"Entering September -- short pants strictly prohibited."

Please obey the law.

Zogby has McCain/Palin pulling ahead and men, not women, favoring Palin; and I offer a poll about that.

It's 49.7% to 45.9% for September 5-6. It was 47.1% (McCain/Palin) to 44.6% (Obama/Biden) for August 29-30.

I'm surprised how few voters are undecided (or for someone other the major party candidates): only 4.4%. But maybe people are shiftable, and claiming to be undecided just isn't as cool as it used to be. Maybe I should stop doing it! Ha ha. But I am undecided. I insist that the candidates woo me until the bitter end.

Now, an interesting thing is that the August 29-30 poll showed 8.3% undecided, which means that the conventions (or whatever else may have happened in the last few days) pushed 3.9% to take a position. If we were to assume that the change in the numbers represented only people moving out of the "others/not sure" category, then 2.6% went to McCain/Palin, and 1.3% went to Obama/Biden.

Another interesting thing is that the polls come out different if you ask the question using only the names of the presidential candidates, with McCain at 48.8% and Obama at 45.7% (and "others/not sure" at 5.5%). So it seems that Palin helps McCain much more than Biden helps Obama.

Zogby analyzes:

Clearly, Palin is helping the McCain ticket. She has high favorability numbers, and has unified the Republican Party. The striking thing here in this poll is that McCain has pulled ahead among Catholics by double-digits. On the other hand, Palin is not helping with likely voting women who are not aligned with either political party. The undecided independent women voters decreased this week from 15% to 7%, but those women went to Obama. Palin is also helping among men, conservatives, notably with suburban and rural voters, and with frequent Wal-Mart shoppers, who tend to be "values" voters who like a good value for their money.

Fascinating. It's the men who are going for Palin and women aren't buying it? Can we still accuse men of sexism -- if they're fine with women candidates, even excited about them, so long as they support traditional family values? Meanwhile, the women voters stay put and are not swayed by the mere sex of the candidate. I'm trying to speculate about which sex does better at analyzing the candidates without taking gender into account. You could say it's the women, because Palin didn't move them, but they may be taking Palin's sex into account and rejecting her because she isn't hewing to the usual women's rights issues or because they are discriminating against her because of sex. And you could say the men are being gender-neutral and what they like about Palin is not her sex but her good, old-fashioned conservatism.

Assuming it's true that it's men, not women, who are enthusiastically embracing Sarah Palin, why is it?
	Men love her womanly charms, and women are discriminating against her because of her sex.
	Men love her womanly charms, and women soberly judge her to be too conservative.
	Women are discriminating against her, and men soberly approve of her impressive conservatism.
	Both men and women are thinking rationally, but men are more conservative.
pollcode.com free polls

"This isn't about going into the coffee shop business and abandoning the library. There are people who really lament this change."

"But if we hadn't done it, we would have lost the users, the students."

Says Ken Frazier, the University of Wisconsin-Madison director of libraries.

He's talking about the College Library, in Helen C. White Hall.

College Library has long been considered a social space on campus, and librarians appear to be encouraging fraternization.

Meanwhile, there are only about 100 paper journals and magazines left in the library, where previously there were a thousand. Most of them are less academic and more focused on popular culture or current events, such as Bicycling or Time. Scholarly journals are still available, but they're housed at the more traditional Memorial Library or in digital form....

With the changes came more room for study and gathering spaces....

Are you a library traditionalists? Do you want everybody to shush?

You can still check out a book. Like this:


(Photo by pamela-o.)

ADDED: Libraries should be used for socializing. Books are sexually stimulating:

PAM: Oh, hi! I'm Pam. You must be Kramer. [Kramer is smitten with Pam and grins goofily.] Jerry's told me a lot about you. [Kramer continues grinning.] Well, I'm supposed to meet Jerry, it's my day off. I work in a bookstore.

KRAMER (mouths the words): Books. [Knocks over a bowl of fruit on the counter.]

...

KRAMER: She works in a book shop. Her name is Pam.

NEWMAN: "Pam." I don't know the woman, but she sounds quite fetching.

KRAMER: I can't even speak in front of her. [Sits down on the couch.]

NEWMAN: Jerry! What could she possibly see in Jerry? [Walks in front of Kramer and trips over his feet.]

KRAMER: She has delicate beauty.

NEWMAN: Jerry wouldn't know delicate beauty if it bludgeoned him over the head.

...

NEWMAN: With your looks and my words, we'll have built the perfect beast.

PAM: Oh, hi! Kramer.

NEWMAN (whispers through the bookcase): Hi. How are you?

KRAMER: Hi. How are you?

PAM: I'm great.

NEWMAN: I too am well.

KRAMER: I too am well.

NEWMAN: Do I smell Pantene?

KRAMER: Do I smell?

NEWMAN: Pantene!

KRAMER: Uh, Pantene.

PAM: Oh, my shampoo. Yeah, it is Pantene, I got a free sample in with my junk mail.

KRAMER (talks rapidly in an attempt to keep up with Newman): Well, there really is no junk-mail...well, everybody wants to get a check or a birthday card, but...

NEWMAN (frantic): ...it takes just as much man-power to deliver it as their precious little greeting cards...

KRAMER: Newman! [Elbows him through the books. Newman falls over.]

PAM: What?

KRAMER: Uh, human. It's...human to be moved by a fragrance.

PAM: That's so true.

KRAMER: Her bouquet cleaved his hardened...

NEWMAN: Shell.

KRAMER: ...shell. And fondled his muscled heart. He embibed her glistening spell...just before the other shoe...fell.

PAM: Kramer, that is so lovely.

KRAMER: It's by an unknown 20th-century poet.

PAM: Oh, what's his name?

KRAMER: Newman. [On the other side of the bookcase, Newman preens proudly.]

I hope you new college kids have many wonderful conversations through bookcases... or in IMs... or wherever...

Tony Mauro wants to remind people that Joe Biden has treated a few Supreme Court nominees a little shabbily.

He writes:

[Clarence Thomas] has less than fond memories of his treatment by Biden, who chaired his stormy 1991 hearing. In his 2007 memoir "My Grandfather's Son," Thomas recalls that Biden initially kept Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment against Thomas private. Before the firestorm began, Biden called him at home and said, "Judge, I know you don't believe me," but if the allegations come up, "I will be your biggest defender." Wrote Thomas, "He was right about one thing. I didn't believe him."

A bit more at the link. But it would be very easy to comb the old Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for loose talk that poured out of Joe Biden's mouth while an esteemed judge had to sit there and put up with it. I may go back and read the transcripts from the Reagan-Bush I era, but as for the the Roberts and Alito material, I've pre-blogged it, so let's see what I have.

There's this description, from Elisabeth Bumiller, of Biden at Day 2 of the Alito hearings:

"I understand, Judge, I am the only one standing between you and lunch, so I'll try to make this painless," he began, with some promise.

Mr. Biden then dived into a soliloquy on Judge Alito's failure to recuse himself from cases involving the Vanguard mutual fund company, which managed the judge's investments. After 2 minutes 50 seconds - short for the senator - Mr. Biden did appear to veer toward a question, but abandoned it to cite Judge Alito's membership in a conservative Princeton alumni group. Mr. Biden discoursed on that for a moment, then interrupted himself with an aside about his son who "ended up going to that other university, the University of Pennsylvania."

Judge Alito, who had been sitting without expression through Mr. Biden's musings, interrupted the senator midword, got out three sentences, then settled in for nearly 26 minutes more of Mr. Biden, with the senator doing most of the talking. With less than a minute to spare, Mr. Biden concluded, thanked Judge Alito for "being responsive," then said to Mr. Specter that "I want to note that for maybe the first time in history, Biden is 40 seconds under his time."

To which I said:

How appalling! And complimenting himself, in the third person, in the end, as if he's being charmingly self-deprecating?

There's this from Day 3 of the Roberts hearings:

Joe Biden is hamming it up big time, dramatizing the frustration of not getting Roberts to say how he'll decide specific cases. We've been through this so many times, but Biden seems to think that, if he just emotes more than the others, the American public will finally see the outrage of a judge not committing his vote before hearing the case. Yet every time Roberts explains why he won't answer, he sounds so eloquent and even inspiring about the role of the judge, that it ends up making the Senator look childish.

None of this Roberts-Alito material is anywhere near as awful as what happened to Thomas (and Robert Bork). Biden was just talking too much, in love with the sound of his own voice, and frankly, that let the nominees off the hook.

"He cheated... on her?!"

A fascinating photoset, but why do we imagine that if only one is beautiful enough -- or sufficiently more beautiful than the other -- the other won't cheat? I can think of at least 5 reasons why the opposite would be true:

1. The terribly beautiful partner's beauty may have had a bad effect on her (or his) personality, since people lavish attention on a beautiful person without expecting reciprocal warmth, so the less beautiful one strays into the arms of someone kinder, more interesting, or more sexually energetic.

2. The less beautiful one may feel less beautiful and inferior, undeserving of the prize, and need to go elsewhere to feel more comfortable and less pressured.

3. A person who marries a terribly beautiful person has demonstrated his attraction to terribly beautiful individuals, so why wouldn't he (or she) feel captivated by other beautiful women? That Billy Bob Thorton had Laura Dern didn't keep him from seeing and loving Angelina Jolie.

4. A less-good-looking person who has won admiration for his (or her) ability to stand next to someone very beautiful may want his ego stroked a second (or third) time by getting another beautiful person to do the same. The first one might seem like a fluke, but if he can get another, it will prove there is something truly amazing about him.

5. A person who marries someone very beautiful may be a very shallow person, attracted to surfaces and thus less likely to form the kind of bond to the soul of another that will be needed to keep the couple together when the novelty and heat of passion wear out, as they almost surely will.

Maureen Dowd, assuming Obama will lose because he didn't pick Hillary, pictures the great Hillary-Palin presidential debate in 2012.

It's like this:

PALIN: I’ve got a little news flash for you, Hillary. Your night-shift, blue-collar-waitress, boilermaker routine didn’t fool me. It’s in your polls but it’s in my D.N.A. I’ve actually been up at 3 a.m. — gutting moose. While you got to go to your snooty Wellesley, I had to switch colleges six times in six years. While you got to go to Yale Law, I had to enter beauty contests and turn my back to judges in a bathing suit to get scholarship money.

CLINTON: I’ve got a little news flash for you, Annie Oakley. Dinosaurs disappeared a lot longer than 4,000 years ago. I admit you’ve had a profound influence on America, and I’m not just talking about all the women wearing up-dos and rimless titanium $375 Kazuo Kawasaki designer frames. You and John are now at war with four countries — Russia, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, even as Osama bin Laden has opened a storefront in a strip mall in Pakistan to make TV ads.

(I added those links.)

Does Dowd's comic vision of the 2012 debate amuse you? Maybe not, but I think the picture of Hillary versus Sarah in 2012 is compelling. That could happen.

Meanwhile, we have the little preview of that scenario as Obama attempts to dispatch Hillary as his female surrogate to attack Palin, which is a dubious strategy. Will Hillary fight for Obama with enough vigor to make Democrats believe she's the one to go up against Vice President Palin in 2012? Maybe she'll fight harder for Obama if she thinks that question is about to come up. Fight well, but how do you fight just well enough?

What the women wore on the convention stages.

Robin Givhan observes the fashions of various political women:

It is not sexist to have noticed that Sen. Hillary Clinton delivered her convention speech dressed in head-to-toe mango. Only an obstinately unaware person would have ignored this question: Senator, why are you dressed like a tropical fruit? One assumes it was to ensure an eye-catching photo for the history books and to underscore her "sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits" legacy.

But what about the potential first ladies?

The first lady serves as a reflection of her husband's administration and of womanhood, and one suspects that when there is a first gentleman, he will bear the burden of epitomizing an ideal of manhood and will be forced to wrestle with accusations that he is too much of a metrosexual, a dandy, a he-man or a wimp. Almost certainly, we will obsess about his ties.

When Cindy McCain made her first appearance at the Republican National Convention, she was wearing a buttercup-yellow shirt dress with a flipped-up collar by Seventh Avenue designer Oscar de la Renta. As is the current fashion, the dress looked as though the designer had found some inspiration in the early 1960s world of "Mad Men." It was feminine, reserved and lovely. Ballpark price for a de la Renta dress: $3,000.

I loved that dress. It is the most distinctive thing any political woman has worn this year. I read some bitching on the liberal blogs about how her outfit cost $300,000, but nearly all of that was the cost of some diamond jewelry. It wasn't a $300,000 dress. But you know, that dress was historically beautiful. And I suppose it's worth $300,000 now. The "off-the-shoulder, ink-blue velvet dinner dress that the Princess of Wales wore when she danced at the White House with John Travolta sold for $222,500" in 1997 (before the princess died).

De la Renta also designed the inaugural gowns worn by Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush and that cream-colored suit Laura Bush wore when she stood next to Cindy McCain at the convention, Givhan notes, pronouncing the Republicans "status quo." Meanwhile, when Michelle joined Barack Obama on the stage, she was "wearing a raspberry, lavender and black print silk dress by American designer Thakoon Panichgul," who is not a heavily established designer:

The dress, with its slim bodice and A-line skirt, came from his 2009 resort collection... [T]he Thakoon dress... was too informal and failed to reflect the significance of the occasion. And with that fabric belt hanging down the back, it resembled a child's special-occasion frock rather than something suitable for a sophisticated 44-year-old. The flats reinforced the tea-party aesthetic

Oops. So we want change... but what kind of change? A change might be for the worse. There's a reason why the status quo is status quo.

If you're a SiteMeter junkie like I am...

You'll be interested to know that SiteMeter -- yes, it's SiteMeter, not Site Meter or Sitemeter -- is shifting to a new platform next weekend.

Following the Migration all Premium Accounts will only pay one flat fee of $6.95 a month or $59.00 a year. This applies to new signups and current paid accounts going forward.

This is great news. The current fee structure was based on traffic levels, and I've been paying about $30 a month and expecting to see an increase with recent (election-based) rise traffic. I love the expanded statistics I get with the premium account, especially this page, which shows the websites readers are coming from. I also like -- and sometimes screen-capture and blog about -- this page, which shows the search terms that bring people here. There are always funny things. The terms are listed in alphabetical order, and there's always something in the section beginning with the word "why" that cracks me up.

For example, right now, there's "why does my dog seem mean when im high." I can click on it and get to the search page and see what post of mine was found and where my post ranked in the search. This page of mine came up on the first page of the poignant search that had some poor soul wondering, perhaps, whether his drug use was distorting his perception of the dog or whether the dog was pissed at him for getting high or -- why not? -- whether the drugs are enhancing his perceptions and the dog actually is mean. Of course, my blog post -- about Barack Obama's statement of belief that he has "the right temperament for the presidency" -- is not going to answer the question. There's nothing in the post about drugs: Obama uses the word "high" to refer to feelings of elation. And there's nothing in the post about dogs -- except one commenter's "Temperament. That's a quality dog breeders emphasize."

At one point, I decided I was paying too much for this information and downgraded to the free basic service, but within a few days I was back. I am hooked on the stuff. (Why does my dog seem mean when I smoke too much SiteMeter?) Suffice it to say, I'm happy with the new low price.

Visit Counts will likely be higher

We have now added the ability to track visits using cookies, this allows SiteMeter to distinguish unique visitors far more accurately than on the old (current) platform. For example, in an office building with internet users sitting behind one IP address the old (current) platform would maybe be able to detect unique visitors about half the time. Using the cookie system it’s nearly 100% accurate.

More traffic. Cool.

For those using our Free service with large volumes of visit traffic your visit counts may be lower. Our new platform offers unlimited capacity on visit records which no longer affects visit counts. (for more information on this see http://weblog.sitemeter.com/2007/10/05/sitemeter-visit-tracking-explained/)

Huh? So my traffic would have been higher under the free service? I don't like seeing that, but it only relates to the past. As for the future, it will be interesting to see the reshuffling of traffic statistic as some blogs will see a boost in their numbers and others a reduction.

So that's the SiteMeter news.

"The question is, will Mrs. Clinton fight Ms. Palin to help her former rival, Mr. Obama?"

Patrick Healy asks:

Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Palin have little in common beyond their breakout performances at the conventions and the soap opera aspects of their family lives. Mrs. Clinton always faces high expectations; Ms. Palin faced low expectations this week, and benefited from them. Mrs. Clinton can seem harsh when she goes on the attack; Ms. Palin has shown a knack for attacking without seeming nasty. Mrs. Clinton has a lot of experience; Ms. Palin, not so much. Mrs. Clinton is pantsuits; Ms. Palin is skirts.

Some Republican delegates in St. Paul saw starker differences.

“Sarah’s smile is sincere, which I never felt from Hillary, who has anger and resentment in her eyes,” said Ann Schmuecker, a delegate from Mountain Home, Arkansas, where she met the Clintons decades ago.

(Song cue.)

But Palin may appeal to the "white working women with children living in the exurbs and in rural parts of battleground states" who stuck by Hillary in the primaries. Obama may look to Hillary to try to deliver those voters to him, but then the question is: Does she want to?

Some of her aides note with a hint of resentment that Mr. Obama did not pick her as his running mate; he did not even vet her fully.

Fully? I thought he didn't vet her at all!

Plus, they add, her fall calendar also includes campaigning for Senate Democratic candidates, not just for Mr. Obama.

Ha ha, yeah. She's too busy!

“Let me tell you something,” said Luanne Van Werven, a Republican delegate from Lynden, Wash., as the convention closed late Thursday night. “I secretly think Hillary loves Sarah Palin.”

Oh, is sisterhood powerful all of a sudden? No. It's just that Hillary may want Obama to lose so she can run for 2012.

ADDED: In the comments, some people are making something of the NYT's use of different honorifics for Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. Why is it Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Palin? The NYT is following a longstanding neutral rule:

The use of “Mrs.” is appropriate whenever a woman prefers it. It isn’t our choice, yours or mine; it is hers. Our style rule calls for us to use "Ms." in subsequent references to a woman unless she prefers "Miss" or "Mrs." and reporters are told that they should ask for the woman’s preference. That holds for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as well as other women (in her case, of course, "Senator" is also an option in subsequent references).

Hillary Clinton is one of those women who asked to be called Mrs.:

THE sign outside Nancy Pelosi's office bears the mark of her feminist roots: it identifies her as "Ms. Pelosi," using the honorific created half a century ago to give women an alternative to disclosing their marital status.

But mostly Mrs. Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, goes by just that — Mrs. Pelosi.

Across the Capitol, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, is referred to as Mrs. Clinton at every roll call. Yet the women in the Senate are split: seven use Mrs., but the other six go by Ms., including three who are married: Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine; Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana; and Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan.

Now, you can analyze the personality or the political strategy of various women as they decide whether to overcome the default and ask to be called "Mrs." (or "Miss"), but put aside your theories about New York Times bias.

"According to Lucille, the waitress serving her table at the time and who asked that her last name not be used..."

Incredibly weakly sourced anti-Palin crap. (Via Memeorandum.)

But being openly racist is only the tip of the Palin iceberg. According to Alaskans interviewed for this article, she is also vindictive and mean. We’re talking Rove mean and Nixon vindictive.

"Everybody's talking about change now."

Obama's all: John McCain is stealing my meme:



That's today in Terre Haute, Indiana.

ADDED: Everybody's talking about Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism, Ragism, Tagism, this-ism, That-ism, is-m, is-m, is-m...

What if you could play like this...

... but only while doing this with your face:



AND: Then there's this:

"3 times in 2 weeks, political speeches were watched by more people than the 'American Idol' finale..."

... or the Academy Awards or opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

We were tuning in like crazy not just for the big new celebrities, Obama and Palin, but even for crusty old John McCain, who, we know, isn't a good speechmaker.

Have we gone mad?

ADDED: Obviously, the election is important, but we aren't voting for best speechmaker. Why are we suddenly so interested in listening to speeches? Isn't that sort of a 19th century form of entertainment? Anyway, observing the trend, I want to propose a new TV show: "American Orator."

"Give me a signal: Adjust your shorts."

It's the commercial that is mystifying and horrifying everyone.

IN THE COMMENTS: Scrutineer says:

One doesn't dissect a Vorshtein.

Choice.

Link.

[I've replaced the embed, which I think is playing havoc with some browsers.]

Regretflix, regretstuff.

Netflix rentals that sit there for months. What were you thinking when you ordered them? That you're the kind of person who watches movies like that? But you're not so why did you get yourself into the situation where a little piece of plastic has invaded your house and taunts you for not being the person you think you should be? Or do you like to be reminded of your lofty aspirations... by objects in your house? There are many worse things you might have around than an unwatched copy of "Hotel Rwanda."

Topics for discussion:

1. What rented movies do you have in the house? How are they making you feel? Do you keep misjudging what kind of person you are? Do you want to become that person or do you think you ought to sharpen up your perception of who you are and rent the movies that person likes to watch? Should you feel worse about not being the kind of person who watches "Hotel Rwanda" or worse about being the kind of person who lacks sharp enough self-perception to know you're not the kind of person who watches "Hotel Rwanda"?

2. Would you feel better if you hadn't rented, if you'd bought the film -- I note my instinctive shift to the term "film" -- and put it on a shelf in a nice bookcase, where it would be part of your "library"? The issue of returning it would cease to exist, and you could think of yourself as the kind of person who has that film in his library. It would be more like all those books you've bought. Or do all those books you've bought and not read taunt you? Are you reading on line now all the time and free of regret because you never remember the pages you've clicked away from, the tabs you never went back to, and the links you might have clicked?

3. What else do you have in your house that is preying on your mind like borrowed or purchased movies and books that you haven't watched/read? Clothes in a size you think you might wear again or with an image that never seems like the way you feel today? Sporting and exercise equipment? Music recordings? (You should like jazz and classical, shouldn't you?) Fresh fruits and vegetables that at least have the decency to decay into a form that forces you to oust them from the premises. Dying plants. And then we slide into the category of things that won't let you stop at mere regret if you fail to turn your attention their way. Those pets. The human beings you live with. No, perish the thought. You're not even allowed to think that you regret bringing them into your house. Your regretspace.

CORRECTED TEXT: Indicated by boldface, above.