Stepping stones

Computer whizzes, help me figure something out.

I noticed I was getting huge traffic this morning — over 3000 visitors an hour — and it was nearly all coming from the Yahoo search for "mccain obama vogue photos" — those exact words, in that order. Right now, Site Meter is showing 68% of my recent traffic as coming from that one search! Here's a list of all the recent searches that brought more than one visitor to my blog:

2,721 mccain obama vogue photos 68.0%
1,099 Not referred from a search engine 27.5%
18 althouse 0.5%
4 ann althouse 0.1%
2 tim russert's last interview

(I know. Who the hell is Clint Wolbert? Please don't get distracted!)

This traffic was coming from many different locations, including foreign countries. Look at the Site Meter world map and you'll see these visitors appear to be coming from all over.

Here is Site Meter's chart showing what search engines people are supposedly coming from. 67.5% of current traffic comes from Yahoo. Since 28.2% of the traffic is not coming from search engines, it looks fishy. Does this merely demonstrate the sheer power of being #1 on a particular search? I only come up 6th in a Google search for those words.

Is something funny going on at Yahoo? Is this real traffic that I can feel good about or phony traffic?

ADDED: The question is whether I've stumbled upon evidence of some sort of scheme to create the appearance of traffic on various websites. I don't suspect that this has anything to do with my blog in particular.

PROBABLE SOLUTION: First, I'm sure I know why I had some visitors looking for Clint Wolbert. My blog comes up second in a search for his name (because he wrote in my comments a couple times), and he was quoted in a NYT article today, which would have set off a few searches:

Gay Couples Find Marriage Is a Mixed Bag

... To Clint Wolbert, 28, marriage is too “assimilative.” Being gay is like belonging to an “exclusive club,” Mr. Wolbert said. “I just worry that the drive to marry will end up kind of chipping away at the culture.”

Second, all that "mccain obama vogue photos" traffic most likely occurred because some high-traffic website included a link to that Yahoo search. People clicked on that link and then were motivated to click again to my post, which was the first link on that search. I haven't located that other post, but it must exist. I sometimes link to a search page to prove a point, such as the fact that there's a lot of talk about something. It seems so obvious now. Now, you've seen my little tendency to think bad people are up to no good.

IN THE COMMENT: Clint stops by and expands on the quote!

The "Meet the Press" tribute to Tim Russert.

Are you watching? (It will be up later for on-line streaming.) [ADDED: Here's that video.]

They are doing a nice job. The graphic still said "Meet the Press With Tim Russert," and they opened to an empty set with Tim's empty chair in the middle, then tilted down to Tom Brokaw. (The initial view of the top of Brokaw's head was — unintentionally — humorous.)

The show is full of interesting clips of old shows — including one just now where he used the expression to "saw your leg off" to Bob Kerrey, a man who's had his leg sawed off.

ADDED: Tom Brokaw breaks up as he tries to quote something Russert said a lot: "What a great country."

AND: At the end of the show, Brokaw reminds us that it's Father's Day and tells us we could honor Russert — who was a devoted son and father and wrote a couple books about fathers — by honoring our own fathers. Then there's a photo montage played over Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road." (Russert was a big Springsteen fan.) They return to the empty set. On screen, the words: Tim Russert/Managing Editor.

Very nicely done. I especially enjoyed the sequence of clips where he confronted various interviewees about whether they intended to run for President. Hillary Clinton's adamant noes were hilarious.

"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."

Is it okay for Obama to say that? If not, why not?

McCain supporters see something to exploit, and the angle is — watch for this meme — what if McCain had said that?

Well, of course, if you say something that resonates with the opinion we already have of you, we will comment on it one way, and if you say something that seems out of character, we take a different tack. So if a warmonger laughs about a bomb, we say one thing. If a peacenik laughs about a bomb, we say another. Both are attacked, and rightly so.

But Obama — is he a peacenik? — didn't laugh about a bomb. He used a figure of speech. (Actually, he amped up the old figure of speech don't bring a knife to a gun fight.)

Figures of speech matter a bit — they offer some insight. But in this case, I was glad to see Obama show some grit and fighting spirit. I worry that he's bland and effete. I worry that he's a peacenik. So — as someone who is committed to neither candidate — I welcomed the remark. I want him toughened up.

A better angle for McCain supporters: Bring a knife to the fight? Bring a gun? Obama runs away from a fight!

There's also the notion that Obama is supposedly represents a "new politics" that precludes tough fighting. Ben Smith writes:

"Why is Barack Obama so negative? In the last 24 hours, he’s completely abandoned his campaign’s call for ‘new politics,’ equating the election to a ‘brawl’ and promising to ‘bring a gun,' " said the RNC's Alex Conant.

Obama doesn't actually use the phrase "new politics" a lot, and this is a box that the Clinton campaign tried, and failed, to keep him in last year, when it emerged early that he was happy to throw punches, and even to start fistfights, sending, for instance, the first negative mail to hit in Iowa last fall.

Obama never paid much of a price for his willingness to go negative. He also, to be fair, never promised that he wouldn't attack, and indeed often promised to be tougher than past Democrats, and bragged of his Chicago training.

Obama would be crazy to avoid fights or to allow himself to be defined as a gentle sweetheart who won't say anything mean.

"I can see why you married her," said George Bush to Nicolas Sarkozy.

Is it okay for him to say that?

"Water rose up way too close to us earlier."

"It went back down later but now the skies have just opened up again and it’s raining hard, hailing on us and a tornado warning. We are just not catching any breaks here in Cedar Rapids at all today."

Dave Howell has words and video on the flooding in Iowa — extremely well presented on his blog (which was linked at BBC.com).

Enter the herb garden.

The place with the gazing globe and the pyramid trellis has changed from 2 days ago:

"Garden closed due to high water."

It's storming again now. Too much water!

But it was completely sunny when I stopped by the garden with my fisheye lens earlier today.

"A man in the audience yelled, 'I can't take it anymore!' No one shushed him."

Just how bad is "The Happening" — the new M. Night Shyamalan movie? (Not the 1960s movie with the Supremes theme song.) James Kirchick says it's even worse than you think. (Spoilers.) The movie has a "morally appalling premise: that the mere existence of the human race is a cause for great shame." Nature somehow sends a message to everyone to commit suicide:

Shyamalan leaves little to the imagination in depicting man's nature-inflicted suicide. We see a woman stab herself in the neck with a hair pin. A man runs himself over with a lawnmower. On can't help but leave the theater thinking that Shyamalan derives a sick, masochistic pleasure in showing the deaths of all his bit characters, hopeless rubes are these human beings. They drove their SUVs for too long and had a big carbon footprint and now they're go.

Ugh! Obscene.

Is it real?
Is it fake?
Is this game of life a mistake?

ADDED: The 60s movie "The Happening" came out in 1967. And here's a Life magazine cover from that year:



Happenings quickly got tiresome and before long, no one would say the word. Somehow, later we got performance art... and a movie called "The Happening" that seems to have no idea that the word once meant performance art.

People keep telling me to read this article...

... but every time I look at it, I get sidetracked and I'm just: no, no, no, no, no, no.

"I got a hard time from all sorts of blogs ... who said I looked like Urkel."

Triumph! Barack Obama knows and cares what bloggers say about his clothes!

"Goodbye, metabolic. Let’s get our checkups together. Go! Go! Go! Goodbye, metabolic. Don’t wait till you get sick. No! No! No!"

Fighting metabo in Japan.

"Farmers hate rules, any rule that controls their land. They hate to have new people making decisions."

When Madison types buy up a lot of land in the surrounding farm land, what happens to local government?

"They're the NIMBYs and CAVEs — Not In My Backyarders and Citizens Against Virtually Everything," [says a Cross Plains farmer Jerome Esser]. "This town was great before they came. Now the newcomers want many of the things changed that made it great.".

The new arrivals buy up land "that our forefathers cleared for farmland," then plant trees and treat it like a city backyard....

[A retired research psychologist who moved to Cross Plains in the mid-'60s, Bob] Bowman says the real debate isn't between old and new so much as a "difference in ideology" between opposing factions. He says the town of Cross Plains is under growing pressure from "pro-rail, anti-development, Progressive Dane liberals." And while liberalism is supposed to be about freedom, "liberals in Madison are arguing now for regimentation over classical 'free to disagree' tradition."

Did the Boumediene case make the Supreme Court a big campaign issue overnight?

Linda Greenhouse notes that some people think so:

[T]he prospect of using the decision as a rallying point seemed to occur to many conservatives simultaneously. The ruling has “teed up the Supreme Court issue nicely for the G.O.P.,” Curt Levey of the Committee for Justice, a group that advocates for Republican judicial nominees, wrote on his blog. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page quoted Justice Robert H. Jackson’s famous observation that the Constitution is not a suicide pact and added, with reference to the author of Thursday’s majority opinion, “About Anthony Kennedy’s Constitution, we’re not so sure.”

On the other end of the spectrum, liberals warned that the vision of civil liberties embraced by the court’s narrow majority — security requires “fidelity to freedom’s first principles,” Justice Kennedy wrote — was hanging by a thread. “One more Bush justice on the court and the decision would likely have gone the other way,” said Kathryn Kolbert, president of People for the American Way. Senator Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic nominee, praised the decision as “an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law.”

So what was that thing Ezra Klein feels so bad about?

Here he is feeling bad. Here's the thing.

By the way, remember the AutoAdmit lawsuit? If you think those Yale law students ought to be able to sue the on-line idiots for saying what they did about them, don't you also have to believe Tim Russert had a cause of action against Ezra Klein? 

ADDED: In the mindset of the AutoAdmit plaintiffs, what Ezra twittered was a rape threat.

"But I can't think of any time in my life when I've felt so awful about the death of a single individual I've never met."

Jac has a nice, long post explaining why Tim Russert meant so much to him.

I ... had to watch ["Meet the Press"]. Every Sunday. He just made the news seem so much more serious, even momentous, than anyone else did.

Above all, he forced our leaders to explain themselves -- to answer the tough questions that everyone was raising about them.

And he did this with everyone, never seeming to discriminate based on party or ideology. I remember when John Edwards had a disastrous performance on Meet the Press in the 2004 race -- many commentators saw it as a major obstacle to him in trying to win the Democratic nomination. And I remember seeing him interview John McCain back in 2006, when he was just a "probable presidential candidate" .... Without being unfair, and even though he gave McCain ample time to defend himself, Russert left no doubt that McCain had shifted far to the right of his maverick/centrist past in preparation for the Republican primaries. At the end of the interview, McCain acknowledged his discomfort: "I haven’t had so much fun since my last interrogation."

Much more at the link.