The delusion that an impostor has replaced your loved one.

It's called Capgras Syndrome. And poor Tony Rosato -- of Saturday Night Live and SCTV -- seems to have it.

Pick...

... a color. Or do it this way.

(Via Metafilter.)

"How professional political operatives secretly control the news you read about the 2008 campaign."

It's not complicated, according to Salon. It's all about Drudge.

Who won't behave like a traditional journalist:

Adam Nagourney, the New York Times' top political reporter on the 2008 campaign, says his employer still maintains relatively strict rules about disclosing opposition research when it is used in a story. "When you get information from a rival campaign," he said, "you are supposed to say you get it from a rival campaign."

Who might like Mitt Romney too much:

"I think it's clear that Romney has gotten fairer treatment from Matt Drudge than any other candidate. There is a lot less negative Romney stuff," said the senior Republican campaign aide. "It stems back to what many people believe is a very good relationship between the Romney team and Matt Drudge."

In particular, Matt Rhoades, Romney's communications director, has a long history as the source for Drudge headlines, having previously served as the research director for the Republican National Committee during the 2006 campaign. In their book "The Way to Win," Time's Mark Halperin and the Politico's John Harris recount that Rhoades traveled to Florida for a friendly steakhouse dinner with Drudge when he took the research director job in 2005.

Oh, my! A good relationship. A friendly dinner! Oh, the sleaziness of new media. I mean, a New York Times reporter couldn't sit down for a meal with a source, could he?

Well, let's check the New York Times Company Journalism Ethics Policy:

Relationships with sources require sound judgment and self-awareness to prevent the fact or appearance of partiality. Cultivating sources is an essential skill, often practiced most effectively in informal settings outside of normal business hours. Yet staff members, especially those assigned to beats, must be aware that personal relationships with news sources can erode into favoritism, in fact or appearance. Editors, who normally have a wide range of relationships, must be especially wary of showing partiality. Where friends and neighbors are also newsmakers, journalists must guard against giving them extra access or a more sympathetic ear. When practical, the best solution is to have someone else deal with them.

Though this topic defies firm rules, it is essential that we preserve professional detachment, free of any hint of bias. Staff members may see sources informally over a meal or drinks, but they must keep in mind the difference between legitimate business and personal friendship. A city editor who enjoys a weekly round of golf with a city council member, for example, risks creating an appearance of coziness. So does a television news producer who spends weekends in the company of people we cover. Scrupulous practice requires that periodically we step back and look at whether we have drifted too close to sources with whom we deal regularly. The test of freedom from favoritism is the ability to maintain good working relationships with all parties to a dispute.

So what did Drudge do with Rhoades that wouldn't fit NYT level ethics? Is it Drudge we should worry about? Or Salon, which seems to have its heart set on trashing him?

Oh, no! The approval rating is down to 29%. Disapproval, 64%.

That's for Congress. Bush is hovering at 33%, where Congress was hanging alongside him last month. To be fair, Congress's average for last year -- per Gallup -- was 25%. People just don't like Congress too much. We're not crazy about the President either but -- again, to be fair to Congress -- it looks as though we're chronically down on the whole institution, whereas with the President, sometimes he's popular. So when the President is unpopular, we mainly don't like what he's doing. But when Congress is unpopular, it's mainly because it's Congress. Sometimes a few of us forget and think wow, Congress, and the number might get up to something like the 37% peak Congress hit this year when Congress was strutting around blabbing about its "mandate," but then, some time passes, and we're back to eh, Congress.

"Are they discriminating... for fear that if the person who doesn’t have the perfect body wins, what does that say about the image of man?"

Or are they discriminating because his prosthetic legs are giant bionic springs?

"If you ever laughed at anything or anyone on this list, you are a racist...."

How to get along in these post-Imus times.

The clash of the critical theory feminist and the sex-positive feminist.

Ouch!

The hood ornament.

It seems unthinkable today. But in 1955, it said something.

I've written about hood ornaments before. You should have seen the hood ornament on the Nash my father bought in the 1950s. Ah! Here it is:

"Just, please, go back to doing something else. Do literary theory. Get upset about Imus. I don't know. But stop talking about Iraq!"

Eli Lake tells the netroots to shut up about Iraq.

Corvette pics.

1954:





1964:







I get lost in the reflections....



... the relative perfection of a car:

Bill Clinton's paean to Hillary.

Discuss!

Well, let me say a couple things:

1. The music gets soooo annoying! About halfway through, I realized I had stopped listening to Bill and was only monitoring the sequence of cornball musical flourishes one and vaguely dreaming of the movie trailer it seemed to belong to. It was some triumphant, heartwarming summer movie that I would avoid like death.

2. Bill completely gave me the impression that Hillary's core policy interest is children's health. Children's health is an important policy interest, but why would I want a President whose core policy interest is children's health? The main idea here is that Hillary is a good person with her heart in the right place. Even if I am willing to be sold that story -- and why should I be? -- I am not going to fall for the notion that we are somehow having an election for Saint of the United States. At most, this ad prepares us to accept her as Secretary of Health and Human Services... even as it acknowledges that her main achievement in the field is a failure. But Bill is good at spinning the failure as an asset. She kept fighting...

3. Really, now, if you've seen the video, tell me: What are her major achievements?

The global warming article I'd like to read in the newspaper.

I keep reading about how hybrid cars and compact fluorescent lightbulbs can reduce the production of greenhouse gases, but I have yet to see an article about the savings that could be achieved if we were to stop delivery of newspapers and magazines and do all of our news reading on line.

For example, The New Republic has a nice "Good Citizen's Guide to Reducing Global Warming" -- PDF -- but they never say you really ought to cancel your subscription to the physical magazine The New Republic and read on line. You should still pay them for full access on-line, and you should buy TimesSelect for the NYT, but isn't it shameful to have this whole stack of newsprint delivered every day?

(And speaking of environmentalism and shame and not worrying about the economic effects on a particular business, shouldn't it become socially unacceptable to drink bottled water?)

Teachers stage fake gun attack and terrorize sixth graders.

Principal admits they showed "poor judgment."

Does Hillary talk like a girl?

Mark Liberman explains why we were right to yawn at that report on a psycholinguistic study that purported to find gender difference in Bill and Hillary's use of language.

I'm surprised to find this paper in a referreed psycholinguistic journal. The analysis is interesting, but its data has no logical connection whatever to gender differences. There are exactly two subjects, and it's true that one them is female while the other is male. But in addition, one of them is from a suburb of Chicago while the other is from rural Arkansas. So perhaps this is really a study about "Regional Differences in the Media Interviews of Bill and Hillary Clinton"? And the two subjects differ in many other ways as well -- the article could with equal plausibility have been presented as telling us about "Social Class Differences" or "The Effect of Early Family Life". Or just "Individual Differences".

"Ignore the trademark prescriptivists."

Says Language Log. How can the International Trademarks Association push a rule like "NEVER use a trademark as a verb" when companies use their own trademark as verbs in ads -- even when it's entirely ungainly and stupid, like "OK, so I Zappos at work"?

Fashion focuses eyes on women's chests.

Upper chests, that is. It's all about the clavicle, the clavicle that you've etched out through hardcore exercise and stringent dieting.



Because what could be sexier that a woman who is shockingly, graphically demonstrating how thoroughly she has excluded all pleasure from her life?

Toned shoppers who want to show off their self-discipline in the face of dessert are choosing dresses with a low, but not plunging neckline, a look that is transforming the area above the breasts into an unlikely new subject for women to obsess over....

Why the new emphasis on a body part most women — and more men — have paid little attention to in the past? Credit a swing of the fashion pendulum, and a malaise over “Girls Gone Wild” style.

Yes, we're bored with breasts now. Haven't you heard? We've had enough of "Girls Gone Wild." We want "Girls Gone Abstemious."

[The clavicle is] an area whose prominence is unlikely to be enhanced surgically (at least for now).

Come on, you slacker plastic surgeons. Get on this, now. Where are my clavicle implants? Figure out how to add bony-looking bumps all over the body. You've been limiting yourself to cheekbones and chins for too long.

This region has been emphasized by the skinny celebrity acolytes of the stylist Rachel Zoe, including Nicole Richie and Keira Knightley. Their ubiquitous deep V-neck tops show off sometimes skeletal frames, and other actresses have taken their cue and sized down as well, to the point that the Internet teems with fashion and celebrity bloggers and message board posters carping about protruding A-list clavicles.

Talk about me, blog about me, say what you like but talk about me. How frighteningly must I cause my bones to protrude to get you to talk about me? Blog about me, dammit!

Courtney E. Martin, the author of “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body” (Free Press, 2007), said that many of the girls and women she interviewed for her book “talked about how far their collarbone stuck out” with pride, as an indicator of their skinniness.

Ms. Martin contends that a generation of young women raised after Title IX and the women’s movement pursue slender figures with the same rigor as they pursue admission to an Ivy League university.

Title IX?! See what happens when you make women competitive? They're just choosing their sport, the extreme sport of thinning.

When Jessica Braff, who works at an advertising agency in New York, lost 15 pounds in her freshmen year of college, the first thing she noticed was that her clavicles were more pronounced.

“I loved it,” she said. She continues to wear clothes that show off her collarbones, which she calls the “easiest and least controversial expression of a kind of sex appeal.”

Yes, it's a kind of sex appeal. The kind that says there is not the slightest thing luscious or sybaritic about me.

On the pro-clavicle side, the most interesting voice is Consuelo Castiglioni, a fashion designer:

[Her] label, Marni, incorporates chest-baring necklines into tops and dresses. The brand has long been a favorite of women seeking clothing that isn’t expressly made to attract men, including skirts with bustles and tops that flare out to obscure any semblance of a waist.

“I think it is clear from my designs that deep cleavages, tight silhouettes, visible tummies or behinds are not part of my aesthetic,” Ms. Castiglioni said in an e-mail message. “What I try to express is elegance and femininity and a more cerebral, hidden sensuality.”

Don't you see? It's intellectual.