"Had I thought that there was any chance that she could have been hurt by this stuff, I would have been a lot more vigilant."

"I had no idea it was so bad... I'd never have thought we'd be in this situation. If she had bought it off the street or from a corner, that's one thing, but she bought it from convenience store."

"Experts are puzzled by the unexpected find of such a large number of skulls at what appears to have been a small, unremarkable shrine...."

"The heads were carefully deposited in rows or in small mounds, mostly facing east toward the rising sun, sometime between 660 and 860 A.D., a period when the nearby city-state of Teotihuacan had already declined but the Aztec empire, founded in 1325, was still centuries in the future."

[Georgia State University archaeologist Christopher] Morehart said some of the skulls were found with finger bones inserted into the eye sockets. “It was common enough that it was intentionally placed there in the eye socket,” Morehart said, though the ritual significance of that remains unclear.

Congressional Democrats whine that their boyfriend never calls them.

Politico reports.

Interviews with dozens of members of Congress and senior aides reveal frustration and in some cases exasperation.... These Democrats say they almost never hear from Obama personally... [T]he president evidences no interest in getting to know them or their political circumstances....

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), an early Obama supporter in 2008 and top surrogate in that race, put it this way: “Everyone loves a touch. It’s not his favorite part of the job. But it’s a necessary part of the job.”

Everyone loves a touch....

"Anybody on the Republican side even thinking or talking about running for president in 2016, I’ve said needs to get their head examined..."

Says the ever-helpful Bobby Jindal.

ADDED: In Jindalworld, the GOP is, right now, the stupid party, so anyone who currently believes he should be the candidate is stepping up to lead The Stupid Party and must be stupid. First, make the party smart. Then, we can talk about whether who should be leading it... obviously, someone who stepped up not to lead it in its present stupid form but who stepped up to make it smart. Which would be Jindal. Get it? He's running.

There! Did I examine his head well enough?

"I wouldn’t be wasting time on a Bob Menendez political obituary."

"I think Bob Menendez is a very tenacious person, and he has the advantage of six long years and a fairly forgiving political environment in New Jersey."

According to — who better to say? — Bob Torricelli.

Think of all the Bobs who've thrived in fairly forgiving New Jersey.

It's all about the time frame. Torricelli had to withdraw when allegations emerged in the midst of a campaign. He didn't have any leeway for riding out the New Jersey forgiveness arc.

"A minor war has broken out south of Qunfudah in the village of Kiad where large groups of hungry baboons from nearby valleys are attacking residences..."

"Hussein Al-Barakati, a resident of Kiad, said that he feared for his mother’s safety as she lives alone near the valley...."

Adel Medini, from the town of Helli, has his own take on the recent scourge of baboons: “It’s a daily game of hide and seek. The baboons are targeting empty houses and are well aware of what they are doing. The assault on the village is not random, as some believe. They proceed according to studied plans. That’s why their attacks do not fail. For example, imagine a resident who is absent from their home for a period of time. Even though it’s just one day, he is surprised to return to find his home in disarray. Some people in this situation thought that thieves had broken into and ransacked their houses … The problem is that the village’s houses are old and non-roofed, and our daily guest is hungry.”

Salem Al-Barakati said that the main reason that the baboons are difficult to stymie is because of their high intelligence. They easily match wits with those out to drive them away.

Via Walter Russell Mead:

It’s not just in Saudi Arabia that baboons see human beings as a prey animal. At the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, there is a parking lot for tourists coming to see the beautiful wild landscape where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. Baboons lurk on the edge of the parking lot, watching tourists come and go. They look for car doors that aren’t locked, windows that are left opened, absent-minded tourists carrying food....

[T]he baboons in that parking lot... clearly felt only contempt for their squishy, soft, clawless and short toothed cousins. You could see it in their hard and glittering eyes.

They easily match wits....

"A mob of wild monkeys has gone on a rampage in a village in eastern Indonesia..."

"... entering houses and attacking residents.... It's unclear why the monkeys, which are usually afraid of humans and flee when they hear human voices, emerged [from the forest] and attacked."

Donald Trump says he's suing Bill Maher for $5 million after Trump accepted his offer, making a valid contract.

The "offer," made last month, was to "pay $5 million to Trump’s charity of choice if he provided a birth certificate proving that he’s not 'spawn of his mother having sex with orangutan.'"

Maher was comically commenting on Trump's offer to pay $5 million to Obama's charity of choice if Obama releases his college records.

This lawsuit news is, of course, Trump, once again, hogging — orangutanning — the media spotlight. Fine. I don't care. But to actually file a lawsuit is: 1. An offense against free speech, and 2. An irresponsible appropriation of the public wealth that will be consumed processing the lawsuit.

“I don’t think he was joking. He said it with venom. That was venom. That wasn’t a joke. In fact, he was nervous when he said it. It was a pathetic delivery,” Trump said on Fox News.

Speaking of pathetic... go away, Donald. And take your hair with you when you leave. 

"To the rebels, the artists, the free thinkers and the innovators. Who care less about labels and more about truth."

"Dare to think for yourself. To look for yourself. To make up your own mind.  Because in the eternal debate for answers, the one thing that's true is what's true for you."

"It was a good 15 minutes into the 34-minute game delay before anything was announced."

"And what was that was said to the worried masses? I have no idea. Charlie Brown’s teacher would have been more coherent, waawaawaa–waawaawaaa. Everyone around me laughed at the absurdity. Ten minutes later, another announcement. Was everything ok? Did we need to evacuate? Waawaawaa-waawaawaa. The only thing we were missing was the FEMA trailers."

Anti-rape suggestions: public execution of convicted rapists and a ban extra-marital sex and an end to co-education.

"Co-education should be abolished and proper education facilities meant exclusively for women should be made available at all level of education."

The Indian government requested proposals, and those ideas come from Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, a Muslim group.

But many Muslim educators, female students, and working women across the country have opposed [the single-sex education] suggestion, charging that it would be detrimental to the development of the Muslim community in India. The public resistance highlights the growing appetite among Muslim parents to improve their minority community's trailing status through education, including that of girls.

"A team of archaeologists confirmed Monday that ancient remains found under a parking lot belong to long-lost King Richard III..."

"The verification came after scientific tests were used to match DNA samples taken from Canadian-born Michael Ibsen, a direct descendent of Anne of York, Richard’s elder sister."

Richard III supporters such as Philippa Langley, a screenwriter and member of the Richard III Society, were driven to find the lost king’s remains by a desire to reopen the debate over his place in history....

“I think the discovery brought the real Richard into sharp focus,” Langley said. “People are realizing that a lot of what they thought they knew about Richard III was pretty much propaganda and myth building.”

Why does finding the body have anything to do with the historical project of finding out what really happened in the past? There's something in the human psyche that makes us care about an ancient controversy because we are confronted with the man's bones. But there is also some relevant evidence:

Trauma analysis of the skeleton found 10 battle wounds, eight on the skull and two on the body, which were inflicted around the time of death, according to Jo Appleby, project osteologist of the University of Leicester. Many of the wounds provided evidence of “post-mortem humiliation injuries,” exacted on Richard III after death by his adversaries.

It looked a little something like this:



Warning: That was propaganda. And Class A scenery chewing.

By the way: As I was setting up that clip for the embed, Meade came over and said: "From just the audio, I couldn't tell if that was Laurence Olivier or a Monty Python parody."

ADDED: There's a Richard III ward in the Hospital for Overacting:

"Livin' in the home of the brave...."

Alicia Keyes festoons the National Anthem with an additional line... and now we are livin' in the Super Bowl comments thread here at Althouse.

ADDED: Beyonce. She lip-synched at the Inauguration, and now she drew so much power to boost that performance that she wrecked the whole second half. At least she didn't wreck the whole second Obama term. I hope!

"He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room."

There's today's sentence from "The Great Gatsby," in the long-running Althouse blog show called The "Gatsby" Project.

Where do we go with this one? Must we dither over the old hobby-horse "literally"? Did Gatsby literally glow? Was he heated to the point of incandescence? I'd say that F. Scott Fitzgerald continually uses metaphor, asserting that things are other than what they are, without the prissy distance of clutter words like like and as if, so what does it matter if he intensifies one of these assertions with literally?

"What gives the mayor the right to decide, without adequate notice, to give our children drugs that will impact their bodies and their psyches?"

The drug is Plan B (the "morning-after pill") and the mayor is Bloomberg.

About 40 separate “school-based health centers” doled out 12,721 doses of Plan B in 2011-12, up from 10,720 in 2010-11 and 5,039 in 2009-10....
The city says about 6,300 NYC girls had unplanned pregnancies last year, and more than half had abortions. Of those who give birth, the city says, about 70 percent drop out of school, making their futures bleak.

Leon Panetta admits that enhanced interrogation was part of locating bin Laden.

On "Meet the Press" today:



"Yes, some of it came from some of the tactics that were used at that time, interrogation tactics that were used. But the fact is we put together most of that intelligence without having to resort to that."