"'Femmebomb' brought down by windbomb." What might have been.

Talking heads who can talk. In Entertainment Weekly, Jessica Shaw recounts the behind the scenes drama of the Barry Manilow episode of American Idol:

"I would never nix a song and say, 'That's not for you,'" vocal coach Debra Byrd says. ''I might say, 'Okay, you don't sound so good right here. Let's rearrange it or change the key or leave out that part.''' This week, a high note at the end of ''Mandy'' was plaguing John Stevens, she adds, so ''I said let's get rid of that gorilla sitting at the end of the song waiting to kick your butt. You know you're gonna screw it up."

Okay, Fox, what I want is a reality show that follows Debra Byrd around! Or alternatively, I'll take a reality show following around Dean Banowetz, the hairstylist:

[re: flower-wearing Jasmine Trias] ''I have been working on de-flowering that girl since day one.''

[re: the problem with John Stevens's hair that requires some burgundy hair dye:] ''the Howdy Doody Idol thing''

[re: his plans to redo Fantasia's hair to look like Whitney Houston's in "The Bodyguard" after Simon said LaToya's hair looked like a "dead cat":] ''After the whole cat comment ... we have to think twice ... But at the end of the day, he's a white guy from the U.K. What does he know about a sista's weave?''

To all TV producers, of fiction and reality shows: I want to watch people who have a way with words! TV is talking heads. Put on people who are good at talking!

And in this light, I have a request for the Presidential campaign: Senator Kerry, President Bush, could you please submit your campaigns in writing?

Do passive students need more toys? Prof. Maule has some thoughts on that classroom clicker device that I wrote about yesterday. I came out for student autonomy both because I saw the devices as coercive and intrusive and because I think students should need to take on the responsibilities of autonomy. Prof. Maule writes:

The typical post-modern student wants to be passive, to be fed information, and to regurgitate it. That's been the educational experience of most of these students. (Too) many of the teachers that these students have encountered, eager for high rankings on student evaluations, prefer to play to the crowd, placate the desires of students weaned on television, and refrain from pushing students to become active participants in their own education. …

If indeed post-modern culture prevents a return to the days of holding students responsible by putting them on the spot, de-valuing their baseless complaints on student evaluations about work load and academic expectations, and failing those who fail, then perhaps getting them involved by "making the work fun" is worth the effort. The clickers are toy-like, they are almost identical to the TV remote with which the student is deeply familiar, they are snazzy and exciting, and they equalize the participation level at something other than zero. Faculty using the clickers claim that the students are enthusiastic about them. That's not a surprise. So surely it's worth a try.

Hmmm.... which side is he really on? When did we cave to "post-modernism"? Do young people today really see themselves in these terms or are they tired of being characterized as the MTV generation and so forth? Aren't we post-9/11 now, so that it's not too late to talk about a serious world of real values and consequences?

I've never seen a personal statement in an admissions file that was all about how the applicant has been spending his life so far playing video games and is hoping to find some snazzy, exciting, familiar devices to play with in the classroom. Nearly every file portrays an individual who is serious about taking on the challenges of learning how to be a lawyer and who has a strong record of independent, responsible academic achievement. No one writes, I'm looking for a place where the teachers will hover over me and feed me information and expect to see me glazed and numb unless they excite me the way TV excites me! On paper, every applicant is hot for a big challenge. I want to hold them to their own representations, not shrug and view these idealized self-portraits as a post-modern joke. Let the joke run the other way: we take these things seriously, we believe you are adults, we think the practice of law is challenging and serious and important, and we are going to treat you like the person you claimed to be when you applied to this school and made us believe you deserved to sit in that seat you are slumping back in right now!

UPDATE: Prof. Maule has a long response to this. What can be done about lack of class participation? I have no special new solution--other than blogging about it. Maybe that will change things. Basically, I favor the traditional law school model. Prof. Maule has something good to say about PowerPoint in the classroom. I detest PowerPoint. If those clickers are helpful the way PowerPoint is helpful that's another reason to be against the clickers. Signed, Cranky Old Retro Lawprof.

Howard Dean will have his own talk show. (Cheap humor: scream show.) I'll believe it when I see it--where's Clinton's talk show we heard so much about?--but here's my advice: don't do it! When has someone prominent successfully started a talk show with full attention focused on him from the first day? You need to work your way into a good talk show, building an audience, while honing your style and making a lot of mistakes. If everyone tunes in to see if you're really any good, at a point when you won't be that good, the show will crash early and embarrassingly. You'll be taunted about your inadequacies from day one.

Anyway, the news of the possible new show appears here in Variety (via Drudge). At first, I didn't notice it was Variety and I was cringing and saying to myself "Who wrote this?" Why is a reporter calling a talkshow not just a "gabfest" but a "skein"? Yesterday, I looked up something about Air America--how's it doing lately, after its big, conspicuous launch, with critcs ready to pounce? I turned up an article (in NEXIS) with the headline: "Two Air America execs ankle." What? Oh, that's Variety, where people can't just leave, they have to "ankle."

But how would a Dean do on a talk show? I have to admit, watching Kerry the other day, I was thinking I miss Dean. Don't you? Wouldn't things be so much more exciting if he were the nominee? Sorry, "presumptive nominee." Oh, I know it's not about excitement. I'm happy to have a boring competent person disappear into the White Hours and do the right things. (Just get to the point, Senator Kerry, and convince me you're competent, so I can stop wasting time listening to you. Feel free to submit it in writing.)

According to "ex-Big Ticket TV topper Larry Lyttle," who seems to be putting the Dean deal together, Dean will be perfect on TV because: "He's a little bit of Howard Beale, a little Dr. Phil and a little Donahue all rolled into one..." The Howard Dean/Beale similarity has been widely noted. So, great--if he'll freak out on camera periodically, we'll tune in, like people used to tune in to Jack Paar, to see if tonight was a night when he'd break down and cry.

According to Lyttle, "The last thing we're going to talk about is politics... [Dean will] look at things like, What happens if you lose a sibling? What about when you're victimized by not having health care?" Oh, yeah, no way that'll verge into politics. We'll steer way clear of that.

UPDATE: A reader--Tracey Berry, a former student--alerts me to a typo up there:

I know that this is a typo: "...disappear into the White Hours..." ... but I could not help but think it sounds very Wasteland-esque -- just the sort of thing that Kerry himself might want to misquote.

"Disappear into the White Hours"--yes, that is (not) going to be the name of my first volume of poetry. I like it as a name for an alter-ego anonymous blog. Or possibly the title of the sort of prestige movie that would star Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore and that I'd kick myself afterwards for thinking I would like.

Alternate response: somehow when I'm thinking about Kerry speaking, the word "hours" lodges itself in my brain.

"The sniper community." For years, I've been following the overuse of the word "community." Not everyone who can be put in one category (e.g., gay) is actually in a communal relationship with others in the category who may, in fact, commune in a group. (You could feel sad and left out if you were something that gets called a community but didn't have any rewarding group experiences.) And not every category that people can be put in is the sort of thing that suggests the relationships of community. I remember hearing the expression "the military community" about ten years ago and thinking, now, the use has reached its most ridiculous extreme. Today, on Morning Edition, I heard the most ridiculous one ever, in a story about American soldiers trained as snipers. One of the soldiers referred to "the sniper community." Next up: the loner community.

UPDATE: Chris notes that the most profound misuse of the term "community" is the expression "the international community."

Simon guesses who will be the AI final two. My guess, as I clicked on this article in Entertainment Weekly, was LaToya and Diana. Turns out that is what Simon Cowell thinks, though he thinks it should be LaToya and Fantasia. I said last night: I think Diana is going to win.

Striking ... splinters. Jeremy links to some blogs written about the stresses of striking by striking TAs, like this one:

this morning i had a bit of a breakdown and couldn't stop sobbing. it just seemed so ridiculous, the whole picketing thing. everyone kept saying "emily, you are just tired. you have been working so hard!" but other people have been working just as hard or harder and did not break down and cry just because. i mean, what did it was really having to hold in my emotions for so long. i could chant my heart out, but not be bored. i could yell and shout about the sanctity of the picket line, but not feel doubt about a strike i was against. i could sing "solidarity forever", but not hate the people on the line with me. i snapped after being on the line for just one hour. after lunch, i was better. i still have splinters that i can't seem to get out, but i am better.

I felt especially sympathetic re the splinters part, because my son just got a lot of splinters in his hand moving some fencing material around at work. And I tried to get it out using the method that I thought was the right method, using a sterilized needle to pick out one end of the splinter and then tweezers to pull it out. I couldn't get any of them. I resorted to Googling for tips on splinter removal, and learned that the method I was using was the right method, but it wasn't working. I found another method, in more than one place, which was to spread Elmer's Glue over the affected area, then let it dry, then peel it off. That might work for very fine splinters (like after an encounter with a fuzzy cactus), but it didn't help. Another tip was soaking it periodically in warm water with baking soda over the course of a few days and see if they just come out somehow. So more than a day passed before we realized professional help was needed. We went to the UW Clinic, where a nurse (basically using the needle/tweezers method) removed 25 splinters (more than we realized were there). So, strikers, with picket sign splinters: you need to go to the doctor. (I know you have health insurance.)

This is from another TA blog linked by Jeremy----and it explains the hostility of yesterday's chalkings:

Day two of the strike was even worse than the first. After an entire day of certain people literally chasing undergrads, snarking at them, swearing at them, and telling them that they'll rot in hell, we were ordered to be nicer to them today. The thing is, the union never told us that we would be asking undergrads not to attend their classes in the first place. So if the TAs, who were striking, didn't know this fact, how were the undergrads supposed to know?

As I looked around me today on the picket line, most of the people I saw were those of us who voted not to strike. If all of us who voted "no" didn't picket, the Social Sciences building would have been empty. Where were all the "yes" voters?

And now we're supposed to withhold our grades. I was talking to a union member friend today, and I think she summed up best how the next membership meeting and rest of semester will go: "So all the PAs and militant jackasses will vote to grade strike, we'll vote not to do it, and then 7110 Social Sciences will be THE ONLY FUCKING TAS TO ACTUALLY STRIKE."

PS. I do realize that first poster meant emotional splinters ... which reminds me of a question we were batting around the other day about physical and emotional pain. It seems to me that at different levels of pain it switches back and forth whether physical is worse than mental. Take slight pain, like a mild headache: I'd rather have the physical pain. But at some degree of pain: I'd much rather have mental than physical. Yet it is possible to imagine and even higher degree of pain, where you would prefer the physical version again (for example, if the mental pain were the death of a loved one). Not sure where hard-to-remove splinters lie on that spectrum.

PPS. Jeremy seems to think the splinters were real wood splinters, and that's what I thought at first too, but then I decided, no, I was excessively real-wood-splinter focused after this two day splinter-struggle with my son. I need to read what's on the page/screen and not infuse my interpretation with so much of my own personal experience. The whole post was about emotions, with no mention of the physical ordeal of holding the strip of lumber that makes up the picket sign. But if Jeremy thought it too ... and presumably he hasn't been having real splinter problems lately ... (we'd know, wouldn't we?) ... I admit I'm not really sure.

PPPS. Ah, so it is actual wood splinters. And it was the rough lumber of the picket sign handle.

Omarosa and ... the ordeal of the bier! According to Jeannette Walls at MSNBC News:

The much-loathed reject from “The Apprentice” was scheduled to appear on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” last week, but refused to go on air when she saw a lie detector test backstage.

“The lie-detector test wasn’t even for her,” a spokeswoman for the show told the Scoop. “It was intended for Jimmy’s Uncle Frank [a regular character on the show], but when Omarosa saw it, she just freaked.” Some fellow contestants have accused Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth of lying when she said one of them used the N-word. “We tried and tried to calm her down, but she just kept saying ‘I’m not going on stage with that lie detector test’ then she just walked out.”

That reminds me of a lesson about relevant evidence I used back in the days when I taught Evidence. We read a 1894 Missouri State Supreme Court case, State v. Wisdom (sorry for the long block quote, but this is not otherwise available on line and it's really cool):

In the course of the examination of the witness Hill, he was asked to tell what happened down at the morgue by the dead body of Mr. Drexler, when the witness Willard and defendant were there, prior to the inquest. This was objected to as immaterial; the objection was overruled. The witness answered that "they told us to put our hands on Mr. Drexler," and that he "and Willard did so, but defendant wouldn't do it." Officer McGrath corroborated this statement. Defendant objected to McGrath's statement, but assigned no reason. The action of the court in this regard is now assigned as error. Who it was that told them to put their hands on Mr. Drexler's dead body does not appear.

The request to touch the body was evidently prompted by the old superstition of the ordeal of the bier in Europe in the Middle Ages, which taught that the body of a murdered man would bleed freshly when touched by his murderer, and hence it was resorted to as a means of ascertaining the guilt or innocence of a person suspected of a murder.

This superstition has not been confined to one nation or people. It obtained among the Germans, prior to the twelfth century, and is recorded in the Nibelungenlied, the great epic poem of that country, in the incident in which the murdered Seigfried is laid on his bier and Hagen is called on to prove his innocence by going to the corpse, but at his approach the dead chief's wounds bleed afresh. That it dominated the English mind is attested by the passage of Matthew Paris, that when Henry II. died at Chinon in 1189, his son and successor came to view his body, and as he drew near, immediately the blood flowed from the nostrils of the dead king as if his spirit was so indignant at the approach of the one who caused his death, that his blood thus protested to God. And Shakespeare voices the same superstition in Richard III., in act 1, scene 2, thus:

"O! gentlemen, see, see! dear Henry's wounds Open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh."

And so does Dr. Warren, in "Diary of a Late Physician," 3 vol., p. 327. That it was a prevalent belief in Africa and Australia, in another form, see 17 Encyclopedia Britannica, pp. 818, 819.

This superstition has come to this country with the emigration from other lands, and, although a creature of the imagination, it does to a considerable degree affect the opinions of a large class of our people.

It is true it was not shown that defendant believed that touching this body would cause any evidence of guilt to appear, or that he entertained any fear of possible consequences, but it was simply a test proposed by some bystander, and it was offered as showing the manner in which the three suspects conducted themselves when it was proposed. Clarke v. State, 78 Ala. 474; Chamberlayne's Best on Ev., page 488.

While defendant had a perfect right to decline, either because of his instinctive repugnance to the unpleasant task or because no one had a right to subject him to the test, and his refusal might not prejudice him in the minds of a rational jury, on the other hand, a consciousness of guilt might have influenced him to refuse to undergo the proposed test, however unreasonable it was and it is one of the circumstances of the case, that the jury could weigh. The jury could consider that, while it was a superstitious test, still defendant might have been more or less affected by it, as many intelligent people are by equally baseless notions as shown by their conduct and movements. It often happens that a case must be established by a number of facts, any one of which, by itself, would be of little weight, but all of which taken together would prove the issue.

So, getting back to Omarosa: even if the lie detector was not to be used on her, and, indeed, even if lie detector tests are not reliable, if she believed it was to be used on her and believed it was reliable, her running off at the sight of it is some evidence that she had lied in her accusation about the other contestant. On the other hand, it isn't very strong evidence. She may have believed lie detector tests are not reliable, especially for someone under stress (as she would be if given the test on camera), and so she could be telling the truth but rejecting the test to avoid producing evidence that would be used against her. And it is also completely sensible to flee the lie detector because it gave her the strong impression that she was going to be subjected to intrusive, disrespectful intrusions other than the interview she agreed to. Oh, and I'd like to see a lie detector test given to the spokeswoman for the show, with questions about whether they were planning to ask Omarosa once she was on stage whether she wouldn't like to take the test.

A sidenote: that case appeared in an early edition of the Green and Nesson problem method Evidence book. I harshly critiqued that edition of Green and Nesson in "The Lying Woman, The Devious Prostitute, and Other Stories from the Evidence Casebook," 88 Northwestern Law Review 914 (1994). That's not available on line, but it makes excellent reading. Having written an article with that title, I now have the rare distinction of having a resumé with the word "prostitute" on it! File that under: Things I Didn't Think About At The Time. And I have no quarrel with later editions of Green and Nesson's book, at least some of which included passages from my article.

ADDED: "The Lying Woman..." is now available to read on line: here.

If only law students had a remote control ... not that they could click off their boring lawprof, but they could conceivably be kept constantly engaged by needing to click in answers to multiple choice questions.

PAUL CARON, a law professor at the University of Cincinnati, uses [high tech clickers] to break through what he calls the "cone of silence" in his classroom.

Well, I've struggled with this "cone" Prof. Caron talks about. And I'd love a high tech solution.

The devices look and work much as a television remote does, sending infrared signals to a receiver at the front of the classroom. The receiver is connected to a computer, which tabulates and analyzes the responses. The data can be displayed by an overhead projector, incorporated into a spreadsheet or posted on a class Web site. Responses are anonymous among the students, but not to the teachers, who can identify students by the serial numbers of their clickers.

In a Constitutional Law class you could accumulate a nice political profile on everyone in the class. You collect a lot of statistics this way, and it is awfully coercive. It doesn't matter in a Tax Law class perhaps, but I think it would be too intrusive to systematically collect this sort of information in some classes, such as Conlaw. Would we not have to comply with University regulations about human subjects experiments? Consider this:

[Indiana University sociology prof Melissa Wilde] uses the devices to turn the 400-student class into a sociological laboratory.

At the beginning of this semester, she had the class use the clickers to answer several basic questions about themselves, including their race, household income and political affiliation. Thanks to the clicker technology, she could collate the data immediately. At the next class, she posted the results, which showed that, compared with the average for the nation, the class had three times as many wealthy students and one-fifth as many poor students.

"They were really surprised and tried to figure out why," Professor Wilde said. "For 20 or 30 minutes, they got really fired up."

"Basically I get them doing sociology of themselves," she added.

Well, that's a nice friendly demonstration of a point about the economics of higher education, but where do we go from there?

I started writing this post with a childlike I-want-one-for-Christmas-too attitude, but I'm getting an oh-no-Big-Brother twinge.

Professor Wilde acknowledged that because she can attach names to each answer, "there's a real potential for abuse." She says she promises the students that for the sensitive survey questions she asks, "I will not connect that serial number to their name." So far, she said, there have been no complaints.

To the contrary, students appear to love the clickers.

Inevitable Orwellian observation: "He loved Big Brother."

Here's where I end up. Students deserve their autonomy in the classroom. By law school, they are adults and they should be taking responsibility for their education. They will soon enough have clients relying on them, and there will be no lawprof wired in to supervise whatever they decide to do. With classroom autonomy, students can play video games or blog or IM or sleep or think about their personal affairs or even engage and learn something. The consequences are there and they will need to live with them come exam time. If they aren't up to keeping track of their responsibilities autonomously, why should they be unleashed with law licenses on an unsuspecting public? So I end up, once again as Cranky Old Retro Lawprof.

UPDATE: Prof. Maule responded to this, and my response to that is up here.

Sex in Space. So, what's the expert scientific opinion on who should be sent on a Mars trip? According to Peter Bond, "a British expert on space matters" (link via Drudge):

"[T]he ideal Mars mission would have - in Star Trek terms - two Mr Scotts and two Mr Spocks, and definitely no Captain Kirks, or Mr Sulus, or Dr McCoys. You need the Scotts to do the engineering stuff, and the Spocks to do the science. You don't need a Kirk because all he does is issue orders - and kiss any woman in sight."

Prince/Musicology. VH-1 ran a nice, but ridiculously short concert show with Prince last night. The first part, with new songs, featured a big band, and Prince in a gray, not purple, suit that was zoot-suitishly long on one side but short on the other side. The second part was done unplugged style with Prince sitting on a stool, doing some of his old songs (though none of my favorites), chiding the audience for not singing along loudly enough, and demonstrating the first song he ever learned to play ("Proud Mary"). Here's a screen capture:

Blog conversation instead of in-person conversation. Tonya has remarked on our tendency to converse via blog, but I'm still going to answer the question she raises at the end of this post about comedians: Margaret Cho.

Kerry on Hardball. I'm watching Kerry on Hardball. This is billed as an "exclusive" interview with Kerry. What does that mean? Any time one person interviews another it's "exclusive"? (No two snowflakes are alike.) It's only exclusive, I'd say, if it's a person who hasn't given any interviews in a long time. That's not Kerry.

Comment on Kerry's face: Whoa! It's re-Botoxing time! He's re-craggifying. Especially, on the right side of the face. Yikes! This Botox stuff wears off unevenly? That's pretty embarrassing.

It's on and on about the medals and ribbons. This is incredibly irritating. I agree with Kerry that it's pointless to quibble about whatever it was he threw away when he was an young man with an issue to fight for. But let's make a deal then: stop using Vietnam as an argument for why you should be President. The whole issue is a waste of time. I'm willing to accept that both Bush and Kerry are good people with good character. Now, get on with it! Give me some substance!

After the first commercial break, Kerry is smiling--with teeth showing oddly. Someone told him to smile, so he's taking stage directions. Oh, I'm so hopelessly tired of Kerry. If he would only take a strong stand about following through in Iraq now, looking forward and not backward! But he is in robotic mode: "The fact is that, uh, to PEEL it away, I think it comes down to this larger ideological, neocon concept of fundamental change in the region and who knows whether there are other motives with respect Saddam Hussein, but they did it because they thought they could." That lack of a "to" after "respect" is in the original. And before he launched into that he seemed to get a weary, okay-I'll-have-to-run-the-neocon-ideology-tape-loop look on his deBotoxifying face. Ugh!

I'm distracted by this news, which puts everything in a new light, but I make it through the final moments of the Hardball interview, as Kerry plugs in the domestic-economy-working-people-tax-cut-for-the-wealthy loop. Then Chris Matthews, sounding like an idiot, complains about calling a technical help line, getting a person with an Indian accent, and saying "Forget about it!" to that person. Why isn't that offensive? Someone answering the phone in an Indian accent justifies some sort of outrage? Meanwhile, Kerry is laughing, showing his teeth awkwardly again. Are we supposed to have contempt for the people of India? How does that relate to the idea that we need to cooperate better with the people of the world, which is what Kerry seems to be talking about half of the time? He's so manipulated and machined-tooled into his candidacy, there doesn't seem to be a real person there to think about putting your trust in.

UPDATE: Strange Doctrines criticizes me for asking for substance while being insufficiently substantive myself, but I'm not the one running for President. I keep asking for a substantive plan for what Kerry would do in the future in Iraq (here and here and here and here and I'll stop there, but that's just April). Without that, I cannot begin to think about him as a replacement for the person who is currently seriously trying to deal with the situation, however imperfectly. Do I need to have my own plan for how to wind down the conflict in Iraq? Kerry is robotically repeating fragments of stump speeches, almost incoherently, as quoted here. How can you understand what he's blabbering about (e.g., re neocons) unless you remember the point from before? As for Matthews, I was truly offended by his prejudice toward people with Indian accents, and Kerry just laughed when Matthews ranted about hanging up on such a person. Kerry is coming across as an empty shell of man.

FURTHER UPDATE: Strange Doctrines responded to that update, but none too coherently. I never said Bush had a more substantive plan for Iraq in the sense of a verbal expression of a plan. What Bush is doing, I can see in the news. Kerry has to tell me what he will do, because he isn't in the position to be actually doing anything yet. I have wasted untold hours of my life listening to Kerry and trying to detect an answer. I waste little time listening to Bush, because I can see what he's doing. I think they are both bad at speaking, if it's any consolation, and I have the complaint about lack of substance with respect to virtually every sort of political debate, speech, or event from Kerry, Bush, and everyone else. Why do I say anything about Kerry's face? One: because he calls attention to it by doing things to it. Two: because I am so bored waiting for an answer to the one obvious question that he never answers that I have to grope for things to do with my mind. Three: because physical appearance is a valid and interesting topic, generally, and even specifically, with respect to the Presidency. It has a lot to do with how people respond to a candidate (e.g., Nixon vs. Kennedy) and matters of style have something to do with how a President is able to persuade and influence.

THIS IS THE LAST ONE: Strange Doctrines still thinks I'm being unfair to Kerry because I'm only asking for a "future" plan for Kerry and not for Bush. Only Kerry's presidency is in the future. I just want to know what he'll do if and when he's President.

What do I have to do to get some crab around here? Here, being Hokkaido. And: the cutest kids in the world.

Harmony and order have been restored in American Idol Land. Aw, that was a sweet results show. The dear boy, John Stevens, had to leave and completely deserved to leave, because you just can't sing that many notes wrong. The charge that Americans were voting in a racist way will dissipate, one would hope, now that no white contestants seem to be left. The top three were the ones who clearly were the best last night. And the vote count was extremely high (28 million), which suggests last week was a fluke, caused by general undervoting and overvoting by some rabid fan types. The ordinary viewers were shaken out of their complacency after Jennifer slipped through the cracks last week, and sheer numbers had a regularizing effect. The right outcome was reached. The tribute to the 16 year old retro grandma-loving boy was quite touching and everyone felt good and cried and loved everybody.

"Whereas, Ann A. Althouse, is known to represent the highest Republican ideals and principles..." Okay, a week or so ago, I made fun of the Statement of Affirmation Nancy Pelosi sent me on behalf of the Democrats. Now, I turn my attention to a letter from Bill Frist that arrived in today's mail:

Based on your remarkable support for President Bush in 2000 and our Republican Senate candidates in 2002, I am honored to extend to you an invitation to become a Platinum Member of the Republican Presidential Task Force.

Fewer than one percent of Republicans will ever attain this honor.

Wait, he's honored, I'm honored--there's a hell of a lot of honor being passed around here. But for what? My "remarkable support" for Bush in 2000? Well, all right, if by "remarkable support," you mean voting for Al Gore. And what on earth are the 99% of Republicans to do to get ahead of me in line for this honor?

Only the most committed Republicans have been recognized with this coveted invitation ... and your place in this long and unbroken line is well earned.

Thanks for all the undeserved flattery and the assurances that it is deserved, but what I really want to know is why is it great to be in a long line? And why "unbroken"? I'm picturing a lot of elite Republicans standing in line and no one cutting in. It doesn't make a lot of sense as something to "covet." And if I have an invitation, why must I wait in line? Is there a show? A gala event? I see there is a lapel pin, and that it "instantly marks you for recognition at the most exclusive Republican gatherings in Washington, D.C., Wisconsin and throughout the nation"--yeah, as somebody who made a contribution in response to this letter, as someone who was impressed by this nonsense.

But this is the thing that I found funniest and that put me in mind of that eerie Affirmation the Democrats sent me to sign:



Why not just send me a signed statement attesting to your belief that your supporters are narcissistic idiots? I'm "affixing" my "grand seal" of bullshit on this.