"Good lawyers representing the detainees is the best way to ensure that justice is done in these cases."

So said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. This came after the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, Charles D. Stimson, was wrongheaded and stupid enough to say:

"I think the news story that you’re really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a result of a FOIA request through a major news organization, somebody asked, ‘Who are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there?’ and you know what, it’s shocking." The F.O.I.A. reference was to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Monica Crowley, a conservative syndicated talk show host, asking for the names of all the lawyers and law firms representing Guantánamo detainees in federal court cases.

Mr. Stimson, who is himself a lawyer, then went on to name more than a dozen of the firms listed on the 14-page report provided to Ms. Crowley, describing them as “the major law firms in this country.” He said, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

Gonzales is obviously right, and I would like to know how Stimson could even entertain the notion that it might be acceptable to say what he did.

UPDATE: Stimson apologizes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Stimson resigns (2/2/07).

"I'm a 67-year-old fat, white-haired, liver-spotted woman."

Oh! It's Grace Slick! She's old and fat and doesn't mind telling you so. And she's doing art now -- pictures, panned by critics, with titles like "Hooka Smoking Caterpillar" and "White Rabbit Remembering the Good Old Days."

"I didn't see or hear anything odd or unusual from the apartment. I just figured them for father and son."

Said Rick Butler.

[He] lives across the street [and] said he saw no evidence that the boy was scared or trying to get away. He even saw Devlin and the teen pitch a tent outside in the complex...

Last fall, Butler said he found a cell phone outside, called a number on it and the teen came outside to retrieve it.

What a strange story! Why didn't Shawn Hornbeck escape?

The crime of overfeeding your dog.

Here.

Bush is "simply too stuntedly ill-informed and reality-detached."

That clotted phrase is James Wolcott's assessment of why President Bush "will not be able to rehabilitate himself in retirement" -- unlike Richard Nixon.

I remember seeing an aging Nixon on C-SPAN speaking and answering questions smoothly and cogently for over an hour on a range of geopolitical topics without benefit of notes and with a humbled confidence that was (for Nixon) charming. Clinton has that kind of sophisticated knowledgability, Jimmy Carter does as well, but Bush never will, so uninterested is he in other cultures and so reliant upon platitudes and homilies and self-affirmation. I think (hope) Steve Gilliard is right: Bush's presidency will unravel in shame and disgrace, as Nixon's did. But unlike Nixon, Bush will not enjoy a lion-in-winter third act. For better or worse, Nixon was his own man, a stark lesson in the possibilities and limits of self-reliance.

Why would you hope things will go badly? Wolcott is characteristically sour, but the subject of former Presidents working on their reputations is important, and speculating about how Bush will fare is worth doing. It's also slightly fascinating to watch people warm up to Nixon now that he's at a great enough distance or -- more likely -- when warming up to him works as a way of expressing how terribly much you hate Bush.

"I thought it was O.K. to be single. I thought it was O.K. to not have children..."

"And I thought you could still make good decisions on behalf of the country if you were single and didn’t have children," says Condoleezza Rice in an interview with the NYT.

During the hearing itself, Ms. Rice did not appear to take issue with Senator Boxer’s comments. During the interview, she addressed them only in response to a question. But the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, suggested earlier on Friday that Senator Boxer’s comments were antifeminist.

“I don’t know if she was intentionally tacky,” Mr. Snow said in an interview on Fox News. “It’s a great leap backward for feminism.”...

Senator Boxer’s comments and the claims and counterclaims about what she meant have captivated the blogs and received extensive coverage on Fox News and other cable channels. One blog, called Swampland, labeled it “Womb Wars.”

Conservative blogs and commentators were quick to seize on the issue. “One Great Leap (Backwards) for Womankind,” read one blog, Bikini Politics. “They will be known by their Fruits,” read another, Macsmind, which billed itself as “Conservative News, Commentary and Common Sense.” Rush Limbaugh also got into the act. “Here you have a rich white chick with a huge, big mouth, trying to lynch this, an African-American woman, right before Martin Luther King Day, hitting below the ovaries here,” Mr. Limbaugh said on his radio show.

As I said yesterday, I don't think it's good feminism to require greater sensitivity toward women than toward men when it comes to political arguments like the one Boxer made. The "Who pays the price?" argument is either a good one or a bad one, and calling attention to childlessness shouldn't be any worse for women than for men.

But let me make three new points:

1. Boxer served up a juicy nugget, and it should have been predictable that blogger types -- and Rush -- would gobble it up. I'm sure she regrets saying it and that this incident will tend to reduce these kinds of statements in the future. It's stupid to give your enemies this kind of raw material. Politicians need to become more savvy about what's bloggable. And the already-savvy Snow did a great job of flagging the bloggability.

2. Women in power should stand on the same level as men and not demand special outrage for insults, but we know that people will say some things about a woman precisely because they think it will hurt her more or because it will stir up prejudices about women. I don't think it's clear that in this case Boxer had that sort of nasty intent, but we can see in some of the reaction to Boxer's statement -- including that quote from Rice, above -- that people continue to think there is something tragic and unnatural about a woman who has not formed a family around herself.

3. Heightening sensitivity to implicit insults in statements made about women can serve the interests of the Democrats. They are the ones with an important female presidential candidate. Now that Republicans have had this little huff over Rice, Democrats will have more power to claim offenses to feminism whenever anyone says anything mean about Hillary Clinton.

“He feels very disappointed that he can’t go on for her."

A quote from the lawyer representing Michael B. Nifong, the prosecutor in the Duke rape case, who is now asking to withdraw from the case in light of the ethics charges against him. I'm reading this in the NYT, which is covering Nifong's problems quite a bit more sympathetically than what I've read elsewhere:

Mr. Nifong’s friends told him he had two choices: dismiss the case or ask the attorney general to take it over. It was a bitter decision, friends said. His reputation hung in the balance. Mr. Nifong decided he had to do something he had left to his investigators over the 10 months since the alleged assault: talk about it directly with the woman he called “my victim.”

In a two-hour meeting at his office on Thursday, Mr. Nifong and an aide talked about the choices, an official involved in the case said. He told the accuser that a trial would be brutal, but that he had already talked with the attorney general’s special prosecutions unit and trusted that office to give the case a fair review. He asked what she wanted to do.

She was concerned about the effect of the case on Mr. Nifong’s career, the official recalled. She wanted to sleep on the decision. She continued to insist she had been sexually assaulted.

On Friday, she and Mr. Nifong spoke by telephone. She again said she wanted to go forward. Although she was not happy about Mr. Nifong’s giving up of the case, the official said, she said she understood his reasoning and pledged to cooperate with any new team.

"Say you're an average congressman. How do you react to President Bush's Iraq speech?"

William Kristol channels congressional thought processes:

You suspect, deep down, that he's probably doing more or less what he needs to do. We can't just click our heels and get out of Iraq--the consequences would be disastrous. And the current strategy isn't working. You have said so yourself. Last fall you called for replacing Rumsfeld. You've complained that there weren't enough troops. What's more, you've heard good things about General David Petraeus from colleagues with military expertise. So now Bush has fired Rumsfeld, put Petraeus in command, and sent in more troops. Maybe this new approach deserves a chance to work?

Is that what they really think? I'd guess they were thinking this new approach doesn't deserve a chance, because it's not going to work. In Kristol's account, the members of Congress go on to undercut the President's efforts for little reason other than their own political advantage.

Ford did more to end the Cold War than did Reagan.

According to Gerald Ford in old interviews The Grand Rapids Press is now free to release.

Ford said Reagan, who challenged him unsuccessfully for the GOP nomination in 1976, was "a great spokesman for attractive political objectives" such as a balanced budget and defeating communism, "but when it came to implementation, his record never matched his words."

Reagan was "probably the least well-informed on the details of running the government of any president I knew," Ford said. In a separate interview, he said Reagan "was just a poor manager, and you can't be president and do a good job unless you manage."

Ford contended his own negotiation of the Helsinki accords on human rights did more to win the Cold War than Reagan's military buildup. Other key factors were the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after World War II and the establishment of NATO, he said.

He also said Carter -- who challenged him successfully in 1976 -- was "a disaster." Who did he like? Eisenhower. And Nixon wasn't so bad.

In which I rave about the MacBook screen.

I replaced my year-old Power Book with a new MacBook today, mostly because the screen on the old computer was looking dimmer and dimmer, and I thought it was going to die. Whether it dies or not is another matter, but I'm setting it aside as a spare right now. I knew the MacBook had a much brighter, clearer screen, and since I don't see all that well, especially in bad light, I decided to spring for the new computer. I can't tell you how happy I am with the new screen. On the old computer, I was always enlarging the font size to read. I was using the new one for several hours before I realized I'd stopped doing that. I can read the normal-size print comfortably again. What an improvement!

"I write tales with brave Ulysses but I prefer the WriteRoom with black curtains."

Possibly the cleverest -- and creamiest -- Metafilter comment ever. Must be read in context.

"So why do respectable but obscure figures think they have a chance at the White House?"

A question raised on the occasion of Christopher Dodd declaring his candidacy.

Their patron saint is Jimmy Carter....

Bonding with MacBook.

There's that Photo Booth stage...









ADDED: That last photo, taken at a café every good Madisonian knows, looks like it's trying to turn into "Starry Night," by Vincent Van Gogh.

Comfort movies.

Do you have a comfort movie? This would be a movie you rewatch in times of stress, when you want to create a comfortable environment for yourself. My son John says he uses the "Back to the Future" movies to mellow out at exam time. He says a lot of people his age -- mid-20s -- have "The Princess Bride" as their comfort movie? So, what's yours?

When I was in college -- in the days before home video -- one campus cinema always showed Marx Brothers movies at exam time. It was understood that this was what you watched to escape the stress. I was trying to think of what I would have now that fits in this category. I was going to say "My Dinner with Andre," "Slacker," "Fast ,Cheap and Out of Control," and "Grey Gardens." But John is disqualifying these choices on the ground that these are actually movies that I consider great, not the sort of junk food that we're trying to talk about here. It's true that I don't have any not-actually-great movies that I like to rewatch for comfort's sake. He says that I use TV reality shows for this. He's right. You know, the other day I watched three episodes of an old season of "Survivor."

(Song that John is playing that is amusing me while I write this post: "Nuages"... by Django Reinhardt. I'm looking for a YouTube clip of that for you, but what I'm seeing is that everyone tries to play that song.)

HEY: This post has a vlog:



And John never found the clip.

OH: I thought of one -- look, we watched it the day I wrecked my car -- "Serial Mom."

Should a blogger long to be a columnist?

Eric Zorn -- who says he "felt like a slacker sharing the stage" with me last night -- compares blogging and column-writing. He does both, so maybe he's not biased. Of course, everyone blogs, and only a few people have newspaper columns...

Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, and me.

I've said it before, but let me say it again. It's our birthday.