In the grass today...

The Persian Pearl ground tulip:



The grape hyacinth:



The blogger...

The red-winged blackbird's point of view.

"The art with which 'Dreams From My Father' is constructed to serve his deepest personal needs shows how ludicrous is the charge of Rush Limbaugh and others that he did not write it."

That laughably incomprehensible sentence is written by Garry Wills in his NYT book review of David Remnick's new book about Barack Obama (inanely titled "The Bridge").

I mean, really,the book serves Obama's interests — excuse me: deepest personal needs — so therefore he must have written it himself. Absurd!

Remnick rightly sees that memoir as a bildungsroman in the specifically black form of a “slave narrative,” a story of the rise from dependency to mature self-possession. 

Oh, for the love of God. How does a privileged modern American get to style himself as a slave?

In order to place himself in that tradition, Obama darkens the early part of the story and lightens the concluding sections. He trims the facts to fit the genre, just as he trimmed the events in his Selma speech to fit the black sermon format. 

Trims the facts, eh? Some would call that lying. Or just bullshit.

Obama was not literally a slave in his youth...

Now there's a concession!

... but he was in thrall to false images of his father, fostered by his mother’s protective loyalty to her husband. 

You see the similarity? He was "in thrall" — etymologically, enslaved — to... to what? To nothing. That sentence just says that Obama's mother presented him with a positive image of his absent father. That's nothing like slavery. It's insensitive to slaves to make that analogy. Hell, it's insensitive to common sense!

Since Obama comes to a later recognition of his father’s flaws, the story is crafted to show him shedding false idealism to become a pragmatic realist. 

Which has nothing to do with slave narratives.

The narrative protects him from claims that he is an ideologue or peddler of false hopes.

Yeah? How?

Things said over an alpina pizza.

The blog comment M reads out loud is here.

At the Green Bark Café...

... howl.

"Without explanation, sometime during the last 24 hours, The Cap Times changed the term tea 'baggers' to tea 'partiers' in the third paragraph of Bill Novak's article."

"Why was this done and does The Cap Times consider this practice to be an example of good journalism?"

So wrote Meade in the comments over here, at a Bill Novak blog post, and his comment is now being addressed at a Cap Times blog post, written by  Chris Murphy. Murphy's headline is "What do you think, is writing 'tea baggers' off-limits?"

It's not clear to me if Mr. Meade was taking issue with the lack of explanation, using the word in the first place or changing it. I've e-mailed him to ask (and also to find out if he's the same Laurence Meade who won Ann Althouse's heart through his comments on her blog), but no response yet.

The objection is — I think it's obvious — to using it in the first place and then to changing it without owning up to the fact that you'd done it and that a correction was required.

If it's the lack of explanation that was the issue, well, now you have it...

Put the correction at the site of the original article, not in some other blog post somewhere. You had one thing, and then you replaced it with something else when there was criticism. It's not the explanation that's wanted. It's the transparency. We know the explanation. You got criticized.

... but what if he objected to changing it? Are there a lot of you out there who think we, especially at the liberal-from-the-day-we-were-born Capital Times shouldn't think twice about using a word that raises conservative hackles? I certainly do see it regularly in the comments from tea party opponents.

Yes, we live in Madison, Wisconsin, where cluelessness skews left.

... I don't think it's that bad, but I can't say I'm comfortable seeing it in a news story, either. The Associated Press, whose stylebook is the arbiter on many such questions, has not yet weighed in, though its most recent edition does say that "tea party" should be lowercase. Lots of help there. So I'll ask you, gentle readers, what do you think our policy should be?

Oh, good lord.

ADDED: Meade writes:

"So I'll ask you, gentle readers, what do you think our policy should be?"

Dear Mr. Murphy,

I think your policy should be based on sound journalistic principles - not what your readers think.

Sincerely,
A Gentle Reader

The bump is back.

Get out your rattail combs.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jason notes the real source of this new trend, whom the above-linked NYT piece eclipses. It's:

"Growing up, he later said, he assumed there was no one else in the world like him."

Meinhardt Raabe, born in 1915 in Watertown, Wisconsin, played the Munchkin coroner and is now, 94 years later, not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.

"I know what you're doing! You want to buy right-wing lettuce seed!"

Just something I said, seconds ago.

"The White House is now faced with a heady political calculation."

"It could invest its efforts, energy and capital in a potentially draining fight this summer over a Supreme Court nominee like Wood, who has made controversial rulings on abortion and would almost certainly face a raging firefight over her confirmation. Or it could move toward a less-controversial selection, such as Garland, in a bid to bolster its domestic agenda before this year's congressional elections. Garland has been spoken of favorably by some conservatives, and Kagan is also seen as less combustible than Wood."

Within this small pool of extremely well-qualified candidates, Obama should pick the person he thinks will do the best work for us on the Court. There will be a big fight no matter what, because there is too much to be gained from using the confirmation as a political battlefield. It's a shameful business to exclude candidates because they have had to decide abortion cases. We are impoverished if the more experienced jurists are passed over precisely because of their experience, because they have written opinions that we can read and argue about. Obama and the Democrats should have the nerve to defend the judicial decisions we call liberal.

"When President Ford was faced with a Supreme Court vacancy shortly after the nation was still recovering from the Watergate scandal, he wanted a nominee who was brilliant" and committed to the law, Obama said, hailing Stevens as a justice who "has stood as an impartial guardian of the law . . . with fidelity and restraint. . . . He will turn 90 this month, but he leaves this position at the top of his game."

On paper, it would seem that this would be Obama's last chance to appoint an assertively liberal choice to replace Stevens, who emerged as the loudest voice of the court's left wing. Democrats hold a large majority in the Senate. Next year, their grip on the chamber could be much more tenuous.

I find those 2 paragraphs, taken together, pretty amusing. Was Justice Stevens a brilliant, impartial, restrained, faithful guardian of the rule of law or the loudest voice of the left wing?

ADDED: Tobin Harshaw does a great job of collecting a lot of opinion about the various frontrunners. Excerpt:

Judicial experience may not be the only intangible working against Kagan. Another may be that she’s Jewish. “Almost nobody has noticed that when Justice Stevens retires, it is entirely possible that there will be no Protestant justices on the court for the first time ever,” writes NPR’s Nina Totenberg. “Let’s face it: This is a radioactive subject. As Jeff Shesol, author of the critically acclaimed new book Supreme Power, puts it, ‘religion is the third rail of Supreme Court politics. It’s not something that’s talked about in polite company.’ And although Shesol notes that privately a lot of people remark about the surprising fact that there are so many Catholics on the Supreme Court, this is not a subject that people openly discuss. … Only seven Jews have ever served, and two of them are there now. Depending on the Stevens replacement, there may be no Protestants left on the court at all in a majority Protestant nation where, for decades and generations, all of the justices were Protestant.”

This is why my money is on Wood.

"Stevens spoke little about his family's ordeal, but it surely helped inspire a lifelong faith in the fairness of judges and the courts."

David Savage tells the fascinating story of Justice Stevens' boyhood:

He was born in 1920, the youngest of four boys in a wealthy family. When he was 7, his father opened the 28-story Stevens Hotel on Michigan Avenue (now the Hilton Chicago), overlooking the lake.

It was said to be the largest hotel in the world, and the young boy met the traveling celebrities of the era, including aviators Charles Lindbergh, who gave young John a dove, and Amelia Earhart, who advised him he should be in bed because it was a school night. A fan of the hometown Cubs, he watched at Wrigley Field as Babe Ruth pointed his bat at the outfield bleachers and hit the next pitch there during the 1932 World Series.

But by then, his family's prospects had darkened with the Great Depression. The stock market had crashed two years after the Stevens Hotel had opened, and the ensuing business collapse emptied most of its rooms. After the hotel was driven into bankruptcy, Stevens' father, uncle and grandfather were accused of having embezzled more than $1 million from the family-run life insurance company to prop up the failing hotel.

His grandfather suffered a stroke, and his uncle committed suicide. Left to stand trial alone, Stevens' father was convicted and faced a long prison term. A year later, however, the Illinois Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction and said that transferring money from one family business to another did not amount to embezzlement.

Justice Stevens was not inconsistent in his interpretation of the Constitution's religion clauses.

J. Brent Walker writes (in WaPo):

Justice Stevens has been a friend of church-state separation. His Establishment Clause jurisprudence has always been strong. He has uniformly stood against government-sponsored religious speech and endorsement of religion. He has been just as critical of attempts on the part of government to fund religious organizations and activities.

However, his willingness to require (or sometimes even to permit) the accommodation of religion under the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause has been lacking. He joined the Court's conservatives in Employment Division v. Smith, the Native American peyote case, which gutted the Free Exercise Clause of its robust religious liberty protection for all Americans, not just Native Americans. 

"However" is the wrong transition. "Accordingly" or "by the same token" would be appropriate. A strong position on the separation of church and state, at its most consistent, leads to the idea that neutral, generally applicable laws do not violate the the Free Exercise Clause. Smith validated uniform laws as they are applied to everyone, with no exceptions required.

Here's Justice Stevens, in a concurring opinion, in Boerne v. Flores, in a case in which a church in an historic district wanted to enlarge its building:

If the historic landmark on the hill in Boerne happened to be a museum or an art gallery owned by an atheist, it would not be eligible for an exemption from the city ordinances that forbid an enlargement of the structure. Because the landmark is owned by the Catholic Church, it is claimed that [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] gives its owner a federal statutory entitlement to an exemption from a generally applicable, neutral civil law. Whether the Church would actually prevail under the statute or not, the statute has provided the Church with a legal weapon that no atheist or agnostic can obtain. This governmental preference for religion, as opposed to irreligion, is forbidden by the First Amendment.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Congress's response to Smith, was an attempt to create by statute what the Court had rejected as a constitutional requirement: exemptions from neutral, generally applicable laws that burden religion. Stevens, alone of all the Justices, thought that RFRA violated the Establishment Clause.

Do you think government should be able to give religious persons and groups "a legal weapon that no atheist or agnostic can obtain"? Do you think it's conservative or liberal to say no, as Justice Stevens did?

Walker dings Stevens for "join[ing]  the Court's conservatives" in Smith, but Justice White was also on that side, and Justice O'Connor was on the other side.  Walker seems to think that he's bolstering his position on the Free Exercise Clause by associating it with conservatives, and it probably is safe to assume most Washington Post readers think like that. But with the religion clauses, it's not so easy. If you're a liberal who cares deeply about the separation of church and state, why would you favor religion-based exceptions to laws that otherwise apply uniformly?

At the Scilla Café...

... you can be as scilly as you want.

Karl Lagerfeld is against gay marriage "for a very simple reason."

See if it's simple enough for you to understand...

In the 60's, they all said we had the right to the difference. And now, suddenly, they want a bourgeois life. For me it’s difficult to imagine — one of the papas at work and the other at home with the baby. How would that be for the baby? I don’t know. I see more lesbians married with babies than I see boys married with babies. And I also believe more in the relationship between mother and child than in that between father and child.

... because I can't understand it.

Teed up for teasing. It's Tiger Woods.

In the new Nike promo:



Ha! Absurd. I know there are all sorts of instant parodies out there, and I haven't clicked on any yet. The original is already ridiculous. Shameless.

On the other hand: the leaderboard.

OR: You could say:

Without speaking a word, he humanizes himself. Tiger's close bond with his demanding father always felt like the one warm, relatable dimension of an otherwise cold and remote personality....  (By the way, is it me or is there something very Hamlet about the way a haggard Tiger gets interrogated by the ghost of his father on the misty ramparts of a golf course?)

Oh, please.

Justice Stevens will retire.

Let the games begin.