Sarah Palin has 950 invitations to do speeches for which she'll be paid in the 6 figures.

950 X $100,000 = $95,000,000.

"Are You an Eco-Douchebag?"

Your reaction to this sign will answer the question:



(Via Boing Boing.)

Is it easier for the poor to up and move to a new place to take advantage of better opportunities?

Ilya Somin thinks that "contrary to conventional wisdom, 'voting with your feet' generally benefits the poor more than the relatively affluent."

It was easier for him when he was poor, anyway:

By contrast, my fiancee and I have recently moved into a new house a mere three miles away from my old condo. For me at least, this move has been more stressful than the previous five combined. Why? Because, due to my much higher pay since becoming a law professor, I now have many more possessions. The packing and unpacking have been a major pain, to put it mildly. Similarly, moving into a house required hiring contractors to do some work to get it ready, and dealing even with good contractors (like the ones recommended to us) is time-consuming and annoying, especially for people who are inexperienced with it. The process of selling the old home and purchasing a new one also requires an investment of time, effort, and money that people moving from one rental unit to another don't have to deal with.

Poverty has its privileges:



But you know, you can have money and not accumulate possessions. In fact, you'll have more money if you don't buy stuff. I'm sorry to point that out when I know we're in a recession in an economy that depends heavily on consumers enthusiastically purchasing things, but the truth is, you can live very simply, and it can be quite rewarding, emotionally and aesthetically. Keep it simple, and you will have more freedom: You can easily — as Ilya says — relocate; you have more of your money left to buy things if you ever do really want or need something; and you'll have less clutter to look at, worry about, maintain, and fuss over.

Giving the finger from a car in the Kennedy funeral procession.

It "appears to be 21 year old Rose Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and Edwin Schlossberg and granddaughter of former president John Fitzgerald Kennedy."



Obviously, someone in the crowd must have said something to her. What do you think it could have been? Is there anything that could have been said that, in your opinion, would justify her response? Your guesses will be more amusing if they're pro-Teddy.

Maybe she's just giving death the finger. You know, there's laughing at death. I'm thinking of giving death the finger.

"Marijuana seems to be marching mainstream at a fairly rapid pace."

Observes the possibly drug-addled Los Angeles Times:

At least in urban areas such as Los Angeles, cannabis culture is coming out of the closet.

At fashion-insider parties, joints are passed nearly as freely as hors d'oeuvres. Traces of the acrid smoke waft from restaurant patios, car windows and passing pedestrians on the city streets -- in broad daylight. Even the art of name-dropping in casual conversation -- once limited to celebrity sightings and designer shoe purchases -- now includes the occasional boast of recently discovered weed strains such as "Strawberry Cough" and "Purple Kush."...

Marijuana's presence on TV and in the movies has moved from the harbinger of bad things including murderous rage ("Reefer Madness" in 1936) to full-scale hauntings ("Poltergeist" in 1982) and burger runs gone awry ("Harold & Kumar go to White Castle" in 2001) to being just another fixture in the pop-culture firmament. Cannabis crops up on shows such as "Entourage," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "True Blood" and "Desperate Housewives," and even on animated shows such as "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy."...

Well, then, legalization must be right around the corner. Remember thinking that around 1969? I do. In 20 or 30 years, people said, we'll be the ones in Congress, and — ha ha ha ha — there's no way we won't legalize marijuana! It's 40 years now, and what happened?

Back to the LA Times hallucination:

Richard Laermer, a media and pop culture trend watcher and author of several books, including "2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade," ... points to a ... subtle shift: aging baby boomers — a generation famous for tuning in, turning on and dropping out — who are keeping their party habits going into their golden years.

"It's hard to fathom that the fifty- and sixtysomethings would be against pot after all the pot they smoked," Laermer said, "Their kids would laugh them out of the room if they started telling them not to smoke pot."

Hello? The Boomers have been in power for decades, so I guess we are hard to fathom. Hey, we're deep and complex and... just as hypocritical as every other generation that ever flowered and went to seed. You can laugh at us all you want, but you actually can't laugh us out of the room... or out of Congress.

Quit laughing. Quit whining. Here. You can watch the entire movie "Reefer Madness" (originally titled "Tell Your Children"). It's so old it's in in the public domain...

... and yet marijuana is still illegal. ADDED: Jonah Lehrer:

I recently moved to Los Angeles and I'm still adjusting to all the medical marijuana stores - there are two within a mile of my apartment. And it's not just the dispensaries, with their parking lots full of fancy cars - it's the Amsterdamesque attitude. Light up a joint and people ask for a hit; light up a cigarette and they give you a dirty look.

Speaking of hypocrisy... "medical" marijuana....

At the Orange Love Café...

... tell me: Do you love someone because they're like you or because they are different?

Dick Cheney condemns the CIA investigation.

On Fox News Sunday today:

We ask those people to do some very difficult things. Sometimes, that put their own lives at risk. They do so at the direction of the president, and they do so with the -- in this case, we had specific legal authority from the Justice Department. And if they are now going to be subject to being investigated and prosecuted by the next administration, nobody's going to sign up for those kinds of missions. It's a very, very devastating, I think, effect that it has on morale inside the intelligence community. If they assume that they're going to have to be dealing with the political consequences — and it's clearly a political move. I mean, there's no other rationale for why they're doing this — then they'll be very reluctant in the future to do that. ...

We had the president of the United States, President Obama, tell us a few months ago there wouldn't be any investigation like this, that there would not be any look back at CIA personnel who were carrying out the policies of the prior administration. Now they get a little heat from the left wing of the Democratic Party, and they're reversing course on that....

The fact of the matter is the lawyers in the Justice Department who gave us those opinions had every right to give us the opinions they did. Now you get a new administration and they say, well, we didn't like those opinions, we're going to go investigate those lawyers and perhaps have them disbarred. I just think it's an outrageous precedent to set, to have this kind of, I think, intensely partisan, politicized look back at the prior administration.

I guess the other thing that offends the hell out of me, frankly, Chris, is we had a track record now of eight years of defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from Al Qaeda. The approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, how did you do it? What were the keys to keeping this country safe over that period of time?

ADDED: John McCain on "Face the Nation":

"I believe that the president was right when he said we ought to go forward and not back. I worry about the morale and effectiveness of the CIA. I worry about this thing getting out of control," the Arizona senator said....

McCain admitted that he was "radically opposed" to the interrogation techniques of the former administration and said, "I think it harmed us."...

"I think these interrogations once publicized helped al-Qaeda recruit. I got that from an al Qaeda operative in a prison camp in Iraq," McCain said. "I think the ability to work with our allies was harmed."

Today, the mushrooms are yellow.

Remember one side makes you larger, and the other makes you small!

Andrew Sullivan trashes the Washington Post for omitting something from its KSM story...

... that the Washington Post included in the story.

How could he make such a mistake? He relied on an Althouse blog commenter! LOL.

And his reading of this blog as "pro-torture" is equally lame.

Come on, Andrew! Raise your game!

I met a dressed-in-black man who walked a white dog...

A mysterious figure on Country Road NN, who seems truly ethereal in the enlargement.

From an expert on "the etiquette of open marriages."

"'I'm a class act in infidelity. I was very clear with my husband from the outset that I would do as I saw fit for myself, and it has nothing to do with him – it's not a sign that he is inadequate in any way. I knew exactly what I was getting into marrying him and he's delightful, kind, supportive, a good husband, a wonderful father and a really nice man. I didn't expect him to be all those wonderful things and a sex god.' In fact, she says the curious thing is that her husband doesn't take lovers, even though she wouldn't mind. 'He isn't a very sexual person,' she explains. They've been 'very happily married' now for nearly 25 years."

"Why Women Continued to Support Ted Kennedy."

By Eleanor Clift.

Organized women's groups overlooked a lot to stand by the senator from Massachusetts. Feminists who proclaimed "The personal is the political" made an exception for Kennedy.

And for Clinton. Face it. Liberal politics always came first for the so-called women's groups, which is why they are not really women's groups at all.

Subliminal argument against coal mining.

(Enlarge.)

(Photographed at the checkout at Whole Foods.)

Did you watch the Teddy Kennedy funeral?

I happened to catch a few minutes of raw feed on C-SPAN showing Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver standing around in one of the lulls. But I find it hard to imagine many people watching this long, drawn-out event and think it was pretty weird that there was so much TV coverage. I'll stick to the written word.

Here's the AP:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was laid to rest alongside slain brothers John and Robert on hallowed ground at Arlington National Cemetery on Saturday evening, celebrated for "the dream he kept alive" across the decades since their deaths.

Did they fact check that the ground is holy? At least they put "the dream he kept alive" in quotes and don't assert that he kept a dream alive, whatever that means. (Cue the comments about how he didn't keep Mary Jo Kopechne alive.)

In life, the senator had visited the burial ground often to mourn his brothers, John and Robert, killed in their 40s, more than a generation ago, by assassins' bullets.

"He was given a gift of time that his brothers were not. And he used that time to touch as many lives and right as many wrongs as the years would allow," Obama said in a eulogy that also gently made mention of Kennedy's "personal failings and setbacks."

As a member of the Senate, Kennedy was a "veritable force of nature," the president said. But more than that, the "baby of the family who became its patriarch, the restless dreamer who became its rock."

Those left behind to mourn "grieve his passing with the memories he gave, the good he did, the dream he kept alive" Obama said inside the packed church.

It sounds like Obama gave a good speech. Must I read the whole text? I'm not going to watch the video. As I've said, I'm sticking to the written word on this one. The only thing that makes sense of all this attention to the old man's death is that it takes us back to the 2 assassinations, long ago, events that commanded long, drawn-out attention.

"The case against 'harsh interrogation techniques' is easy if they don't work."

Corporate lawprof Gordon Smith applies the same observation to arguments about corporate social responsibility:

Naive commentators often attempt to win points by portraying corporate managers as unenlightened and backward. If they would just act responsibly, the argument often goes, the world would be a better place and corporations would be more profitable to boot!...

The tough issue isn't whether managers should be "responsible" when responsibility pays, but whether managers should forfeit profits to pursue a "responsible" path. Tellingly, corporate law doesn't have much to say on that issue. Legislatures ban many forms of irresponsible behavior, but the marginal cases -- the morally complex cases -- are left to managerial discretion.

Of course, it's great for your argument if you can show that what you think is the moral path is also something that is better for all sorts of selfish reasons (or even if you can just get people to believe that it is). But idealists should want to accept the challenge to show why their position should be taken even if selfish interests point in the other direction. It makes your moral argument stronger if you can get people to believe it even when it requires sacrifice. On the other hand, moralists should think about the consequences of their hardline positions. It's not all about making the strongest argument for what you already believe. You might be wrong, and your imperviousness to real-world effects can be dangerous.

(The terrorists themselves seem to have a hardline moral position that is impervious to real-world effects.)

"Khalid Sheik Mohammed stood before U.S. intelligence officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading what they called 'terrorist tutorials.'"

The Washington Post tells us just how much KSM told, as a result of the use of "harsh interrogation techniques":

In 2005 and 2006, the bearded, pudgy man who calls himself the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks discussed a wide variety of subjects, including Greek philosophy and al-Qaeda dogma. In one instance, he scolded a listener for poor note-taking and his inability to recall details of an earlier lecture.

The captive terrorist took advantage of the opportunity to act like the kind of teacher who lords his power over you.

Speaking in English, Mohammed "seemed to relish the opportunity, sometimes for hours on end, to discuss the inner workings of al-Qaeda and the group's plans, ideology and operatives," said one of two sources who described the sessions, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much information about detainee confinement remains classified. "He'd even use a chalkboard at times."

Does this perhaps mean that KSM was the kind of guy whose vanity and urge to dominate made him vulnerable to manipulation by non-harsh techniques? Or was it necessary to humiliate him in order to generate an overwhelming hunger to be admired by his captors? (I don't mean to suggest that I know the answers to these questions. I am simply asking them.) The CIA report does call him "an accomplished resistor," who offered little before "he was subjected to an escalating series of coercive methods, culminating in 7 1/2 days of sleep deprivation, while diapered and shackled, and 183 instances of waterboarding."

Mohammed provided the CIA with an autobiographical statement, describing a rebellious childhood, his decision to join the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager, and his time in the United States as a student at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, from where he graduated in 1986 with a degree in mechanical engineering.

"KSM's limited and negative experience in the United States -- which included a brief jail stay because of unpaid bills -- almost certainly helped propel him on his path to becoming a terrorist," according to the intelligence summary. "He stated that his contact with Americans, while minimal, confirmed his view that the United States was a debauched and racist country."

Here's a question for Andrew Sullivan, who flaunts his morality but nevertheless thinks it's okay to toss around the expression "Ann Althouse's pro-torture blog": What do you think made KSM view the US as debauched? I doubt if it was our support of harsh interrogation techniques — whether you use the word "torture" for that or not. I assume it was — in part — the liberty and equality — incomplete though it may be — that women and gay people experience. He wanted to mass-murder us because of that. I'm predicting that Sullivan's answer to my question will be to call me "pro-torture" for asking — that is, not to answer. He's an accomplished resistor resister.

Mohammed provided $1,000 to Ramzi Yousef, a nephew, to help him carry out the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. In 1994, he worked in the Philippines with Yousef, now serving a life sentence at the federal "supermax" prison in Colorado, on a failed plot to down 12 U.S. commercial aircraft over the Pacific.

Mohammed told interrogators it was in the Philippines that he first considered using planes as missiles to strike the United States. He took the idea to Osama bin Laden, who "at first demurred but changed his mind in late 1999," according to the summary.

Mohammed described plans to strike targets in Saudi Arabia, East Asia and the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks, including using a network of Pakistanis "to target gas stations, railroad tracks, and the Brooklyn bridge in New York." Cross-referencing material from different detainees, and leveraging information from one to extract more detail from another, the CIA and FBI went on to round up operatives both in the United States and abroad.

"Detainees in mid-2003 helped us build a list of 70 individuals -- many of who we had never heard of before -- that al-Qaeda deemed suitable for Western operations," according to the CIA summary.

"[R]ound up operatives both in the United States and abroad... build a list of 70 individuals..." That doesn't say that 70 individuals were rounded up, only that 70 were on the list.

Mohammed told interrogators that after the Sept. 11 attacks, his "overriding priority" was to strike the United States, but that he "realized that a follow-on attack would be difficult because of security measures." Most of the plots, as a result, were "opportunistic and limited," according to the summary....

Mohammed was an unparalleled source in deciphering al-Qaeda's strategic doctrine, key operatives and likely targets, the summary said, including describing in "considerable detail the traits and profiles" that al-Qaeda sought in Western operatives and how the terrorist organization might conduct surveillance in the United States.

Without KSM's cooperation, what would have happened? Do those who think he shouldn't have been broken truly vividly picture a second 9/11 level attack, then a third, then a fourth, then a fifth, and so on? I understand wanting to say that morality is absolute and these techniques debase us, undermine who we are (or who we are supposed to be), and should therefore never be used. But where would the people of this country would be if those additional attacks had occurred? I don't think they'd even listen to the kind of criticisms of the techniques that we are hearing now, in our comfortable world where the CIA did what it did to KSM. What then?

ADDED: Andrew Sullivan's post, linked above, says: "A commenter on Ann Althouse's pro-torture blog reminds readers what the Washington Post chose to omit from its story - KSM's debriefing from the Red Cross." And then he's got a quote that is in the Washington Post story! Maybe next time, Andrew, read the source material before you trash it. And don't just rely on the random Althouse blog commenter!