In Madison, Wisconsin today... a little anti-Kentucky signage.

Get it? (If I'm reading the humor correctly, the reference is to the Wisconsin song/motto "On Wisconsin" and the supposed reputation of Kentuckians for having sex with their cousins.)

Watch the basketball games with us. Comments are on moderation, but I'm sending things through quickly.

Need something to read. Here's "Kentucky Basketball: Is Wisconsin The Underdog?"

So, why the Big Ten bias when only two of both broadcast teams attended Big Ten schools? Who knows? Maybe they are so sick of the SEC winning football titles and also basketball titles? Is it the one-and- done thing? Maybe the fact that the SEC has won 12 football championship and 5 basketball championships while the Big Ten has won 2 football championships and only 1 basketball titles since 1989 as pointed out in this Lost Lettermen article.

Two things you can count on for whatever reason, they will be talking up Connecticut and Wisconsin all throughout the games against Florida and Kentucky until the second half should Florida or Kentucky take control of the game.

"I think there is a gay mafia. I think if you cross them, you do get whacked."

Said Bill Maher, on the "Overtime" portion of his HBO show "Real Time," and this really annoys me, because I watched the whole damned show last night, hoping he'd do this issue, and the show was pretty bad and boring, never getting to this issue, and now I see it was dumped in the on-line only part?!

How did that happen? Hmm??? I suspect The Gay Mafia!

"This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative."

"John Hibbing and his colleagues are pioneering research on the physiological underpinnings of political ideology."

It all adds up, according to Hibbing, to what he calls a "negativity bias" on the right. Conservatives, Hibbing's research suggests, go through the world more attentive to negative, threatening, and disgusting stimuli—and then they adopt tough, defensive, and aversive ideologies to match that perceived reality.

ADDED: The term "negativity bias" reveals Hibbing's own bias, because one could just as well characterize the same phenomenon as positivity toward the world one lives in and has known over time. Why stress the negativity toward threats to one's normal world rather than the love for what one seeks to protect?

Blacklisting Prop 8 supporters and gay-rights antagonists is perfectly analogous to the old blacklisting of Communists and Communist "sympathizers."

Isn't it? I'm inviting you to probe this analogy, which may be a good or great but not perfect analogy. Help me locate any possible lack of alignment between the 2 phenomena, for the purpose of close examination.

Distinguishing the words "blabber," "babble," and "blather."

I used "blabber" and "blather" in a single post today, and proofreading, Meade wanted to correct the "blabber" to "blather." I'd written, first, that "the columnists will blather about" who should replace David Letterman, and, later, I criticized a columnist for "stumbl[ing] into blabber like 'something ineffable and increasingly impossible to describe.'"

I had to question whether I'd used "blabber" mainly to avoid repeating "blather." These words may seem so close in sound and meaning that they are interchangeable, so this is the post that delves into the "blabber"/"blather" distinction.

Militantly tolerant — now, there's a concept. Too bad it's only an editing error.

From an article that's been up at the NYT since yesterday afternoon, by Farhad Manjoo, titled "Why Mozilla’s Chief Had to Resign":

Is this an instance of political correctness run amok? Is it a sign that Silicon Valley has become militantly tolerant, unwilling to let executives express their personal viewpoints on issues unrelated to their jobs? I’ve seen many such worries expressed online; even supporters of same-sex marriage have been characterizing Mr. Eich’s ouster as an awful precedent for giving in to moralistic mob rule.

A 20-year sentence to a woman who killed her baby with morphine delivered through breast milk.

It was the minimum sentence for the crime of homicide by child abuse, which is what the prosecutor charged and proved against Stephanie Greene.

Greene’s lawyer said she was only trying to stop debilitating pain from a car crash more than a decade before and relied on her own judgment and medical research on the Internet instead of the advice of doctors and is still overwhelmed with grief from the loss of her child....

A toxicology report from the baby’s autopsy found a level of morphine in the child’s body that a pathologist testified could have been lethal for an adult, prosecutor Barry Barnette said.... Greene still faces 38 counts of obtaining prescription drugs through fraud, and Barnette said he is still deciding whether to take those cases to court.

"Russia must be viewed as a unique and original civilization that cannot be reduced to 'East' or 'West,'"

"A concise way of formulating this stand would be, 'Russia is not Europe,' and that is confirmed by the entire history of the country and the people."

"Today the most intriguing question some panicky UW fans are asking..."

"... is whether Kaminsky, emboldened by a breakout junior season, will leave school a year early to enter the NBA draft."

Commemorating a suicide.

There's a lot of that going around today, 20 years after Kurt Cobain killed himself.

This is worse than the annual commemoration of the murders of John Lennon and John Kennedy, since it's a self-murder. If you like someone who's now dead, how about choosing some other day to think about them, their birthday, perhaps? When we care enough to make a national holiday out of someone who got killed — note that we've never done that for a suicide — we pick the birthday (Lincoln's Birthday, Martin Luther King's Birthday), not the death day.

But we all know why death days get attention. To dwell on the death is our own self-absorption. Where was I when I heard that X died? How did I feel? How did it change my life? Just admit that's what you're doing, remember that's what you're doing, and when you're doing it with someone who killed himself, don't forget he did that to you. He did that to the teenaged kids who loved him, changing that music they loved to something that contained the meaning death, the meaning that life is not worth living.

And he had not only his music, but a baby daughter. I don't want to hear about the suicide note that complained about how he didn't enjoy going on stage and being adulated by fans. Quit performing! Devote your life to your daughter. Shooting yourself is your first choice? That's what you say to the kids who loved you (and to your daughter)?

"I ran the CIA interrogation program."

"No matter what the Senate report says, I know it worked."

ADDED: Meanwhile:

A senior CIA official has died in an apparent suicide this week from injuries sustained after jumping off a building in northern Virginia, according to sources close to the CIA.

Name not yet released. 

"Letterman’s replacement: Can he (or she!) please be a grown-up?"

WaPo's Hank Stuever asks, and I'm more interested in why one would ask for a "grown-up" than in who the grown-ups are who could actually do the old-fashioned gig that is a late-night talk show. Me, I'm beyond grown-up. I'm old. Not as old as Letterman, but old. I watched a good bit of Johnny Carson back in the 60s and early 70s, in the days before you could record a TV show, when the fact that a show came on late actually meant something. And my kids and I eagerly consumed TiVo'd Letterman back in the 90s.

This blog began in '04, and when I look through this blog's Letterman tag, I don't find material that is based on my watching the show as a show, just news stories and clips I consumed because things were being talked about on-line. In 2009, I had "Is it really so terrible that David Letterman has a bachelor pad in the building where he tapes his show?" and "Oops, Letterman really is the lecher he seems to goofily pretend to be." How did he survive that? I guess the Women Warriors of America were not so fierce 5 years ago. And that was not long after he got in so much trouble mocking Sarah Palin that NOW took Palin's side of the argument.

"The people who were criticizing Brendan [Eich] were people who have advocated passionately for the rights of the oppressed."

"For them to turn on someone this way is wrong," said Geoffrey Moore (identified in the NYT as "a Silicon Valley consultant and author who has worked closely with Mozilla"):

Mr. Eich, he added, is a very analytical person who got into a situation he did not have the social skills to navigate. “My bet is he’s feeling very wounded. He gave his life and soul to this. Sometimes a community doesn’t really know what it’s doing,” Mr. Moore said.

Community speech — collective speech — it matters. But it doesn't really know what it's doing.

AND: Andrew Sullivan prints and responds to some reader mail he got after he wrote about what happened to Eich.

Morality has always been about keeping society on the same page. If you violate the the norms, then you are shamed and ridiculed. The ultimate “victory” of the gay rights movement will be that those discriminating against homosexuals will be ridiculed and isolated as bigots. Ultimately we can only hope that the best values win out, and that we will always find outcasts in society that share our values, should our values violate the norm.

There you have the illiberal mindset. Morality trumps freedom. Our opponents must be humiliated, ridiculed and “isolated as perverts”. I mean “bigots”, excuse me.

NOTE: I'm adding this note to make that double indentation clear. The single indent is Sullivan's response to his reader. I wouldn't put the punctuation outside of the quotation mark like that, by the way.

"I’m telling you, I swear to God, the face looked like a rubber mask."

"If I thought for one instant it was a real person I would have called the police, my manager, everyone I could think of."

At the Pink-and-Yellow Café...

... you can raise whatever topics you like. I've got moderation on these days though, so have some patience about seeing your comment go up.

By the way, please consider doing your on-line shopping at Amazon by going in through the Althouse portal.

I'm just noticing Amazon's FireTV, a new product in the Roku/Apple TV niche.

"Justice Thomas Was Right/Citizens United and the defenestration of Brendan Eich."

James Taranto connects the Eich ousting to what Clarence Thomas wrote, dissenting, from the part of the Citizens United opinion that was 8-1:

I cannot endorse a view of the First Amendment that subjects citizens of this Nation to death threats, ruined careers, damaged or defaced property, or pre-emptive and threatening warning letters as the price for engaging in "core political speech, the 'primary object of First Amendment protection.'"