At the Pulsatilla Vulgaris Club...

... pulsate, you vulgar creatures.

Have you been to any of the 100 highest-grossing independent restaurants in the U.S.?

It looks like a good list of places to avoid, actually. I've been to exactly one: Cliff House (in San Francisco).

You walk up into the mountains...

... I'll just photograph the sunset from the hotel window.

Man, this thin atmosphere is making me lazy.

Tom Toles talks about cartooning.

With Bob Wright on Blogggingheads.

And he's got a blog now. It's got regular writing along with cartoons, and there are some cool "outtakes" from cartoons, like this one...

... which has such a charmingly recognizable quick sketch of Obama.

At the Earth Goddess Café...

... deliver.

"Suicide is generally considered taboo in Hinduism, the religion of most Indians, because it disrupts the cycle of reincarnation that is central to the soul’s progress...."

"But the willingness to die for a cause, as exemplified by Gandhi’s epic fasts during the struggle for independence, is seen as noble and worthy. Ancient warriors in Tamil Nadu, in southeastern India, would commit suicide if their commander was killed.... And the practice of sati, or widow burning, although outlawed, remains a potent symbol of wifely devotion."

"But if the old bowing and boyish president is receding, a new and more ominous president is emerging."

Shelby Steele examines the new Barack Obama, after the health care fight:

A historic figure making history, this is emerging as an over-arching theme—if not obsession—in the Obama presidency....

The old fashioned, big government liberalism that Mr. Obama uses to make himself history-making also alienates him in the center-right America of today. It makes him the most divisive president in memory—a president who elicits narcissistic identification on the one hand and an enraged tea party movement on the other. His health-care victory has renewed his narcissistic charge for the moment, but if he continues to be a 1965 liberal it will become more and more impossible for Americans to see themselves in him.

Drill, baby, drill.

Obama goes Palin.

The unselfish husband.

"If a man were to invite a lady to marry him on the ground that he ardently desired her happiness and at the same time considered that she would afford him ideal opportunities of self-abnegation, I think it may be doubted whether she would be altogether pleased."

At the Sunset Café...

... every evening is different, beautiful.

Althouse in Boulder.

Is this where I belong?

A 15-year-old girl kills herself, and 9 of her classmates are arrested on various charges... but what did they do?

Of course, it's terrible when a young person commits suicide. And a suicide may have chosen self-murder because of the bad relationships in her environment. But if we don't favor arresting people who are very mean to people who don't commit suicide, why would we favor these arrests when someone does commit suicide?

Assume you are a teenager contemplating suicide. If you knew the 9 kids at school who were meanest to you would get criminally prosecuted if you killed yourself, would you be more likely to kill yourself or less? I don't know enough about the psychology of suicide to answer my own question, but my intuitive sense is that self-murderers — or some self-murderers — intend to deal a severe blow to the people they leave behind. And knowing your enemies will be prosecuted might spur you on.

Anyway, here's the article about the Phoebe Prince, who hanged herself, prompting the authorities to arrest 9 of her classmates. See if you can figure out how the shock and sorrow of the young girl's death got processed into criminal charges against 9 teenagers and whether this reaction is helpful or just.

[T]wo boys and four girls, ages 16 to 18, face a different mix of felony charges that include statutory rape, violation of civil rights with bodily injury...

Private citizens can commit civil rights violations?

... harassment, stalking and disturbing a school assembly. 

A felony charge of disturbing a school assembly?

Three younger girls have been charged in juvenile court, Elizabeth D. Scheibel, the Northwestern district attorney, said...

... Ms. Scheibel said that Ms. Prince’s suicide came after nearly three months of severe taunting and physical threats by a cluster of fellow students.

“The investigation revealed relentless activities directed toward Phoebe to make it impossible for her to stay at school,” Ms. Scheibel said. The conduct of those charged, she said, “far exceeded the limits of normal teenage relationship-related quarrels.”

It was particularly alarming, the district attorney said, that some teachers, administrators and other staff members at the school were aware of the harassment but did not stop it. “The actions or inactions of some adults at the school were troublesome,” Ms. Scheibel said, but did not violate any laws.

I'm still trying to understand what the crimes were. Everything anyone did in relation to a suicide looks awful in retrospect, but the dead person's act of self-murder should not transform non-crimes into crimes. Prosecuting people who were horribly mean should not be a community's way to deal with the grief and outrage felt after a suicide. To what extent are the adults in the community scapegoating the kids to avoid their own feelings of guilt? If there are no crimes to use against the school officials, maybe that's a reason not to unload the weight of the law against the kids.

Ms. Prince’s family had recently moved to the United States from a small town in Ireland, and she entered South Hadley last fall. The taunting started when she had a brief relationship with a popular senior boy; some students reportedly called her an “Irish slut,” knocked books out of her hands and sent her threatening text messages, day after day....

On Jan. 14, the investigation found, students abused her in the school library, the lunchroom and the hallways and threw a canned drink at her as she walked home....

Some of the students plotted against Ms. Prince on the Internet, using social networking sites, but the main abuse was at school, the prosecutor said.

"Plotted" to do what?

“The actions of these students were primarily conducted on school grounds during school hours and while school was in session,” Ms. Scheibel said.

Ms. Scheibel declined to provide details about the charges of statutory rape against two boys, but experts said those charges could mean that the boys had sex with Ms. Prince when she was under age.

Legal experts said they were not aware of other cases in which students faced serious criminal charges for harassing a fellow student, but added that the circumstances in this case appeared to be extreme and that juvenile charges were usually kept private.

So, teenagers willingly having sex with each other, and prosecutors do nothing about it. But if someone commits suicide — an inflamed heart breaks — then the sex partners of the dead person are rounded up and prosecuted for statutory rape. Is that fair?

And "appeared to be extreme"? Were the "legal experts" told more details than appear in this article? Because knocking books out of someone's hands and throwing a canned drink don't sound extreme. And then there's the story of a teen love affair that ended and left some heated feelings. It can't be that.

I'd say we need to be careful how much power we give to those who contemplate suicide. Do we think it will work out better if such a person thinks her enemies will be prosecuted? It's especially bad if nothing is done about bullying until there's a suicide. There is the suicidal person feeling alone, beleaguered, and helpless. She's considering ending it all, and the prospect of escaping all pain and consequence is vividly enhanced by the hope that her antagonists will suffer the ravages of criminal prosecution.

Things that make John Cole think about his testicles...

... if he has any testicles.

***

"Now is not the time to search for nonexistent loopholes that preserve a broken system."

Writes Kathleen Sebelius, cowing the insurance companies into foregoing the use of a loophole that existed in the text the Democrats hastily scribbled.

"This activity was not eligible for reimbursement" — this "Eyes Wide Shut"-themed sex show.

And the Republican National Committee has now fired the staffer who expensed it.

The late-night excursion followed an official RNC event in Los Angeles for donors in its “Young Eagles” program...

[Erik Brown,] the donor who was reimbursed for footing the bill... “has verbally agreed to repay the funds to the RNC.”

... Brown, a church-going mid-level political operative, “was not entirely thrilled with the venue that people ended up at,” but nonetheless agreed to foot the bill after the RNC staffer in question told him the committee would reimburse the cost.

Why is Brown's name in the article and the staffer's name isn't? Seems Brown got screwed. He didn't even want to go. Apparently, he paid only because he was going to be reimbursed. And now he's the one whose name has a sex-smear on it. And he's out $2,000.



ADDED NOTE: This post isn't meant to excuse Michael Steele or any other RNC fool. It's just a shred of sympathy for the devil Brown.

UPDATE: The staffer has been identified as Allison Meyers, the director of Young Eagles. 

He's only saying this now because no one cares anymore.

It's only a play for our attention, after all else has failed. Absolutely zero credit for coming out — to Ricky Martin.

"If she had drive and ambition, what's wrong with that?"

That's how June Havoc — dead now at 97 — defended her mother, who was portrayed — unsympathetically, for those not given to excessive sympathy — in the musical "Gypsy." The musical was based on the memoir written by her sister Gypsy Rose Lee. How would you like the world to know the story of your childhood through the eyes of your jealous older sister?

***

But "Gypsy" is such a great musical. It transcends whatever may have been true about the 2 sisters and their mother.  Wouldn't you take great satisfaction to have played a part in the generation of sublime work of art, even if it meant that the real you would forever be submerged under someone else's fictionalized version of you?

"What this film was about for me, which are the moms that take care of the babies and the children no matter where they come from."

Said Sandra Bullock, accepting her Oscar, after fighting alongside her husband Jesse James to win full custody of his 6-year-old daughter, Sunny. There are 2 other James kids — Chandler, 15, and Jesse Jr., 12 — who have had Bullock as a mom. Moms take care of the babies and the children no matter where they come from... but what is she supposed to do now that her husband has betrayed her? Stay together for his children? Or are they her children now? She has dropped plans to adopt them. Presumably, James's children will go back to their real mothers, now that James is consorting with that tattooed, Nazi-arm-band-wearing stripper.

"After 16 years and $10 billion — and a long morning of electrical groaning and sweating — there was joy..."

Scientists jubilate over whatever it is the Hadron collider did.

Following two false starts due to electrical failures, protons whipped to more than 99 percent of the speed of light and to energy levels of 3.5 trillion electron volts apiece around a 17-mile underground magnetic racetrack outside of Geneva a little after 1 p.m. local time. They crashed together inside apartment-building sized detectors designed to capture every evanescent flash and fragment from microscopic fireballs thought to hold insights into the beginning of the world.

I'm just relieved we weren't swallowed by a black hole.

Support for closing Guantanamo has dropped 12 points in the last 14 months.

It's down to 39 percent, and it's no mystery why. It's one thing to speak about it in the abstract during the campaign, quite another actually to release or relocate the detainees.

On a mountaintop in Central City, Colorado.

At the Mountaintop Café...

... unspoool.

"Weapons of mass destruction."

Let's look at the news of these arrests over the weekend:

Nine members of the Christian militia group Hutaree have been indicted on multiple charges involving an alleged plot to attack police, including seditious conspiracy and attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. Attorney in Michigan announced this morning.

"Six Michigan residents, along with two residents of Ohio and a resident of Indiana, were indicted by a federal grand jury in Detroit on charges of seditious conspiracy, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, teaching the use of explosive materials, and possessing a firearm during a crime of violence," according to the government's press release, which you can read in full below.

From the government's own press release:

The indictment further alleges that the Hutaree planned to kill an unidentified member of local law enforcement and then attack the law enforcement officers who gather in Michigan for the funeral. According to the plan, the Hutaree would attack law enforcement vehicles during the funeral procession with Improvised Explosive Devices with Explosively Formed Projectiles, which, according to the indictment, constitute weapons of mass destruction. 

Assuming these allegations are true, this is indeed a nefarious plan and it's great that these people were caught. But I must also say that it's interesting to see that Improvised Explosive Devices with Explosively Formed Projectiles, which, according to the indictment are "weapons of mass destruction." That blows a big hole in the notion that there weren't weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Lawprof Jack Balkin says the individual mandate is constitutional because it's a tax.

Interesting argument:

The individual mandate, which amends the Internal Revenue Code, is not actually a mandate at all. It is a tax. It gives people a choice: they can buy health insurance or they can pay a tax roughly equal to the cost of health insurance, which is used to subsidize the government’s health care program and families who wish to purchase health insurance....

The Constitution gives Congress the power to tax and spend money for the general welfare. This tax promotes the general welfare because it makes health care more widely available and affordable. Under existing law, therefore, the tax is clearly constitutional.

The mandate is also not a “direct” tax which must be apportioned among the states by population. Direct taxes are taxes on land or “head” taxes on the general population. The individual mandate does not tax land. It is not assessed on the population generally but only on people who don’t buy insurance and aren’t otherwise exempt. It is a tax on behavior....

But will the Obama administration want to defend the mandate this way? Millions of Americans are getting a big new tax hit? It's not just a question of whether this argument will work in court. It's a question of whether Obama wants to shout out loud that the supposedly beneficent new law is a huge new tax on the very people he assured — over and over — that he would not raise taxes on.



"I can make a firm pledge under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."

ANY FORM.

"Starting this year, insurance companies will be banned forever from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions." That's what Obama said.

But it's the text of the law that matters, and:

The fine print differs from the larger political message. If a company sells insurance, it will have to cover pre-existing conditions for children covered by the policy. But it does not have to sell to somebody with a pre-existing condition. And the insurer could increase premiums to cover the additional cost.

If they screwed up something that important, what else did they screw up? Or do you think they deliberately gave the insurance companies that loophole, in which case, the question is what other surprises are tucked away in the 1000s of pages of fine print?

ADDED: This suggests an answer to mystery — discussed yesterday — of why the insurance companies didn't barrage us with "Harry and Louise"-type ads this time. They lobbied behind the scenes and got the language they wanted in the bill. Who put that language in? Who wrote the statute? We know the members of Congress who voted for it probably didn't even read much of it. They went on assurances and assertions about what was in it. And there was that outrageous idea — said with a straight-face by Nancy Pelosi — that they had to pass the bill to find out what's in it.

Now, maybe the idea was to set up the insurance companies. They'd read the text and see they could do something and shock the people by saying no to the extremely sympathetic people who have sick children and who were so trusting and happy when they saw the bill pass.

Whether that was planned or not, it is the spin now. From the first link, above:

Congressional Democrats were furious when they learned that some insurers disagreed with their interpretation of the law.

“The concept that insurance companies would even seek to deny children coverage exemplifies why we fought for this reform,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the Senate commerce committee, said: “The ink has not yet dried on the health care reform bill, and already some deplorable health insurance companies are trying to duck away from covering children with pre-existing conditions. This is outrageous.”

Oh! Bad corporations! Evil, greedy, selfish corporations! We'll hear that old refrain once again, with melodramatic new feeling. What a great opportunity to soften everyone up for the next big reform, when the government takes over everything. Down with the child-killing insurance companies! 

"Here, it's tie-dye and marijuana. It's just like the 1960s, with the Vietnam War still to protest."

John Yoo, back at Berkeley, endures his environs.

"I think of myself as being West Berlin during the Cold War, a shining beacon of capitalism and democracy surrounded by a sea of Marxism," Yoo observes, sipping iced tea in the faculty club lounge, a wan smile registering the discomfort of colleagues walking by en route to the bar.

He sees his neighbors as the human figures of "a natural history museum of the 1960s," the Telegraph Avenue tableau of a graying, long-haired, pot-smoking counterculture stuck in the ideology's half-century-old heyday.

He's happy in Berkeley, he says, and that's something I understand.

The shadow man in the rock.

"The Butt."

A painting, from a slide show of paintings, supported by this essay by Roberta Smith that argues that the art form known as painting still lives. The essay is flabbier than the ass depicted in the painting. It contains lines like: "And something else greatly reduces the chances of the death of painting: too many people — most obviously women — are just beginning to make their mark with the medium and are becoming active in its public dialogue."

The boys have fallen behind.

But why? Nicholas D. Kristof asks.

Some people think that boys are hard-wired so that they learn more slowly, perhaps because they evolved to fight off wolves more than to raise their hands in classrooms.

But why has the problem gotten worse lately?

[In “Why Boys Fail,” by Richard Whitmire] argues that the basic problem is an increased emphasis on verbal skills, often taught in sedate ways that bore boys. “The world has gotten more verbal,” he writes. “Boys haven’t.”...

Some educators say that one remedy may be to encourage lowbrow, adventure or even gross-out books that disproportionately appeal to boys....

Indeed, the more books make parents flinch, the more they seem to suck boys in. A Web site, guysread.com, offers useful lists of books to coax boys into reading, and they are helpfully sorted into categories like “ghosts,” “boxers, wrestlers, ultimate fighters,” and “at least one explosion.”

Hey, I thought we needed to worry about fanning the flames of violence. Face it, Kristof, the world of men has ended. You — you men — in your geekhood, transformed your world of action into a world of text, and we women sat down and started typing, typing circles around you, the way we talk circles around you from the earliest possible moment ...



... and so women rule and women will rule... unless somebody pulls the plug.

"Earth Hour"... and other revealing "climate change" hypocrisies.

"Some of the lights the state Capitol were turned off Saturday night as part of Earth Hour a worldwide effort to get people, institutions and governments to shut off their lights for an hour to bring awareness to climate change."

Oh, I'm getting some awareness out of this, all right. This is heightening my awareness that the people who do stunts like this do not actually believe in the "climate change" emergency. Anyone who actually believed would oppose — among many, many other things — all the decorative illumination of the exteriors of public buildings. Just turning it off for an hour? Do you think we are idiots?

***

This reminds me of those churchgoers who pray for an hour a week — in public — and spend the rest of their time engaging in whatever nasty behavior they please. Why do they do this? Do they think they'll get absolution? Eh. You have to actually believe to think there's absolution. If they really believed, they wouldn't behave like that.  I think they, in their selfish interest, hope to gain favor and to prompt other people to believe and behave virtuously.

***

Some illumination of public buildings is required by the FAA, as noted in the linked article. But that reminds me: Why are people flying all over the place anyway? If we really believed in the touted emergency, we would limit flying to the truly essential. And what would be truly essential?

Business and government meetings can be done by video conference. Close down that that government building altogether! Think of all the carbon emissions that would save. (I will concede that in a representative democracy, officials really may need to mingle together in the flesh)

Recreational travel is a monument to disbelief in the seriousness of the climate change alarm. How can you go jaunting about to Europe or wherever and turn around and expect other people to buy tiny tin-can cars?

***

How about if everyone stays home and reads. Read until you figure out how to write English (or whatever language you think you know). The Wisconsin State Journal writes "to bring awareness to climate change." Like "climate change" is an entity that could be jolted into conscious thought.

Under the individual mandate, will people buy the insurance or just pay the penalty... or just not buy the insurance and not pay the penalty?

Because the penalty is not going to be enforced. (Via Instapundit.) Although they've made proof of insurance or payment of a penalty something you put on your income tax return, the usual enforcement mechanisms the IRS employs to collect taxes are not going to be available. So, no liens, no civil or criminal sanctions.

Sheer, shocking incompetence by Congress? Could be. Or it could be the key to the plan to ruin insurance companies by forcing them to take any new customers who are currently inclined to pay, i.e., customers who now have conditions requiring treatment. [AND: Once the insurance companies are ruined, there will be nothing left but the long dreamed-of, single-payer government program.]

What I don't understand, then, is why insurance companies didn't campaign against the reform. They must have understood what was in the offing. (Right?) There must be some explanation for how this thing is supposed to work, otherwise, we'd have been swamped in "Harry and Louise" ads, like last time. Or is there sheer incompetence in private business too? ... in which case, what does it matter if the government takes over everything?

All I can think is that the penalties were there, the insurance companies were lulled, and then the enforcement was yanked out at the last minute, blindsiding them. And yet, even with enforcement of the penalties, the insurance companies faced the obvious risk that people would opt for the penalty — which was comparatively cheap — instead of buying insurance, until they needed treatments that were more expensive than the insurance policy (minus the penalty). The silence of the insurance companies was already a mystery.

***

A reading for the day: "Silver Blaze," by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

At the Too-Early Café...

... it's hard to think of anything to say in this pre-dawn light. You start the conversation.

Sarah Palin at Searchlight.

"Note to Welch: Just ’cause guys will listen to a story about three women in a hot tub..."

"... doesn’t mean a woman wants to hear about three dudes clogging the pool drain with free floating back hair."

***

Here's the part of the BHTV that refers to. It's also a featured link in the sidebar at Bloggingheads with the teaser "Matt Welch. Mickey Kaus. A swimming pool. What happened next may be enough to derail a Senate campaign."

***

Mickey Kaus has qualified as a candidate. Congratulations!

"Kentucky!!!!!! WTF????????"

We're just hanging here waiting for room service and watching basketball and the sun setting over the Flatirons and I'm reading the "Kentucky" Twitter feed out loud and laughing. I don't much care about basketball, but the raw emotion in the Twitter feed cracks me up, and you know West Virginia is my team:



UPDATE: Pasta, salmon, salad consumed. Kentucky spent.

Breaking up is hard to do... with friends.

It's not quite the same as breaking up with a lover, but it can be tough.

Are you going to the "conservative Woodstock" — the "Showdown In Searchlight"?

"Searchlight is not a destination by any means. It's a tiny town. And the locals have told us this is already by far the biggest thing that's happened in their town's history. That's how we see it, a huge number of people coming to a unique place where the draw is, we are going to put on this show and this rally."

***

We're already in Boulder, so it's only about 800 more miles — beautiful, scenic miles. Meade's toying with the idea of us going. It would be great blogging. 

Anyone want to egg me on? (Egg salad me on?)

***

Searchlight is Harry Reid's little home town, so getting thousands of anti-Reidites to go there is pretty prankish. It got me thinking about those Philadelphia flash mobs that have been in the news these last few days:

[H]undreds of teenagers have been converging downtown for a ritual that is part bullying, part running of the bulls: sprinting down the block, the teenagers sometimes pause to brawl with one another, assault pedestrians or vandalize property....

“It was like a tsunami of kids,” said Seth Kaufman, 20, a pizza deliveryman at Olympia II Pizza & Restaurant on South Street. He lifted his shirt to show gashes along his back and arm. He also had bruises on his forehead he said were from kicks and punches he suffered while trying to keep a rowdy crowd from entering the shop, where a fight was already under way.

“By the time you could hear them yelling, they were flooding the streets and the stores and the sidewalks,” Mr. Kaufman said.....

Most of the teenagers who have taken part in them are black and from poor neighborhoods. Most of the areas hit have been predominantly white business districts.

In the flash mob on Saturday, groups of teenagers were chanting “black boys” and “burn the city,” bystanders said....

[T]he mobs started as a kind of playful social experiment meant to encourage spontaneity and big gatherings to temporarily take over commercial and public areas simply to show that they could.

“It’s terrible that these Philly mobs have turned violent,” he said.

Tea Partiers need to maintain a strong culture of peaceful friendliness. Please don't rampage through the city. And don't chant anything racial this time. Just kidding. I don't believe anything racial was ever chanted by the Tea Partiers. But Tea Partiers do chant. They chanted "Kill the Bill," last weekend, and a crowd chanting anything with a violent word — like "kill" — is going to upset some people. Their opponents are keen to portray them as violently angry. Remember how a group of people from outside the neighborhood looks to the people who live and work there and keep the Conservative Woodstock true to the original Woodstock idea of peace and love.

Leaving Wisconsin, crossing the Mississippi.

Biden: "That's the American people, man. We've gotta give them light,"

Wha? He had some analogy going, having to do with diving into a quarry swimming hole when he was a kid — diving from what he says is a height of 100 feet:

"The frightening part was you go down really far, I mean literally really far. So deep it's totally black. Your chest constricts, you panic and you don't know whether you're swimming down or up.

"But when you get about 12 to 14 feet from the top you see light and everything is OK. You're still 12 feet underwater, but it's OK. You see light."

Who will get subsidized under the new health care reform?

I think a lot of people are assuming they will get subsidized, but do they really know where the line will be drawn and the extent of the subsidy?

The cutoff level would be an income of four times the federal poverty level. For one person, that’s about $44,000 a year. For a family of four, the comparable figure is about $88,000.

Subsidies would be figured on a sliding scale, with those who make less getting a bigger boost and those nearer the top getting a smaller one.

The formula is pretty complicated. Basically, though, people who make three or four times the poverty level would get enough federal money so that they would not have to pay more than about 10 percent of their income for a decent health insurance package.

So, if you make $88,000 and have a family of 4, you may have to fork out $8,800 a year ($733 a month).

People who make less would have to pay a smaller slice of their income for coverage. For instance, individuals who make about $14,000, and four-person families with incomes of about $29,000, would not have to pay more than 3 to 4 percent of their incomes for insurance.

If you make only $29,000 and have a family of 4, you are already on a terribly tight budget, and yet you will be required, perhaps, to spend $1,160 a year. I'd really like to see a chart that shows how much people are going to need to pay.

The federal subsidy would go straight to the insurer. It would look like a discount on the policy to the customer.

I think there's going to be a sliding scale of freaking out over the new requirements. Just understanding them and absorbing what is required will be stressful. And then you have to come up with the money, or face the penalty:

If you ignore this mandate and don’t get health insurance, you’ll have to pay a tax penalty to the federal government, beginning in 2014. This fine starts fairly small, but by the time it is fully phased in, in 2016, it is substantial.

An insurance-less person would have to pony up whichever is greater: $695 for each uninsured family member, up to a maximum of $2,085; or 2.5 percent of household income.

There are exceptions. Certain people with religious objections would not have to get health insurance. Nor would American Indians, illegal immigrants, or people in prison.

Well, you could always join the right religion.

Sorry, but I can't help thinking that millions of people are going to freak out.

Karl Rove says "[Bush] was set on Cheney for vice president, and I thought it was a bad idea."

So I guess he wasn't Bush's Brain.

"For about 30 to 35 minutes I laid out the reasons why he shouldn't pick Dick Cheney"...

... his age and health, [his] close association with Bush's father...

"[Bush] prodded and poked at me, and disagreed," Rove said....

"I can't be concerned with the politics of it," Rove said Bush later told him, noting he needed a "good partner," and Cheney was that man.

"It really was his first presidential decision...."

"Here in the United States,we spend about 17% of our GDP on health care, but out-of-pocket expenses make up only about 12% of total health-care spending."

"In Switzerland, where they spend only 11% of GDP on health care, their out-of-pocket expenses equal about 31% of total spending. The difference between 12% and 31% is huge. Once people begin spending substantial sums from their own pockets, they become willing to shop around. Ordinary market incentives begin to operate. A good bill would have encouraged that."

Economics Nobelist Gary Becker thinks it would have been easy to draft a good health care bill, but what we got is bad. Still, he's optimistic.

Coffee, pre-dawn, Mountain Time.

After driving 1000 miles straight through the night.

It's Spring Break at last.

What might lead to the legalization of marijuana...

... the need for something more to tax.

"Whiteness thus became a method of stigmatizing dissenting ideas, a marker of ideological respectability..."

"... [Nell Irvin Painter, in 'The History of White People,'] should have investigated this phenomenon further. Also missing from the book is an analysis of the all-important question: Who benefits and how from the imprimatur of whiteness? Political elites and employers of low-wage labor, to choose just two groups, actively policed the boundaries of whiteness."

"Are zoophiles attracted only to sexually mature animals — and if not, does this make them 'zoopedophiles'?"

"Do zoophiles find particular members of their preferred species more 'attractive' than other individuals from those species, and, if so, are they seduced by standard beauty cues, such as facial symmetry in horses? What is the percentage of homosexual zoophiles (those who prefer animal partners of the same sex) over heterosexual zoophiles?"

Questions, questions. I must say I've never thought about any of those questions before.

At the Doggy Squirrel Café...

... ooh... ahhhh....

"When we have a terrorist attack, the Democrats always ask, 'What did we do to provoke it? Why do they hate us?'"

"Have you heard, any of them, ask the same for something they've imposed on us?  Have you heard the Democrats once ask, 'Why are they mad at us?  We need to understand their rage!'  We have to understand the rage of people who killed 3,000 Americans in terrorist incidents.  We're told, 'We have to understand the people in this country, minorities and whoever else, unhappy with whatever.  We gotta understand their rage. We have to expect it. We have to allow for it.'  Well, how come the anger that we feel, the Democrats aren't interested in understanding?  Why do they not ask, 'Why are they so mad?'" 

***

The Democrats immediately shifted into the theory that anger over the bill is simply not allowed. They merged that anger with actual violence, and they took whatever reports and threats of violence they could find and, in turn, merged them with the anger over the bill.

***

Can we identify neutral principles about anger and violence? How much free expression of anger do we accept in our opponents? When will we listen to it as part of a valuable debate? When do we stigmatize it as part of a system of violence? If the answer to the last question is whenever it serves our political interests to do so, then we are making propaganda.

Linda Greenhouse peers into the psyches of the Supreme Court Justices to predict what they'll say about the constitutionality of the health care bill.

She predicts the decisional path in the brains of the judges will be determined by deep instincts about the states and the federal government:

The architects of the Rehnquist federalism revolution....

Go to the link for some detail on what Greenhouse likes to call the "federalism revolution."

.... were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and his fellow Arizonan, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (Chief Justice Rehnquist was actually from Milwaukee, but he decided during his Army service in North Africa that he liked the air of the desert rather than the cold and damp of the Great Lakes.) They were Westerners to whom the notion of states’ rights came naturally.

But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is not William Rehnquist, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. is not Sandra Day O’Connor. John Roberts has made his career inside the Beltway ever since coming to Washington to clerk for Rehnquist. As for Sam Alito, I don’t believe that apart from a brief part-time gig as an adjunct law professor, this former federal prosecutor, Justice Department lawyer and federal judge has cashed a paycheck in his adult life that wasn’t issued by the federal government. Nothing in their backgrounds or in their jurisprudence so far indicates that they are about to sign up with either the Sagebrush Rebellion or the Tea Party.

Chief Justice Roberts appears particularly in tune with the exercise of national power. 

Here, Greenhouse notes 2 dissenting opinions —Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, where Roberts would have saved the EPA from the state's lawsuit to force it to deal with global warming, and Gonzales v. Oregon, where Roberts would have let the United States attorney general keep doctors from prescribing the suicide drugs that were authorized by Oregon law.

Finally, Greenhouse aptly observes that even some of the Justices who favor the states in federalism decisions lose their nerve when they are confronted with "issues that people really care about." Chief Justice Rehnquist balked when he got to the Family and Medical Leave Act (in Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs) — and that case was only about whether an employee of a state could get back pay when the act was violated, not the more momentous question of whether the act was constitutional or could bind the state.

So now we have a monumental new law. Can we really imagine the Supreme Court thwarting it?

John Roberts is an acutely image-conscious chief justice, as watchful and protective of the Supreme Court’s image as he is of his own. I find it almost impossible to believe that this careful student of history would place his court in the same position as the court that has been rewarded with history’s negative judgment for thwarting the early New Deal.

But the Supreme Court got cold feet about standing up to the will of the democratic branches of government right after Franklin Roosevelt won a big landslide election in 1936. The health care reform law followed an election that wasn't about health care reform at all. The main thing people were thinking about when they voted for Obama in 2008 was the dramatic economic crisis. There were also the 2 wars and amorphous hopes for a post-racial America.

The 2008 election cannot be read as a mandate for health care reform, especially not for the aspect of it that is challenged in the current lawsuits: the  individual mandate to buy health insurance. That could not possibly have been foremost in the voters' minds. First, during the campaign, Obama spoke emphatically against it. And second, even after a year of talk about the reform, people don't really understand what the individual mandate is going to be.

There isn't a big majority of Americans who are counting on being compelled to buy insurance. There isn't even a majority — even a thin majority — of Americans who favor the health care reform as a whole, and this is even before they need to confront something that is probably going to shock and distress a lot of people who haven't studied the text of the law and have simply trusted that the government is about to give them the good things they need.

Greenhouse tries to patch this hole in her argument:

Midweek polls showed the public already rallying around the new health care law. That trend is likely to accelerate as people realize that the law’s benefits belie the scare stories — just around that time that the state challenges are likely to reach the Supreme Court. It won’t require a summa cum laude in history from Harvard to be able to tell history’s wrong side from its right.

So Chief Justice Roberts and the others are going to want to surf the wave of history... that wave that we're still watching for.

"If I were Elin... man, I would have hit a lot more than she did. I would have kept hitting!"

"You would still be swinging the golf club?" "Yeah, (Elin) stopped. She was respectable. I'd get the baseball bat, I'd get everything out."

That's Sandra Bullock, the supposed "girl next door" type, being, presumably, cute and adorable. We're expected to find that especially poignant now because Bullock did not know at the time that her husband was cheating on her too. Poor, darling Sandra!

There will not even be a tiny dent in Bullock's lustrous reputation for her endorsement of — or lighthearted joking about — murderous domestic violence.

Don't even say "down there"...

... over here.

Fight post-traumatic stress...

... with Tetris.

[Tetris] employs many of the same areas of the brain - to do with visual processing and coordinating thoughts and actions - that are involved in laying down memories.

"Disrupting those functions by diverting the brain's attention in this crucial six-hour window seems to dampen down the vividness of memory"....

"It’s far from clear to me that public money should be used to build two office towers."

"If the market does not support these buildings, why should government step in?"

"My ideal state as a reader when I'm reading other people is feeling I'm vaguely wasting my time when I'm not reading that novel."

Ian McEwan on the feeling the writer should create in the reader.

Also, on what makes him able to write: "I suppose it just so happens that the woman I love happens to be my wife, and that is a piece of luck. That creates a sort of stability and a sort of endless interest. I know there are other writers who need the kind of spur of unhappiness to work, but not me. When I'm unhappy I can't work."

ADDED: (Via reader email.) "This is the nature of empathy, to think oneself into the minds of others. These are the mechanics of compassion: you are under the bedclothes, unable to sleep, and you are crouching in the brushed-steel lavatory at the rear of the plane, whispering a final message to your loved one. There is only that one thing to say, and you say it. All else is pointless."

"1) WHO WANTS WHAT? 2) WHAT HAPPENS IF HER DON’T GET IT? 3) WHY NOW?"

This is what you must ask yourself — scream to yourself? — about every scene in your screenplay, according to David Mamet.

Hey, I'm going to ask that about every scene in my life.  WHAT HAPPENS IF HER DON’T GET IT?

Wow, the Canadians are really helping Ann Coulter with her PR!

"This has never, ever, ever happened before — even at the stupidest American university. . . . Since I’ve arrived in Canada, I’ve been denounced on the floor of Parliament — which, by the way, is on my bucket list — my posters have been banned, I’ve been accused of committing a crime in a speech that I have not yet given, I was banned by the student council. So welcome to Canada!"

Obama's opposition to the individual mandate.

Plainly stated:



"When Senator Clinton says a mandate, it's not a mandate on government to provide health insurance. It's a mandate on individuals to purchase it. Massachusetts has a mandate right now. They have exempted 20% of the uninsured because they've concluded that that 20% can't afford it. In some cases, there are people who are paying fines and still can't afford it so now they're worse off than they were. They don't have health insurance and they're paying a fine. In order for you to force people to get health insurance, you've got to have a very harsh, stiff penalty."

I voted for him, not her. He was so sensible and pragmatic, considering all the details, so carefully and intelligently. He wasn't an ideologue. Where is the guy I voted for?

Real problems of violence against members of Congress or self-victimization for the purpose of political argument.

I'm seeing all these stories about threats to members of Congress and wondering what to make of it. An unpopular bill was passed, and the protests continue. Obviously, those who voted for the bill would like to shut up the criticism and delegitimitize the political movement against them. For the last year, we've seen opposition to the bill portrayed as irrational anger, and this new theme sounds like more of the same.

Here's Politico reporting:

The threats against members of Congress who voted for health care reform have turned from a nuisance to a serious law enforcement issue, increasing security concerns as lawmakers prepare to head home for spring recess.

That's the lead paragraph. Let's see what turned the "nuisance" into a "serious law enforcement issue."

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Capitol Police and the House sergeant at arms on Wednesday were brought into a closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting, during which lawmakers expressed fear for their safety and the safety of their families.

So Democrats held a meeting, the press was excluded, and high-level security personnel came in to hear expressions of their fear. Is this political theater or something more substantial?

The Capitol Police, according to several in the caucus meeting, encouraged members to report any incidents to the department. They also offered security assessments of district offices and even members’ homes.

That is an unremarkable answer that police would give to anyone who expressed a nonspecific fear of violence. It's not the police alerting members of Congress based on something they have learned.

One Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Phil Hare of Illinois, said he knows several Democrats who have told their spouses to move out of the home districts while the lawmakers are in Washington.

“If this doesn’t get under control in short time, heaven forbid, someone will get hurt,” Hare said.

If what doesn't get under control?!

And House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland told reporters after a caucus meeting that members who feel in danger would “get attention from the proper authorities.”

I get it. Some of them feel afraid. And if anything actually happens, like anybody else, they'll be able to call the police. What is the story here?

Hare is holding eight town hall meetings in his district over the recess and requested that the Capitol Police coordinate with his local police department to provide security. His wife has pleaded with him to cancel the events.

He doesn't want to hear the anger. This looks like a trumped-up excuse to cancel the town halls.

“My wife is home alone, and I’m worried for her,” he said. “I am about to have my first grandchild. I don’t want to have to be worried.”

Ah, but you were so brave to vote for the bill. To be fair, the bill was passed to help women and children, and Hare would like to continue his beneficence to women and children by not having to account for himself to the people.

Incidents are sprouting up all over the country.

What are the incidents?

The gas lines were cut at the house of Virginia Democratic Rep. Thomas Perriello’s brother, near Charlottesville, Va., prompting an FBI investigation. Local police are making routine checks of the home. A tea party activist from southern Virginia posted online the address of Perriello’s brother, thinking it was the lawmaker’s.

I really want to know the details about this one. Who did it and why? Let me see the photographs. I want to know all about it. I don't like the home addresses being posted on line, and I don't like even peaceful protests at any individual's house. I can see why you'd be upset that your address is known. But anyone could commit an act of vandalism (including dirty tricksters on the Democrat's side). Is the press following up about what, exactly, happened? Or are they complacently passing this story on to be used to propagate the violence meme?

The only other "incident" cited in the article was a "brick... thrown through the window of the Democratic Party’s Cincinnati office." Did anyone see who did it? Was a note attached? Who did it and why? Again, this can be a dirty trick by someone on the Democrats' side.

Clearly, those who are angry about the bill should limit themselves to speech and apply pressure to others in their movement not to cross the line into any kind of violence or damage to property. Any incident of that kind will be greatly magnified in the press and used to undermine the movement. But we should all be vigilant about the way the Democrats and their friends in the press are leveraging these stories for political purposes, exaggerating and failing to check facts. We should closely monitor the journalism, the rhetoric, and the leaps of logic. Hare's remark "If this doesn’t get under control" has a chilling generality to it. Dissent and protest should not "get under control." It should be free.

UPDATE: House Republican Whip Eric Cantor criticizes Democrats for using reports of violence for political purposes. At the same time, he throws out a story about a bullet hitting a window at his campaign office. Is he doing the same thing he's criticizing others for doing? Perhaps, to some extent, but he doesn't make any insinuation about who did it. His point is that violence is serious, but it's random and somehow separate from the real political debate and should be dealt with in a neutral way, not exploited to make rhetorical points.

About those attempts to smear the Tea Party as racist.

Doubt is cast on the spit story.

And what about the claim that the n-word was chanted? It seems likely that all that was ever chanted was "Kill the Bill." Maybe one of the elderly congressmen heard "Kill the Bill" as "n*gger." Without any recorded audio to corroborate that perception, I'd say the hypothesis should be: It didn't happen.

Wipergate.

Hmmm.

"Why in my house?! Why in my bed?!" "Well, Bob, it just seemed like a convenient thing."

Remember the fabulous 1969 movie "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice"?



There with the beautiful Natalie Wood (as Carol) is, as Bob, Robert Culp. The day has come to say goodbye to Robert Culp, who has died at the age of 79.

Culp was also in "I Spy," which was also the first place we encountered Bill Cosby. Here, you can watch the entire first episode of "I Spy" on YouTube. Look in the sidebar for more full episodes.

But it's "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" that had the big effect on me. The clip above shows Bob finding out that his wife is having an affair, and Bob and Carol are free-thinking open-marriage types, but Bob still angry — and then he must confront the conflict between that emotion and his ideology. I was 18 when that movie came out, and so, for me, Bob and Carol were the older generation. We laughed at the stupid way they thought they were hip. And yet, for all the laughing, somewhere along the way, it reached us. That last scene... I wish I could find that on YouTube, but I can't. See the movie, if you haven't. The music is Jackie DeShannon, "What the World Needs Now," and I can find a clip of her singing that (on "Shindig"):



What the world needs now is love, sweet love. It's the only thing that there's just too little of. What the world needs now is love, sweet love — no, not just for some but for everyone.

Grigory Perelman, math genius, living in a tiny apartment in St. Petersburg, doesn't want that $1 million prize.

Please take the prize, Dr. Perelman.

The mathematician is reported to have said "I have all I want".... speaking through the closed door of his flat.

He also turned down the Fields Medal:

"I'm not interested in money or fame," he is quoted to have said at the time.

"I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo. I'm not a hero of mathematics. I'm not even that successful; that is why I don't want to have everybody looking at me."

He seems to be so wrong, but he is so much smarter than we are. Should we not absorb his opinion with awe and respect?

Icicles and iPods.

A deadly combination.

The end of the constitutional challenge to Wisconsin's diploma privilege.

The case was settled with a $7500 payment to the plaintiff. Back in December, the judge — Barbara Crabb — decertified what had been a class action (including all the graduates of out-of-state law schools who sought to practice law in Wisconsin and were required, under state law, to take a bar exam when the graduates of Wisconsin law schools — the University of Wisconsin and Marquette — had a "diploma privilege" to skip the exam).

Lawsuits challenging the new health care law.

Filed:

“Congress lacks the political will to fund comprehensive health care … because taxes above those already provided [in federal healthcare programs] would produce too much opposition,” the Virginia lawsuit says.

“The alternative... is to fund universal health care in part by making healthy young adults and other rationally uninsured individuals cross-subsidize older and less healthy citizens,” the suit says.

The seven-page lawsuit presents a straightforward challenge to Congress’s decision to rely on its power to regulate interstate commerce to justify the federal mandate that every individual must have health insurance or pay a penalty.

“It has never been held that the Commerce Clause [of the Constitution] … can be used to require citizens to buy goods and services,” the suit says. “To depart from that history to permit the national government to require the purchase of goods and services would deprive the Commerce Clause of any effective limits.”

Who's in the Tea Party movement?

A Quinnipiac poll:

74 percent are Republicans or independent voters leaning Republican;
16 percent are Democrats or independent voters leaning Democratic;
5 percent are solidly independent;
45 percent are men;
55 percent are women;
88 percent are white;
77 percent voted for Sen. John McCain in 2008;
15 percent voted for President Barack Obama

More women than men. Surprising?

The harmonica, in 1944.

That's Larry Adler, dead now, at 91.

Addicts have a choice.

Right?

"If I Ate Lab-Grown Human Tissue or Organs, Would I Be Considered a Cannibal?"

I'm adding this to my list of moral questions about things nobody wants to do.

Questions:

1. What else can we put on that list?

2. If you bite your cuticles or the inside of your mouth and keep chewing and swallowing, are you a cannibal?

3. Why does it matter whether a particular word — such as "cannibal" — applies to something, when the real question is whether something is right or wrong?

I think that was the worst episode of "American Idol" ever.

Throwing Things has some detail. Just horrendous. Like a competition to see who could be worst. How could Paige be that bad and it yet not be clear that she's the one who'll have to leave? 

Saul Alinsky's interest in excrement and (bizarrely racial) flatulence.

I've been reading Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals," and I've run into some really weird things. I'd copy out text from the book, but to save time, I'll just cut and paste this material — which tracks the book — from an interview he did with Playboy here and here:

ALINSKY: The most effective way to [attack Chicago mayor Richard Daley was] to create a situation in which he would become a figure of nationwide ridicule.

Now, O'Hare Airport in Chicago, the busiest airport in the world, is Mayor Daley's pride and joy, both his personal toy and the visible symbol of his city's status and importance. If the least little thing went wrong at O'Hare and Daley heard about it, he was furious and would burn up the phone lines to his commissioners until the situation was corrected. So we knew that was the place to get at him. But how? Even if we massed huge numbers of pickets, they'd be virtually lost in the thousands of passengers swarming through O'Hare's terminals. So we devised a new tactic. Picture yourself for a moment on a typical jet flight. The stewardess has served you your drinks and lunch or dinner, and afterwards the odds are you'll feel like going to the john. But this is usually awkward because your seat and those of the people sitting next to you are blocked by trays, so you wait until they're removed. But by then the people closest to the lavatories have got up and the OCCUPIED signs are on. So you wait a few more minutes and, more often than not, by the time the johns are vacant, the FASTEN SEAT BELTS signs are on, so you decide to wait until landing and then use one of the terminal restrooms. You can see this process in action if you watch the passenger gate at any landing airplane. It looks like almost half the debarking passengers make a beeline for the lavatories.

Here's where we came in. Some of our people went out to the airport and made a comprehensive intelligence study of how many sit-down pay toilets and stand-up urinals there were in the whole O'Hare complex and how many men and women we'd need for the country's first "shit-in."... For the sit-down toilets, our people would just put in their dimes and prepare to wait it out; we arranged for them to bring box lunches and reading material along to help pass the time. What were desperate passengers going to do -- knock the cubicle door down and demand evidence of legitimate occupancy? This meant that the ladies' lavatories could be completely occupied; in the men's, we'd take care of the pay toilets and then have floating groups moving from one urinal to another, positioning themselves four or five deep and standing there for five minutes before being relieved by a co-conspirator, at which time they would pass on to another rest room. Once again, what's some poor sap at the end of the line going to say: "Hey, pal, you're taking too long to piss"?

Now, imagine for a second the catastrophic consequences of this tactic. Constipated and bladder-bloated passengers would mill about the corridors in anguish and desperation, longing for a place to relieve themselves. O'Hare would become a shambles! You can imagine the national and international ridicule and laughter the story would create. It would probably make the front page of the London Times. And who would be more mortified than Mayor Daley?....

PLAYBOY: How did you organize Rochester's black community?

ALINSKY: ... We had a wide range of demands, of which the key one was that Kodak recognize the representatives of the black community who were designated as such by the people....

[An] idea I had that almost came to fruition was directed at the Rochester Philharmonic, which was the establishment's -- and Kodak's -- cultural jewel. I suggested we pick a night when the music would be relatively quiet and buy 100 seats. The 100 blacks scheduled to attend the concert would then be treated to a preshow banquet in the community consisting of nothing but huge portions of baked beans. Can you imagine the inevitable consequences within the symphony hall? The concert would be over before the first movement -- another Freudian slip -- and Rochester would be immortalized as the site of the world's first fart-in.

PLAYBOY: Aren't such tactics a bit juvenile and frivolous?

ALINSKY: I'd call them absurd rather than juvenile. But isn't much of life kind of a theater of the absurd? As far as being frivolous is concerned, I say if a tactic works, it's not frivolous. Let's take a closer look at this particular tactic and see what purposes it serves -- apart from being fun. First of all, the fart-in would be completely outside the city fathers' experience. Demonstrations, confrontations and picketings they'd learned to cope with, but never in their wildest dreams could they envision a flatulent blitzkrieg on their sacred symphony orchestra. It would throw them into complete disarray. Second, the action would make a mockery of the law, because although you could be arrested for throwing a stink bomb, there's no law on the books against natural bodily functions....

A shit-in and a fart-in. I thought you should know.

"Patrick Kennedy leaves note for Ted on gravesite: 'Dad, the unfinished business is done.'"

"The political odyssey of health care reform in many ways is the story of Ted Kennedy, and as President Obama signed the historic bill into law Tuesday, Kennedy's gravesite was a place of quiet celebration and poignant reflection."

Response?
	Genuinely touching.
	Embarrassing, exploitative PR.
	I wish I could unsee that.
	Do not trouble Teddy now. He is feasting with Jesus now, with big portions on giant plates.
pollcode.com free polls

Do we care if Biden says the f-word to Obama and it's picked up by the microphone?

And if we do care that Biden said "Mr. President, this is a big fucking deal," why should we care?

Why should we care?
	Biden shouldn't be saying bad words.
	Obama shouldn't be hearing bad words.
	Biden shouldn't be so fucking careless in front of a microphone.
	Obama and Biden should be more circumspect about exercising power and not enthusing like schoolboys.
	We don't like being reminded that we really are fucked.
pollcode.com free polls

"The food portions depicted in paintings of the Last Supper have grown larger - in line with our own super-sizing of meals, say obesity experts."

That is not from The Onion, folks. That's BBC.com.

Professor Brian Wansink, who, with his brother Craig, led the research, published in the International Journal of Obesity, said: "The last thousand years have witnessed dramatic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food...."

His team used computer-aided design technology to scan and calculate the relative measurements of items in the paintings, regardless of their orientation.

These included works by El Greco, Leonardo Da Vinci, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Rubens.

Based on the assumption that the width of an average loaf of bread from the time should be twice that of the average disciple's head, the researchers plotted the size of the Passover evening dishes.

Never eat anything larger than your disciple's head.

The main meals grew 69% and plate size 66% between the oldest (carried out in 1000AD) and most recent (1700s) paintings. Bread size grew by about 23%.

The sharpest increases were seen in paintings completed after 1500 and up to 1900AD.
Craig Wansink, who is a professor of religious studies, says the changes in portion sizes is probably a reflection of culture rather than theology.

"There is no religious reason why the meals got bigger. It may be that meals really did grow, or that people just became more interested in food."

Take, eat, this is my supersized body....

Mickey Kaus and the fear of microbes.

Matt Welch discloses:

"I'm the weird one! I'm the weird one!"

"Weird: The Al Yankovic Story" from Aaron Paul

How do we really feel about Nancy Pelosi?

I think she's going to come out of all of this very well. Here's my salute to her:



In the comments to the "Stump Nightclub" open thread last night, kentuckyliz prodded our resident animator Chip Ahoy: "photoshop this pic with a teabag dangling down into her mouth. Or clip her out and paste her onto the background for The Scream." She meant this picture:



Not my stump picture:



And Chip said: "Gnarly root Medusa tea-bag Pelosi but nobody is allowed to look at it except for kentuckyliz and Rialby. And now I must go and pray to repent for God told me he's going to totally kick my ass."

So, of course, we looked:



Oh, lord! That's so wrong and so right. But that's another kind of salute to the lady who has claimed her place in American history. There was a time when we pulled our punches when a woman was involved. I say Chip's GIF is a landmark in the journey toward equality for women.

And God have mercy on us all.

It's the new Bloggingheads — with me and Matt Welch!

It's called "It's Fun to Be Goo" and is mostly in response to the passage of the health care bill, but there's some cool miscellaneous material in there, like the story of Matt and Mickey Kaus in Eugene Volokh's swimming pool, which includes my idea for a Speedo based on the California flag.

At the Stump Nightclub...

... stop and stomp.

IN THE COMMENTS: Flexo says:

You better watch it.

We might have the government spending $ 10 million to commission some "artist" to create a sculpture replica of those twisted roots.

Ha ha. He's remembering this. You know, I thought the stumps (especially the other one) were beautifully sculptural and wanted to bring them into the house. Meade hacked that idea off at the roots by agreeing on the condition that I be the one to carry them in.

"It's so nice to have a man around the Althouse."

LOL.

ADDED: A video from today at Meadehouse:

"Are tea parties racist?"

Matt Welch examined this (newly revived) question last December:

It started in early August, as members of Congress began facing their unusually restive constituents in a series of town hall meetings. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, citing not one shred of contemporary sociological evidence, asserted that “the driving force behind the town hall mobs” is “cultural and racial anxiety” on the part of the “angry white voter.” Within a month, that bit of omniscient whitey baiting was perilously close to conventional wisdom....

Welch attended a rally:

But if there was anything “overwhelming” about the protest it was the percentage—which I would place well above 90—of signage and conversation specifically referring to government spending, economic policy, and creeping federal interference into various areas of life. I saw nothing about affirmative action, nothing about welfare, nothing about illegal immigration, almost nothing about hot-button social conservative issues, and very little on foreign policy. If race played a central role, 100,000 people did a good job of hiding it.

"It's fun to be goo."

An out-of-context snippet:



From a forthcoming Bloggingheads, recorded just now.

We're going to get a dog like that and name it Payback.

That way, if anyone asks is it a girl or a boy, we can say, "Well, we named it Payback...."

***

Thanks to Irene ("Hey look! Some crafty Tea Partier stole Bo") and Meade ("Irene, I'm sorry I failed to get the name of the beautiful dog in that photo so I'm just going to call her 'Payback'...").

I'm getting a lot of flak for saying "So what if some idiot said a bad word?"

I'm not going to link to some of the outrageous anti-Althousiana out there, but you can easily find it by Googling "Althouse" and "So what if some idiot said a bad word?" You'll find some harsh stuff. Did you know I'm "lunatic fringe right-wing blogger Ann Althouse"? Anyway, here's my old post, where I've added this new material:

I'm not approving of ugly epithets, just emphasizing the comparison between an individual ordinary citizen, who might not be very sane/smart/educated, and a member of Congress, who wields great power. The member of Congress should not pretend he's weak, when he is in fact strong. It's also exceedingly lame — and, frankly, racist — for white people to be so quick to think of powerful black politicians as vulnerable and besieged. I assume the black politicians laugh at them in private. The willingness of black politicians to make power moves in racial terms suggests to me that they know exactly what they are doing: leveraging patronization.