"If you’re in the con game and you don’t know who the mark is … you’re the mark."

An old David Mamet quote, deployed in the second-to-last sentence in an article titled "Campaign Sources: The Romney Campaign was a Consultant Con Job."

The FBI investigation that felled Petraeus "started with two women."

The NYT reports that "began with a complaint several months ago about 'harassing' e-mails sent by Paula Broadwell, Mr. Petraeus’s biographer, to an unidentified third person" ("not a family member or a government official"). Checking Broadwell's email, they "stumbled across" her affair with Petraeus.

The NYT source said: “People think that because it’s the C.I.A. director, it must involve bigger issues... Think of a small circle of people who know each other.”

So who is the second woman? Not Petraeus's wife because, we're told, it was "not a family member." But there's a "small circle of people." What woman would Broadwell "harass"?

ADDED: "Associates of Petraeus had received 'anonymous harassing emails' that were then traced to Broadwell... suggesting she may have found their names or addresses in his e-mail."

At the Cirrocumulus Café...

... you can talk about anything you like.

(This photo makes today look bleak, but it was midday, sunny, and warm out on the bike trail south of Madison.)

"Obama seems to be a nice man, and that is precisely the problem... It's better to have a sheep in wolf's clothing than a wolf in sheep's clothing."

Said Julian Assange.

That stood out to me this morning as I'm trying to understand the resignation of David Petraeus, who — as discuss in an earlier post — "presided over a moderation of the CIA's controversial drone program to take into greater account diplomatic sensitivities, a shift that sometimes put him at odds with the head of the agency's Counterterrorism Center."

Daniel Day-Lewis voices Lincoln with "a high-pitched, wavering tone that has been likened to both a 14-year-old boy and Mr Burns."

People are complaining... but they're complaining about historical accuracy!

Harold Holzer, a Lincoln scholar, told CBS News: “Lincoln died long before audio recording was possible so we have no hints about what he really sounded like, except the reminiscences of his contemporaries. The most frequent things we read are that he had a nasal, high voice that somehow miraculously floated over large crowds.”

Day-Lewis said "said the voice materialised 'in my mind’s ear'" and "If I hear a voice, I tend to believe that I hear it for good reason.”

Here's a new trailer, including some of Day-Lewis's vocalizations. I don't have a problem with the presumably historically grounded high-pitched voice. But what's the point of going realistic about the sound of Lincoln's voice when everything else about the movie seems all theatrical and pretentious, including the lines Day-Lewis must speak with that voice? "I am the President of the United States clothed with enormous power!"

Petraeus is "an absolutely necessary witness."

Says House Homeland Security Committee Chairman, Representative Peter King.

Won't Scott Brown end up back in the Senate...

... if John Kerry is tapped for Secretary of State?

"Your wife is having an affair with a person you happen to respect. Why would that last detail change the way you respond to her cheating?"

"Do you admire this man so much that you haven’t asked your wife why she keeps having sex with him? I halfway suspect you’re writing this letter because you want specific people to read this column and deduce who is involved and what’s really going on behind closed doors (without actually addressing the conflict in person). That’s not ethical, either."

Said the NYT Ethicist, last July, responding to "NAME WITHHELD," who some people are now speculating is the husband cuckolded by Petraeus.

ADDED: I'm surprised to see the NYT Ethicist is Chuck Klosterman. I know him as the author of the book "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto." Excerpt:

I’m having a crisis of confidence, and I blame Jesus.

Actually, my crisis is not so much about Jesus as it is about the impending rapture, which I don’t necessarily believe will happen. But I don’t believe the rapture won’t happen, either; I really don’t see any evidence for (or against) either scenario. It all seems unlikely, but still plausible. Interestingly enough, I don’t think there is a word for my particular worldview: “Nihilism” means you don’t believe in anything, but I can’t find a word that describes partial belief in everything. “Paganism” is probably the closest candidate, but that seems too Druidesque for the style of philosophy I’m referring to. Some would claim that this is kind of like “agnosticism,” but true agnostics always seem too willing to side with the negative; they claim there are no answers, so they live as if those answers don’t exist. They’re really just nihilists without panache. Not me, though. I’m prone to believe that just about any religious ideology is potentially accurate, regardless of how ridiculous it might seem (or be). Which is really making it hard for me to comment on Left Behind.

That's the beginning of an essay on the Left Behind series.

Petraeus fell because of the affair, the drone program, or Benghazi — which is it?

"Central Intelligence Agency Director David Petraeus resigned after a probe into whether someone else was using his email led to the discovery that he was having an extramarital affair," The Wall Street Journal reports, without naming sources. I selected some items from the article that relate to the time line:

It was the second national-security revelation to come to light in the two days after President Barack Obama won re-election. On Wednesday, the Pentagon acknowledged that Iranian fighter planes had fired on an unmanned reconnaissance drone five days before the election....

Mr. Petraeus was scheduled to testify before the Senate intelligence committee next week. Michael Morell, who was named acting director of the CIA after Mr. Petraeus's resignation, will appear instead....

Administration officials said the White House was briefed on the affair Wednesday by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Mr. Obama was informed Thursday by his staff and met with Mr. Petraeus that day. Mr. Petraeus then offered to resign. The announcement came Friday afternoon....

The computer investigation began late this spring, according to a person familiar with the investigation. Mr. Petraeus wasn't interviewed by the FBI until recently....

He presided over a moderation of the CIA's controversial drone program to take into greater account diplomatic sensitivities, a shift that sometimes put him at odds with the head of the agency's Counterterrorism Center.

Let's reorganize those facts:

1. Drones. Petraeus had moderated the drone program to make it more diplomacy-sensitive,  the head of the CIA Counterterrorism Center was not happy with that, and Iran fired on a drone 5 days before the election.

2. Benghazi. Petraeus was about to represent the CIA in testimony before Congress and now he will not.

3. The gmail account. This problem dates back to last spring, but Petraeus was only interviewed about it recently, the White House was briefed on Wednesday and Petraeus was confronted and pushed/fell into resignation in the next 2 days.

Given the timing of these 3 sets of facts, it's hard to believe Petraeus left because of the affair or the problem with his gmail. It seems much more likely to have to do with the drones or Benghazi.

By the way, who is the head of the CIA Counterterrorism Center?

"Because Romney made opposition to raising tax rates on the superwealthy part of his campaign..."

"Obama seemed to interpret his defeat of his GOP challenger as a referendum on this point..."

"And I just want to point out, this was a central question during the election. It was debated over and over again. And on Tuesday night, we found out that the majority of Americans agree with my approach. And that includes Democrats, independents and a lot of Republicans across the country, as well as independent economists and budget experts."

Is that the way elections work? There's a struggle right now to impose an interpretation on the election. One man got more votes than the other. We were put in the position of having to vote for one man or other other. But how does that translate into what we want on particular issues? It translates through the power-holders insisting on the meaning they like. We still get to fight back. The interpretive process never ends.

"I had been reading about the color indigo, how it had been introduced into the spectrum by [Isaac] Newton rather late..."

"... and it seemed no two people quite agreed as to what indigo was, and I thought I would like to have an experience of indigo. And I built up a sort of pharmacological launchpad with amphetamines and LSD, and a little cannabis on top of that, and when I was really stoned I said, 'I want to see indigo now.' And as if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo appeared on the wall. Again it had this luminous, numinous quality; I leaped toward it in a sort of ecstasy. I thought, 'This is the color of heaven.' ... I thought maybe this is not a color which actually exists on the Earth, or maybe it used to exist or no longer exists. All this went through my mind in 4 or 5 seconds, and then the blob disappeared, giving me a strong sense of loss and heartbrokenness, and I was haunted a little bit when I came down, wondering whether indigo did exist in the real world."

Oliver Sacks, in his new book "Hallucinations," discussed in a nice interview on NPR today.

New Hampshire, the most womanly state of all time.

All female: the Governor and all the members of Congress (2 Senators and 2 members of the House).

"I wanted to see if I had wasted my time writing..."

"And I thought it was rather successful. At the end of his life, the boxer Joe Louis said: ‘I did the best I could with what I had.’ This is exactly what I would say of my work: I did the best I could with what I had. And after that, I decided that I was done with fiction. I do not want to read, to write more. I have dedicated my life to the novel: I studied, I taught, I wrote and I read. With the exclusion of almost everything else. Enough is enough! I no longer feel this fanaticism to write that I have experienced in my life."

Philip Roth, at the age of 78, having written one more book, and having just read all his books (in reverse chronological order).

Supreme Court takes Voting Rights Act case.

WaPo reports:

The justices three years ago expressed skepticism about the continued need for Section 5 of the historic act, which requires states and localities with a history of discrimination, most of them in the South, to get federal approval of any changes in their voting laws....

That is, the law applies differently to different states, based on their record with voting and race decades ago.

Petraeus's woman: his biographer!

What does it say about a man that he falls for the woman who cranks out the PR about what a swell guy he is?

It's so... John Edwards and Rielle Hunter.

The man falls in love with... himself!

An orchestra of outdated printing equipment plays Bob Dylan's "Times They Are A-Changin'."

Warning: it is an ad.

PRINTER ORCHESTRA from Chris Cairns on Vimeo.

Here's a video about making the ad:



Maybe you think an artist should hold himself above commercial advertising. I'm not especially puritanical on the subject, but I don't like to see the artist's most holy songs sold out. It hurt me circa 1980 when Orange Slice — was it Orange Slice? — used "Good Vibrations." But "The Times They Are A-Changin'" is not the most sacred Dylan. And it kind of always was an advertisement. And when I think what are his holiest, unsell-out-able works, I have a hard time. If some glue company did something with "Stuck Inside of Mobile..." I think I would laugh.