"A friend of ours saw 'four killed in cartoon violence,' and added, 'by anvil.'”

Comic writing, analyzed.

"Incompetent," "good," "idiot," "liar," "Christian," "honest," "arrogant," "strong," "integrity," and "ass."

Those are words to describe President Bush, in rank order, according to a recent Pew poll.

The link is to a New Republic article by Ryan Lizza, who goes on to talk about Senator Feingold's censure effort. Read the details. Here's the conclusion:

[T]he partisans on the left cheering Feingold appear to have both the policy and the politics wrong. Censure is meaningless. Changing the FISA law is the way to address Bush's overreach. And the only way for Democrats to change FISA is for them to take back the Senate. This week, Feingold's censure petition has made that goal just a little bit more difficult to achieve. What an ass.

Via Scott Lemieux, who thinks Lizza is expressing "TNR center-right contrarianism at its most vacuous." Why? Because if you think it's politically damaging to censure the President -- per Lemieux -- you ought also to be afraid to put stronger, more explicit limits in th FISA law. But I think Lizza's point is that censure is just blowing off steam, incurring political damage without changing anything. Playing it carefully now, in Lizza's view, would help the Democrats win over Congress in the '06 elections, at which point they could amend the statute and have a real effect. Lemieux, nevertheless, asks "And if the Democrats believe that he was breaking the law, why on earth shouldn't he be censured?" I don't quite think he's the best person to be deciding who's "vacuous."

Off keynote.

Today is the WisPolitics blog summit. I'll be going first, giving the keynote address, but I've got a feeling that the chance of my striking the keynote are slim.

UPDATE: James Widgerson describes the event. And he's really right about that reporter's photograph.

"We're now two generations into a lack of culinary knowledge being passed down from our parents."

Says one cooking teacher. And cookbook writers are dumbing down the recipes, not trusting you to understand words like "sauté" and "simmer." Then there's the guy who emailed General Mills to ask if he could substitute a peach for the eggs in a recipe. And yet three quarters of meals are still prepared at home. Presumably, people are microwaving frozen things, making sandwiches, pouring bowls of cereal, opening bags of chips, and that sort of thing. Is this so wrong? Every other day you get a real meal in a restaurant, and the rest of the time you tide yourself over with sandwiches, cereal, and snack food. And don't forget to eat it in front of the TV. I think "Top Chef" is on.

"Elevator to the Gallows."

Today, I saw this brilliant poster:



This 1957 film will play at the Orpheum soon. Here's an NPR segment from last summer about the newly restored film. They've got the original poster over at that link. Here it is:



Don't you love Jean Moreau? Don't you love Louis Malle? This is one of his first films. An early Malle film that we love chez Althouse is "Zazie Dans Le Metro." A later Malle film, which happens to be my favorite film ever, is "My Dinner With Andre."

By the way, this is a pretty great poster too:



Would you see a film on the strength of the poster? I wouldn't. But the poster could be a strong factor. If "V for Vendetta" were playing in a theater here, I would have gone out to see it today, based on the poster and the fact that I still have enough love left over for the Wachowski brothers, even though I suffered through "The Matrix Reloaded." "Bound" and "The Matrix" were quite something. But, alas, "V for Vendetta" is not playing in Madison, and by the time it comes around, I'm sure my feeling for seeing it will have dissipated. That's either a good or a bad thing about living in Madison.

CORRECTION: "V for Vendetta" is playing in Madison now. The website I checked this morning was pathetically un-updated.

"Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies."

Such is the statement to Daily Variety, signed "Trey Parker and Matt Stone, servants of the dark lord Xenu," addressing the mysterious substitution of an old episode of "South Park" for the scheduled "Trapped in the Closet" episode (the one that shreds Scientology):

"So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun! Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu!!!"

Variety reports the rumor that Comedy Central was catering to Tom Cruise, who threatened not to promote "Mission: Impossible 3," Paramount's big summer movie. Paramount and Comedy Central have the same parent company, Viacom.

Andrew Sullivan is urging readers to email Viacom at press@viacom.com and demand that they show the episode.

Comedy Central has already yanked one South Park episode, under pressure from the Catholic League. Now they're caving in to the Scientologists. Can you see them allowing another South Park episode which includes Muhammad? South Park has portrayed Muhammad before, but that was before the Islamist bullies took to the streets. You think Viacom cares about freedom of expression?

Sullivan recommends "Support Freedom of Speech" as the title of your message, so you should do that, if the spirit moves you.

Comedy Central's official excuse, by the way, is that they wanted to show "Chef's Salty Balls" as a tribute to Isaac Hayes, who just quit the show because of the way it mocked Scientology. We were just talking about Hayes's quitting, and, in the comments to that post, the subject of the episode swap comes up, and I offer the explanation that they were paying tribute to Hayes. I note that "Chef's Salty Balls" really is a prime Hayes episode, and it has the added timeliness of making fun of artsy movies about gay cowboys (eating pudding). Hey, is Comedy Central reading my blog in search of feeble excuses?

"All types of competitive activities should be positive, healthy, cheerful and have a favorable influence on morality."

So says the Chinese government, clamping down on TV shows of the "American Idol" type.

The rules threaten programs like the copycat singing competition "Super Girl" and its planned male version, "I Love Real Men," the South China Morning Post reported Friday.

The directive, posted on the administration's Web site, limits the number of competitive programs and forbids them from copying others' formats. It also criticizes the "star worship" generated by televised singing competitions.

Television stations cannot award prizes or cash, and the clothing and hairstyles of participants cannot be "vulgar," the rules say.

Does this elevate your opinion of our reality shows?

More seriously:

A Shanghai academic, who declined to be named, said authorities were worried about the way national competition programs organized large numbers of people to vote, the Post reported.

Learning democracy, "American Idol" style. Isn't the love of democracy a big part of why we love "American Idol"?

"America voted and..." -- these are the words Ryan Seacrest uses to capture our attention again and again.

We love having the choice and seeing who wins. But is this love of ours positive, healthy, and cheerful? Does it have a favorable influence on morality? Well, of course it does!

(Link via Drudge.)

Distinguishing gay marriage and polygamy.

Charles Krauthammer says legalizing gay marriage paves the way to legalizing polygamy:

In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as gay marriage advocates insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement -- the number restriction (two and only two) -- is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice...

To simplify the logic, take out the complicating factor of gender mixing. Posit a union of, say, three gay women all deeply devoted to each other. On what grounds would gay activists dismiss their union as mere activity rather than authentic love and self-expression? On what grounds do they insist upon the traditional, arbitrary and exclusionary number of two?

If Krauthammer has been writing about this subject for 10 years, it boggles the mind that the obvious distinction has not yet dawned on him.

Legal marriage isn't just about love, it's an economic arrangement. Having the state authorize your union is not the same thing as having your friends and neighbors approve of you and your religious leaders bless you. It affects taxes and employee benefits -- huge amounts of money. A gay person with a pension and a health insurance plan is incapable of extending those benefits to his (or her) partner. He (or she) can't file a joint tax return. That's not fair. A polygamous marriage, however, puts a group of persons in a position to claim more economic benefits than the traditional heterosexual couple. That doesn't appeal to our sense of fairness.

The law doesn't assess how much two people love each other. Two persons of opposite sexes can marry for all sorts of reasons. If there were a device that could look into their souls and measure their love, we wouldn't accept the outrageous invasion of privacy it would take for the government to use it. Excluding gay couples from marrying does generate the complaint that society does not sufficiently respect homosexual love, and by harping on this point, proponents of gay marriage activate their opponents who think that's a good thing.

But it's not all about love and who respects what. It's also about economics. And in that dimension, it's easy to distinguish polygamy.

UPDATE: This one has a lot of comments! And then there are the other bloggers writing about it. Eugene Volokh is disagreeing with me, but only because he's misreading me, and if he's misreading me, I've got to expect that misreading is rampant. I've tried to keep the commenters here focused on what I'm actually saying, but I can't rein in everyone who's talking about me. There are 98 comments right now on the Volokh post, and I'm probably not going to read many of them. But let me just say why I think Volokh has misread me. He seems takes that last clause "it's easy to distinguish polygamy" to mean what it literally says ripped out of its context. But I'm not saying that the distinction is so obvious that everyone will accept it. I'm just refuting Krauthammer, who thinks there is no way to stop the slip down the slope from gay marriage to polygamy. I'm against the scare tactic that is being widely used: don't accept gay marriage or nothing will stave off polygamy. All I'm saying is that there is a principled basis for drawing a line between the two. Nothing compels us to choose that line, however. I freely admit that.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

And, therefore: Happy Birthday, John!

"And would those cheering, white 'Bama football fans check her name when they're in the privacy of the voting booth?"

WaPo op-ed columnist Eugene Robinson contemplates Condoleezza Rice running for President:

Black conservative Shelby Steele recently speculated with an interviewer from the American Enterprise, a conservative journal, about how a race between Hillary Clinton and Rice might turn out. "If Hillary runs against a man, my guess is there's a certain women's vote out there that will go for her, even many Republicans," he said. "But if she's running against Condoleezza Rice, that would disappear. A large bit of the black vote that Democrats are so desperately dependent upon would also disappear. If Condoleezza Rice ran, she could win by simply taking an extra 15 percent of the black vote."

But from my own anecdotal observation, Spike Lee speaks for a lot of African Americans who have strong negative feelings about Rice. If she runs, he told the New York Observer, "African Americans will have to really, really, really, really, really , REALLY analyze the secretary of state's record, and get past the pigmentation of her skin. . . . I'm not going to vote for that woman. No. Way. "

Steele acknowledges that he might be wrong, that Rice might turn out to be a lousy politician. Lee acknowledges that "I'm not the spokesperson for 45 million African Americans." The truth is that nobody knows how voters would respond to a black woman who loyally serves an administration so reviled in the black community.

And would those cheering, white 'Bama football fans check her name when they're in the privacy of the voting booth?

Nobody knows. But I'll bet that someday -- maybe not soon, but someday -- we'll find out.

I hope we do.

"The days when a man's beer belly was shown off as a symbol of his manliness are over."

Who knew men thought a pregnancy-like protruberance was manly? The report is from Britain, so apparently it was some strange British perspective on the male body. Anyway, it's over.

Snowy exile.

It's pouring snow here in Madison, Wisconsin, and I'm exiled from my house again. I'm very happy for the snow, because the house looks far prettier at this time of year with the dull yard and bare branches coated with snow. Does Nature want me to sell my house today?

I drove downtown to set up in a State Street café, but there is a sports event -- basketball? -- at the Kohl Center and the area was badly parked up, so I turned west and, feeling hungry, stopped at The Atlantic Bread Company. They have sandwiches and WiFi, so why not give them a chance? I got the turkey club panini, which turned out to be inedible. I think the parts were assembled some time ago and something -- tomato-oids? -- liquefied, sogging the bread into a slimy dough. The coffee is okay, and the music is classical. At the next table, a man and two women, Bibles open, quietly share interpretations.

Camille Paglia in black and white.

Christopher Althouse Cohen frames the shot in Austin, Texas.



Click here for a better view.

"I'm not going to be threatened by Arianna Huffington!"

Says George Clooney:

Yesterday, Clooney released an angry statement calling Huffington's methods "purposefully misleading," and she acknowledged that his so-called blog - slamming Dems who voted for the war in Iraq for fear of being labeled "liberal" - was actually compiled from Clooney's recent interviews with the UK's Guardian and CNN's Larry King.

But Huffington insisted (and forwarded me E-mails that seemed to back her up) that she believed she had explicit permission from one of Clooney's PR reps to publish his disparate quotes as a single piece of writing. "This was a misunderstanding," she told me yesterday, as the disputed blog was removed from her Web site.

Clooney told me: "Nobody has ever written an op-ed piece for me. If I say I've written something, I've written it. When I go to the Oscars, I write everything I say...I stand by what I do, but I'm very cautious not to take giant steps onto soapboxes because I think they're polarizing."

Clooney said that when he demanded a disclaimer from Huffington, she refused. "She told me that it's a big no-no in the blogosphere, where people are supposed to write their own pieces."

There's a minor and boring problem here: Who speaks for George Clooney? He has PR people, and if they agree to things on his behalf, and afterwards he decides he doesn't like it, it seems a bit unfair for him to portray the other party to the agreement as underhanded.

The interesting thing is that Clooney's willingness to embarrass Huffington over what his PR people did throws light on how The Huffington Post operates. Now, the celebrity blog part of the Huffington Post looks like just a PR outlet, a place for assorted quotes and press releases to assemble in the form of a blog. Why looking like a blog works as a way to win readers is something of a mystery, of course. But there are all sorts of blog-looking things out there trying to get your attention. Do they detract from real blogs? Do you know the difference between a real blog and a fake one?

Do you know the difference between a real book and a fake one?

UPDATE: Here is Arianna Huffington's explanation of her interaction with Clooney, along with various assertions about how The Huffington Posts generally gets blog posts from celebrities. The claim is that 99% of the bloggers (which includes a lot of journalists and other non-stars) type directly into the blog software, and only 1% email, fax, or phone in their material. Presumably, the big name celebrities are in the 1%.

Very, very rarely (in 10 months, it's fewer times than you can count on your hand), we will work with a first-time blogger the way editors do in other, traditional media -- suggesting ideas and offering direction on what makes a blog different from, say, a New York Times op-ed. Part of what we've always tried to do with HuffPost is bring to the blogosphere some of the most interesting voices of our time that are not already there. This is the first time there was no back and forth with the writer -- our sample was approved 'as is' -- which is where the misunderstanding occurred.

I read this as an open invitation to bloggers to find other HuffPo posts there that are cobbled together from various sources the way Clooney's was -- though we won't have any way to know if the star was involved in the approval process. I find it hard to believe that it only happened this way once and just by chance this was a person who would choose to make a public stink about it and embarrass Huffington.

MORE: An emailer writes:

I work for a Public Relations/Marketing firm.

The basic rule is that NOTHING goes out without the expressed approval of the client. When you write a statement for the client the person whose name appears on the statement personally reads and approves it. If you ghost an article for the client, the client reads and approves said article.

It is not uncommon for releases. etc. to go through 10 to 20 revisions before the client gives approval.

If things happened as described by Huffington, Clooney’s PR people did a very unprofessional job.

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense why he's pissed at her and not his own people.

"American Idol" -- results.

I'm late getting around to covering tonight's show. But TiVo preserved it, and I was predicting Melissa would get sent home tonight. That turned out to be true. But it wasn't predictable that Ace and Lisa would be the other two in the bottom three. I predicted Kevin and Bucky for that. Both those guys looked awfully relieved.]

UPDATE: If you're looking for the results of this week's show, click on the banner at the top of this blog and then scroll down to the newest episode!

"The jacket was charcoal, not maroon; the shirt was light blue, not pink..."

The NYT has quite a correction today:

The cover photograph in The Times Magazine on Sunday rendered colors incorrectly for the jacket, shirt and tie worn by Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor who is a possible candidate for the presidency. The jacket was charcoal, not maroon; the shirt was light blue, not pink; the tie was dark blue with stripes, not maroon.

The Times's policy rules out alteration of photographs that depict actual news scenes and, even in a contrived illustration, requires acknowledgment in a credit. In this case, the film that was used can cause colors to shift, and the processing altered them further; the change escaped notice because of a misunderstanding by the editors.

Here's the original article with a tiny version of the photograph. (Today's correction is preserved there.) I've got the original magazine in front of me, and I can tell you the depiction of Warner is simply horrifying. When I first saw it, I was mesmerized by how they made him so unattractive, so ridiculous. I was fixated on the big Chiclet-teeth and didn't notice the jacket was maroon and the shirt pink. The effect of those things was purely subliminal. But making a man's blue shirt pink? Why do that? In the hope of reaching some unguarded, homophobic part of the reader's mind? Maroon jacket? No competent politician would ever wear a maroon jacket! You're reaching into our heads and making us think he's weird and untrustworthy.

There's still no explanation of how they got his whole face to look so bizarre. Here's how people who like him present him.

UPDATE: The Anchoress blames Warner:

[H]e should have known better. The New York Times Magazine has madea habit of putting deplorable, awful, really cheesy pictures on its front cover when it comes to two sorts of people: Any Republican, and Anyone Who Might Run Against a Clinton.

But isn't the article pretty positive? And doesn't the NYT Magazine routinely publish strange photographs of celebrities' faces? It wasn't long ago that they made George Clooney look like an alien! Here's something I wrote in the comments to this post:

I think someone over at the magazine just believes in anti-flattery for the celebrities that other magazines cater to. I think they want to make us laugh [at] and not fawn over the big shots. It's like caricature, but done with photography.