steve Simels

I had that in the banner at that top of the blog from the date of this post until July 24th. But Simels can't have his name up there forever. He's just not that important. And I have other fish to fry. Whatever the hell that means.

"UnAustralian"... "This is what happens when you let hippies organise a big event."

Live Earth was a flop because it was too hard to buy beer.... and lots of other reasons.

In the UK, they didn't like the f-word... and the Princess Di tribute was so much nicer.

There was some skepticism -- here in America -- about the connection between the cause and the event:

Just 22% [of Americans] said they followed news stories about the concert ...

Most Americans (52%) believe the performers take part in such events because it is good for their image. Only 24% say the celebrities really believe in the cause while another 24% are not sure. One rock star who apparently shared that view is Matt Bellamy of the band Muse. Earlier in the week, he jokingly referred to Live Earth as "private jets for climate change."

Only 34% believe that events like Live Earth actually help the cause they are intended to serve. Forty-one percent (41%) disagree. Those figures include 10% who believe the events are Very Helpful and 20% who say they are Not at All Helfpul. Adding to the skepticism, an earlier survey found that just 24% of Americans consider Al Gore an expert on Global Warming.

Given a choice of four major issues before the United States today, 36% named the war in Iraq as most important. Twenty-five percent (25%) named immigration, 20% selected the economy and only 12% thought Global Warming was the top issue.

So you can't stir us up with a big rock show? That's a good thing, isn't it? I mean, this cause may be a good one, but it's nevertheless good if we're immune to the use of music for propaganda purposes.

I watched some of the show. I TiVo'd everything, then fast-forwarded through most of it. I enjoyed Crowded House and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And everyone likes Madonna now. She works so hard. She's still willing to get out on the dance floor flat on her belly and writhe until we are entertained. Alicia Keys is okay, but when she deigned to participate in "Gimme Shelter," she made it very obvious -- to those of us who will always have the sound of Merry Clayton imprinted on our brains -- how much more of a voice it's possible to have.

My favorite part of Live Earth was one of the conservation film clips that I mostly skipped. Some guy was showing off his apartment -- a table he found on the street and the hemp upholstery on his sofa -- to explain us a few of the manifold techniques we could use to save the planet. And then -- this was supposed to seem hip and not comic -- he advised us to wrap presents with metallic paper obtained by turning potato chip bags inside out and washing the grease off it. Oh, that brought back memories of a job I had in the mid-70s that required me to read Women's Day. I'll never forget the article that advised women to make curtains out of pop tops -- remember pop-topping? -- and to save the string from bakery cake boxes and knit it into dish cloths.

It's really easy, by the way, to cut back your consumption of fossil fuels. There's no need to embrace this depressing 70s vibe. But it's funny as hell to see a young hipster recycling it for us with utter sincerity.

IN THE COMMENTS: A hot and funny fight between ace commenter Bissage and planet-famous music critic Steve Simels.

Dreaming of a heroically liberal Supreme Court.

Linda Greenhouse has a piece today about liberals scheming to "take back" the Supreme Court.

[S]ome liberal legal scholars suggest that beyond political tactics, what the left urgently needs is a long-term strategy built around an affirmative message of what the Constitution means and what the enterprise of constitutional interpretation should be about....

Exactly what that vision should encompass is now the question. It is easy enough to find consensus on a checklist that would include a robust reading of the guarantees of the Bill of Rights, including the notion that some rights are fundamental; a constitutional interpretation not tethered to a search for the framers’ original intent; invigorating the right to privacy to include personal privacy in the electronic age; restoring the shield of habeas corpus; and recapturing the government’s ability to intervene for the benefit of African-Americans and other minority groups without being constrained by the formal and ahistorical neutrality that liberals saw as the conceptual flaw in the chief justice’s opinion a little over a week ago invalidating two voluntary school integration plans.

Recapturing the government’s ability to intervene for the benefit of African-Americans and other minority groups without being constrained by the formal and ahistorical neutrality that liberals saw as the conceptual flaw in the chief justice’s opinion a little over a week ago invalidating two voluntary school integration plans. That's one hell of a snappy phrase.

Actually, the reason that item looked so awkward on the checklist is that it's different from all the other items. Greenhouse had to strain to try to make it not look different. Everything else is about expanding constitutional rights, and that one's about narrowing rights. The way you "recapture" "ability" (AKA power) for the government is by cutting out the rights.

Greenhouse interviewed a few liberal lawprofs who bemoaned the loss of the "heroic" liberal Supreme Court justice and spoke of a long time line for getting back to a Court that would resemble what we had in the days of Earl Warren. But there's no substance to this plan. It's just the expression of a wish about the future (or a longing for the past).

This grand vision for a Court that would expansively and actively enforce rights will be seen by present day voters as a political proposal. If people today really want that vision, they can get it from the political branches. They don't need a reactivated liberal Court.

The liberal lawprofs' dream seems to be that you could get people to believe that the expansive vision of rights is the proper way to do constitutional interpretation and they'd be willing to go along with that even if they didn't want these rights enough to support enacting them into law through statutes. But what are the chances that people today would allow liberal academics to convince them of such a thing?

Garden with a sundial.

Armrest arrest.

That didn't happen, the nonhappening of which made the news because the transgressor of social norms was Clay Aiken.

Isn't it interesting that if you remove the "m" from "armrest" -- and the "m" looks rather like an armrest -- you get "arrest"? No, you're not interested in things like that? Well, my friend, you are missing out on a big category of entertainment in life.

"Only one sentence in the book struck me as terrible." "Tell me."

“The dark brown Volvo lurked in a corner spot.” "That’s definitely me. I love the word 'lurk.' I know a car shouldn’t be lurking. I do understand that. But it is kind of the way I write."

Deborah Solomon interviews Jackie Collins.

"I promise this is on topic, so please bear with me. . . . One day, as a cure for a broken heart..."

That's the first line of the NYT Magazine's "On Language" column, broken off at the exact point when I realized they must have a guest writer subbing for William Safire.

A good column, by Jaimie Epstein, about the travails of looking for love on line when you're a language buff and you have to get to know people from their writing:

But just imagine what it’s like to be afflicted with an excess language-sensitivity gene. I mean, how would you feel if someone extolled your “skillful verbage”? Maybe he liked the way I threw my verbs around, but my nose picked up a whiff of “garbage.” And what about the onomatopoeticist who enjoyed the “slurshing sound of the waves”? “Slurshing” made me think “drink sloppily and quickly,” and combined with the motion of the water, the effect of his words was to produce welling seasickness, not the soothing rock and roll of the ocean crashing and uncrashing with romantic abandon along the shore of a secluded beach that he must have been aiming for.

Uh-oh, I just ended a sentence with a preposition!...

Hmmm... well, I would have sniffed at the phrase "my nose picked."

"5 Biggest Reasons TV Lists Are Hot! Hot! Hot!"

What are your Top 5 Favorite TV List Shows?

How did I miss "40 Most Softsational Soft-Rock Songs"? Here's the list, though. Let's see if I can say what I hope I can say that I've never liked a single one of them. Oops, no, I can't. I'm not ashamed to have liked and to still like:

33. Cat Stevens - "Peace Train"
13. Carpenters - "Superstar"

But that's all.

Take my pitcher.

"I know that the websites that speak of this problem are websites that have the highest number of visits ... "

"... And I tell myself that this expression of the masses and of the people cannot be without any truth." What's stupider: the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory or that Traffic = Truth Theory?

"Sometimes when I'd be cleaning out a theater and I'd be really hungry. I'd eat a few Mike and Ikes off the floor."

What rule do you follow when food falls on the floor? The 5 Second Rule? Does it depend on where the floor is, whether it's indoors or out, whether it's your floor or someone else's, whether it's carpeted? Does it depend on how good or how expensive or gooey (or Mike-and-Ike-like) the food is? How hungry you are? Or does it depend on who's watching?

And what do you think when you watch other people following their food-on-the-floor rules? Do you like them best when their rule is closest to yours, and if you dislike them when they deviate from your rule, do you dislike them more if their rule is laxer than yours or if it's more stringent? Do you admire someone with a higher (or a lower) standard?

If someone else's food falls on the floor, do you encourage them to eat it, maybe by yelling "5 Second Rule!"? If you're one of those people who say "Don't eat that, it fell on the floor," are you afraid they'll think you're squeamish about everything and no fun at all or do you feel good about the noble public health service you're performing?