"It is not the job of the local police to enforce the federal drug law."

Says a California appellate court, ordering the police to give a man back his marijuana. State law did not bar his possession of marijuana, because he was authorized to use it under the Compassionate Use Act. Of course, the possession is still a crime under federal law, but let the feds come after him then. It's no business of California authorities.

ADDED: I'm not endorsing this decision. In fact, I have some doubts about it. I'm just presenting it for discussion at this point.

"And, to be blunt, he does not look like a creepy goofball."

Robin Givhan takes a look at Michael Jackson.

"I think the guy who's sitting pretty at the moment? John McCain."

Says David Corn in this Bloggingheads (with a response from Jim Pinkerton):



(Here's the whole episode.)

Longest...

... leap.

ADDED: "Knievel was the most complex man I’ve ever known — although I don’t claim to have known him."

"A man has just walked into the Clinton office, opened his coat and showed us a bomb strapped to his chest with duct tape."

News.

UPDATE: The NYT reports that the man, Leeland Eisenberg, now in custody, was said to be "despondent," because he was facing a divorce, and that he'd been on a drinking binge.

So who's more likely to think they're mentally healthy — sane people or nuts?

"Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats or independents to rate their mental health as excellent, according to data from the last four November Gallup Health and Healthcare polls."

"Rudy's New Shag Fund Explanation!"

That's what Josh Marshall calls it.

And here's how Hog on Ice snarks:

Giuliani appears to have cheated the taxpayers, although I'm not sure that's true; perhaps there is nothing illegal or improper about using taxpayer money to pay for security when you commit adultery. God knows we paid the Secret Service when Bill Clinton was doing it, many times. And let's not even mention the Arkansas State Police. Oops, I mentioned them.

I'll opine more when I get the chance. Right now, I'm only trying to give you something to talk about while I'm off doing things....

"What we cared about was that he was real."

Sorry about the light blogging this morning. You might want to talk about this Howard Kurtz piece which looks at CNN's approach to selecting questioners for its YouTube debate. The quote in the heading is from David Bohrman, CNN's Washington bureau chief, justifying using a question from Retired Brig. Gen. Keith Kerr, who's on Hillary Clinton's steering committee on gay and lesbian issues.

The teddy bear teacher is sentenced to 15 days in prison.

Presumably, this is better than a flogging, but mobs are demanding that she be shot, and the prison conditions are hellish:

The Omdurman prison where Mrs Gibbon will be locked up was built for 200, but now houses 1,200 women and 300 children, most of the adults jailed for illegally brewing alcohol.

Spare a moment to think not only of Gillian Gibbons, whose story we know, but of those 1,500 others, especially those children.

ADDED: More here:

The protesters streamed out of mosques after Friday sermons, as pickup trucks with loudspeakers blared messages against Gillian Gibbons, the teacher who was sentenced Thursday to 15 days in prison and deportation.

They massed in central Martyrs Square, outside the presidential palace, where hundreds of riot police were deployed, although they did not attempt to stop the rally.

"Shame, shame on the U.K.," protesters chanted.

They called for Gibbons' execution, saying, "No tolerance: Execution," and "Kill her, kill her by firing squad."

Survivor!

Oh, how I love this show! Great episode. Spoil away in the comments.

"Mrs Gibbons technically faces three charges - insulting Islam, inciting religious hatred and contempt for religious beliefs..."

Those who subject her to those charges are inciting contempt for religious beliefs.

"What do you mean by 'right wing progressivism'?"

Jonah Goldberg explains what he thinks is so wrong with Huckabee.

"If I lose, then I think it's fine for people to speculate that I don't have the bloodlust."

TNR has an interview with Barack Obama that ends with the question: "Do you worry that people look at that and say 'Well, this guy doesn't have the thirst, the kind of bloodlust for brass-knuckle politics that you need to have?'" The answer:

This argument never makes sense to me. If I lose, then I think it's fine for people to speculate that I don't have the bloodlust. I think I'm going to win doing exactly what I'm doing. This notion that somehow the only way to succeed in politics is to try to kneecap people, distort their records, engage in underhanded maneuvers--I just don't buy it. Now, you know what, if it turns out in this campaign that I have lost, and the reason I've lost is because I wasn't willing to do things that I think are wrong, I can live with that. I don't think that's going to happen. The one thing I won't tolerate is people trying to play that stuff on me. The one thing I hope people have become very clear about, and if not I will remind them, is I won't be a punching bag for anybody. I won't have people try to engage in unfair attacks against me. And if they come at me hard, I will come back at them harder. Alright?

Hillary as the woman behind the man.

I can now do little embedded clips from Bloggingheads. Try this:



Here's the whole diavlog.

(And sorry for the insolent look on my face on the freeze frame. I was going to pick another clip just to avoid it. But other matters are more pressing at the moment)

A 47-year-old woman pretended to be a 16-year-old boy on line and tormented a 13-year-old girl she knew.

After getting the girl to fall in love with this nonexistent boy, the middle-aged woman turned mean, argued, and said "The world would be a better place without you." The girl immediately committed suicide. Has the woman committed a crime?

But a St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department spokesman, Lt. Craig McGuire, said that what [Lori] Drew did “might’ve been rude, it might’ve been immature, but it wasn’t illegal.”

In response to the events, the local Board of Aldermen on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure making Internet harassment a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $500 fine and 90 days in jail.

"Give me a break; that’s nothing,” Mayor Pam Fogarty said of the penalties. “But it’s the most we could do. People are saying to me, ‘Let’s go burn down their house.’”

You need a statute if you want something to be a crime. Internet harassment is a crime in many states, including Wisconsin, but there are free speech limits on what can be criminalized.

Anyway, what was Drew's motivation? It looks as though she started out wanting to help her own daughter, who was rejected as a friend by the girl who killed herself:

In a report filed with the Sheriff’s Department, Lori Drew said she created the MySpace profile of “Josh Evans” to win Megan’s trust and learn how Megan felt about her daughter...

“Lori laughed about it,” {said a neighbor], adding that Ms. Drew and Ms. Drew’s daughter “said they were going to mess with Megan.”

After a month of innocent flirtation between Megan and Josh, Ms. Meier said, Megan suddenly received a message from him saying, “I don’t like the way you treat your friends, and I don’t know if I want to be friends with you.”

They argued online. The next day other youngsters who had linked to Josh’s MySpace profile joined the increasingly bitter exchange and began sending profanity-laden messages to Megan, who retreated to her bedroom. No more than 15 minutes had passed, Ms. Meier recalled, when she suddenly felt something was terribly wrong. She rushed to the bedroom and found her daughter’s body hanging in the closet.

A bizarre part of the story is that the police only heard about it because of a foosball table:

Shortly before Megan’s death, the Meiers had agreed to store a foosball table the Drews had bought as a Christmas surprise for their children. When the Meiers learned about the MySpace hoax, they attacked the table with a sledgehammer and an ax, Ms. Meier said, and threw the pieces onto the Drews’ driveway.

Drew went to the police about that. She filed a complaint that said she thought the hoax “contributed to Megan’s suicide, but she did not feel ‘as guilty’ because at the funeral she found out Megan had tried to commit suicide before.”

Incredible. It's hard to believe that a person who seems to be a functioning member of society could have such bad judgment, distorted perception, and pitilessness.

"A hall full of yowling Ron Paul loons and questions from Unabomber look-a-likes in murky basements."

Richelieu at Weekly Standard deplores CNN's YouTube debate:

America got to see a vaguely threatening parade of gun fetishists, flat worlders, Mars Explorers, Confederate flag lovers and zombie-eyed-Bible-wavers as well as various one issue activists hammering their pet causes. My cheers went to a listless Fred Thompson who easily qualified himself to be president in my book by looking all night like he would cheerfully trade his left arm for an early exit off the stage to a waiting Scotch and good Cuban cigar. The media will probably award a win to Mike Huckabee, the easy listening music candidate at home in any crowd, fluent in simpleton speak and the one man on the stage tonight who led the audience to roaring cheers by boasting that he had a special qualification to be president that none of the second-raters on the stage could match: A degree in Bible Studies from Ouachita Baptist University of Arkadelphia, Arkansas.

Well put.

ADDED: By contrast, look at how positive Captain Ed is about CNN's handling of the debate:

For the most part -- with a few glaring exceptions -- the network eliminated the silliness and stuck to substance. The questions hit hot topics and sparked some fierce debate. With a couple of exceptions, Republican fears of crypto-Democratic hit questions failed to materialize, and the candidates responded substantively to the rest.

I expected the debate to descend into silliness and gotcha moments. The only gotchas came from the candidates. Truthfully, this may have been one of the least "gotcha" and most substantive debates we've had this year.

Live-blog the YouTube debate with me.

Let's cover tonight's debate in the comments. That way there will be automatic time stamps and we'll have a nice dialogue format. Get ready.

Here's a pretty sunset while you're waiting:



That happened tonight. I'm not palming off some other night's sunset. That's tonight's sunset.

ADDED: Come into the comments and talk about the debate.

UPDATE, NEXT MORNING: Lots of comments! Did you like this approach to live-blogging? Let me sum up what I thought:

1. Anderson Cooper is a very weak moderator. He's a nice-looking man, but he had no authority, and, as a result, the candidates did whatever they wanted, which was actually revealing and interesting. It was really bad, however, when he allowed the retired general in the audience to hold the mike and lecture us on gays in the military. Once the point was made, that man had no right to consume air time like that, and Cooper was incompetent at stopping him. It seemed that at one point someone cut the mike, but then Coooper didn't take advantage of that to move on, he made efforts to get the mike back and to give the man more time. If that was supposed to be an expression of Anderson's own commitment to gay rights, it was: 1. inappropriate, and 2. inept.

2. Giuliani was good — nice and scrappy at the beginning, which set the tone the others had to deal with. Giuliani made Romney seem stiff and nervous, and he did a nice job turning the charge of "sanctuary city" back on Romney with "sanctuary mansion" — a memorable phrase.

3. CNN seemed to choose the YouTube videos that would show individuals who would repel a sizable segment of Americans: the guy with the gun, the kid with the Confederate flag, the Christian with the Bible. Or are you going to tell me CNN just loves props?

4. Thanks to everyone who participated in the comments. I think people did a great job!

"Ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety."

Norman Mailer wins the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

The idea of the award is "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it." But I do think they confuse good writing about bad sex with bad writing. Mailer was writing about Adolf Hitler, so he must have meant the act to seem ugly. This conflation of bad sex and bad writing was really obvious in 2004 when they gave the award to Tom Wolfe a passage in "I Am Charlotte Simmons":

Wolfe's third novel is set in an imaginary elite Ivy League university and is seen through the eyes of his eponymous heroine - a shy, virginal country girl who is initially shocked by the decadence and excess she encounters. Wolfe spent four years roaming the campuses of America's top universities researching the novel and claimed in a Guardian interview that "I have tried to make the sex un-erotic. I will have failed if anyone gets the least bit excited. So much of modern sex is un-erotic, if erotic means flight of fancy or romantic build-up."

I've read that book, and Wolfe did exactly what he says he meant to do.

Nevertheless, bad sex or bad writing, the chosen passages are quite hilarious.

"The ABA Journal Blawg 100."

The ABA Journal has put together a list of the 100 top law blogs — and they were nice enough to include me in the "Ivory Tower" category. Check it out. And feel free to give me a vote. You can only vote once for each blog, but you can vote for as many blogs as you want.

"They're watching us and laughing... to them we are pussies. It's like they look at us and they're like, 'Oh, look at those wimpy little pussies.'"

Fabio talks politics. Thats what he says about Abu Ghraib. On Iraq:

"Those people, they hate us no matter what," he says. "And you know, we started the fight, so let's finish it. You can't just walk away with your back to them, because they gonna stab you."

But don't get excited, Republicans. He's for Hillary:

"She's so smart," he says. "And with her, you're getting two with one. You know I love women, because I owe my success to women. To me, it will be the biggest reward. I would love for the first time to have a woman president."

And with Hillary in charge, he says, the Iraqi insurgents better watch out. "When a woman gets pissed off at you," he says, "she's going to get you, you know?"

(Link via Memeorandum.)

"Will the secular left soon attack the religious right for being pro-science?"

Joseph Bottum writes::

I have long suspected that science, in the context of the editorial page of the New York Times, was simply a stalking-horse for something else. In fact, for two something-elses: a chance to discredit America's religious believers, and an opportunity to put yet another hedge around the legalization of abortion. After all, if our very health depends on the death of embryos, and we live in a culture that routinely destroys early human life in the laboratory, no grounds could exist for objecting to abortion.

With these purposes now severed by the Japanese de-differentiation technique, which way will it break?

The answer is, quite possibly, toward a rejection of science by the mainstream press. Since the 1960s, abortion has skewed American politics in strange and unnatural ways, and the cloning debates are no exception....

[N]ow that abortion is out of the equation: much less hype about all the miracle cures that stem cells will bring us, more suspicion about the cancers and genetic pollution that may result, and just about the same amount of bashing of religious believers—this time for their ignorant support of science.

Much of the debate about stem cell research was really about abortion — on both sides. But I see no reason to think that the "secular left" will turn against science. For one thing, "hype about all the miracle cures" isn't scientific. "Suspicion about the cancers and genetic pollution" is phrased to sound unscientific — a lot of free-floating emotion and paranoia. But it is part of science to keep track of the ill effects of scientific advancements. It seems to me that both sides of the political debates support science up to the point where it offends their moral principles, and both sides imbue whatever they have to say about about science with the emotional fervor they have for their political causes. That's what we've been seeing all along, and I don't see that changing.

ADDED: I think the term "anti-science" most aptly refers to a rejection of science as the way of understanding the world. Various religionists, ideologues, and ignoramuses are anti-science in this sense. But nearly all of us have moral sensibilities that don't come from any scientific method and that we see as explaining the world in some ways that are superior to science and that we will use to limit science, for example, when we forbid experiments on human beings. But there is another use of the term "anti-science" that we are indulging in here that's quite different. It's a hatred of technological advances or a philosophical or religious preference for a simpler or more traditional way of life. We may fully believe that science is the way to understand things, but we've decided we don't want to know or we don't want the innovations that the knowledge would make possible. I think we all are rather selective about changes we like and don't like, so we're all somewhat "anti-science" in this sense.

The New York view.

Just now.

ADDED: I took nearly the same picture in mid-August.

"A bureaucratic fiefdom... 500 officials... a 1,300-page plan.... sensitive to scrutiny... documents... locked away... 'We will demonize'..."

Stephen Braun, in the L.A. Times, looks into the proposition that Hillary Clinton's experience as First Lady is a legitimate credential for the presidency:

Clinton's all-access pass into the West Wing gave her an intimate education in presidential decision-making that none of her opponents can claim. She observed at close range how big government works, and she learned painfully from her missteps how easily it bogs down...

She built an insular White House fiefdom known as Hillaryland, surrounding herself with a tightknit band of loyalists who skillfully advanced her causes, but who were also criticized for isolating her from political realities.

Hillaryland's denizens began to jokingly refer to themselves as "the Stepford Wives." Their unflinching devotion gained them wide berth in the West Wing.

Staffers were expected to work grueling hours and report back any development that involved the first lady. She kept them busy with news clippings that she covered with scrawled questions and filed in a cardboard carton in her office.

She kept them busy with news clippings that she covered with scrawled questions and filed in a cardboard carton in her office. That sounds strangely small time. What exactly was the task at hand? (Was it something like those scrawled notes Dick Cheney wrote on that New York Times op-ed written by Joe Wilson?)

The first lady's management of the initiative to overhaul American healthcare remains her closest approximation of high-wire decision-making....

[U]nder her watch, the healthcare task force became a bureaucratic fiefdom. More than 500 officials churned out reports that funneled into a 1,300-page plan....

She appeared sensitive to scrutiny from the start. Just three days after her husband gave her authority over the healthcare plan, she was already considering limits on public access to the plan's records. In a Jan. 28, 1993, memo, deputy counsel Vincent Foster advised the first lady and Ira Magaziner, who devised the complex healthcare process structure, that task-force records might be withheld from release under the Freedom of Information Act if the files remained "in the control of the president."

Her response is not known because many of her healthcare documents have not been released. The Clinton library in Little Rock has released scores of healthcare memos sent to the first lady. But none of her own memos or notes is available, and though some are now scheduled for release early next year, others may remain locked away until after the 2008 election.

Her doggedness was not matched by her coalition-building skills. Chicagoan Dan Rostenkowski, the gruff, powerful former House Ways and Means chairman, felt that congressional committees should lead the way. "None of the people in your think tank can vote," he recalls telling Clinton. "She wasn't persuaded."

She courted skeptical Senate Finance Chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but undercut the stroking with threats. At a weekend retreat after the State of the Union address in 1993, she dismissed worries about meeting a 100-day deadline set by her husband for a healthcare bill. Asked what would happen if they were late, she said: "You don't understand. We will demonize those who are blocking this legislation and it will pass."...

This is the one effort at management that is available for us to examine... to the extent that she will allow us to examine it. A bureaucratic fiefdom... 500 officials... a 1,300-page plan.... sensitive to scrutiny... documents... locked away... "We will demonize"...

If her experience as First Lady has prepared her for the presidency — and it is her argument that it does — then we must look at that experience and ask what kind of President she is prepared to be.

"This whole Taser concept has gone way too far, but we suppose it's better than mass murdering crowds of people."

Gizmodo picks up on the Taser flying saucer drone.

We were just talking about this last Sunday here.

Bloggingheads!

Check it out. I'm back... with a vengeance.

ADDED: Topics:

Norman Mailer on women

The subliminal seduction of Mr. Whipple

Living and loving with Alzheimer's

"Leave me alone to have my guns"

Huckabee and Obama: pragmatic idealists

Is Hillary man enough to be president?

Judith Regan's secret dirt on Giuliani

Limbaugh.

I'm getting reports that I was mentioned on Rush Limbaugh's show today. Can anyone recount what was said

UPDATE: I think the reason my name came up is because it's in this column published this morning by Charlie Sykes.

IN THE COMMENTS: Scroll down to 2:22 for a link to the audio clip. And, yes, it is the material from the Sykes column. And, beyond that, Rush's point is that the new generation is not receptive to the "political correctness" of their elders.

Blogging the conventions.

I see the Democratic Party is about to accept applications to bloggers to cover their convention (in Denver next summer):

The move gives bloggers and the new media a chance to shine, much as they did at the trial of Scooter Libby earlier this year, and to bring a whole new perspective, and competition, to convention coverage. This is, after all, the first convention since the rise of YouTube....

Convention activities will go for 96 hours; with networks no longer providing wall-to-wall coverage and television viewership declining, [Jason Rosenberg, the director of online communications for the Democratic National Convention Committee] hopes bloggers can help kindle excitement about the event and, by extension, about the Democrats themselves.

“Bloggers can give you 24-hour coverage of the convention, of the delegate meetings, of the caucuses, of the parties,” Mr. Rosenberg said. “Everything that goes on, the bloggers can be there to cover.” This includes speeches not delivered in prime time or too late for East Coast print deadlines.

Well, anyone can watch the whole thing on C-Span. The best way to cover the conventions is to TiVo the whole thing and then watch and blog what catches your attention. Do you really think you'd do better on site?

Still, there are other things you'd see if you were there. Imagine wandering around with your little video camera — looking for... trouble. Then there's the whole seductive practice of blogging the other bloggers.

[The bloggers'] presence also makes the media itself a bigger story and increases the likelihood that you will be seeing more stories by the media about the media covering the media....

See, that's a big reason for a blogger to go there. You might be the center of attention. You might be more interesting than the blowhard on the podium. Wouldn't it be just like a blogger to take that bait? Of course, I know the feeling. Remember when I traveled to Washington to be on CNN on election night — TV watching me watch TV? What a thrill. Who hasn't watched TV and thought: Wouldn't it be cool if there was another TV show that would be me watching this show?

Bloggers obviously bring a different take — less restrained, more granular, in real time — from that of the mainstream media, and that’s exactly what the Democrats want...

Mmmm.... granular.

Mr. Rosenberg said the bloggers would be of “all stripes,” but asked if that included Republican or conservative bloggers, he said that would be decided case by case.

They want good press, of course. Should I apply? To see if they reject me? But then if I attended, I'd be around a lot of bloggers who — I think — hate me. Yet, in my experience, most of the bloggers are pretty nice. Most. Not all. Compare this and this.

Jen Caltrider, executive producer of ProgressNowAction, said the Democrats “are doing a pretty good job of bringing bloggers into the fold”....

"The fold." Want to be in the fold? You sheep. They'd like to tame you... make you feel privileged... so you'll get invited again...

So the local Colorado blogosphere, spearheaded by ProgressNowAction.org and in conjunction with dailykos.com, is picking up the slack and hosting a blogger hangout at the Alliance Center, just across the street from the Pepsi Center....

It will provide food, couches, big televisions, studios for multi-media mixing and will snag big-name convention-goers for interviews with the non-credentialed bloggers.In a plug for the blogger center, Markos Moulitsas, the founder of dailykos, wrote recently: “I learned in 2004 that being in the convention hall is not that great. It’s hot. You get the crappiest seats. WiFi is spotty at best. Getting through security is a nightmare. Ugh. I’m not even going to apply for a pass.”

He said that not being at the convention center “won’t be a disaster, since the REAL fun will be at our blogger gathering.”

A different fold. Want to be in that one? I know I don't belong there. Though I do like cool air, comfy seats, and great WiFi. But I can get all that right alongside my TiVo. It's so much easier to see what's going on from home. You can hear. You can pause. You can vlog yourself watching and pausing and commenting. You've got no distractions. Nobody cajoling you. Nobody scowling at you. You can think straight and write sharp things.

ADDED: A reader emails, responding to my "'The fold.' Want to be in the fold? You sheep. They'd like to tame you... make you feel privileged... so you'll get invited again...:

Hah! Pretty good.

Except you don't quite have the whole sheep thing down. Nobody tames sheep — I speak as one who raises sheep on a little hobby farm down in Oregon (WI), where the family and I have a herd of 15 head at the moment. Instead, what you do is either fleece them — i.e., shear off their wool for spinning; or you slaughter them. That's about it, as far as the sheep business goes. They're quite tame already, any more and they'd be more like fainting goats (some hilarious video footage of them here).

Still and all, as far as metaphorical grist for the mill (fleecing, spinning, slaughtering) goes, not too bad, eh?

English teacher in Sudan faces 40 lashes for letting students call the teddy bear Muhammad.

It's considered blasphemy.

Of course, I'm opposed to whipping as a punishment, but it seems to me that if you go to a foreign country to teach people's children, you have a responsibility to learn the deep beliefs of the culture you've entered and to adapt to it. Think of a foreign teacher coming to the United States to teach in our public schools. We would expect her to refrain from from leading the students in a prayer, and she would be sanctioned if she didn't comply. People in other countries might think, what is wrong with these Americans? All the teacher did was say a harmless, voluntary nonsectarian prayer.

Now, if the police burst into the classroom and tasered her [this hypothetical American teacher], there'd be cause to complain. The problem in this Sudan case is the punishment not what is considered an offense. In fact, even in the United States, I think a teacher should refrain from calling a teddy bear Muhammad. The practice of avoiding offense to religion in public school is not a violation of the principle of separating religion and state or the right to free speech.

I'm not talking about the more general problem raised by criminalizing "blasphemy." Clearly, that violates principles of free speech and separating religion and state. This case concerns a teacher who is trusted with the education of children. It is no answer that the children got the idea of naming the bear "Muhammad." The teacher is obligated to guide them. Think how you'd feel if your child's classroom had a teddy bear named "Shithead," and the explanation was that the kids named it.

CORRECTION: The heading to this post originally had that the woman was "sentenced" to 40 lashes. She has been arrested and faces that sentence. One hopes that the outcry against this will spare her.

I happen to think this a great Christmas gift... and a great fundraising idea.

The Plank reports:

I'm sure many--if not most--Plank readers have spent the four days since Thanksgiving saying to themselves, "My friend/relative/significant other is a huge Mitt Romney supporter, but I just can't think of what to get him/her this holiday season." Well, worry no more! In an email entitled "The UltiMITT Holiday" (yes, apparently they've hired Kathryn Jean Lopez to write their fundraising email subject lines), the Romney campaign presents their holiday gift packages. It will cost you $250, but without a doubt the best gift is the "Gold Ribbon Package," which includes a "downloadable phone message of Mitt answering your voicemail using your name."

I'm not saying it's what I want, but there've got to be people who would get a bang out of having the Mitt enunciate their name — over and over for all their friends. And from Romney's perspective, it raises money using very little of the candidate's time. Couldn't he record 100 of these in 5 minutes? That's $25,000. And it also creates a warm feeling of connection to the donor and operates as high-quality, word-of-mouth advertising to everyone who calls him.

"It’s time to steel ourselves for the heavily advertised Bush-and-Condi show at Annapolis...."

While you're hoping the Iraq war fails, don't forget to gear up you hopes for a big collapse of the mideast peace talks.

"Gov. Mike Huckabee, Republican of Arkansas, what will it take to get you to run for president in 2008?"

Asked C-Span's Brian Lamb back in 2005. Answer? "Oh! That's a big question. Probably a vision from above."

So... was there a vision? Could somebody ask him?

"Sen. Clinton is claiming basically the entire eight years of the Clinton presidency as her own, except for the stuff that didn't work out..."

"... in which case she says she has nothing to do with it," said Barack Obama.

"There is no doubt that Bill Clinton had faith in her and consulted with her on issues, in the same way that I would consult with Michelle, if there were issues. On the other had, I don't think Michelle would claim that she is the best qualified person to be a United States Senator by virtue of me talking to her on occasion about the work I've done."

Glad he said that.

Was Lincoln already dying of cancer when he was assassinated?

Dr. John G. Sotos thinks so, based in part on the theory that Lincoln suffered from MEN 2B:

He thinks the diagnosis not only accounts for Lincoln's great height, which has been the subject of most medical speculation over the years, but also for many of the president's other reported ailments and behaviors.

He also suspects Lincoln was dying of cancer at the time he was assassinated, and was unlikely to have survived a year. He thinks cancer -- an inevitable element of MEN 2B -- killed at least one of Lincoln's four sons, three of whom died before reaching age 20.

Another doctor disagrees, however, because the patients he treats who have this disease usually "have massively enlarged colons that bulge visibly, gurgle audibly and produce large amounts of gas," and who among has heard — or even thought — of Lincoln farting?

The truth could be ascertained through DNA testing of the fragments of Lincoln's body or the bloodstained clothes and bedding that have been preserved, however, these fragments are considered relics:

Tim Clarke Jr., spokesman for the [National Museum of Health], said curators in the past decided that "destroying nonrenewable, historically significant material is not in the public's interest," but added that "as technology changes and the social and ethical environment changes, it could be addressed" again.

Isn't our interest in actual historical information more significant than having relics to look at? 

In fact, why don't we question the display of a dead President's body parts and bloody pillows?

"There is an intensity and intimacy to Giuliani that can be unsettling."

"He has an authoritarian streak, as well as a penchant for secrecy and dependence on loyalists, that may remind voters of the current chief executive."

Newsweek sinks its talons into Rudy Giuliani.

ADDED: On Giuliani's relationship to Bernard Kerik:

Giuliani's loyalty to his last police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, bordered on the blind. The two men had come to know each other when Kerik, acting as an off-duty cop, drove Giuliani during his first mayoral campaign in 1989 (Giuliani lost to Dinkins). Kerik was the sort of diamond in the rough Giuliani appreciated—a tough street cop who got things done. Giuliani has insisted that he did not know about Kerik's questionable dealings with two businessmen with alleged mob connections. City hall records reviewed by NEWSWEEK suggest that the mayor may have been briefed on some of these problems just before Kerik was appointed commissioner. But Giuliani has said he has no memory, and his tight palace guard remains close-mouthed. ("There were mistakes made with Bernie Kerik," Giuliani said earlier this month, adding that Kerik's wrongdoing should not outweigh his crimefighting successes.)

That's quite mild — from a big cover story in a prominent newsweekly that seems aimed at digging up all the dirt on Giuliani.

There's a reminder of Giuliani's use of government power to retaliate against a museum that exhibited art that offended him:

He was outraged at an art show at the Brooklyn Museum called "Sensation." The exhibits included a picture of a black Virgin Mary surrounded by bits of pornography and a pile of elephant dung. Giuliani ordered the museum to shut down the show or lose its city subsidy. He lost in the courts; the show went on.

Newsweek connects this to his support of a priest charged with accused of molestation and characterizes Giuliani's "moralism" as uneven and " tribal" ("tribal" because the priest was from his neighborhood).

"When conservatives feel comfortable mocking the victims gunned down by Clinton-era attorney general Janet Reno's FBI in Waco, Tex...."

"... it suggests that a complacent and increasingly authoritarian establishment feels threatened."

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch have a rousing paean to Ron Paul in today's WaPo.

...Paul's success has mostly left the mainstream media and pundits flustered, if not openly hostile. The Associated Press recently treated the Paul phenomenon like an alien life form: "The Texas libertarian's rise in the polls and in fundraising proves that a small but passionate number of Americans can be drawn to an advocate of unorthodox proposals." Republican pollster Frank Luntz has denounced Paul's supporters as "the equivalent of crabgrass . . . not the grass you want, and it spreads faster than the real stuff." And conservative syndicated columnist Mona Charen said out loud what many campaign reporters have no doubt been thinking all along: "He might make a dandy new leader for the Branch Davidians."

An Althouse coffeehouse.

Good morning, everyone. I'll be off-line for most of the morning, so please use this space to gather and talk about what you like. I'll join you later.

Vlog?

Stop me before I vlog again. Or raise some topics and ask some questions, and this might turn into a vlog day.

ADDED: The vlog is done, and will be posted soon. It's about: Mark Halperin's op-ed about the influence of Richard Ben Cramer's book "What It Takes," the prospect of vlogging this blog's commenters (with references to Alexandra Pelosi's documentary "Journeys With George"), and whether children should call their parents by their first names.

AND: Here it is.

Cat conversation and sexism in the algorithm.

Two cats are having a conversation. It's uncanny:



Let's see that cat talk translated into English:



Ha ha. I love it. Why did I run across that today?

I was writing the previous post about Hillary Clinton and "the boys" who allegedly bullied her, and one of the news articles linked to this Clinton campaign video:



YouTube has a sidebar showing links to more videos — presumably videos that have some relationship to the video you just watched. How is YouTube calculating these relationships? Something about a "cat fight"? Is there sexism in the algorithm?

That time Rick Lazio invaded Hillary's space.

Everyone talks about the time Rick Lazio invaded Hillary Clinton's space in a debate when the two were running for Senator. The myth is that people were viscerally offended by a man aggressively approaching a woman.

The Clinton campaign recently complained about "the boys" ganging up at a debate, and there was speculation that it was an attempt to get people to react to her opponents the way New York voters reacted to Rick Lazio.

This made me want to see the old video of the debate with Lazio, but I couldn't find it through Google and YouTube searching. My commenters were helping me search, and Ruth Anne Adams came up with the clip from the debate as it was used on "The Daily Show." But, finally, Hector Owen found the whole segment of the debate: here. (Ignore the error message. It should play.)

Let's examine the Lazio Space Invader myth. Here's a contemporaneous article in the NYT:

... Mrs. Clinton exploited an opportunity before a friendly audience of women to make a concerted attack on Mr. Lazio's debate tactics. Many supporters of Mrs. Clinton said they found Mr. Lazio to be pushy and disrespectful during the debate in Buffalo -- bullying her in a way that he would not have bullied a male opponent.

Mrs. Clinton's senior advisers have seized on that notion to blunt favorable portrayals of Mr. Lazio as strong-willed and determined, and Mrs. Clinton joined the effort yesterday. Expanding on a comment she made the morning after the debate, Mrs. Clinton received knowing chuckles and applause when she said having two younger brothers was the best preparation for her sometimes bruising encounter with Mr. Lazio.

Then she complained of having to share her lectern with an overly aggressive Mr. Lazio. (He approached her at the end of the debate and urged her to sign a document he said was a promise not to raise or spend any more soft money.)...

''How about that idea that you turned off women voters?'' Gabe Pressman of WNBC-TV asked [Lazio].

Mr. Lazio said women were being sold short by suggestions that they would not vote for him because he gave Mrs. Clinton a tough debate....

Here's Kate Phillips (of the NYT) after the recent debate:

[S]o many political correspondents... have invoked the Rick Lazio moment...

The former Congressman’s charge across the stage in September of that year was equated with bullying, something that’s a far cry from the largely reasoned responses of Mrs. Clinton’s rivals on the stage the other night.

Still, we’re told it’s all gender politics, or as one of our colleagues once called it back then, hormonal politics (on both sides, folks).

Funny how history and language keep replaying, no?

WaPo's Ruth Marcus wrote:

Now this six-on-one stuff. Clinton stumbled in the debate, uncharacteristically but nowhere near fatally. In response, Penn & Co. are playing a good game of rope-a-dope.

After all, they have experience with this move, from the 2000 New York Senate race, when Republican Rick Lazio loomed into Clinton's personal space during a debate and quickly saw his numbers tank. For the Clinton campaign, the best thing would be to have the Philadelphia story played as Lazio II -- more bullies trying to intimidate her....

[U]sing gender this way is a setback. Hillary Clinton is woman enough to take these attacks like a man.

Yeah, that's what Lazio said at the time and voters resisted.

Here's what Rush Limbaugh said:

Now she's out there playing this victim card, and a lot of people in the media are not happy about this -- and I'll tell you what it is. You know, it's not just the cheapest form of pandering. To all of a sudden, say, "I'm a strong woman. I'm strong as a man! I can handle this job." Now all of a sudden to go victim, and to have your campaign tell the press, "Yeah, well, this is part of a long-planned strategy based on what happened when Rick Lazio invaded her space during a Senate debate for the election in New York."

So they're going back to that playbook because they think it worked then, but running for president is a little bit different from running for the Senate, especially if most of your career has been built up on, "You're tough, and you're not going to back down from anybody! You're Hillary Clinton! You've got a testicle lockbox."

(A testicle lockbox?)

But the fact is: It did work then. You can say, as Phillips did, that what Lazio did was different. But look at the video. Don't rely on the myth. Look at the video. It might have been inept theater to ply the piece of paper at her, but it wasn't an effort to bully the woman out of politics.

"Being first lady is sort of half job and half life but good experience in either case."

Writes Michael Kinsley, analyzing Hillary Clinton and her recent jab "We can't afford on-the-job training for our next president."

... Clinton was clearly referring to work experience. But there is also life experience. Being first lady is sort of half job and half life but good experience in either case.

She has to be careful about making a lot of this. Many people resent her using her position as first lady to take what they see as a shortcut to elective office. More profoundly, some people see her as having used her marriage as a shortcut to feminism.

Count me as one of those people!

But being the president's spouse has to be very helpful for a future president. It's like an eight-year "Take Your Daughter to Work Day." Laura Bush, as far as we know, has made no important policy decisions during her husband's presidency, but she has witnessed many and must have a better understanding of how the presidency works than all but half a dozen people in the world.

And does anyone think of her as qualified for the presidency? How about Nancy Reagan?

One of those half a dozen is Hillary Clinton, who saw it all -- well, she apparently missed one key moment -- and shared in all the big decisions. Every first lady is promoted as her husband's key adviser, closest confidant, blah, blah, blah, but in the case of the Clintons, it seems to be true. Pillow talk is good experience.

Oh, let's direct these questions at Hillary Clinton, can we? Do you mean to say that pillow talk is good experience?

Clinton mocks Obama's claims that four years growing up in Indonesia constitute useful world-affairs experience. But they do.

I'm interested in seeing if her mockery silences him. Will he shut up about this idea that he is what Kinsley calls "a world man." Or will he figure out how to say it better and not her allow her to squelch him. If he can't do that, his vaunted oratorical skills mean little.

Kinsley owns up to supporting Obama. Here's how he explains his reason:

When I hear him discussing issues, I hear intelligence and reflection and almost a joy in thinking it through.

Oh, good lord. You can say that about people you meet every day in academia, and there's no reason at all to trust those characters as President. I'm sorry, but I hear patronizing in Kinsley's words.

"And who’s this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?/That’s tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers’ little boy!"

Wrote the poet Wislawa Szymborska.

And who's this dashing young man?



(The book.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Bob says he's "pretty enough for Che-style t-shirt immortality." Lindsey is ready to cast the Keanu Reeves in the movie version.

"Good night, my darlings, I’ll see you tomorrow."

Noël Coward's last words, from a review by John Simon.

Lots of good tidbits in the review. I like this one:

"To me, the essence of good comedy writing is that perfectly ordinary phrases such as ‘Just fancy!’ should, by virtue of their context, achieve greater laughs than the most literate epigram."

Presumably, many more tidbits in the book. The man corresponded with Virginia Woolf, T. E. Lawrence, Ian Fleming, Laurence Olivier, Marlene Dietrich, John Osborne, Harold Pinter, and many others.

I'd get the book myself if it were available in the Kindle format. For some reason, I'm devoted to my Kindle, even though it hasn't arrived yet. We'll see if it lives up to my ideation. I remember how I felt when I bought my Rocketbook. How wonderful it was... until I decided I hated it.

"'Blame U.S. for 9/11' Idiots in Majority."

New York Post headline.

Sixty-two percent of those polled thought it was "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials turned a blind eye to specific warnings of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Only 30 percent said the 9/11 theory was "not likely," according to the Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll.

The findings followed a 2006 poll by the same researchers, who found that 36 percent of Americans believe federal government officials "either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action" because they wanted "to go to war in the Middle East."

In that poll, 16 percent said the Twin Towers might have collapsed because of secretly planted explosives - not hijacked passenger jets flown into them.

And what hit the Pentagon? Twelve percent figured it was a US cruise missile.

Oh, no. What is to become of our democracy if people are so foolish? Grasping for hope, I theorize that people don't actually go around thinking these things but being polled somehow lures them into agreeing with statements. I'm not saying the poll wasn't done according to professional standards. I'm just speculating that maybe when people hear a calm, professional-sounding voice state a proposition, perhaps something that they haven't really thought about, they fall into agreement. (And, yes, I know, it's pathetic that that's all I can come up with when I'm grasping for hope.)

"You cannot call it real pain. I just found that time was infinitely long."

Says Antoine di Zazzo, who's been tasered more 50 times. Di Zazzo — a Taser representative in France — has tasered the French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen and offered to taser the French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy declined the offered but made a campaign promise to arm the country's 300,000 police with tasers.

National Front leader Le Pen, who was 79 at the time, went to inspect the gun last year because of the headlines it made when Sarkozy made his pledge as interior minister. "He did not want to try it but I took him a bit by surprise," said di Zazzo.

"He has special protection because he is a leading politician but I got round them and fired into his shoulder. He fell over but got up again and then went around telling people: 'You are shaking the hand of the man who has tried Sarkozy's toy'."

Now, that's really strange. Why is di Zazzo out bragging about this, instead of in prison?

Meanwhile, reports of deaths by Taser are getting a lot of attention:

There has been much debate in Canada after a 40-year-old Polish man died last month after he was 'tasered' by police. Another 36-year-old man died Saturday five days after an altercation with police who used a Taser to subdue him.

There have been at least three other deaths this week in the United States after police use of the Taser.

Amnesty International has said there have been about 300 deaths around the world after Taser use and has called for it to be suspended while a full investigation into the impact is conducted.

On Friday, the UN Committee said the stun gun "causes acute pain, constituting a form of torture".

Taser International says that no death has been attributed to the use of the gun and that the controversy is caused by misunderstanding of new technology. It has won more than 50 legal cases in the United States alleging the gun was linked to a death.

"If electricity was to kill it would do so straight away," said di Zazzo. "In most of these cases people have carried on fighting or struggling after they were hit by the Taser and had recovered. In a lot of these cases there is a drug overdose or cerebral delirium involved."

"In Canada, the man carried on struggling afterwards and was hit by batons and the police knelt on him. You can also die from being hit with a baton or knelt on," he added.

Taser says its device "saves lives" because it is an effective alternative to a real gun. Each stun round is videod by a camera on the gun for future evidence.

Anyway, it seems to me that Taser has the better side of that argument. We're talking about disabling someone who is a current threat — an alternative to the use of some other weapon. This is different from the question of inflicting pain on someone who is already restrained. Or do you think that the use of pain to disable a person ought to be considered torture and that police ought to be required to use a weapon that disables by damages a person's body?

I was interested to see that there is a camera built into the guns used in France. I see there's talk in the U.S. of adding these $400 accessories to tasers.

Taser Cams are like in-car videos and serve two primary functions," said Peoria Police Chief Steven Settingsgaard. "First, they can prevent abuse by their mere existence. More importantly, however, they can disprove false allegations of misuse when they arise."...

The Peoria County Jail already use Taser Cams... Sheriff Mike McCoy said..."You see what the Taser sees. It answers a whole lot of questions, and it's a factual tool for us."

Interesting. You see what the target does while the Taser is pointed at him. You'll have to figure out what he was doing a moment before that.

And prepare for the new Taser: "a mini-flying saucer like drone which could also fire Taser stun rounds on criminal suspects or rioting crowds."

"So then I realized I was in trouble."

Matter of fact recognition of what you have to do to survive.

Just started cutting the meat away from the bone...

Wow! What a great guy!

A child's skeleton, masks made of human skin, stuffed animals, Nazi memorabilia...

Things Marilyn Manson bought using his band's money, according to a lawsuit filed by keyboardist Stephen "Pogo" Bier. Showing a tin ear for public relations — or a keen ear for what pleases a certain niche fan — Manson said:

"The fact that he's claiming that I've treated him unfairly, financially, is really ridiculous."

Don't you realize that all this creepy stuff is the reason we've made so much money. Prove it's a waste!

"And I would never spend my money on a Chinese girl skeleton. That would be crossing the line. It's a Chinese boy, for the record."

Dead child humor.

"You are sometimes on the point of saying that so-and-so’s thighs showed that he wanted to travel in India!"

Some critic said that to Leo Tolstoy. But, so what? Let's read "War and Peace" again: There's a new translation by the wonderful Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

If "every campaign is... a narrative," what's Hillary Clinton's narrative?

Mickey Kaus looks at John Ellis's idea, which he gleaned from the Nixon campaign. Ellis says:

She knows what it's like to get her head kicked in every day, day after day after day, for months and years on end. She endures....

...I think her narrative is not "she's inevitable because she's experienced and the others are too light." I think her narrative is "formidable, battle-scarred, flawed, but important." I think [Hillary strategist Mark] Penn thinks he can micro-target to victory. I think they need a large macro theme that enables people to vote for Hillary, even though they don't want to.

It's obviously late now. This is work they should have done in 2006 and 2007: setting the context for "understanding" her candidacy ...

Ha ha. They need to explain to us how to vote for Hillary, even though we don't want to. 

But I'm not really laughing. Actually, I picture myself doing exactly that. I don't like her, and I don't want to vote for her, but somehow, I assume that in the end I will. I'm resisting now — look at all my recent Hillary posts — but it's probably because I see myself ending up doing what I don't want to do.

So Mickey says:

Campaigning as tough, battle-scarred fixture, etc. would certainly serve Hillary better, should she lose Iowa and New Hampshire, than campaigning as "inevitable." It seems entirely possible... that primary voters might feel like resurrecting Ms. Durability after she's suffered a bit by way of a New Hampshire loss. (Making her suffer a bit might even be the point...) But there's no point in resurrecting a failed Ms. Inevitability. ...

So "enduring" is the new "inevitable." It's all "inevitable" can be when you're not — you know — inevitable. Plus, "enduring" seems almost charmingly complex. Which has that pseudo-warmth that's as warm as you can be when you're ... Nixonian.



(By the way, where the video of Rick Lazio invading Hillary's space in that old debate? Is it not available on line? If not, why not?)

ADDED: The video is hard to find, but Ruth Anne Adams found "The Daily Show"'s version of it.

"Patronage does not mean giving a job to someone who supported you politically."

"It means giving a job to someone only because he supported you politically." So wrote Rudy Giuliani in his book "Leadership," quoted in this WaPo article, which airs the views of his critics:

Giuliani "had a blind spot when it came to people he knew well" and "very little respect for the vetting process," [said Jerome Hauer, who briefly headed the office emergency management.] "The competent people in the administration all tended to leave because they got tired of the borderline-incompetent people who got in. He ran off the professionals because they were difficult to work with. If they didn't do things the way he wanted or overshadowed him, he got furious."

Fran Reiter, a deputy mayor under Giuliani, said most initial Cabinet hires came via a "very extensive search process," but the mayor was more likely to emphasize personal ties when it came to public safety jobs. Giuliani wanted ownership over that realm because of his law enforcement background, she said. And he worried that department veterans who he did not have ties with would have more allegiance to the departments than to him.

"These were areas where he just really wanted people whom he trusted and who were not going to do anything other than what he wanted them to do," she said.

Giuliani's most ill-fated promotion, other than Kerik's, was his 1998 choice to run the city's Housing Development Corp.: Russell Harding, the son of the former head of New York's Liberal Party, whose backing of Giuliani was crucial in his election. Harding had no college degree or background in housing and finance, and was eventually convicted of stealing more than $300,000 from the agency and sentenced to more than five years in prison for the embezzlement and for possessing child pornography.

More in the article. This is an aspect of the Giuliani candidacy we need to study carefully. 

"These patients are still people, they are still emotional and they still need love."

The story of Justice O'Connor and her husband, who, debilitated by Alzheimer's, found a new love, makes us want to think more deeply about what it means to have a relationship with someone who can no longer remember you:

Laura L. Carstensen, a psychology professor and founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, said new relationships among dementia patients can often be very hard on families....

"The emotion center of the brain tends to be relatively well preserved in dementia patients, even as their memory disappears. ... The key to understanding these relationships is that that these patients are still people, they are still emotional and they still need love," she said....

Is there any choice but to manifest acceptance of what has happened, to be generous to the person who is — after all — dying? The real pain and jealousy — if it exists — must be endured privately. But one need not tell the world about any of it, as Justice O'Connor has chosen to do. There is little point in her saying: Look what is happening to me and how well I am taking it. I'm thinking that, knowing this is common occurrence, she is offering some moral support for others who are facing what she is. It's a generosity extending outward, to strangers.

It happens that there is an excellent movie on the subject this year called "Away From Her," an adaptation of an Alice Munro story called "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" (available now as a separate book).  I watched the movie the other day, then read the story. I wanted to read the story to understand more of something I thought I saw in the movie, but what I was interested in was not part of Munro's story at all. It was introduced by the screenplay writer, the film's director, Sarah Polley.

Early in the movie, the husband, Grant, tours the nursing home where he will put his wife, Fiona. We see that there are 2 floors to the facility, the first floor, where patients are continually involved in socializing, and the second floor, where they put more "progressed" patients. Grant refuses to look at the second floor or even to think of Fiona ending up there. Later, we see that on the second floor, there are simple rooms and no socializing. 

Don't we all, always, move between the first and second floor, the life of socializing and the life of solitude? We have different preferences, and some of us are more introverted and choose to live on the second floor. I thought there was a larger concept to the movie, and I have to spoil the ending to say what I mean.

On the first floor, Fiona becomes attached to another resident, a man named Aubrey. She sits with him and watches him play bridge, and she tends to him. She's absorbed in him. Her husband tries to reach her, by bringing her books and reading to her as he had done in the past. (He was a professor of Icelandic literature, and she was of Icelandic ancestry, and the book is about Iceland.) She can't understand him, and she what she likes about Aubrey is that he doesn't confuse her. 

When Aubrey leaves the facility, Fiona declines and, consequently, they move her to the second floor. Grant does what he can to get Aubrey back, but in the end, before Aubrey's return, Grant enters the room and finds Fiona reading the book about Iceland. She seems alive again, restored by reading, and she can, to some extent, recognize and love her husband again. She isn't confused by a book or a man who is devoted to books, she's reoriented.

I thought this meant something about solitude, reading, and the life of the mind. I thought the message was something like: We fall out of touch with our humanity, we lose our grip on our own identity if our life is filled with socializing. Or: Institutions are designed by extroverts, who think there's something wrong if there isn't continual social interaction, and an introverted person, who thrives in the life of the mind, is ruined in such a place.

I don't think Munro's story says anything like this, but I think it is the leavening that Sarah Polley — who is only 27 — brought to the story, giving it a much broader and more universal meaning. 

"Maybe yellow blotches, wrinkles, and phantom fetuses really get a pubescent neotenic mole salamander in the mood for love."

What's the web's most reliable source of amazing sentences? I think it's Go Fug Yourself.

"I'm coming to your planet, but with gifts."

Don't you love Elisa? Spit and all.

How dare you question her! To question her is to wish my son had died!

Howard Kurtz notes that the candidates are using a type of ad that looks very mellow but is designed to inoculate them against future attacks.

Here's the Hillary ad he mentions:



UPDATE, Sunday, November 25: "Using a man to talk about trust — is that an admission that she has a problem with men and that she has a problem with the trust factor?" Tim Russert asks on today's "Meet the Press."

How I know who the NYT wants to be President.

I looked at these 3 photos.

(Thanks to my son John for this insight. And here's an earlier post on the linked article.)

ADDED: Hey, remember "plaidgate"?

"The wind of freedom blows." "No, that slogan blows."

Think you've got a good college slogan? Think again.

Consider Cornell's motto, "rated No. 1 by Motto" (there's a Motto magazine for some reason):

It's a statement made by the university's founder, Ezra Cornell: "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study." Still, that mouthful leaves Scott White, who runs the Web site Brand Identity Guru, nonplussed. "Wow. Okay. I don't know what to say to that," he says. "I think that's just awful."

The University of California has "Fiat Lux" — in other words, "Let There Be Light." A tad grandiose. On the "light" theme, but not mentioned in the article is the University of Wisconsin's motto: "Numen Lumen." What does it mean? It rhymes. It's fun to say. It sounds like a guy's name. (Newman Louman.) But what does it mean? I've never known — through all these 20+ years of reading it. And apparently, no one else does either!

What Lola wants...

... is to be a star.

(And that first commenter over there is mean... and also uninformed about the significance of Frida Kahlo in the mind of Madonna.)

"Our prescribed drugs do extra duty as political sedatives."

Frederick C. Crews looks at the dynamics of "Big Pharma."

[T]he pharmaceutical companies haven't so much answered a need as turbocharged it. And because self-reporting is the only means by which nonpsychotic mental ailments come to notice, a wave of induced panic may wildly inflate the epidemiological numbers, which will then drive the funding of public health campaigns to combat the chosen affliction.

This dynamic also applies to a variety of commonplace if bothersome states that the drug makers want us to regard as chemically reparable. They range from excitability and poor concentration to menstrual and menopausal effects and "female sexual dysfunction," whose signature is frustration in bed with the presumably blameless husband or lover.... As patients on a prophylactic regimen, we are grateful for any risk reduction, however minuscule; but our gratitude leaves us disinclined to ask whether the progressively lowered thresholds for intervention were set without any commercial influence. In that sense our prescribed drugs do extra duty as political sedatives.

"Iowa is a state where, if you work very hard and are a very good speaker..."

"...you can get to speak at a gazillion small meetings and have a gazillion people say, 'Holy heck, this guy is really good.'"

People are trying to explain why Mike Huckabee suddenly appears to be doing so well in Iowa. He isn't using direct mail, he's just started with a TV commercial, and he has little money and few staffers.

The candidates and their food issues.

The NYT presents the full array.

Hmmm.... Barack Obama was "chubby" as a child. 

Mitt Romney "eats the same thing every day."

Gerald R. Ford "bit into a tamale with the corn husk still on" in 1976.

Bill Richardson is "a veteran of the Atkins and liquid diets who wears a double chin despite daily workouts."

Mike Huckabee — the anti-Richardson — once lost 110 pounds and now says "If you’re really overweight, some people just look at you and immediately sort of write you off. They just assume you’re undisciplined.”

Big problem for everyone: They have to eat the local delicacies whether they like it or not.

This make me want to dredge up the old Bob Dylan rap song — "I Shall Be Free":

Now, the man on the stand he wants my vote,
He's a-runnin' for office on the ballot note.
He's out there preachin' in front of the steeple,
Tellin' me he loves all kinds-a people.
(He's eatin' bagels
He's eatin' pizza
He's eatin' chitlins
He's eatin' bullshit!)

Ha ha. Very hard to understand that last word from the recording. I've listened to that song hundreds of times — mostly back when I let Bob Dylan rearrange all my opinions circa 1966. And right now, this morning, is the first time I've known what the word was.

ADDED: John IMs: "hm, I wonder who the NYT is supporting based on the photos they chose for that food article." LOL.

Come on, Democrats, please, attack Hillary!

Kimberly A. Strassel looks for weakness in Hillary Clinton's campaign:

Mr. Obama has come the closest to delving into Mrs. Clinton's past, though you need an Enigma machine to decode it. His campaign slogan is "Change We Can Believe In." (Translation: If you elect her, don't be surprised what she discovers in a box under a table.) He's mused about "character and judgment." (Translation: I don't trade in cattle futures.) Freudian psychology this is, Mortal Kombat it is not. Yet while the squeaky clean Mr. Obama may be best positioned to make a moral case against Mrs. Clinton, his own "politics of hope" has made it difficult to pull out the brass knuckles.

The rest of Mrs. Clinton's opponents fear an attack on her ethics would backfire, allowing her to paint herself as a female victim. You can bet they've studied the video of Rick Lazio, Mrs. Clinton's 2000 Senate opponent, invading her debate space, and Mrs. Clinton's ensuing performance as flinching, defenseless woman. (Mr. Lazio sank like a rock.) She has suggested she's not above a repeat act, dispatching Bill to warn that "the boys" were being awfully "tough" on his wife.

This made me want to go study the video myself, but I couldn't find it. Is it just me, or is that video hard to find on line? Does she really act "flinching" and "defenseless" after Lazio's idiotic invasion-of-the-space? In any case, her "repeat act" about "the boys" ganging up on her failed miserably, so what is Strassel's point?

Some Democrats seem to be relying on Republicans to raise the character question. But liberal voters aren't listening to Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney, and if they were, they'd view GOP persecution as added reason to vote for her. Mrs. Clinton thinks so, having just unveiled an ad featuring Romney and McCain attacks.

The Democratic debate has grown more personal in past days, with the barbs hitting ever closer to home. Whether this carries into a tougher discussion on Mrs. Clinton's character, who knows? It may just be inevitable.

Come on, Democrats, please, attack Hillary!

Sorry, Hillary made me say that. 

"At the moment, Giuliani and fellow moderate Mitt Romney are attacking each other for being insufficiently Tancredo-esque."

Writes David Brooks: 

[T]hey are participating in the greatest blown opportunity in recent political history. At its current nadir, the G.O.P. had been blessed with five heterodox presidential candidates who had the potential to modernize the party on a variety of fronts. They could be competing to do that, but instead they are competing to appeal to the narrowest slice of the old guard and flatter the most rigid orthodoxies of the Beltway interest groups. 

Leopard.

Ah! I'm so happy with Leopard, which I've just installed in my MacBook, and I can boil my reason for happiness down to one word: Buttons!

Since January 2004, when I started blogging, I have had to keep Mozilla/Firefox open on my computer along with my preferred browser, Apple's Safari, because, in Blogger, Safari wouldn't display a "compose window" with a set of button-icons for adding links, putting text in italics, blocking and indenting quotes, and that sort of thing. Getting buttons in Blogger was something that meant far more to me than any cool innovations like "Time Machine" or "Cover Flow."

All these years I have been keeping 2 browsers open when I used my computer. To use only Safari, I'd have had to type in HTML code whenever I wrote a post. You might think I'd have just used Firefox alone, since it had such an important advantage, but there has always been something different about the way web pages look in Safari that made the other browser insufferable. I can't pinpoint what it was — it was subtle —but I couldn't force myself to switch. 

And the Safari that came with Leopard is even cleaner and crisper looking — a big aesthetic improvement over the old Safari I loved.

I also get pleasure from removing a program that isn't Apple. I enjoy the ideological purity, I have to admit. I deeply believe that everything will work out better if I stay within the tender confines of what Apple has decided is good for me (though I do make exceptions, for example, to get those buttons).

Now that I'm purging the invader Foxfire from my MacBook, I'm also going to oust my oldest invader species, Microsoft Word. I'm going to switch to Apple's word processor Pages. This will end a relationship that began in 1985, when I got my first computer, a Mac 512. (I never had the first Mac, the 128, and I distinctly remember the exact tinge of my jealousy when a colleague acquired a Mac Plus. I replaced the 512 with a Mac Classic, which I still have, and which I enjoy firing up now and then, just to reminisce about what life was like with that tiny black and white screen. It's still the best place to play Tetris.) 

With that first Mac, I had the Apple program MacWrite, which seemed wonderful compared to a typewriter, but it lacked one thing that I absolutely needed as a legal scholar: footnotes. Microsoft Word for Mac came out in 1985, so I was there for version 1. That was back before people started hating Microsoft. I loved it, because it did those footnotes for me. There was no option to stay with an Apple product back then, and I got so accustomed to Word that I never wanted to look at anything else. Actually, I never much liked the bulky improvements that were added, but it was like being married to it. Word got old and ugly, but I had committed. 

But now that I'm getting Firefox out of here, I'm kicking out Microsoft too. For months, maybe years, Word has been suddenly shutting down without warning, which is a really irritating flaw when you write a lot and often have deadlines, as I do.

So, I'm reveling in purification this morning. 

That said, I did just order a Kindle, which — just look at it — is so not Apple.

UPDATE: Safari crashes constantly!

Happy Thanksgiving.

Yes, it's Thanksgiving. I hope you're geared up properly to observe the occasion according to your family traditions or your quirky innovations. Here at the Althouse house, we're doing things our way. I think you know what that means.



Hint.

A vlog about Thanksgiving squirrel, Mancow, guns, law school, commenters, and Madison versus New York.

"The unknown can be very anxiety provoking, You don't know what will be served. You don't know who you will sit next to."

That's a quote from the front-page article in the Wisconsin State Journal: "Thanksgiving a difficult time for people with eating disorders."

Okay, react away.

You might say anything from: That woman should shut up and volunteer in a soup kitchen to That's the way I feel about Thanksgiving and I don't even have an eating disorder.

Vlog?

In some quarters, they're clamoring for a vlog. I think I might do that, in maybe about an hour. But you've got to throw some questions at me. Vloggable questions!

I meant to post this before I got on the plane in NYC.

It's a NY fall picture. I'm not sure if this is beautiful or upsetting:

Greetings from Madison, Wisconsin.

I hope you've all made to your holiday destinations or, if not, that you'll be getting there soon. It's a little chilly here... and starting to snow. Fine with me. I love getting back home.

"[A prison doctor] said he saw in me what he called 'the consciousness of innocence.'"

"It’s very dangerous. He said if you bring it into prison with you, you will have the most horrifying experience that a human being can possibly have. You won’t survive. You have to acclimate and accept your situation and not resist. You can’t keep holding on to your innocence. You have to let go of it and start acclimating."

Says Richard Paey, who didn't take the doctor's advice and did badly in prison. He is a paraplegic with multiple sclerosis who was convicted of drug trafficking, based on his possession of a large amount of painkillers, which he contended were solely for the treatment of his own pain. In prison, the state treated him with even larger doses of painkiller than he'd been giving himself.

Governor Charlie Crist pardoned him in October, and here he gives a long, interesting interview to Radley Balko of Reason. (And here's the Metafilter discussion of the piece.)

reason: Many people have compared your case to that of Rush Limbaugh. Some have said Limbaugh was let off because of his political affiliation. But reason’s Jacob Sullum has suggested Limbaugh was let off because he played the drug warrior’s game—he admitted he was an “addict,” and took his punishment. But you refused to say you were an addict, or concede that you’d done anything wrong. You insisted you needed painkillers to live a normal life. Sullum believes that’s why Limbaugh got a slap on the wrist, while you got 25 years.

Paey: I think Sullum’s take is pretty accurate. Mr. Limbaugh chose to label himself an addict. What I didn’t understand when I went to trial is that there is a tremendous fear of addiction in this country. The prosecutor in my case didn’t see me as a patient...

This is a serious problem we have in this country—this fear of addiction, and how we perceive the use of prescription drugs. There are lots of myths and misconceptions out there.

Whoever was counseling Rush Limbaugh gave him good advice. Admitting he was an addict played to his favor. I was convicted because the prosecutor hammered away at the jury that I was an addict and that my doctor was a pusher. I was sort of blindsided when the prosecutor started to make that argument—that I was nothing more than an addict. I can’t think of a worse slur to attach to a person.

CORRECTION: The governor who pardoned Paey was Charlie Crist, not Jeb Bush.

"Probably the strongest experience I have in foreign relations is the fact I spent four years overseas when I was a child in Southeast Asia."

So said Barack Obama. Terrible choice of words, "foreign relations." And Hillary Clinton takes full advantage:

"Voters will have to judge if living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face,"’ Clinton said. "I think we need a president with more experience than that, someone the rest of the world knows, looks up to and has confidence in."

(Voters will also have to judge whether being First Lady is the kind of experience we need.)

ADDED: I see now that I'm not the only one to read Hillary's mockery and think yeah, right, First Lady.

AND: It's the point of Maureen Dowd's column too: "Is living in the White House between the ages of 45 and 53 foreign policy experience?"

Come on, Barack: Attack! Of course, she'll push you back with that stern reminder that you promised to be Mr. Hopeful Sunny Dreams, but you've got to get over that.

And, by the way, I think the quote — "Probably the strongest experience I have in foreign relations is the fact I spent four years overseas when I was a child in Southeast Asia" — was meant as a kind of witticism, a play on the words "foreign relations." He developed relationships with people in a foreign country. If there were a novel titled "Foreign Relations" — you'd instantly get it.

The 6 imams case survives a motion to dismiss.

In a decision by U.S. District Judge Ann Montgomery:

According to a police report, the men were arrested because three had one-way tickets and no checked baggage; most had requested seat belt extensions; a passenger reported that they had prayed "very loudly" before the flight and criticized U.S. involvement with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and they were seated widely throughout the aircraft.

Montgomery said it is "dubious" that a reasonable person would conclude from those facts that the imams were about to interfere with the crew or aircraft. She said the plaintiffs had stated a plausible claim that MAC officers violated their constitutional rights...

Montgomery, considering the evidence in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs, said the facts they alleged "support the existence of an unconstitutional custom of arresting individuals without probable cause based on their race."

Power Line reacts:

However disappointing Judge Montgomery's order, I think it is good that we will learn the facts behind plaintiffs' lawsuit. The highly capable lawyer representing the Metropolitan Airports Commission is my friend and former law partner Tim Schupp; he will leave no stone unturned on behalf of the MAC. I think it is safe to say that the case of the flying imams one in which the truth should be known, and in which the truth will set us free.

Yes, let's get to the factfinding. No need to throw this out on a motion to dismiss when the plaintiff's version of the facts must be taken as true.

What effect will the Supreme Court's gun case have on the '08 election?

Jack Balkin asks a great question. To answer his question, he predicts what the Court will say in its decision in District of Columbia v. Heller:

(1) that the 2nd amendment protects an individual right, (2) that this right applies against laws in federal territories like the District of Columbia, (3) that a relatively deferential standard of reasonableness applies, and (4) that, even under this relatively deferential statute at least one part of the D.C. gun control law is unconstitutional. That is to say, I predict a decision that tries to split the difference and is aimed roughly at the middle of public opinion, even if not the exact center.

That sounds right to me.

Will people get stirred up if the outcome is that hedged and bland? Balkin thinks the newspaper headlines will scare people — and they'll scare people into the embrace of the Democrats:

[I]f the Court strikes down any part of the D.C. handgun ban, the headlines in the newspapers will announce that the Court has protected gun owners rights and that gun control laws around the country are now constitutionally vulnerable....

So, just as a decision favoring abortion rights fires up pro-life politics, a decision recognizing gun rights will stir up the people who support gun control.

Obviously if I am wrong in my predictions, and the Court adopts the collective rights theory, conservatives will benefit. But I think there is very little chance that the Court would take this case if it a majority did not want to embrace the individual rights position. And even if members of a conservative majority understood that the appearance of a conservative result would help liberals and Democrats, I do not think it would change their decision in the case.

Is Balkin trying to mess with Justice Kennedy's head?

Anyway, Balkin's prediction is that the Court will slice it down the middle, but people, under the sway of inflammatory newspaper headlines, will misunderstand the case and vote for Hillary Clinton.

Very interesting. I think he's missing something, though.

The decision won't come for many months. (Oral argument should be in March.) During this time, it won't be a court opinion affecting voters minds, it will be a debate about gun rights and, more broadly, how to interpret the Constitution. Candidates will be asked all sorts of questions as this issue comes to the forefront.

The issue will get intertwined — I predict — with the abortion question. How should we interpret the text of the 2d Amendment, and how does that fit with the way you interpret the Constitution to protect the right of privacy? What kind of Justice will you put on the Supreme Court? If you support Roe v. Wade, you can't suddenly switch to strict constructionism to beat that pesky 2d Amendment into submission.

Things can get complicated, and it will be a difficult dance — more difficult for some that others. I'm not ready to assume Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic candidate.

Barack Obama ought to see an opportunity here. He was a constitutional law professor. He may have the skill to speak elegantly about constitutional rights when asked questions that leave Hillary Clinton spluttering for answers that don't sound hypocritical. John Edwards has legal skill too, and he may find a way to speak clearly and persuasively to people about constitutional law.

Meanwhile, the Republicans can make progress promoting a coherent approach to constitutional interpretation and sound judicial appointments, but they too are vulnerable to stumbing over the complexities. Who will do the worst? There are lots of contenders! But it's quite likely Giuliani will do the best, given his extremely strong legal background.

ADDED: Glenn Reynolds assesses the effect on the election. Unlike Balkin, he concentrates on the pre-decision debate about the issue:

[T]he court has ensured that the gun-rights issue will move to the forefront this election season, at both the presidential and congressional levels. This is probably bad for Democrats, given that most Americans believe they have some sort of right to arms under the Constitution.

It's also probably bad for Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, who have generally been less supportive of gun rights than the other GOP contenders. But maybe Hillary Clinton will prove flexible: Bill Clinton said that the gun issue cost the Democrats control of Congress in 1994, and Hillary no doubt remembers that.

Gloomy Brooklyn.

Monday afternoon Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.

Let's talk about guns.

The Supreme Court has granted cert. in the Second Amendment case from the D.C. Circuit. This should prove very exciting to those on both sides of the gun control issue and to people like me who are fascinated by constitutional interpretation.

ADDED: From WaPo's Robert Barnes:

For years, legal scholars, historians and grammarians have debated the meaning of the amendment because of its enigmatic wording and odd punctuation:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Gun rights proponents say the words guarantee the right of an individual to possess firearms. Gun-control supporters say it conveys only a civic or "collective" right to own guns as part of service in an organized military organization....

The court rewrote the question to say it would decide whether the relevant provisions of the city's law "violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia, but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for private use in their homes."