Drudge pushes Walker.

The link under the picture goes to WKOW's "Walker gets standing ovation in NH, but most in attendance still undecided."

Other links at the top of Drudge:

1. "THRONGS OF SUPPORTERS GREET GOV..." goes to the Weekly Standard: "Throngs of Supporters, Media Greet Walker in New Hampshire/Presidential candidate talks of riding his Harley in N.H.." That comes with a 6-minute video:




2. "TESTS MESSAGE IN $1 SWEATER..." goes to The Hill's "Walker tests his message in New Hampshire":

In his first trip to the second-in-the-nation presidential nominating state since 2012, Walker donned a sweater he said he bought for a buck from Kohl's, a big retailer founded in his home state, and cast himself as an executive willing to roll up his sleeves to streamline government and protect the homeland.

3. "JEB JABS 'FRONTRUNNER'..." goes to The Boston Herald's "Jeb Bush takes jab at Scott Walker as both continue N.H. tour""

“I’m not a candidate. I don’t think — maybe he is — I don’t know. You can’t be a front-runner until you start running,” Bush said after touring Integra Biosciences here yesterday.

Bush’s remarks were in response to Walker’s comments earlier this week to Breitbart News. He said President Obama’s recent criticism of Wisconsin’s so-called “right to work” law “suggests maybe we’re the front-runner if somebody is taking an active interest in what a state governor is doing, particularly in light of the fact that we’re not the only one.”

4. "Early Intensity In Race..." goes to the NYT's "New Hampshire, Shaping Up as Free-for-All, Gets Early G.O.P. Attention": At the link, a photo of Jeb, grim-faced and surrounded by grim-faced media types poking microphones at him, and a photo of Walker, smiling in a baseball cap and listening to one person at the  New Hampshire Republicans' 2016 Kickoff Grassroots Training at Concord High School. Key sentence: "Talking to a motorcycle aficionado afterward, he even mused about coming back to campaign here on his Harley-Davidson."

5. "Does road to White House start in Wisconsin?" goes to the Weekly Standard's John MacCormack's "See Scott Run/Does the road to the White House start in Wisconsin?"

Do you know who isn’t an ordinary person? Hillary Clinton. “Saying you’re broke when you’ve got two homes, or you’re making a quarter of a million dollars a speech, or you haven’t driven a car in 18 years, those are all things that I think further embolden that theory that someone like Hillary Clinton who is of Washington—who lives in Washington, who worked for the last term for President Obama in Washington, who served in the Senate in Washington, who lived in the White House in Washington, who spent the early days of her career in Washington—this is someone who embodies Washington,” Walker told me during our March 8 interview. (Like an ordinary guy, Walker sometimes says a word like “embolden” when he means “emphasize.”) 

"You think L.A. is Hell, this awful place of corruption and anti-creativity, and when I look at Wisconsin..." said Matt Groening...

... to Lynda Barry (who teaches at the University of Wisconsin), and she said: "It’s its own kind of Hell... colder than Scott Walker’s tit... When I look at your place in Malibu, and you can see the ocean, I just think, I’d rather die than live here."

Groening and Barry, cartoonists who have known each other for a long time, were doing an appearance together in a bookstore in NYC, where, I presume, the audience looks down on both Wisconsin and Malibu.

"And they handcuffed me to the electrical box for seven hours... At first I was panicking, and then I started singing 'I Shall Be Released' by Bob Dylan."

"I don't know how long I was singing that damn song for, but it was quite some time.... I don't want to be remembered for this alone... I'd like to be remembered for the good things I've done. I'm a husband, a father of two really cool kids. But they're saying it's half a billion worth of artwork. And ultimately I'm the one who made the decision to buzz them in. It's the kind of thing most people don't have to learn to cope with. It's like doing penance. It's always there."

Said Rick Abath, who was 27 a quarter century ago, when he was a night-time guard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.


(The police photograph you before they un-duct-tape you.)

What's your sign?

3 signs — seen yesterday on State Street — bespeak 3 quite distinct frames of mind. What's your sign?

1. Believing in basketball...



2. Coffee and sado-masochism...



3. Wistful robot with a blue flower...

"Charles Barkley Says Paying NCAA Athletes Is A Turrible Idea, And Americans Still Agree."

Can someone explain to me why the Huffington Post used that "turrible" spelling? Is it mocking Barkley's speech? It it mocking the idea?

The idea sounds right to me, by the way:

"There’s only a couple of players on the college team that actually can really play in every sport, so sometimes you have to look at the big picture... All of those kids are getting a free education. But let’s say we do it your way … we have to pay the diving team, the swimming team. That’s crazy. Less than 1 percent [of college basketball players] are going to play in the NBA... What about the other 99 percent that are getting a free education? Think about it."

I'm looking at the comments now and see that the top-rated comment is:

The spelling of terrible in the article title ("Turrible") diminishes both the point of Mr. Barley's opinion and his education. Further, given how some in his country have worked to to portray African American men, it can also be interpreted as racist.

That gets the response "but that's how he says the word" — which is something I wondered about, but didn't know — and the original commenter comes back with "And in how many instances have journalists used regional accents when writing on a commentary's opinion?" — which is exactly how I would have responded to the assertion that Barkley happens to pronounce "terrible" like that. I mean, he'd have to be awfully famous for that word, pronounced that way before it wouldn't seem disrespectful and a cheap way of discounting what is a damned good argument. He's not famous enough for saying "turrible" that I knew it. Are there any other cases of famous people so famous for a way they pronounce a word that the respelled word would be used like that in a headline? The only thing I can think of is a bunch of dumb old headlines about Ed Sullivan and his "really big shew."

A proposed Women-of-the-Supreme-Court Lego set is rejected as a violation of Lego's policy against "politics and political symbols, campaigns, or movements"...

... which prompts NPR to delve into whether what the Supreme Court does is (or looks like) politics:

"I honestly understand having a policy in place like that," said [science journalist Maia Weinstock, who designed the set]. But Weinstock said she looked at the policy before submitting and didn't think that her project was political.

"The U.S. Supreme Court is supposed to be separate from political considerations," she said. "People are appointed for life specifically so that they don't answer to the changing whims of politics."

Of course, that's especially silly when you are celebrating the presence of women on the Court. They are there because Presidents appointed them, and it's obvious that the final selection from the pool of qualified candidates is political. Ronald Reagan had made it a campaign promise that he would appoint the first woman to the Supreme Court. And when has any President simply nominated the person with the best judicial mind or some such entirely neutral concept?

The Milwaukee Brewers ban high fives.

Can you guess why?

How much can Romney help Rubio?

WaPo reports:

Sen. Marco Rubio has been cultivating a relationship with Mitt Romney and his intimates, landing some of the 2012 Republican nominee’s top advisers and donors and persistently courting others as he readies an expected 2016 presidential campaign.

In a crowded field of contenders, the imprimatur of Romney could help clear Rubio’s path into the top tier. Since Romney announced in January that he would not run for the White House again, he and Rubio have had at least two lengthy phone calls in which Romney encouraged and mentored the 43-year-old Florida senator about the political landscape, according to a Romney associate.

Rubio and Romney have built a warm and trusting rapport, in contrast to the frostiness that exists between Romney and the two current GOP front-runners, former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. When Romney said in January that it was time to turn to the “next generation of Republican leaders,” it was widely interpreted as a swipe at Bush and a boost to a fresher face, such as Rubio.

What's the evidence of frostiness toward Walker?

"Dell Williams, who in 1974, after being humiliated by a department-store clerk when she tried to buy a vibrator, was moved to start Eve’s Garden..."

"... the New York boutique widely described as the nation’s first sex shop catering specifically to women, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 92."

In the early ’70s, Ms. Williams took a workshop from the sex educator Betty Dodson, an advocate of women’s masturbation. So that women might experiment in private, Ms. Dodson recommended the Hitachi Magic Wand, a cylindrical vibrator nominally sold for aching muscles.

Off Ms. Williams went to Macy’s to buy a Magic Wand. There, she wrote afterward, she found herself face to face with a “pimply 20-something” male sales clerk.

“What do you want it for?” he asked in a carrying voice.

“I left Macy’s that day,” she wrote, “clutching my precious, anonymous brown shopping bag and thinking: Someone really ought to open up a store where a woman can buy one of these things without some kid asking her what she’s going to do with it.”

It's interesting that she needed to say that the man had acne, considering the folk belief that masturbation causes acne. Was Williams subtly insinuating that the sales clerk was seeking the camaraderie of a fellow masturbator? Or did she feel a compulsion to humiliate him after he (accidentally?) humiliated her?

I went looking for a good link for the proposition that masturbation causes acne — which has got to be one of the all-time great correlation-causation misperceptions. I'll go with this page from "Acne For Dummies."

I also ran across — why have I never noticed this before? — Mark Twain's "Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism" (a speech given in 1879 at The Stomach Club, a group of American writers and painters in Paris):

The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: a disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke and tell indelicate stories — and mainly, a yearning to paint pictures. The results of the habit are: loss of memory, loss of virility, loss of cheerfulness and loss of progeny.

Of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, this has the least to recommend it. As an amusement, it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there is no money in it....

And yet, there was money in it... for Dell Williams.

"I'm going to argue here that removing 'women' from the language of abortion is a mistake."

"We can, and should, support trans men and other gender-non-conforming people. But we can do that without rendering invisible half of humanity and 99.999 percent of those who get pregnant. I know I'll offend, hurt and disappoint some people, including abortion-fund activists I love dearly. That is why I've started this column many times over many months and put it aside. I tell myself I might be wrong...."

For the annals of hand-wringing, I offer you this, from Katha Pollit in The Nation.

You know, if you're going to fret about "erasure" in the context of abortion... well, good lord, how blind can you be?!

"This is the best example of animals being jerks that I think I have ever seen."

Top comment for this.

I'm blogging this mainly because I have a tag for animals are jerks. 

IN THE COMMENTS:& Michelle Dulak Thomson put up the URL to this excellent video in which the cats are only scantily jerky:

"We had Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney. If it's just whoever's next up, that hasn't worked so well for the Republican party in the past."

"Jeb's a good man. You're not going to hear me speak ill will of Jeb. He's a friend of mine.... I think highly of him. I just think voters are going to look at this and say, 'If we're running against Hillary Clinton, we'll need a name from the future — not a name from the past — to win.' "

Said Scott Walker.

Hey, what if it's not Hillary Clinton? Is a name from the past okay then?

(The phrase "a name from the future" amuses me.  It's like the GOP needs someone coming in from a time machine.)

The sign says "Memorial Union Terrace/CLOSED/For The Winter" but it's 60° here in Madison.

A man in shorts waits for a lake and a snowball to melt:



Many people have crossed the chain with the "CLOSED" sign, perhaps because the "CLOSED" sign is subject to interpretation — it's not substantively winter — or maybe because they don't care about your signs, man....



And here's another chain crossed:



That little yellow sign says "CLOSED," but come on... you can't close a lake...



Welcome to spring, everybody!

"Did she seem to you a happy, hungry warrior? She couldn’t make eye contact with her questioners..."

"... and when she did she couldn’t sustain it. She looked at the ceiling and down at notes, trying, it seemed, to stick to or remember scripted arguments. She was shaky. She couldn’t fake good cheer and confidence. It is seven years since she ran for office. You could see it.... This wasn’t high-class spin. These were not respectable dodges. They didn’t make you grudgingly tip your hat at a gift for duplicity. "

Peggy knocks Hillary.

A delightful payoff for research prompted by random curiosity about language.

Sasha Volokh is bemused by the phrase "still and all" in Supreme Court cases.

It sounds slang-y because "and all" occurs in casual speech (like "and stuff"), but it's actually old-timey (like "It cannot be gainsaid").

Sasha consults the OED and finds the the phrase goes back to 1829. And he searches the entire Supreme Court archive to find that there is — after 2 recent iterations of the phrase "still and all" — only one other appearance of those 3 words in sequence, a 1961 case about the search of a distillery:

Indeed, the officers here could have abated the nuisance without judicial help by destroying the still and all of its paraphernalia....

"Many of the women who use the website have a great deal in common. They were almost all 'skeptical' of the concept at first..."

"... and, while their biggest fear is still being judged by society for what they do, every single one of them insisted that there is a very clear distinction between prostitution and being paid to date a man – even when they have sex with them."

"Honestly, I don't think it's any different than a marriage with a house wife," Rachel explains to Daily Mail Online. "If the wife is not working, she is being paid and supported by her husband, and of course they have sex. Does that make her a prostitute?"

ADDED: A husband and his stay-at-home wife are an economic unit in a single-earner household. The income-earning spouse isn't paying the home-based spouse. They've divided the contributions within a shared enterprise, and they have substantial mutual obligations if they decide to end the arrangement. Rachel doesn't mean to disrespect traditional marriage. She just does that by accident as she tries to distance herself from prostitution and makes an old-fashioned everything's-economic argument.