"Companies are realizing that women comprise a very heavy percentage of the cocktail-drinking community..."

"... and I believe they are starting to speak more directly to women without the fear that they're going to alienate the male base."

"Deadly storms, intense heat bring misery to millions."

Are you okay?

"The occasional banality of the conversations is a deliberate challenge, not least to the notion of banality itself."

Key sentence from an article written by a woman about how men can't understand some book written by a woman.

"Damien wants to make a statement and this statue certainly does that."

"I think it’s a wonderful idea and I’d be surprised if anyone opposed it."

"[A] plain wedding band made of titanium, engraved with big block letters on the inside..."

"It appears to be that will imprint 'I'M MARRIED' around your finger."

Because what you want your wedding ring to express is mistrust.

At the Aldhouse Café...

... it's delightful.

"The Navy will not use a target depicting a Muslim woman holding a gun..."

"... at a new training range for SEALs in Virginia Beach."

The announcement came hours after the Council on American-Islamic Relations asked the Pentagon to remove the target. A picture of the cardboard target, which shows a woman in a headscarf holding a pistol, was published in The Virginian-Pilot on Tuesday. The image shows verses of the Quran hanging on the wall behind the woman, which also generated criticism from the group.

About that recall recount in Racine.

The majority in the Wisconsin senate hangs on the result. Can we trust it?

The recount process has uncovered a series of stunning revelations regarding ballot security.

That's MacIver, which might tend to exaggerate.

"I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that's the America millions of Americans believe in."

"That's the America I love."

Said Mitt Romney according to Doonesbury, which made fun of it, and Language Log's Geoffrey K. Pullum was initially inclined to mock, and then thought about it, and realized he agreed with it.

One thing that gave him second thoughts is that his co-blogger Mark Liberman had already processed the quote, using the sublime technique of sentence diagramming. Which is nice.

But the more important basis for second thinking is that when you get to Liberman's old post, you find out that Romney didn't even speak those words. Mark Steyn did, and he was purporting to paraphrase Romney, for humorous effect. Pullum found out he was laughing at Steyn and Steyn was trying to make us laugh, and suddenly the quote wasn't funny anymore. Pullum, the liberal, was initially enjoying laughing at Romney — and his vapid dorkiness — and then he found out he was laughing at something a big right-winger — Steyn — had intended as a joke. Hey, that's not funny!

Pullum regains his sense of self-liberalism and goes into 4th of July mode:

It's nearly the 4th of July.... I love being back in America. It's like slipping into an old pair of shoes that really fit.... I don't think I can find anything mistaken in the passage. I think I believe in that America too. God bless it, anyway.

His post ends with a note that it's completely rewritten, because he apparently had originally assumed Romney did say those words, hadn't seen Liberman's old post, and went the mockery.

Laughing rats.

Via James Taranto, who tweaks the scientists as having "lonely lives" (since they are resorting to tickling rats). But I think it means something, if animals laugh — if they play and have fun — and it's not all survival instinct.

Note that the rats don't just laugh, they latch on to The Hand as a playmate and chase it around, eager to engage it in more fun times.

"White House Already Denying That Mandate Is A Tax. If you deny that it’s a tax, you admit that it’s unconstitutional...."

Says Instapundit, linking here.

I've got to disagree. Under Chief Justice Roberts' opinion, what matters under the constitutional law is how the thing operates in reality, not what you call it. You can switch the labels around, play whatever political euphemism games you like, and the judges will let you get away with that. It's propaganda. Knock yourself out. Bamboozle the people. Democracy rolls on.

But in court — the message is — we look through the surface and see what is really happening. And if it is structured and functions like a tax, it's a tax.

You know, there's a saying that lawyers and lawprofs like. I think it's corny, so I haven't been saying it. I don't think that in 25+ years of teaching law I've ever said it, but I've heard it said so many times, and it's said because it's a way of saying something that lawyers and lawprofs really think about law: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.

A physician's epiphany: "I was not, as I had imagined, a professional, but an employee."

In the wee hours today, our commenter Pogo wrote:

Can't sleep.

A little over ten years ago, I had an epiphany at work. I was struggling until I suddenly realized that I was not, as I had imagined, a professional, but an employee.

And my eyes opened, and I understood.
The employee game is an easy one to play, unless you don't know you're playing it.

What we learn about Scientology from the Katie Holmes/Tom Cruise divorce.

Holmes seeks sole custody of the couple's 6-year-old child Suri, who has supposedly been raised under principles of Scientology:

Suri is apparently treated as an adult, free to make decisions on her clothes, make-up and diet.

Scientology expert Rick Ross explained to the Daily Mail's Alison Boshoff last year: 'Scientologists treat kids as if they are individuals capable of making their own decisions.'

Indeed, Tom echoed this approach in an interview in 2010.

'I say to Suri, "I really want you to eat this protein if you’re going to have that sugar,"' he said.

'She looks at me and she goes: "Dad, I don’t think you should try to force me to do something I don’t want to do."'...

Just last week, an evening of pizza and ice-cream with her mother ended in tears when Katie took her daughter's cone away.

If we assume, for the purposes of discussion, that Cruise follows a religion-based approach to child rearing, involving maximum autonomy, and Holmes now objects to that and wants to raise the child according to more conventional decision-making and discipline by the parent, how much of a factor should that play in determining custody? Should Cruise's ideas about child-rearing have more weight or less weight because they are premised on religion?

At the Painted House Café...

... we're still here. Come on in. Surely, there are new things to talk about.

"[F]or ordinary conservatives, as opposed to long-beleaguered conservative law professors, this case wasn’t about proving law professors wrong..."

"... it was about limiting the power of the government by overturning the coercive mandate. That objective was not achieved."

I'm just another lawprof, but I think the Commerce Clause decision matters a lot. Yes, Congress can work around its limit by tapping the taxing power, but it's not politically easy to tax.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if Chief Justice Roberts did switch his vote?

"There has been tons of speculation in the last day that Chief Justice Roberts changed his vote at some late stage in the Affordable Care Act case," writes Orin Kerr, linking to his Volokh co-blogger David Bernstein's 2 posts on the tantalizing meme. Kerr looks at the evidence and speculates about how the complexity of the writing project could have unfolded without Roberts ever switching sides. He was the 5th vote in 2 majorities, one with the liberal 4 and one with the conservative 4:

Roberts is the swing vote in this case and this is the biggest case of his time on the Court, so he quite naturally assigns the opinion to himself....