Politics of the Penis.

Andrew Sullivan and Marc Ambider bring the imagery:

"One has the sense of deflation. I am a little ... I feel a little tired. Traffic's off a little bit. And everybody's kind of chilled."

"The Clintons are good for tumescence on the blogosphere...."...

"On the other hand, I just can't get it up for this story. Maybe it's just being not tumescent with Clintons."

I don't know why....

I like these 2 together....





Featheriness?

"Camus, Bob Dylan, and Naked Women Painted Like Cows" — it's me and Rachel Sklar.

On Bloggingheads.

ADDED: Here's a clip from the end where we talk about McCain's possible Supreme Court nominations:



And here's my old post about McCain's judges speech.

On boldface and ludic reading.

I've gotten some use out of these bullet points. In case you were wondering about my newfound love of boldface.

The linked article deals with many aspects of the very interesting topic of how we read on-line... and whether our brains are getting rearranged in the process.

But here's the part that really pulled me in:

Ludic Reading

... Pleasure reading is also known as "ludic reading."... Two fascinating notions:

• When we like a text, we read more slowly.

• When we're really engaged in a text, it's like being in an effortless trance.

Ludic reading can be achieved on the Web, but the environment works against you. Read a nice sentence, get dinged by IM, never return to the story again.

I suppose ludic readers would be the little sloths hiding in the jungle while everyone else is out rampaging around for fresh meat.

I love this idea of ludic reading, but if it's about attaining a state of effortless trance, for me, the web environment is much more effective. In fact, it's dangerously effective! Hours and hours slip away as I click around and read and click some more. I never lose track of time while reading a book.

I feel bad about that. I'd love to enter a trance state and live completely inside of a book for many hours. But I have to force myself to stay engaged and keep going. I'm always thinking of other things and jumping up to read (or do) something else.

But on the web, the whole style of reading already incorporates this jumping around. Distractions are built into the experience.

Now, you might want to say this ludic web reading is self-indulgent and feeding what is some sort of attention deficit disorder of mine, but that is only because you are taking book-reading as the norm. Me, I resist the grip of an author wanting me to stick with his order of things, line after line, page after page. I can't find the pleasure in that. I'm not saying I won't read a book, just that if you want to know what is conducive to ludic reading, I say it's the web.

Alex Kozinski's wife (Marcy Tiffany) explains it all.

In a long, very carefully written email to the Patterico blog.

First, what do we think of this use of one's wife to run interference for you in matters sexual? For me, it's a little too:



But let's look at some text excerpts:

[T]he LA Times story, authored by Scott Glover, is riddled with half-truths, gross mischaracterizations and outright lies. One significant mischaracterization is that Alex was maintaining some kind of “website” to which he posted pornographic material.

Obviously, Glover’s use of the word “website” was intended to convey a false image of a carefully designed and maintained graphical interface, with text, pictures, sound and hyperlinks, such as businesses maintain or that individuals can set up on Facebook, rather than a bunch of random files located in one of many folders stored on our family’s file server. The “server” is actually just another home computer that sits next to my desk in our home office, and that we use to store files, perform back-ups, and route the Internet to the family network. It has no graphical interface, but if you know the precise location of a file, you can access it either from one of the home computers or remotely.

Now, it is a website, though, isn't it? Tiffany avoids saying that Glover falsely identified Kozinski's site on the web as a website. She can only assert that that he meant for readers to picture something more elaborate and accessible than it was.

As to how [the tipster Cyrus] Sanai accessed our server and was able to rummage through our personal files, frankly we are still trying figure it out. Apparently, if a person is able to find a link to an item in the “stuff” file, and he knows what he is doing, it is possible for him to reverse engineer his way into other items stored in that file without our knowledge or consent.

But wait! Kozinski himself welcomed visitors when he promoted himself in the "Judicial Hotties" contest run on the conspicuous blog Underneath Their Robes and provided links to his server. And what is this "reverse engineering"? Clicking around within a site?

A newspaper – especially a major newspaper as the Los Angeles Times purports to be – is supposed to be a responsible member of the community, not a predator. If the presence of certain files on a judge’s computer is a truly a newsworthy matter, it would have been so months earlier, before Alex was assigned [the Isaacs] trial, and certainly a few days earlier, before a jury had been chosen and the trial had commenced. But what excuse is there for timing the story with surgical precision so as to do maximum damage to the judicial process? In doing so, the LA Times caused the effort of the court, the parties and the 150 citizens who answered the call of duty by reporting for jury service from near and far to go to waste, just to make a big splash. This strikes me as worse than irresponsible.

I certainly agree with that and with much other material in the letter. The LA Times shouldn't have published the idiotic attack, and Kozinski did nothing wrong.

"Obama's new anti-smear website... It's the new go-to spot for Obama dirt."

Kaus quips.

Actually, I'm disappointed. That site hasn't fed us any new dirt since last week. Or am I wrong to try to read it like a blog and look for the newest stuff at the top?

The Associated Press seeks to dictate the terms of "fair use" of its copyrighted articles.

The NYT reports:

Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.

That would put a crimp in blogging!

On Saturday, The A.P. retreated. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., said in an interview that the news organization had decided that its letter to the Drudge Retort was “heavy-handed” and that The A.P. was going to rethink its policies toward bloggers.

Good thinking.

“We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this,” Mr. Kennedy said....

Still, Mr. Kennedy said that the organization has not withdrawn its request that Drudge Retort remove the seven items. And he said that he still believes that it is more appropriate for blogs to use short summaries of A.P. articles rather than direct quotations, even short ones.

“Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see,” he said. “It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.”

I agree that bloggers shouldn't just cut and paste most of an article when all you are doing is pointing to an article or creating a place for people to comment on it, but quoting is extremely important. Much good blogging involves going through a text line by line and critiquing the precise wording. Even when all you are doing is saying here's a good article, you need to quote it a bit to interest people and make them want to look at it.

Even if The A.P. sets standards, bloggers could choose to use more content than its standards permit, and then The A.P. would have to decide whether to take legal action against them. One important legal test of whether an excerpt exceeds fair use is if it causes financial harm to the copyright owner.....

“We are not trying to sue bloggers,” Mr. Kennedy said. “That would be the rough equivalent of suing grandma and the kids for stealing music. That is not what we are trying to do.”

They are, however, trying to worry bloggers.

Lots of commentary collected here. I like this from Jeff Jarvis:

* I don’t really give a damn what your guidelines are. I have my own guidelines.... The point of fair use and fair comment is that there can be no set guidelines. That’s just ridiculous.

* I will say again that the AP should start using our linking and quoting guidelines rather than its homogenization practices....

The A.P. doesn’t get to make it’s own rule around how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows. So even thought they say they are making these new guidelines in the spirit of cooperation, it’s clear that, like the RIAA and MPAA, they are trying to claw their way to a set of legal property rights that don’t exist today. And like the RIAA and MPAA, this is done to protect a dying business model - paid content.

As Jarvis notes, when we blog news stories, we often have a choice of sources and we drive traffic to the sources we link. Bloggers can make AP our link of last resort — or completely boycott it. That's going to cost AP, isn't it? And if the answer is yes, that goes a long way to proving that what we are doing now is fair use.

ADDED: Jarvis's guidelines:

Bloggers should not quote excessively from others’ content and when they quote it should be for a reason — to agree, disagree, comment on, recommend, correct (there can be many reasons). This is fair use and fair comment. There can be no word-count limit because it depends on the use. If I want to fisk a story, I may well quote the whole thing because I am commenting on it all. The test is reasonableness: a fuzzy test, but life is fuzzy.

Jarvis versus lawyers:

My suspicion is that it’s the lawyers who got the AP into this mess. My best advice for the AP’s executives is that they should try to practice the bloggers’ ethic of the link and quote themselves (updating their news values with one more value). My next-best advice is that they should walk down the hall and tell the lawyers to put a damned sock in it or send them off for a very long off-site on a golf course where they can do no harm. This is not going to be resolved enforcing the fine print of outmoded laws built for an extinct age. This is a constantly changing landscape that must be maneuvered with flexibility and openness. But if those lawyers continue to threaten bloggers who know more about this new age and are only practicing their appropriate ethics, I will continue to use this space to suggest where socks should go.

"Being gay is like belonging to an 'exclusive club.' I just worry that the drive to marry will end up kind of chipping away at the culture."

That's a quote from Clint Wolbert, in a NYT article titled "Gay Couples Find Marriage Is a Mixed Bag." I wasn't going to blog that article, but I went back to it today when it was cited as the solution to a secondary puzzle within the big puzzle I asked for help about here. That is, I was getting a few visitors who were searching for the name Clint Wolbert — someone I didn't remember ever hearing of though my blog came up second on these searches. My update explaining the source of the blog traffic brought Wolbert to the blog comments over there, where he wrote:

My point in the article was that gay people should acknowledge that marriage is a double edged sword. It's great to have the option to marry. Some day far away I'll probably avail myself of it. But the more gay culture takes on the trappings of heterosexual normalcy, the less distinct the culture will be. And I like the culture.

The photographer and I were talking about this subject and he equated it to when Jackie Robinson, et. al. were invited to participate in major league baseball. It's great, a watershed, a step in the right direction. But that meant the community built around the Negro Leagues was going to disappear. That's a net positive, but only because the benefit outweighed the detriment. The detriment did in fact exist.

It's the same with gay marriage. Nothing is black and white. It's great that gay people can marry, and it's great that more gay people have these rights in the US now than ever before. But people should be aware that gay marriage comes at a price to the community. (A price that's worth paying, definitely, but still, it's a price).

It's tough to capture that sentiment in a sound bite.

I thought it was cool that he stopped by, but I'm not writing a separate post merely to marvel at the coolness of blogging. I wanted to set up a place to talk about the actual issue. I'm glad Wolbert expanded on his point, because, reading the article, I assumed he was like those gay activists who gave Andrew Sullivan hell years ago for arguing in favor of gay marriage. It used to be much more common to expect gay people to be radical and to critique conventional society — not to want to join it.

ADDED: I'm trying to find video of the great debate that Sullivan (and Norah Vincent) had with Richard Goldstein and Carmen Vasquez, but I did find this 2002 article by Camille Paglia that describes it.

Up the garden path.

"The hole in your heart when you don’t have a male figure in the home who can guide you and lead you."

Barack Obama, speaking from personal experience... and deviating from politically correct feminism.

Mr. Obama cited the need for stronger law enforcement services and resources for education, more job opportunities and other resources for communities.

“But we also need families to raise our children,” he said. “We need fathers to realize that responsibility doesn’t just end at conception. That doesn’t just make you a father. What makes you a man is not the ability to have a child. Any fool can have a child. That doesn’t make you a father. It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.”

There are a lot of women raising children alone — or with another woman — who don't like to think that their children are missing some special "guide" or "leader" because there is no male parent figure. This is not to say that such women don't see the value of a good father, only that they find something offensive in saying that the "male figure" in particular is needed. And Obama is saying that it is so important that it left a hole in his heart:

“I know the toll it took on me, not having a father in the house,” he continued. “The hole in your heart when you don’t have a male figure in the home who can guide you and lead you. So I resolved many years ago that it was my obligation to break the cycle — that that if I could be anything in life, I would be a good father to my children."

Now, I know what he is trying to do is to push more men to be involved in their children's lives, but the way he is saying it, he is siding with traditionalists who think the male role is special, distinctive, and necessary.

ADDED: Matt Yglesias strains this out:

This one will, I expect, be a pretty big hit politically, too, since it has certain conservativish resonances about the centrality of family conditions to our social problems.

Pussyfooting is so loud. You'll have to click on the link to figure out whether Matt agrees with the NYT that Obama was talking about black men.

IN THE COMMENTS:

Holdfast said:

Obviously his mom did a pretty decent job raising him...

I said:

Actually, he spent a lot of the time with his grandparents, and his grandfather was the father figure. Maybe he should read Clarence Thomas's memoir ("My Grandfather's Son").

Thomas, like Obama, spent much of his youth living with his married grandparents. Thomas lavishes credit on his grandfather. Perhaps Obama would say that Thomas does have a hole in his heart.

Zachary Paul Sire said:

Obama is just pandering and doing what he's "supposed" to be doing...same thing goes for him helping fill sandbags in Iowa.

Palladian said:

So you're admitting that he's a phony liar? That he doesn't actually believe what he's saying? That he's just lying to the "heartland" in order to get elected and implement his anemic socialism?

If this is true, then where's this "change" we've heard so much about? Or is that, as many of us suspect, just another empty political lie? If he's willing to lie and pander to the "heartland" about the need for fathers then what makes you assume that he isn't lying about all that "hope" and "change" nonsense in order to pander to urban liberals?

William said:

Wow, yesterday Obama came out in favor of bike helmets and today we note that he is in favor of fatherhood. He certainly is not afraid to take a forthright stand on the tough issues....We are all pocked with emptiness. It is what we use to fill up those empty spaces that defines us. I wonder if the Rev Wright wasn't in some way a father figure. If the abandonment by his father was the central trauma of his life, then Obama has re-enacted that trauma with the Rev Wright. And perhaps he will find some other blowhard to re-enact it with again. I think O'Neill, no stranger to childhood trauma, observed that the past is never really past. We keep revisiting the same pain, hoping to make it turn out right. And it never does.

Unfairly psychoanalytical? Obama's text invites it.

Lou Minatti said:

Ya'll do realize this was Obama's Sister Souljah speech, right? The speech wasn't aimed at men who abandon their families, it was aimed at white middle-of-the-roaders, aka Reagan Democrats.

Amba said:

It's not so much that men and women have different roles. Their roles are much more alike now than they used to be. It's not what they do but what they are: how they sound, how they feel, how they smell. A sense of protection and authority emanates from a man because his voice is deep and his body is solid. This is very primal. It's like the sun and the moon.

This reminds me of a conversation I had recently about whether, in an egalitarian heterosexual relationship, the man should protect the woman and whether she should want the feeling of being protected.

AJ Lynch said:

Is it hard to write a book in tribute to your father after he has left a hole in your heart?

FYI - Senator Obama is a phony.

I think Obama knows he failed his mother by concentrating on his father the way he did, but, to be fair, the book is not so much a "tribute" to his father as it is a search for what he missed and an expression of regret for loss. As he said in the speech at the church yesterday, he made that longing for a father central to his own life as he became the good father he did not have.

ADDED: Donald Douglas says he was "surprised" that I "ridiculed Obama's speech from a feminist perspective." Where did I ridicule him? My point is that he disrespected a point of feminist dogma. I didn't take a position on the correctness of the dogma. I just want everyone to see that he crossed feminism here. I want that noticed. He threw a bone to traditionalists, and you were so into gnawing it that you didn't notice that I was not talking about whether children need fathers.

Stepping stones

Computer whizzes, help me figure something out.

I noticed I was getting huge traffic this morning — over 3000 visitors an hour — and it was nearly all coming from the Yahoo search for "mccain obama vogue photos" — those exact words, in that order. Right now, Site Meter is showing 68% of my recent traffic as coming from that one search! Here's a list of all the recent searches that brought more than one visitor to my blog:

2,721 mccain obama vogue photos 68.0%
1,099 Not referred from a search engine 27.5%
18 althouse 0.5%
4 ann althouse 0.1%
2 tim russert's last interview

(I know. Who the hell is Clint Wolbert? Please don't get distracted!)

This traffic was coming from many different locations, including foreign countries. Look at the Site Meter world map and you'll see these visitors appear to be coming from all over.

Here is Site Meter's chart showing what search engines people are supposedly coming from. 67.5% of current traffic comes from Yahoo. Since 28.2% of the traffic is not coming from search engines, it looks fishy. Does this merely demonstrate the sheer power of being #1 on a particular search? I only come up 6th in a Google search for those words.

Is something funny going on at Yahoo? Is this real traffic that I can feel good about or phony traffic?

ADDED: The question is whether I've stumbled upon evidence of some sort of scheme to create the appearance of traffic on various websites. I don't suspect that this has anything to do with my blog in particular.

PROBABLE SOLUTION: First, I'm sure I know why I had some visitors looking for Clint Wolbert. My blog comes up second in a search for his name (because he wrote in my comments a couple times), and he was quoted in a NYT article today, which would have set off a few searches:

Gay Couples Find Marriage Is a Mixed Bag

... To Clint Wolbert, 28, marriage is too “assimilative.” Being gay is like belonging to an “exclusive club,” Mr. Wolbert said. “I just worry that the drive to marry will end up kind of chipping away at the culture.”

Second, all that "mccain obama vogue photos" traffic most likely occurred because some high-traffic website included a link to that Yahoo search. People clicked on that link and then were motivated to click again to my post, which was the first link on that search. I haven't located that other post, but it must exist. I sometimes link to a search page to prove a point, such as the fact that there's a lot of talk about something. It seems so obvious now. Now, you've seen my little tendency to think bad people are up to no good.

IN THE COMMENT: Clint stops by and expands on the quote!

The "Meet the Press" tribute to Tim Russert.

Are you watching? (It will be up later for on-line streaming.) [ADDED: Here's that video.]

They are doing a nice job. The graphic still said "Meet the Press With Tim Russert," and they opened to an empty set with Tim's empty chair in the middle, then tilted down to Tom Brokaw. (The initial view of the top of Brokaw's head was — unintentionally — humorous.)

The show is full of interesting clips of old shows — including one just now where he used the expression to "saw your leg off" to Bob Kerrey, a man who's had his leg sawed off.

ADDED: Tom Brokaw breaks up as he tries to quote something Russert said a lot: "What a great country."

AND: At the end of the show, Brokaw reminds us that it's Father's Day and tells us we could honor Russert — who was a devoted son and father and wrote a couple books about fathers — by honoring our own fathers. Then there's a photo montage played over Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road." (Russert was a big Springsteen fan.) They return to the empty set. On screen, the words: Tim Russert/Managing Editor.

Very nicely done. I especially enjoyed the sequence of clips where he confronted various interviewees about whether they intended to run for President. Hillary Clinton's adamant noes were hilarious.

"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."

Is it okay for Obama to say that? If not, why not?

McCain supporters see something to exploit, and the angle is — watch for this meme — what if McCain had said that?

Well, of course, if you say something that resonates with the opinion we already have of you, we will comment on it one way, and if you say something that seems out of character, we take a different tack. So if a warmonger laughs about a bomb, we say one thing. If a peacenik laughs about a bomb, we say another. Both are attacked, and rightly so.

But Obama — is he a peacenik? — didn't laugh about a bomb. He used a figure of speech. (Actually, he amped up the old figure of speech don't bring a knife to a gun fight.)

Figures of speech matter a bit — they offer some insight. But in this case, I was glad to see Obama show some grit and fighting spirit. I worry that he's bland and effete. I worry that he's a peacenik. So — as someone who is committed to neither candidate — I welcomed the remark. I want him toughened up.

A better angle for McCain supporters: Bring a knife to the fight? Bring a gun? Obama runs away from a fight!

There's also the notion that Obama is supposedly represents a "new politics" that precludes tough fighting. Ben Smith writes:

"Why is Barack Obama so negative? In the last 24 hours, he’s completely abandoned his campaign’s call for ‘new politics,’ equating the election to a ‘brawl’ and promising to ‘bring a gun,' " said the RNC's Alex Conant.

Obama doesn't actually use the phrase "new politics" a lot, and this is a box that the Clinton campaign tried, and failed, to keep him in last year, when it emerged early that he was happy to throw punches, and even to start fistfights, sending, for instance, the first negative mail to hit in Iowa last fall.

Obama never paid much of a price for his willingness to go negative. He also, to be fair, never promised that he wouldn't attack, and indeed often promised to be tougher than past Democrats, and bragged of his Chicago training.

Obama would be crazy to avoid fights or to allow himself to be defined as a gentle sweetheart who won't say anything mean.

"I can see why you married her," said George Bush to Nicolas Sarkozy.

Is it okay for him to say that?

"Water rose up way too close to us earlier."

"It went back down later but now the skies have just opened up again and it’s raining hard, hailing on us and a tornado warning. We are just not catching any breaks here in Cedar Rapids at all today."

Dave Howell has words and video on the flooding in Iowa — extremely well presented on his blog (which was linked at BBC.com).