On the evening of September 10th, there is a mournful glow in lower Manhattan.

The low cloud cover keeps the memorial lights from projecting up into the sky and the glow spreads out horizontally.

As I stand on my balcony to record the image, I think of the people -- I don't know who they were -- who lived in this apartment in 2001. They must have stood here on the morning of the 11th and gazed on the incomprehensible sight.

(I did not adjust the color in this photograph. I only turned up the contrast and the sharpness a little. The intense warmth of the color -- that is there.)

"Only the moron dead-enders who still believe Iraq had anything to do with 9-11 continue to support the war."

Kos asserts, based on a survey that shows 33% of Americans believe "Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon."

Not surprisingly, this [percentage] correlates very closely to support for the war. In other words, only the moron dead-enders who still believe Iraq had anything to do with 9-11 continue to support the war. If they insist on clinging to the fiction of Saddam's involvement, they ain't gonna change their minds on the war itself. All rational human beings have concluded it's time to get the heck out.

Yes, you are the rational one, comforting yourself with made-up ideas that everyone who doesn't agree with you must be irrational. But I don't think Saddam was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks, and I support the war. I'm sure General Petraeus doesn't think Saddam was personally involved, and Petaeus -- who knows a bit more than you -- supports the war. I think there are many others.

And then there are plenty of ill-informed people, and my guess is that a lot of them are against the war because they've gotten the feeling things aren't going well and notice that opposing the war seems to be what people are doing these days. I don't think they're "morons," but many of them are probably of below-average intelligence, and I'll bet quite of few of them heard the Saddam question and bumbled into a "yes" answer.

And why are lefties so illiberal about the less-smart and less well-educated citizens? [ADDED: I'm not saying all lefties do this, but that the ones who do are betraying their values.] Aren't these the people you act like you care about when you propound your various policies? Why are you calling people "morons"? Do you not concern yourself with mentally retarded persons and their families? I'm too politically correct to call you a "moron," but I will say that your reasoning is off and your self-flattery is embarrassing as you lazily conclude that the same 33% of Americans believe each of the things that you do not.

Catholics are "easily the most positive of Christian denominations" when it comes to gay marriage.

Asserts Andrew Sullivan (a Catholic).

42 percent in favor, 48 percent against in the new Pew poll (compared with 14 percent in favor and 81 percent against among white evangelicals). While that cannot please the Vatican, it reflects my own experience of tolerance, acceptance and a commitment to social justice in the pews.

But click over to the survey he cites. There aren't even any results for Protestant denominations! Protestants are just divided into "evangelicals" and "mainline." I'll wager that Episcopalians -- who are a denomination -- are more pro gay marriage than Catholics. But even if you count "mainline" as a denomination, look at the numbers. The mainliners are more in favor of gay marriage than Catholics. Sullivan's bias is really showing here.

Sullivan is also writing about that brain science article we've been talking about here today. He's not at all critical of the study's methodology or conclusions. It's just a springboard for congratulating himself again:

[R]espondents who had described themselves as liberals showed "significantly greater conflict-related neural activity" when the hypothetical situation called for an unscheduled break in routine.

Conservatives, however, were less flexible, refusing to deviate from old habits "despite signals that this ... should be changed."

And smart conservatives, recognizing their own flaws, can learn from liberal adaptivity.

Maybe he's not referring to himself there.... but it sure sounds like it to me. [ADDED FOR CLARITY: That is, he is the "smart conservative" who has learned from liberals.] Anyway, why not say that smart liberals can recognize their flaws and learn from conservatives? [ADDED: That is, there are problems with both the tendency to bend and the tendency not to bend, and whichever tendency you have, you would do well to become aware of and smart about.] And why doesn't Sullivan notice that his penchant for asserting that his side is best evinces the very flaw he ought to be correcting for if he thinks he's smart (and I think we know he does)?

"It's bad taste to talk about ex-husbands and ex-wives, that's all."

Said Jane Wyman about Ronald Reagan:

"It's not because I'm bitter or because I don't agree with him politically. I've always been a registered Republican. But it's bad taste to talk about ex-husbands and ex-wives, that's all. Also, I don't know a damn thing about politics."

He didn't talk about her either:

In Reagan's autobiography "An American Life," the index shows only one mention of Wyman, and it runs for only two sentences. "That same year I made the Knute Rockne movie, I married Jane Wyman, another contract player at Warners," Reagan wrote. "Our marriage produced two wonderful children, Maureen and Michael, but it didn't work out, and in 1948 we were divorced."

Good taste! Who remembers that anymore?

This was sweet:

A few days after Reagan died on June 5, 2004, Wyman broke her silence, saying: "America has lost a great president and a great, kind and gentle man."

A fine first wife and a fine actress, Jane Wyman died at home at the age of 93.

On hold.

I've been on hold with American Airlines for 1 hour and 11 minutes.....

ADDED: 1 hour and 44 minutes.... I've got patience.... Probably calling on Monday morning was a bad idea.... Still... 1 hour and 46 minutes... that's crazy....

FINAL OUTCOME: After 2 and a half hours on hold, I had to hang up to do a meeting!

THEN: I called back around 5 and got through in less than 10 minutes. Something weird must have happened this morning, including my own failure to give up and try again again later. American Airlines does not suck.

AND: I'm told there was something weird this morning. A commenter to this post says: "My wife is a ticket agent for AA at DFW airport and had to work 3 hours O/T today because of monsoon-like storms that started at dawn and lasted until noon. When they have that number of flights being cancelled they press reservations into service to get thousands of people rebooked. Needless to say she was whipped when she got home."

The Giant Inflatable Rat.

So there was this Giant Inflatable Rat....



... at the corner of Clinton and Remsen Montague Streets. So I grab a quick (and distorted) picture with my iPhone.

I arrive at my office and Google "giant inflatable rat" for all the Giant Inflatable Rat information I need (like what's that rash on his belly?). I see there's a Flickr group: "The Rat Patrol." I join the group, I upload the picture, etc. etc.

I hope you appreciate my efforts keeping you abreast of what going on here in Brooklyn. Seems to be some labor dispute.

You've seen it around: a giant creature with menacing buckteeth, long claws, and red, beady eyes. It's a regular at union protests and strikes, wherever there's labor tension. If the Rat could speak, it would get right to the point: "So I moved your #@!% cheese. You wanna do something about it?"...

Twelve years ago, Mike O'Connor, owner of Big Sky Balloons & Searchlights in Plainfield, Illinois, created the first rat at the request of a union member in nearby Chicago. Said the union man of O'Connor's first sketch: "It's not mean enough." O'Connor added bigger fangs and a pink belly with "festering nipples." "I love it," the man said. So did other unions. Today, Big Sky sells between 100 and 200 rats a year--even though it is a nonunion shop itself....

Does the Rat work? "Usually, employers go bonkers when they see it across from their property," says Randy Mayhew, organizing director of Laborers International Union of North America, which employs about 20 rats. "It's an effective piece of street theater," says Peter Jones, executive director of the Labor Heritage Foundation.

Festering nipples, eh? That's what it takes to make management cringe. Festering nipples.

"There are two cognitive styles -- a liberal style and a conservative style."

Some scientists did a study that, they say, reveals there's a "right wing brain" and a "left wing brain":

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M....

Lead author David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University, cautioned that the study looked at a narrow range of human behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, he said.

Do you find yourself blocking the distracting information that is this study? You may be a conservative.

IN THE COMMENTS: I love this response from Pogo:

"conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. "

Read: Liberals are good people. Conservatives are stupid, unable to tell one letter from another.

Or: Liberals have no standards, and can be made to believe anything at all, no matter how ridiciulous.

... Conservatives quickly discover how to avoid time-wasting. Recognizing the preponderance of Ms over Ws, vote M. Spending valuable thought on being precise aboout M vs W is a waste of your time. The more crucuial question is: when the incentive to be right is correct, who is more accurate? For example, why spend effort on trivial matter whose consequences of being wrong are zero?

I read the study. In contrast to their interpretation, it tells me that liberals easily do what they're told. Conservatives resist.

Another issue I see now is: Which students volunteer to do psychological tests? It may be that liberal students want to help further science and conservative students are showing up for the cash. The conservative finds the most efficient way to get what he wants, which is the cash. Why bother getting the answers right? Also, there is the matter of which students self-identify as "conservative" -- especially among the students who chose to attend New York University and UCLA, where the study was done. These may be very usual people. Meanwhile, most students call themselves "liberal" at these places -- I assume. You may not be comparing the brains of conservatives and liberals, but of oddball outsiders and average kids.

ADDED: A neuroscientist trashes the study:

... 91% of the variance in accuracy was attributable to factors other than political orientation. Moreover, they do not present a figure of this data as they did for their other results. When a correlation is this small (.30), it can be heavily influenced by the performance of a very small number of subjects who may be outliers.

A related point on the possibility of a small number of subjects influencing the data. They don't report the numbers of subjects who were liberal versus conservatives but perusal of one of their figures indicates that they had a grand total of 7 subjects who were on the conservative side of '0'. This is totally inadequate for any behavioral study. They also don't report the gender breakdown of the subjects by political orientation. There is strong bias to females in the study (63%) but, as you know, there is a very strong likelihood that the males were over-represented among the conservative participants (this is not reported). This may sound like a trivial factor but it is not. I can tell you from my own experiences in testing university students in dozens of studies on cognitive abilities that the typical university male could not give a crap about how they perform in psychology lab experiments. This is a critical factor if there is a tendency for the conservatives in their study to also be males.

Petraeus wants 6 more months.

General Petraeus reports to Congress today.
Here's a poll showing Americans trust the military commanders much more than either the President or Congress to deal with the war:

Only 5 percent of Americans — a strikingly low number for a sitting president’s handling of such a dominant issue — said they most trusted the Bush administration to resolve the war, the poll found. Asked to choose among the administration, Congress and military commanders, 21 percent said they would most trust Congress and 68 percent expressed most trust in military commanders.

I don't think that disparity between the President and Congress means people side more with Congress than the President, because those who side with the President are probably much more likely to put the military first when given those three choices. The President himself continually expresses trust in the military commanders.

Some Democrats took issue with the characterization of General Petraeus as operating free of influence from the administration, suggesting that they would like to diminish his credibility heading into days of intense sparring over how much more time Mr. Bush’s strategy for Iraq should be given.

“I don’t think he’s an independent evaluator,” Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

If so, then the poll demonstrates extremely strong public trust in the President. (Note: I said if.)

Read on in the linked article, and you'll see that Americans also support troop withdrawals and think the war isn't worth fighting. That's what they say when they are asked what they would do if they had to trust themselves with the war. But do people have a confidence in those opinions about military strategy that displaces the 68% trust in the military leadership?

UPDATE: Mike Nizza offers these bullet points on the opening statement:

• Overall Assessment: “The military objectives of the surge are in large measure being met.”
• Most Important Development: The rejection of Al Qaeda by Sunni tribes in Anbar province. Other areas are following suit, he adds.
• End of Surge: The troop levels in Iraq can return to pre-surge levels by the Summer of 2008, he said. “However, in my professional judgment, it would be premature to make recommendations on the pace of such reductions at this time,” he added.
• Violence: A slew of charts reports that violence is dropping in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq. The general says the number of attacks and deaths would be lower without Al Qaeda in Iraq’s attacks. One chart shows that two provinces have seen increasing violence during the surge.
• Al Qaeda in Iraq: The deals with Sunnis in Anbar province and operations against leaders of Al Qaeda in Iraq have left the group “off balance,” but not defeated, he asserted.
• Iran: The general said there is evidence that the Iranian government is using its Al Quds force to help spur the insurgency in Iraq, a charge that the U.S. military has leveled before. The aim, he said, was to create a friendly organization in Iraq as Iran has in Lebanon with Hezbollah.

"You could tell by the expression on her face. Instead of just blocking everybody out and doing her thing, you could tell she was thinking about it."

Poor, humiliated Britney Spears. She didn't sound bad, because it's an excellent recording, but she made almost no effort to move her lips in the general area of the lyrics. And all those gyrating dancers around her only made her look more unsteady and confused. The choreographer's exaggerated expressions of sexuality -- the undulating torso and the overarched back -- expressed only: oh, I have to do another one of these things.

Watch the nightmarish scene here. And note the looks on the faces of the stars in the audience. The men all look stunned and sad and seem to feel sorry for her or embarrassed to watch. The women, on the other hand... I'm seeing exultation as their competitor falls.

The worst thing seems to be that Britney's own people sent her out there in a bra-and-panties outfit that is begging the entire world to call her fat -- when she could so easily have been encased in dark spandex that would make you look mean-spirited for talking about her weight.

Or was that the Britney equivalent of Elvis Presley's Vegas outfit? Why was that jumpsuit white? Were they trying to make him look like a beached whale? Perhaps there is some level of stardom where you don't try to disguise your flaws, you're just out there saying That's The Way It Is. I'm showing you my flobby belly because It's Britney, Bitch.

AND: Did I say Britney was fat? No! Reread if you think I did.

"Very dull... a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions."

"Even if the work had come to light five years ago, when the subject was timely, I don’t see that there would have been a chance for it."

"Rudy Giuliani wouldn’t stand much chance in a squishy election."

But if it's going to be a crunchy election, look out.

Squishy elections, like the one in 2000, are ones where the candidates attempt to blur the differences among them on major issues and run, instead, on more ethereal attributes like character and authenticity, the kind of traits best demonstrated by sipping beers or emoting on “Oprah.” Rudy Giuliani wouldn’t stand much chance in a squishy election. But 2008... may be a crunchy year, where the nominees of both parties present sharp contrasts on hard philosophical questions, starting with how to view the threat of Islamic terrorism and what course to take in Iraq. And Giuliani is well positioned for such debate, having defined himself, in the public mind, as the unflinching foe of a radical and dangerous ideology.

Souvenir shop politics.

Biding my time while my guests looked for T-shirts and statuettes, I tried to understand the politics of the place:

Fire David Brooks!

I'm still puzzling over the relevance of my "Flak" post to this angry Kos campaign.

This weekend, rather than politics...

I've been keeping up with a 7-year-old (and his dad, my nephew Cliff)...

Some perspectives on liberty.

Where we were last night.