Daywalker "totally bites him in the ass."

Scroll down to the "in the comments" part.

"Oh, damn. Where did you come from? I’m white. I’m entitled. There’s a black man stealing my show."

The things they say at Barack Obama's church:

In a guest appearance at Trinity United Church of Christ, the priest, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, who resigned about two weeks ago from an unpaid position on the Obama campaign’s Catholic advisory council, delivered a tirade against Mrs. Clinton that included fake tears, a high-pitched voice and top-of-the-lungs screaming. He also gave a racially tinged critique of so-called “white entitlement,” of which he says Mrs. Clinton is guilty.

“When Hillary was crying, and people said that was put on — I really don’t believe it was put on,” said Father Pfleger, 59, the white pastor of a predominantly black South Side church. “I really believe that she just always thought: ‘This is mine. I’m Bill’s wife, I’m white and this is mine. I just got to get up and step into the plate.’ And then, out of nowhere, came, ‘Hey, I’m Barack Obama.’ And she said, ‘Oh, damn. Where did you come from? I’m white. I’m entitled. There’s a black man stealing my show.”

Father Pfleger, a well-known longtime activist and friend of Mr. Obama, issued an apology late Thursday. “I regret the words I chose on Sunday. These words are inconsistent with Senator Obama’s life and message, and I am deeply sorry if they offended Senator Clinton or anyone else who saw them.”

Another sorry-if-you-were-offended apology.

Of course, the Clinton campaign is delighted by Pfleger's wonderful gift:

“Divisive and hateful language like that is totally counterproductive in our efforts to bring our party together and have no place at the pulpit or in our politics,” said Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton. “We are disappointed that Senator Obama didn’t specifically reject Father Pfleger’s despicable comments about Senator Clinton, and assume he will do so.”

How much mileage can they get out of this one?

Reading over Pfleger's remarks, I think they'd be perfectly apt in a comedy routine. The main problem is that they were in a sermon in a church... and it's Barack Obama's church, the source of way too many of his problems. How on earth could someone who supports Obama and is clever enough to say something like that be stupid enough to say it there?

ADDED: You've got to see it in video. [Better version of the clip swapped for the one I had before.]



Hilarious. Race-baiting... it's wrong. Still... LOL.

And here's Rush Limbaugh:

This is stupid! Unless there's a plan here. They must be out to sink Obama at this church, 'cause they know the whole world's watching. Well, that could be, too. Maybe they're just selfish. They're just trying to increase attendance and to hell with Obama. The thing is, this Pfleger guy, he's right. He stole that from me. I didn't say it quite that way, but we all know that the Clintons sitting around, you know, shell shocked. "What happened to us?"

AND: More Pfleger:



UPDATE: Obama and his wife resign from Trinity Church.

"Bleary-eyed and somewhat bedraggled... five and a half hours... 'felt like five and a half weeks."

That was last night. The real fight is today, as the Democrats struggle to find a way through the Florida and Michigan problem.

"Should he be introduced as a Neanderthal man, a bigot, a warmonger, looking out at us from the 19th century?"

Who asked that about whom in 1964?

"They wear high, tight, wight collars, black jackets and what were once known as 'ice cream pants.'" What the hell are ice cream pants? Did people even know that in 1964?

"Unknown Man Commits Suicide." A forlorn headline, from 1899.

Was it "absurd to turn around and start appointing people based on sexual preference" to a public policy committee devoted to the AIDS epidemic? In the Reagan Administration, in 1987.

Imagine arguing that the plan for the New York subway line should be bent eastward so Harlem residents don't flow downtown and unbeautify Central Park West. Some people did, in 1922.

"Will no one weep for the tulips?" Asked in 1939.

A warning that the ghetto law will soon be enforced. Also in 1939.

It's the Reagan Adminstration that's to blame — and never Congress — as the NYT looks at law, taxes, and racism in 1983.

Who is out to get the "carpers, critics and killjoys" and "reactionaries" in 1934?

Movies seen and not seen.

Yesterday at the Sundance theater here in Madison, Wisconsin, it was opening night for the "Sex and the City" movie. Women were swarming around and inside the place. Some arrived in groups of 4 and wearing short, tight dresses. The "caffe" area that, at Sundance, replaces the concession stand, had a party atmosphere. Were they serving drinks? I think they were.

But we weren't there to see "Sex and the City." We were there to see "The Fall." Unlike the ladies in little dresses, we did not dress like characters in the movie. That is, we did not wear loincloths or red masks with rectangular eye holes or helmets or diaphanous gowns. But we were just as eager to take in the show on opening night.

Here's the trailer that got me:



Watching the trailer again, I can see that it absolutely accurately represents what is in that movie, so if you like that, go see it. If you don't, don't. Here's the Roger Ebert review that the trailer summarizes in one word ("Magnificent"). And here are a few more Ebert words:

Either you are drawn into the world of this movie or you are not. It is preposterous, of course, but I vote with Werner Herzog, who says if we do not find new images, we will perish. Here a line of bowmen shoot hundreds of arrows into the air. So many of them fall into the back of the escaped slave that he falls backward and the weight of his body is supported by them, as on a bed of nails with dozens of foot-long arrows. There is scene of the monkey Otis chasing a butterfly through impossible architecture.

The monkey belongs to Charles Darwin, who's out on a quest with the Black Bandit, an Italian anarchist, an escaped slave, and a Indian (whom the man has described as an American Indian but the girl has pictured as a man from India). The alternating sequences of fantasy and storytelling reminded me of "The Princess Bride." And there's a satisfying ending that reminded me of [click for spoiler].

The movie has gotten mixed reviews. To the extent that these say the story isn't coherent, I think they are wrong. Pay close attention and you'll see how it makes sense. You have an impoverished 5-year-old child who is listening to a story told by a suicidal, drug-addicted man. The fantasy sequences are the combination of his words and her visualization. The story takes place in the early days of Hollywood and filmmaking is a theme. The man is in the hospital because he was paralyzed in a fall doing a movie stunt, and in putting a story into words he is like a screenplay writer and the girl is like the director, so the slippage between his story and her imagination tells of the writer's loss of control of his story as it is made into a movie. The little girl is in the hospital because she fell out of an orange tree doing her work as a migrant picker. In her eagerness to see the man's story in her head, she's a movie fan.

ADDED: Importantly, this movie was made without CGI. They made models like this:



Better get that explosion right the first time. I hate CGI — I feel visceral revulsion to it. The beauty of "The Fall" is clearly film beauty, not computer tricks.

Court rejects challenge to the form of the Wisconsin referendum on gay marriage.

Wispolitics reports:

A Dane County judge upheld Wisconsin’s constitutional amendment banning gay marriage Friday, describing the propositions included in the referendum put to voters as “two sides of the same coin.”

UW-Oshkosh instructor William McConkey challenged the amendment, arguing Wisconsin statutes limit referendums on constitutional amendments to a single question. McConkey’s attorneys argued that the marriage amendment asked voters to respond to two separate questions: how marriage should be defined in Wisconsin and whether marriage benefits should be allocated to unmarried people.

This decision is not surprising. I don't much like referendums, and I support same-sex marriage, but I don't like the use of a procedural hypertechnicality in court to thwart democracy. Defeat the amendment on the merits.

IN THE COMMENTS: Peter Hoh asks "What's the status of the amendment? Is it on the ballot for November?" No, it passed in 2006. This is an effort to invalidate it. "Defeat the amendment on the merits" was ambiguous. I only meant to say that if we're going to have referendums, the voters should prevail.

"I still happen to believe that Saddam Hussein was a threat, that he needed to be dealt with."

Tony Blair responding to Matt Lauer, who's quoting furiously from the Scott McClellan book.

Ezra Klein tries to figure out a way for the Democrats to secure their masculinity.

It's not through Jim Webb:

Democrats can't out-tough the GOP. It's possible that James Webb can do it. But he's sui generis; a Democrat who can win at politics when played under Republican rules. Democrats love those candidates, because they think of presidential elections as an away game, and they're endlessly hunting for the candidate who plays best under those conditions.

What then are the Democratic "rules"? Or what's the Democratic "home game"? Ezra mixes the metaphor. Sports don't have different rules at different stadiums. But he doesn't even go on to try to discern the rules or the conditions at the home stadium. He moves on to Obama-promotion:

His policies -- particularly his domestic policies -- have not been half as innovative as his politics. But his willingness to double down on opposition to the gas tax holiday, to battle back on negotiating with dictators, to respond to attacks by pressing the point, has been genuinely exciting. And though he has been confident and even aggressive in all of this, he has not been "tough."

And he disses Kerry:

He has not pretended to go shooting, or driven on to Jay Leno's show on Harley. He's essentially been making his own rules.

So can you figure out what Ezra wants to say about masculinity as played by Democratic rules in Democratic stadiums? He titles his post "The Politics of Masculinity," and I think his real point may be that Democrats shouldn't try to compensate for what appears to be inadequate masculinity, but try to find where he says that:

To be clear, this isn't a commentary on Webb.

Well, then be clear. What is it a commentary on?

But the argument for his elevation to the national ticket -- which is to say, to become one of the faces of the party -- is about the electoral benefit of a hyper masculine, effortlessly tough, culturally conservative (seeming) candidate who can win back those Reagan Democrats and white males.

I'd love to have a private, confidential conversation with Webb about what he thinks about the way his party perceives him as some sort of walking bucket of extra testosterone.

As I wrote the other day, I don't think the Democratic Party should be orienting itself towards reknitting that particular coalition.

Knitting! Only a Democrat would talk about knitting masculinity.

I think there are other, more plausible, paths to a majority coalition; paths that are more durable because they aren't so candidate-specific, and that could create a political model better for progressivism and for broad participation in electoral politics.

That's the last sentence of his essay! Come on, Ezra! Real men don't use semicolons. And more than that: Say what you have to say. Don't pussyfoot around. I think you mean:

We are the Mommy Party. Let's own it. Let's do it! The home game is knitting and cooking and putting bandaids on booboos. Be forthright about it. That's more masculine than driving a Harley or a tank or carrying a gun and a dead duck and nominating a bucket of testosterone for VP.

IN THE COMMENTS: George quotes a part of the essay that I left out:

"He [Webb] is the daywalker, combining a progressive's positions with a southern militarist's affectations."

A 'daywalker' is a vampire.

What does that sentence mean?

UWS guy said:

I thought the daywalker line was pretty hip. It also made Webb sound even more bad-ass.

Chip Ahoy said:

I find Ezra Klein nearly incomprehensible and in possession of a disordered mind. And yet his readers apparently 'get' him. One said he understood the metaphor of daywalkers, then elaborated incomprehensibly.

Newscaper says:

This is hilarious IMO. It doesn't mean what Klein, Mr. [wannabe] Hip thinks it does. The other comment here was right in that by making a semi-obscure (by mainstream stds) pop culture reference to Blade -- the vampire comics and Snipes films, he was trying to sound cool and edgy.

What a dipshit -- he actually botched the metaphor.

A "daywalker" is a vampire who can survive in sunlight and fully mingle with normal people and pass as one. But he's still a vampire.

Sounds like Klein is saying the Dems in general are the vampires who can't stand exposure in the light of day (see other commenter's correct 'prog' vs 'lib' observation), and admitting the Dems are treacherous, blood-sucking parasites -- yep, sounds about right :)

But, one might interject, "But wait, the daywalker Blade IS the good guy in the stories," to which I reply that Blade is only the good guy because he has turned *against* the evil of the other vampires, opposing their agenda rather than advancing it.

Klein's metaphor so totally bites him in the ass, by inadvertently being approriate in a way that is 180 out of synch with his intentions in using it.

"ROUND FIVE: It begins with #5 So-Young Chung shyly approaching the microphone as if it were a guillontine..."

"... with BBC Bailly saying "howdy, So-Young!" to her like they are at a Texas BBQ instead of the greatest spelling competition EVER, with So-Young thinking and pronouncing and pronouncing and thinking and asking for the definition over and over again. It's painful. It's polite. It's so very elegant. And it ends with So-Young spelling "chrysoprase" (an apple green variety of something valued as a gem) all wrong. So-Young's whispered thanks upon hearing the dreaded ding...heartbreaking."

The best Spelling Bee coverage ever continues at Throwing Things.

"That's a stain that will never go away!"

O'Reilly getting really mad.

The 100 greatest guitar songs (according to Rolling Stone).

#1 is "Johnny B. Goode."

#4 has a place in my heart.

A rare rhino is caught in the wild by a hidden camera and then flips out — like a Hollywood actor confronting the paparazzi.

Who understands the mind of the rhino? Look at him. Look into his eyes:



Where are his eyes? What a face. Wouldn't you smash cameras if you looked like that?

"I Knew It Was a Terrible Mistake, but I Didn’t Mention It Until I Got a Book Contract."

The "most tedious" of 3 annoying types of political memoir, according to this NYT editorial. (The other 2 are: "'I Reveal the Honest Truth' a kiss-up-and-tell designed to settle scores (nod to honesty optional)" and "'I Was There at the Start,' designed to make the author appear to be the linchpin of history.") Like the NYT, I can't get past the rank venality of McClellan's project.

And does McClellan add anything to the discourse?

From the WaPo:

Instead, McClellan says, President Bush stayed in a "permanent campaign culture" and allowed his staff to use misleading and incomplete information to "sell" the Iraq war to the American people. While the president focused his public arguments on the possibility that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, McClellan said, his true goal in toppling Saddam Hussein was to boost democracy in the Middle East.

It seems to me that Bush didn't do enough to boost support for the war. He let criticism go unanswered and seemed to trust that the American people would understand why he was doing the right things, so I completely don't get the "permanent campaign culture" charge. As for the decision to concentrate on the WMD rationale over the democracy argument: It's been well known for a long time.

The insouciant orangutan.

Spelling is not on the list yet, but Grammar just made it at #99.

On the list of Stuff White People Like:

White people love rules. It explains why so they get upset when people cut in line, why they tip so religiously and why they become lawyers. But without a doubt, the rule system that white people love the most is grammar. It is in their blood not only to use perfect grammar but also to spend significant portions of time pointing out the errors of others.

You know, I was a little tough on Stuff White People Like when I first read about it, but I've come to appreciate how hard it is to write. (I even hope the "Stuff White People Like" book is successful. Here, buy it.) I mean, try to think what could be written about spelling if it were to be added to the list.

Also, I note that #100 — congratulations on getting to 100 — is bumper stickers. I was just writing about bumper stickers the other day, and I didn't think of writing:

When a white person drives an older car (6+ years old) that has a resale value under $2000, they will coat the entire backside of the car in bumper stickers. Because of the abundance of space they are free to include stickers from all areas of white support: music, politics, the environment, insults to right wing politicians, and various movements that tell people to keep a city “weird.”

But when white people have a nice new car such as a Prius or an Audi station wagon, the fear of losing resale value prevents them from applying more than one sticker. Therefore that one sticker must properly capture the essence of the car and the political views of the driver.

The safest and most accepted choice for a sticker is always one that supports a Democratic Presidential candidate (Ralph Nader is an acceptable substitute). As of February 2008, white law requires an Obama 08 bumper sticker to be placed on the back of every Prius. Though these stickers reach peak effectiveness during an election year, it is acceptable to leave this sticker on the car until the next election regardless of whether or not the candidate actually won. If it’s a disputed election like in 2000, the sticker can be left on for the life of the car.

The newest addition to the list is Being Offended:

[T]here are few things white people love more than being offended.

Naturally, white people do not get offended by statements directed at white people. In fact, they don’t even have a problem making offensive statements about other white people (ask a white person about “flyover states”). As a rule, white people strongly prefer to get offended on behalf of other people.

"Engaging kids who make funny kid decisions, like ordering the official polo shirt five sizes too big..."

"... or confounding Dr. Bailly with impromptu Napoleon Dynamite impressions."



"In a way, I think it’s that these kids are not just good – they are so much better than I am at something that I have done almost every day since I learned to write. Part of my job – a vanishingly small but nonetheless nonzero part – is spelling things correctly. I do it boringly, perfunctorily, and once a year it’s fun to see people do it daringly, with panache and joy and wispy mustaches."

It's National Spelling Bee time again and that's just part of one post at Throwing Things, where — like every year — there will be many, many posts.

I didn't travel far afield to take this photograph yesterday.

And my subject didn't hassle me. Nevertheless, I felt bad about it.

"If you take a photo surreptitiously, if you’re quick, your photo will be awful."

"If you take care, you will inevitably be seen by someone and most likely be told something in Arabic. It will sound angry. Maybe it’s praise for your ingenuity, but I doubt it."

Traveling far afield to take photographs. It sounds too hard.

In the arb.

Are you ready to talk about Scott McClellan?

I'm not. Start without me.

(If you're buying his book, please buy it here.)

IN THE COMMENTS: John Stodder says:

Wasn't McClellan horrible at his job? That's what I remembered. He looked clueless half the time and the press had no respect for him.

Why would anybody care what he says?

I don't mean this in a partisan way. If you wanted to read a memoir of any president, why would you choose the one written by an incompetent clown.

It's not the disloyalty that bothers me. It's the press suddenly finding wisdom in a guy they previously disregarded as stupid and unreliable.

It's inevitable that critical Bush-era memoirs will come out, but written by smarter people. I'll read those.

I hate that attention whore!

Because I'm an attention whore, and that attention whore is getting more attention. The whore!

UPDATE: Look at me! Don't look at me!

Uh oh. There's a rabbit in the yard.

(Enlarge.)

UPDATE:

If they could somehow grow meat without it having ever to have been an animal, would you eat it?

And would you be required to eat it?

Oh, I'm picturing it:

Skum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America. Every hour you could drink from your canteen and take a salt tablet. Every two hours you could take five minutes. At sunset you turned in your coveralls and went to dinner --- more slices from Chicken Little --- and then you were on your own. You could talk, you could read, you could go into trance before the dayroom hypnoteleset, you could shop, you could pick fights, you could drive yourself crazy thinking of what might have been, you could go to sleep....

Dinner was drab as usual; I couldn't face more than a bite or two of Chicken Little. Later I was hungry and there was the canteen where I got Crunchies on easy credit. The Crunchies kicked off withdrawal symptoms that could be quelled only by another two squirts of Popsie from the fountain. And Popsie kicked off withdrawal symptoms that could only be quelled by smoking Starr Cigarettes, which made you hungry for Crunchies. Had Fowler Schocken thought of it in these terms when he organized Starrzelius Verily, the first spherical trust? Popsie to Crunchies to Starrs to Popsie?

(Read the whole thing.)

How to snack like Barack Obama.

You'll want 2 things:

1. MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars. (Get some here. Hmmm: "This product contains sugar alcohols, which may cause gastrointestinal discomfort. Excessive consumption may have a laxative effect." Be careful, Barack!)

2. Black Forest Berry Honest Tea.

And if you're thinking of making this into the Barack Obama diet, so you can be as fit as Barack Obama, you might want to get your own personal "body man," and let's hope he has a name like "Mr. Love." Damn it, I want a body man. (Hillary Clinton has a body woman, you know — Huma Abedin.)

Mr. Love said he had been hired with “no job description whatsoever.”

“It was just like, ‘You just go out there and — Take. Care. Of. Stuff,’ ” Mr. Love said, taking his time with each word.

Would you want to be shadowed about by a body man (or woman)? What would your body man do?

When Mr. Obama dropped food on his tie while eating in the car between stops, Mr. Love was ready with a Tide pen. He always carries one, along with ballpoint pens, and has turned himself into a walking dispensary of Sharpies, stationery, protein bars, throat lozenges, water, tea, Advil, Tylenol, Purell and emergency Nicorette, not to mention his ever-present iPhone, BlackBerry and Canon Rebel XT digital camera.

So, one thing is: he basically carries your purse. Your gigantic purse. (Or manly variant of a purse.)

He watches TV with you:

“One cardinal rule of the road is, we don’t watch CNN, the news or MSNBC. We don’t watch any talking heads or any politics. We watch ‘SportsCenter’ and argue about that.”

He says nice things to the media when they are writing puff pieces about you:

“He’s quick and he’s strong,” Mr. Love said of Mr. Obama. “A lot of people still don’t know that he’s left-handed, so he can get to the basket and get his shot off, even though he’s not the most explosive or tallest player on the court.”

The things a lot of people still don't know. How will we ever get up to speed on the candidate by November? Anyway, Barack is left-handed, so hold that MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bar in your left hand as a tribute when you undertake the Barack Obama diet. Get plenty of exercise, too. Play basketball. Don't be bowling. Watch sports. Don't watch the news. Check your BlackBerry and have a sip of that Black Forest Berry Honest Tea. Layer in some Nicorette for balance. Now, relax. Purify your hands. Hope. Dream. Everything is going to be all right.

ADDED: "Are you gonna save me? Can you save me? You gonna make me happy? You gonna make me smile? Can you save me? Tell me, Mr. Love."

I'm so mad at you, I'd boycott you....

.... but I don't patronize Dunkin' Donuts anyway, so ... uh... stop it — right now! — and maybe I will.

Caucuses = voter suppression.

The best of the pro-Hillary arguments.

Something we were talking about...

... back here... got me thinking about this:

"There was a time when residents in this liberal college city would greet homeless people by name."

The L.A. Times takes note of an attitude change in Madison, Wisconsin:

They'd stop to chat with Scanner Dan, the grizzled guy with a walkie-talkie buzzing at his hip as he asked for change. They'd offer odd jobs to a man known as Snowball, who was rumored to have been a smuggler for the Chicago mob during Prohibition.

Then two violent slayings in less than three months shook residents in the state capital, which is also home to the main campus of the University of Wisconsin.

Both victims were stabbed in their homes in the middle of the day by strangers, police said.

Though investigators have no suspects, the police focused on the city's homeless and transients, among others. Now a backlash against Madison's down-and-out population is brewing.

The real problem with electronic books.

I've been meaning to do another vlog about me and my Kindle. (Here's the original one.) The truth is, I hardly ever touch the damned thing.

(But please, if you buy one, buy it through this link so I can get a percentage of the $359 purchase price. And I'm saying that mainly to prompt some skepticism about rave reviews of the Kindle you might be reading in blog posts with Amazon Associates links like that in them. So if you appreciate that little lesson in skepticism, but still want to buy a Kindle, reward me by using my link.)

I've always thought my problem with the Kindle was the gray-on-gray screen — think Etch-a-Sketch — the one the rave reviews say is "easy on the eyes." Yes, and a room with dimmed lights is easy on the eyes, but it's a bad place to read. I want contrast: black letters on a white background. I want that in a book, and I want that in a computer screen, so of course, I want that in an electronic book. I want easy to read.

But anyway, maybe the ugly, hard-to-see screen isn't the real problem with an electronic book:

Books ... give off special smells. According to a recent survey of French students, 43 percent consider smell to be one of the most important qualities of printed books—so important that they resist buying odorless electronic books. CaféScribe, a French on-line publisher, is trying to counteract that reaction by giving its customers a sticker that will give off a fusty, bookish smell when it is attached to their computers.

I know. You're thinking: The French! But focus, people. The entire sensory experience of a book is important.

There's the feel too:

When I read an old book, I hold its pages up to the light and often find among the fibers of the paper little circles made by drops from the hand of the vatman as he made the sheet—or bits of shirts and petticoats that failed to be ground up adequately during the preparation of the pulp. I once found a fingerprint of a pressman enclosed in the binding of an eighteenth-century Encyclopédie—testimony to tricks in the trade of printers, who sometimes spread too much ink on the type in order to make it easier to get an impression by pulling the bar of the press.

Okay, I know. You're thinking, that guy is way more of an aesthete than I even want to be, and if I want some smells and feels — I'll have sex, not grope a book. (I'm talking about you, not me. I will grope an Apple computer.)

***

"That guy" is Robert Darnton, and his essay "The Library in the New Age" ranges far beyond what I've used here, so read the whole thing. Also, Robert Darnton wrote one of my favorite books, "The Great Cat Massacre," and if you buy it at that link, you will be giving me some money, so read that whole thing too.

IN THE COMMENTS: Simon says "Buffy" already did it:

"Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower or a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell... musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is... it has no texture, no context. It's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible. It should be, um... smelly."

UPDATE: Dan from Madison tells the story — with pictures — of me demonstrating the Kindle. Excerpt:

Here is a horrible backlit photo of a random woman who interrupted us to tell us how much she absolutely loved her Kindle. Both Ann and I told her she was nuts.

ADDED NOTE TO READERS WHO ARE HAVING TROUBLE UNDERSTANDING THIS POST: I've added boldface and enlarged some print in the original post, which was apparently a tad subtle. Let me be sledgehammer clear. The stuff about smell is humor. My problem with the Kindle was AND IS the gray-on-gray screen. I want contrast: black letters on a white background. I want that in a book, and I want that in a computer screen, and of course, I want that in an electronic book. I want easy to read. I don't want to read ugly gray-on-gray print. Get it?

"If Obama isn't an old-school Keynesian, what is he?"

Asks John Cassidy (as he reviews "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness" by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein):

One answer is that he is a behavioralist—the term economists use to describe those who subscribe to the tenets of behavioral economics, an increasingly popular discipline that seeks to marry the insights of psychology to the rigor of economics....

The central tenet of the Chicago School is that markets, once established and left alone, will resolve most of society's economic problems, including, presumably, the mortgage crisis. Keynesians—old-school Keynesians, anyway—take the view that markets, financial markets especially, often fail to work as advertised, and that this failure can be self-reinforcing rather than self-correcting. In some ways, the behavioralists stand with the Keynes-ians. Markets sometimes go badly awry, they agree, especially when people have to make complicated choices, such as what type of mortgage to take out. But whereas the Keynesians argue that vigorous regulation and the prohibition of certain activities such as excessive borrowing are often necessary, behavioralists tend to be more hopeful about redeeming free enterprise. With a gentle nudge, they argue, even some very poorly performing markets—and the people who inhabit them—can be made to work pretty well.

"The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

That's what Teddy Kennedy said at the Democratic Convention in 1980 when he could not wrest the nomination away from President Jimmy Carter. Recently, he explained: "I loved the Senate before I ran for the president... I think I became a better senator, with greater focus and attention... It all depends on the attitude, what's in the mind of the person."

Will Hillary Clinton — assuming she doesn't pull off some miracle and get the nomination — return to the Senate with anything like this attitude? First, she'll be surrounded by Senators who supported Obama. ("I'm sure she'll remember, for the rest of her life, who was with her and who wasn't," says Christopher Dodd.) Second, won't she immediately start running in the 2012 election — if McCain wins — or for New York governor... and President in 2016?

It's boring to ask why men have affairs, so let's just talk about why women have affairs.

Emily Bazelon wants to talk about infidelity:

Like everything else about male sexuality, the male desire to lie with another woman is boringly uncomplicated. But why do women have affairs? The judgment of literature (Anna Karenina, Madam Bovary) is that they feel trapped and oppressed, or, less sympathetically, that they're easily gulled by preying males one or two notches up the social ladder. Two centuries later, I would imagine that life is a bit different. The answer we heard from writers like Erica Jong and Gael Greene back in the swingin' Plato's Retreat 1970s was that women crave sexual variety in precisely the same way men do. Three decades later, though, feminism no longer insists that women's desires and inclinations be identical to those of men. It may even be permitted to recognize that, at least superficially, the female sex drive seems, in the aggregate, less pronounced (or at least less conspicuous) than the male sex drive. You don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex. You do hear stories about women telling their husbands they no longer want to have sex.

So, if sex, especially variety in sex, is less important to women, we must have more complex and fascinating reasons for committing adultery.

Christopher Hitchens hates it when the waiter pours the wine into anyone else's glass.

How come that idiot doesn't know that Hitch gets more than a proportionate share?

Get your craft to Mars.

"The spacecraft Phoenix landed safely on Mars yesterday, making a hazardous soft landing on the planet's far north with all its scientific systems apparently intact and ready to begin an intensive new search for life beyond Earth."

Free associating:

"This is a generation that is watching the world come undone."

Says the Oberlin professor. The diligent students unplug the refrigerator. And they set a 3-minute time limits on showers:

... Becky Bob-Waksberg, racked up the morning’s longest shower: Eight minutes. The house cuts Ms. Bob-Waksberg slack, Mr. Brown said, because of her thick, curly hair, which takes longer to shampoo.

The world is coming undone, but Ms. Becky Bob-Waksberg must maintain her luxuriant locks. You know, if you really cared — you unplugged the refrigerator! — you would shave it down to a crewcut... for the greater good. There's a 3-minute timer in the bathroom, to impose the rule on everyone else. There's also "a picture of former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina plastered to the ceiling."

That was Ms. Bob-Waksberg’s idea. No one wants to linger in the shower with someone staring down from the ceiling, she said.

“You could also look at it another way,” she said, “that John Edwards is encouraging me to take a shorter shower.”

Why Mr. Edwards? “He had the strongest global warming policies of any of the candidates,” Mr. Brown said.

Seems to me he has the most glossy, luxuriant hair. I think Ms. Bob-Waksberg is rubbing it in that you have to take a short shower and she doesn't.

"Oh, this is so terrible: The people they want her. Oh, this is so terrible: She is winning the general election, and he is not."

The fervid brain of Bill Clinton knows what those other people are thinking: "It is just frantic the way they are trying to push and pressure and bully all these superdelegates to come out."

Just frantic. Indeed. Is Bill Clinton crazy? She is winning the general election, and he is not. Oh my goodness, we have to cover this up.

There's also this: "I've never seen a candidate treated so disrespectfully just for running."

Who are these people he's so concerned about? Apparently, the media. But what is the media's motivation to drive Hillary Clinton out and elevate Barack Obama if the secret truth is — as Bill tells it — that only Hillary can win against John McCain? The media's self-interest is on the side of more news, and Hillary versus Barack is the news. It can't be that the media want the Democrat to lose in the fall. Is there any way to collect the scattered Clintonian thoughts? Maybe: The media fell in love with Barack Obama and now they'll do anything for him.

***

By the way, what got me to post on this story was his odd use of the present tense in the quote "She is winning the general election, and he is not." That's especially odd, you know, coming from a man who got into so much trouble over the fine point of the meaning of the word "is."



"It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If 'is' means 'is and never has been' that's one thing - if it means 'there is none', that was a completely true statement."

Why did he speak in that too-cute way? It would have been so easy to say: "I was asked a question in the present tense. 'Is' means 'is.' In the present. The answer was no. Is means is and no means no. That was true. Period."

Ah! It doesn't help Hillary to have Bill out there, making us think about Bill all the time.

Palate cleanser.

Madison bumper sticker.

Because your political opinions are more important than protecting the innocence of children and your terrific sense of humor cancels out any ugliness that might seem to intrude on the sensitivities of repressed adults.

Did you watch "Recount," that HBO movie about the 2000 Florida recount?

I thought it was quite good. Though the story was mainly told from the Gore side, the Bush point of view was represented fairly, and there was a good overall balance to it. Complicated legal issues were explained surprising well without belaboring through through the use of various actors playing characters shown working out their next moves and real TV reporters seen in old video clips, telling us the news as it happened 8 years ago. It was especially exciting to see those old news clips, because, perfectly edited in, they stirred up the emotion that I felt when I saw them the first time. And the acted-out material really worked on me — as I was yelling at Al Gore not to concede and laughing at you don’t have to be snippy about it.

Kevin Spacey was the main character, Ron Klain. You either like Spacey or you don't. He seems to use dullness as his technique, and at this point, for me, it seems hammy. But his fleshy face was kind of subtly fascinating on the HDTV screen and I enjoyed him well enough.

We loved Laura Dern as Katherine Harris. It's so easy to mock the vain and exaggerated Harris, but Dern did a good job of getting inside the character. I could laugh and feel some reasonable sympathy for her.

The best actor was Tom Wilkinson, who, playing James Baker, mainly had to state legal positions and strategies. One thing I really love to get from an actor is the feeling that this person is thinking of the words he is saying — I want to lose the sense that there was a script — and Wilkinson really hit that spot for me with lines that must have looked dull on paper. After all, Baker was mainly about standing his ground, while the other side was scrappily fighting for every vote. But Wilkinson made this stolid intransigence damned exciting.

Of course, I got a kick out of seeing actors play the Supreme Court Justices. The Stevens and O'Connor were particularly good. The Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn't speak — maybe she wasn't even an actress — but she looked the part — amusingly.

That's my opinion. Take into account that: 1. I voted for Gore and rooted for Gore throughout the recount, 2. I accepted the Supreme Court's determination from the beginning (and continue to accept it after writing about it in depth and teaching it in detail numerous times), and 3. I didn't want Bush to become President, but I never hated him, and I voted for him in 2004.

IN THE COMMENTS: Somefeller writes:

I saw the film at a premiere last week at the Baker Institute at Rice. It was a lot of fun, and watching James Baker and Kevin Spacey elbowing each other every now and then when a good line in the film came on certainly added to the atmosphere. At one point, the sound went out on the film in a point when Spacey's character was having a big scene, to the horror of the Baker Institute staff, but it turned out great because Kevin Spacey jumped up and said his lines live, to the enjoyment of the audience, who basically got a free one minute live performance from Spacey. I spoke with Laura Dern at the reception after the film and asked her about her portrayal of Harris. She said the lines that Harris spoke in the film came from Harris's own book and from interviews with other GOP people involved in the Florida recount, so they weren't just created by the writers. She also said she tried to portray Harris (who she thought was basically someone in over her head and in many ways used cynically by other Republicans) sympathetically and not just as a cartoon character or villain, and she hoped that came through to the audience.

"What's a good-looking girl like you doing in a corrupt society like this?"

Note passed by Abbie Hoffman, during the Chicago 7 trial, to (female) courtroom artist Andy Austin.

Good night, Dick.

Dick Martin has died.

“My life has been divided into three parts in the show-business world: nightclubs, television, and then I was a director for 30 years of television shows. And I think the most fun I ever had was nightclubs. I loved nightclubs.”

And we loved you on television. "Laugh-In" came on in 1968, and you were more of an early-60s Playboy-type guy. But no matter. "Laugh-In" was a jumble, and you were part of it, the dumb guy in an old-fashioned comedy team stuck into a trendy new show that everyone watched back then.

"Does Senator Clinton understand how tasteless — even how ghoulish — it is to use the word 'assassination'?"

Chris Wallace confronts Terry McAuliffe. Video.

Prairie vortex.

Prairie.

(Enlarge.)

Bars, horse manure, and sexual restraint.

Former bartender Paul Broomfield explains the problem of bars:

"When you work at a bar, you get to see the best and worst of a person in one night. They come in wearing a mask, looking like they've got it all together. As they get drunk, you see the decline, all the demons they're battling will emerge on a magnified scale"...

"It's all about self-affirmation, getting the attention you crave. Someone wants me, so that makes me feel good. The funny thing with the bar is that seldom are people there to help you. They want to take as much energy from you as they can"....

His new job is the shoveling of horse shit (literally):

"It's grounding, and helps me figure out where I am on my path. Do I do my work with love, unbegrudgingly, as best I can, even though the second I leave, the stalls will fill up with poop again?"

He's a yogi, and he practices brahmacharya — sexual restraint:

Yoga tames the ego, softens attachment to cravings, and helps Broomfield strive to live in ways which honour his path.

"My yoga practice is masturbation. It's stepping into that pool of self-hatred or sorrow, or whatever you're dealing with on that day, and finding love for yourself over and over again."

The view from the forest floor.

Cookie exudes confidence.

Hey, Too Many Jims is still monitoring the cruel neutrality.

I thought he'd given up. Even took him off the blog rolls. But he's all geared up now. The best way to see how the monitoring is going is to check the "labels" in the sidebar. Here are the significant ones:

Clinton Negative (3)
Clinton Neutral (25)
Clinton Positive (2)
McCain Neutral (6)
McCain Positive (1)
Obama negative (6)
Obama neutral (31)
Obama Positive (1)

See? Cruel neutrality it is!

And here's the original post where I take my vow of cruel neutrality and point to Monitoring the Cruel Neutrality.

His is bigger than Bill's.

Obama "looks like his own Secret Service agent."

"So cool."

You never see Hillary Clinton or John McCain or any other presidential candidate wearing sunglasses. Or.... wait... did Bill Clinton wear sunglasses when he played the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show?

Did you remember it right? Even without sunglasses though, Bill Clinton was projecting coolness. He was the last Democrat to win the presidency, so... maybe coolness is required. Maybe being a Southern governor is required. We shall see. Maybe it's coolness that works for the Democratic candidate. UPDATE: In the comments, Pissed Off Hillbilly: "Clinton played 2 songs that night. He wore sunglasses on the second one, Heartbreak Hotel." Ah! So that wasn't the embellishment of memory. And maybe we can catch somebody else in sunglasses: More? Maybe they are Transitions lenses.

Hillary Clinton and the non-apology.

I called bullshit on HC's "apology" yesterday, but let's look at it more closely:



Language Log has the in-depth analysis of the transcript:

The apologizer's goal is to cite the narrowest possible range of offended people and reasons for offense. Thus it's not an accident that Senator Clinton mentioned the feelings of the Kennedy family and others about mentioning RFK's assassination, but not the feelings of those who were shocked by the implication that she should stay in the race in case her opponent is killed.

Read the whole thing.

You know, if she'd come right out and said I'm staying in the race because Barack Obama might be assassinated, it would have been — in addition to outrageous — nonsensical. If she dropped out, and he was then killed, the party would have to turn to someone, and it would obviously be her. How is staying in the race a special way to preserve her claim on the nomination in case of his death?

So, then, does this mean that we should believe her assertion that she wasn't really saying I'm staying in the race because Barack Obama might be assassinated? But her point about how late the nomination was decided in 1968 doesn't make much sense either. In that year, the first primary — New Hampshire — was on March 12th. This year, the New Hampshire primary was January 8th and the Iowa caucus was January 3rd. So the process got under way more than 2 months earlier.

In conclusion, I would like to apologize to Andrew Sullivan. On Thursday, I took him to task for calling Hillary Clinton a sociopath.

Questions that distracted me while watching the movie "Iron Man."

1. Who is that actor? (I had to hang around for the credits so I could exclaim "Oh, that was Jeff Bridges!)

2. Are we not supposed to know there is such a thing as a closed head injury? (Iron Man — who is an un-super-powered human being inside a high-tech suit of armor — gets slammed into things with intensely violent force, yet emerges from his suit unharmed, not even dazed. Yes, I know it's a comic-book movie. I'm just saying that I was distracted by thinking: That would have killed him.)

***

Googling around, putting together this little post, I ran across The Forbes Fictional 15. Who are the richest fictional characters? Iron Man (Tony Stark) is #10.

"Brought up by a rabid feminist who thought motherhood was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman."

"I very nearly missed out on becoming a mother."

And I very nearly missed out on linking to this article — because I've already written about Rebecca Walker and, even then, I felt put off by the way this woman is getting too much publicity saying thoroughly conventional things — motherhood is fulfilling — while being the daughter of a writer (Alice Walker) who had to build her fame by coming up with interesting new things to say and now has a daughter who manufactures fame out of expressing hostility toward her famous mother.

But this article is getting a fair amount of attention. Michelle Malkin is saying: "Print this out and send it to every young liberal woman you know."

So I read it. This struck me:

My mother took umbrage at an interview in which I'd mentioned that my parents didn't protect or look out for me. She sent me an e-mail, threatening to undermine my reputation as a writer. I couldn't believe she could be so hurtful - particularly when I was pregnant.

Devastated, I asked her to apologise and acknowledge how much she'd hurt me over the years with neglect, withholding affection and resenting me for things I had no control over - the fact that I am mixed-race, that I have a wealthy, white, professional father and that I was born at all.

But she wouldn't back down. Instead, she wrote me a letter saying that our relationship had been inconsequential for years and that she was no longer interested in being my mother. She even signed the letter with her first name, rather than 'Mom'.

But wait. You are the one trying to undermine her reputation. What is she supposed to do? Write articles portraying you as lying or exaggerating or nutty? She seems to be keeping her silence. I'm back to my original instinct: Look away.

Pajamas in Shanghai.

"Once that relaxation of the dress code became acceptable (starting around the 1980s) the perimeter for p.j.-wear just kept expanding until many people were wearing them day in day out."

Surprising photos at the link. (Via Kottke.)

Madison panorama.

Hillary Clinton, justifying staying in the race: "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."

Incredible! She'll say anything.

ADDED:

She later issued an apology for the remark.

"I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation and in particular the Kennedy family was in any way offensive. I certainly had no intention of that whatsoever," the former first lady said.

Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson defended the comments to The Post, "She was talking about the length of the race and using the '68 election as an example of how long the races in the past have gone -- she used her husband's race in the same vein."

Sorry, that's not called an apology. That's called bullshit.

Can polygamy be a crime in the United States?

Here's some timely analysis by law and religion prof John Witte Jr. (It's especially timely for me because it's the subject of the Constitutional Law exam I'm working on grading right now... as I take a break to blog.)

For nearly two millennia, the Western tradition has included polygamy among the crimes that are inherently wrong. Not just because polygamy is unbiblical, unusual, unsafe, or unsavory. But also because polygamy routinizes patriarchy, jeopardizes consent, fractures fidelity, divides loyalty, dilutes devotion, fosters inequity, promotes rivalry, foments lust, condones adultery, confuses children, and more. Not in every case, to be sure, but in enough cases to make the practice of polygamy too risky to condone.

Should we limit freedom to do one thing because it often leads to something else? Shouldn't we be very careful when the thing we would limit is something that we ourselves have no interest at all in doing but that other people believe is essential to their eternal salvation?

From the opinion in the 1878 Supreme Court case — Reynolds v. United States — that upheld the criminalization of polygamy:

[T]he accused, proved that, at the time of his alleged second marriage, he was, and for many years before had been, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly called the Mormon Church, and a believer in its doctrines; that it was an accepted doctrine of that church "that it was the duty of male members of said church, circumstances permitting, to practise polygamy; . . . that this duty was enjoined by different books which the members of said church believed to be of divine origin, and, among others, the Holy Bible, and also that the members of the church believed that the practice of polygamy was directly enjoined upon the male members thereof by the Almighty God, in a revelation to Joseph Smith, the founder and prophet of said church; that the failing or refusing to practise polygamy by such male members of said church, when circumstances would admit, would be punished, and that the penalty for such failure and refusal would be damnation in the life to come."

Reynolds was sentenced to 2 years at hard labor.

More from Witte:

[S]ome religious communities and their members might well thrive with the freedom to practice polygamy. But inevitably closed repressive regimes like the Texas ranch compound will also emerge—with under-aged girls duped or coerced into sex and marriages with older men, with women and children trapped in sectarian communities with no realistic access to help or protection from the state and no real legal recourse against a church or mosque that is just following its own rules. We prize liberty, equality, and consent in this country too highly to court such a risk.

Why isn't it better to strictly police child abuse, rape, and under-age sex? Why pick on one sort of behavior that has a risk of leading to these things? What if the evidence showed that mothers living with men who are not their children's fathers runs a high child abuse, rape, and underage sex? Could we criminalize that too? The answer shouldn't be the religious motivation seems especially repugnant.

"If Golda Meir... heard about Golda nutcrackers, she would have bought them by the case and given them away as party favors."

Peggy Noonan channels Golda Meir... and calls Hillary Clinton a prissy sissy for complaining about sexism.

It is blame-gaming, whining, a way of not taking responsibility, of not seeing your flaws and addressing them. You want to say "Girl, butch up, you are playing in the leagues, they get bruised in the leagues, they break each other's bones, they like to hit you low and hear the crack, it's like that for the boys and for the girls."

Butch up!

But really, the cries of sexism are a way to try to hit low and hear the crack. It just hasn't been too effective.

Al Franken wrote about sex.

Horrors!

The Obama and Clinton campaigns are in "formal talks" about a VP slot for Hillary?

That's the report, but David Kurtz says:

On first blush I'm skeptical that there really are "formal talks" in the usual sense of that phrase. The report appears to lean heavily on sourcing from within the Clinton camp, which is notable. The significance here may not be that there are formal talks underway or that the vice presidency is under discussion. The real significance may be that this is the opening salvo from the Clinton camp ahead of the negotiations that would likely accompany her withdrawal from the race.

"Formal talks" seems like an awfully strange way to talk about something like this. It makes them sound like separate sovereigns.

Anyway... Obama: Don't do it! I mean, talk to her, get her to behave well toward your campaign, but don't put her on the ticket.

Here's Michael Crowley:

There are a lot of reasons why I think it makes no sense for Obama to pick Hillary, and why I don't think it will happen. There's the fact that Obama's entire campaign was a foil against Hillary's allegedly terrible Beltway-bound judgment. There's the absurdity of the idea that the Obama camp would be willing to wake up every day braced for whatever ill-advised thing was going to come out of Bill's mouth next. There's Obama's need for someone with more unimpeachable national-security credentials.

"Court Says Texas Illegally Seized Sect’s Children."

That was obvious.

''All whites are racist in the U.S.A.''

A statement in a NYC teachers' training manual that raised an outcry in 1987 — today's Year That Blog Forgot.

"John McCain is a liar. He's a man without honor, without integrity..."

John Hawkins — of Right Wing News — is a having a bit of a problem with the Republican Party's candidate.

The Brooklyn Bridge is 125 years old tomorrow.

I'd been looking at the Brooklyn Bridge for the last 9 months, but I'm back in Madison now, so I'm missing the festivities. I must have walked across the bridge 20 times while I was living in New York, and I still have a picture of the bridge as the welcome page of my iPhone. So let me mark the occasion with a few of my favorite pictures of the bridge:

"And whatever happened to the 'Kennedy Court'?"

Asks Linda Greenhouse, in a survey of the Roberts years on the Supreme Court that notes the decline of 5-4 decisions. There's only been 1 this year (and it was a "low-profile" statutory case where Justice Kennedy, in dissent, was not the deciding vote). Last year a third of the cases were decided 5-4. What's going on? It may be that the more contentious cases will come in the last days of the term. Greenhouse notes that Justice Stevens has voted with the conservative Justices in a few key cases:

It would be too simplistic an explanation to say that the liberal justices, at least some of them, have simply given up. Something deeper seems to be at work. Each of those three cases might have received a harder-edged, more conclusively conservative treatment at the hands of the same five-member majority that controlled the last term.

Instead, the lethal injection and voter ID decisions hewed closely to the facts of each case. Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol passed muster, but the court left open the possibility that another state’s practice might not. The voter ID challenge reached the court on a nonexistent record, so perhaps a stronger case could be made at a later time. Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in the child pornography case construed the statute so narrowly as to allay the First Amendment concerns of Justices Stevens and Breyer and win their full concurrence.

So perhaps there was a bit of movement on both sides — not simple liberal capitulation, but liberals using their limited leverage to exact some modest concessions as the price of helping the conservatives avoid another parade of 5-to-4 decisions.

Or is it the Chief Justice playing a moderating role and following through on the ideas about minimalist decisions that he expressed at his confirmation hearings?

Recall the pledge that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. made, both in his 2005 confirmation hearing and in the early months of his tenure, to seek consensus and to lead the court in speaking in a modest judicial voice....

The court’s modulated tone may also stem from the fact that this is an election year....

It's interesting that this line is well-separated from the discussion of Justice Stevens behavior. Is he perhaps hoping for a President who will appoint a liberal Justice or 2? It would not help that agenda to display the spectacle of 4 liberal Justices eager to change everything if only they could get one more vote.

Who's to say what these big patterns mean as cases are decided individually, by judges forming opinions mostly on their own? But Greenhouse's observations sharpen our view as we look to see the torrent of cases in the upcoming days. (And how strange it will be when we won't have Greenhouse to sharpen the picture for us anymore!)

ADDED: Jonathan Adler objects to the Greenhouse analysis.

Watching "American Idol."

This is Chris — for 1 minute and 20 seconds — watching last night's final results show. Can you tell if he's enjoying it?

That's taken with my new Flip camera, which seems pretty handy. The actual video quality is much better than what shows up on YouTube.

ADDED: I had to take the clip down because of a technical problem. I'm really having a lot of trouble uploading to YouTube. I keep getting the message "unable to convert video file." I had one version that uploaded — in MPG4 — but it got horizontally compressed (with vertical bars on the sides and distorted video). I'm editing AVI files in QuickTime Pro. Any advice?

Lilac.

Stephen Pinker opines on conservative bioethics: "The Stupidity of Dignity."

In TNR:

The sickness in theocon bioethics goes beyond imposing a Catholic agenda on a secular democracy and using "dignity" to condemn anything that gives someone the creeps. Ever since the cloning of Dolly the sheep a decade ago, the panic sown by conservative bioethicists, amplified by a sensationalist press, has turned the public discussion of bioethics into a miasma of scientific illiteracy. Brave New World, a work of fiction, is treated as inerrant prophesy. Cloning is confused with resurrecting the dead or mass-producing babies. Longevity becomes "immortality," improvement becomes "perfection," the screening for disease genes becomes "designer babies" or even "reshaping the species." The reality is that biomedical research is a Sisyphean struggle to eke small increments in health from a staggeringly complex, entropy-beset human body. It is not, and probably never will be, a runaway train.

"The fate of the world for the next four years. It’s all going to boil down to a few old Jews in Century Village."

Rabbi Ruvi New predicts.

Crist, Jindal, Romney.

Looks like McCain wants a governor for VP. Which one?

What do you think of Bobby Jindal?

Mr. Jindal, who was born in Baton Rouge, La., to a family that had just arrived there from the Punjab area of India, took office as Louisiana’s governor in January after serving three years in the House of Representatives. Mr. Jindal, who was born a Hindu but became a Roman Catholic as a teenager, campaigned for governor as a social conservative, opposing human embryonic stem cell research and abortion in any form and favoring teaching “intelligent design” in schools as an alternative to evolution.

But Mr. Jindal also has a reputation as a policy wonk, like the Clintons, with a specialty in health care issues. After graduating in 1991 from Brown University, where he majored in biology and public policy, and attending Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Mr. Jindal worked for the management consulting firm McKinsey and Company and was executive director of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare. He later served as secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals and in the Bush administration as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for planning and evaluation.

Sounds great. The health specialty could work very well in the mix. But Jindal is only 37! That's 5 years younger than our youngest President... but old enough — in constitutional terms — to be President. I see fodder for jokes about how old McCain is. Their average age — 54 — seems ideal for a President. Downside: It would make it impossible to argue that Obama is too young to be President.

ADDED: Jindal turns 37 on June 10th.

"How do you respond to a sociopath like this?"

Asks Andrew Sullivan about... Hillary Clinton. She's a sociopath now? Why?

She agreed that Michigan and Florida should be punished for moving up their primaries. Obama took his name off the ballot in deference to their agreement and the rules of the party. That he should now be punished for playing by the rules and she should be rewarded for skirting them is unconscionable.

She's insane because she's fighting for the nomination using whatever arguments are available? If it's such a bad argument, it will lose and that will be the end of it. Obama is making the arguments that work for him. To exaggerate the hatefulness of her arguments and the virtuousness of his is to be too caught up in your personal preference for one candidate over the other. Obama's taking his name off the Michigan ballot wasn't all about some sort of supreme respect for rules and agreements. If he'd thought he was going to do very well, wouldn't he have left his name on?

Here's part of the quote from Hillary that drove Sullivan up the wall:

Now, I’ve heard some say that counting Florida and Michigan would be changing the rules.

I say that not counting Florida and Michigan is changing a central governing rule of this country - that whenever we can understand the clear intent of the voters, their votes should be counted.

Ha ha. That's rich. She is using the buzz words from the 2000 Florida recount (in which each of the 2 candidates made the arguments that helped his cause and acted outraged that the other was making arguments which he'd have made himself if they would have served his end). Clinton drives the point home:

I remember very well back in 2000, there were those who argued that people's votes should be discounted over technicalities. For the people of Florida who voted in this primary, the notion of discounting their votes sounds way too much of the same.

This isn't insanity. It's litigation. Quite normal. If the rules help you, you insist on the importance of rules. If the rules hurt you, they are mere guidelines that must bend flexibly for the sake of justice.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan responds ... but in the form of printing an email from an unnamed reader that makes some incoherent assertions about law.

To use the ligitation [sic] analogy, if you walk in to court espousing the exact opposite position of an earlier stated position, you lose, plain and simple. Your opponent calls it an admission, throws it in your face, and probably moves for sanctions.

What is this person talking about? "Admissions" as an exception to the hearsay rule? If a party says one thing about the facts of the case and then another, it's evidence, to be analyzed as the factfinder sees fit. You don't "lose, plain and simple." You just have a credibility problem. But I'm not talking about assertions of fact. I'm talking about legal arguments — arguments about what the law is or how it is applies in this case. You're allowed to make one legal argument and then another. You can make 2 contradictory arguments in the alternative at exactly the same time.

AND: I should add that what the emailer and Sullivan (and some of my commenters) are doing is also the litigation style — acting as if the argument on the other side is utterly ridiculous. I'm soooo jaded about that sort of thing. I can see what you are all doing. One side or the other will win, and it probably won't be Hillary, but her argument is not insane.

ADDED: An emailer copies me on email sent to Sullivan:

I do not agree with Althouse's comment discussed at this link on your blog (as it unfairly ascribes to Obama the same type of win-at-all-costs mentality exhibited by Clinton). However, the reader response that you highlight for the purpose of knocking down Althouse's view is simply not correct as a legal matter.

The reader believes that "if you walk into court espousing the exact opposite position of an earlier stated position, you lose, plain and simple" on the ground that the litigant has committed an "admission" that would be determinative in the litigation and even subject to sanctions. That is not so. Flip-flops in position -- even within the scope of the litigation itself — are generally not themselves determinative of the outcome, let alone sanctionable. Generally, speaking, a change in position has to meet the criteria of the doctrine known as "judicial estoppel" for a litigant to be bound to the first position and thus prevented from relying on an inconsistent position in the litigation. And that doctrine requires that the litigant take the first position in the litigation itself AND that it be accepted by the court before the litigant is prevented from later raising the inconsistent position. And even then there are exceptions. There are, of course, doctrines that prevent parties from re-litigating cases that have been concluded, but that problem does not arise here because NO litigation has yet taken place let alone concluded.

So, I think it is clear that Clinton could litigate a challenge to what has occurred in Michigan or Florida without being formally prevented from raising positions adverse to positions she posited previously. That, of course, is a different question from whether she would prevail in the litigation. I think the chance of her prevailing in such litigation is remote, let alone in a way that would would alter the Democratic primary season outcome.

"Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both proposing versions of RomneyCare on a national scale."

So we'd better look at the results of the experiment in Massachusetts.

I play 2 video games.

Twice recently, I've had a house guest who has brought a video game system, attached it to my television, and insisted that I play it.

1. My first guest brought a Wii, and the game I was induced to play was: Bowling. I felt a little silly acting out the motions of bowling while holding a remote control and being represented on screen by a character that looked like one of those old Fisher-Price LittlePeople, but it was kind of fun. I don't remember my score. Better than 37, I'm sure. Efforts to induce me to play another game or to bowl again failed. I did watch a lot of playing and contemplated whether this was a reasonably healthful, decently athletic activity for a young child. Good enough, I thought. But as long as you're up and moving around, why not move around in this real world we have here instead of manipulating your guy in an impoverished play world? The more realistic a video game is, the more I'm likely to think about how much more realistic real life is. If you're making your guy bowl, I'm going to think: Hey, we should go bowling — actual bowling. If you're making multi-shaped blocks drop onto a pile, I'm just thinking rotate it! or whatever.

2. My second guest brought an Xbox, and the game was BioShock. So there I was floating in the ocean amidst the burning wreckage of a plane crash. Look around, I'm told. That is, wiggle my right thumb. Go places. That is, wiggle my left thumb. I'm told the crucial skill is to move around and look around at the same time, in some sort of fluid 3-D fashion. I realize I am never going to learn this skill. I'm either going to be looking around or moving, not both. But I have the game on "easy" mode, so I'm able to survive this and every other ineptitude. Okay, so I find the stairway out of the water and bumble my way into an elevator to the bottom of the ocean past various signs and cityscapes that make me say, "Hey, this game seems to be based on Ayn Rand." I'm told this is a correct observation. So I'm all: "You bought a right-wing game." Yes. But then I'm mostly moving around in lots of dark hallways, rooms, and staircases where various characters come at me and I slug them with a big monkey wrench I picked up somewhere. No matter how vicious my attackers are, I always kill them, because I'm playing in "easy" mode. I find I like to hit them about 10 more times after I've killed them, spattering blood about and feeling the thud in the vibrating controller in my hands. "Why do I like doing that? Does that mean I'm a bad person?" After a while, I say that's enough for me, get up, and feel queasy and dizzy. I go get a glass of orange juice, take a sip, then sit down at the table and put my head down. "That game made me sick."

"It's a wholesome image I'm getting from this tiny article: milk-drinking boys, going to the movies with English-speaking Australian girls."

The Year That Blog Forgot today is 1943.

Yes! I'm watching the "American Idol" finale!

Aren't you? I think the judges were pushing David Archuleta, the kid who really really wants to win, but I heard it through the grapevine that the winner is David Cook.

UPDATE: Told ya!

AND: I love the way people responded to the guy who didn't seem to care if he won, who wasn't needy about this. The vote was 56% to 44% — that's a huge margin. That means something. Cook is — despite the immense taint of "AI" — pretty damned cool.

The absolutely insane talk of Obama promising Hillary Clinton the next seat on the Supreme Court.

I have avoided talking about this but now there's a WaPo column on the subject and I can't stand it anymore. James Andrew Miller writes:

It's likely that the next president will face at least one Supreme Court vacancy. Obama should promise Hillary Clinton, now, that if he wins in November, the vacancy will be hers, making her first on a list of one.

How could Hillary Clinton possibly be considered an appropriate Supreme Court nominee?

Obama could ... appreciate Clinton's undeniably keen mind. Even Clinton detractors have noted her remarkable mental skills; she would be equal to any legal or intellectual challenge she would face as a justice. The fact that she hasn't served on a bench before would be inconsequential, considering her experience in law and in government.

Now, why did WaPo publish this? Miller was a special assistant to Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker Jr. and he has a book about the Senate, but he sounds like a complete fool here. His notion that Hillary Clinton belongs on the Supreme Court is just: Everybody seems to think she's pretty smart. And it doesn't even matter that she has no judicial experience and has never done anything to indicate that she is any sort of a legal scholar or has anything like a judicial temperament.

If Obama were to promise Clinton the first court vacancy, her supporters would actually have a stronger incentive to support him for president than they would if she were going to be vice president.

No, they wouldn't! They'd think that Obama shouldn't be trusted with the responsibility of appointing federal judges.

Instead of subjecting herself to a long wait and another possible defeat, [Hillary] could don one of those roomy black robes, make a potentially ineradicable impact on the course of the republic -- and never again have to worry about being liked.

"Roomy black robes" — is he calling her fat?

Senate confirmation would be all but certain, even putting aside the gains that Democrats are likely to make in November.

Why not just beg people to vote for McCain? The Senate is going to rubber-stamp whatever unqualified, politicized judicial nominations a President Obama would send its way? Well, then, we must have the opposite party in the White House!

President Obama would engender praise (at least from Democrats) at the prospect of Hillary going toe to toe with Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito. Clinton's gumption and determination might make her one of the most powerful forces ever on the court, particularly when it comes to swaying other justices when the court is closely divided.

Miller thrills at the prospect of law as a raw political battle. Democrats who respect the rule of law and want rights to be taken seriously should not cheer at that spectacle. And conservatives will once again get strong traction arguing — as McCain did the other day — that their judges are the ones who are faithfully subservient to the law. I know liberals don't believe that, but they must present themselves as wanting judges who bring legitimate interpretative skill and diligence to their task and operate independently from politics. Or all is lost.

So Garry Kasparov is trying to give a speech when a penis helicopter starts flying around the room.

Really!

"On a gorgeous, unseasonably mild day in Portland, a free performance by a hugely successful local band is likely to draw a huge crowd."

But the NYT frontpaged that 75,000 people thronged to see Barack Obama. No mention of the band. I'm not sure how big a deal this is. The Times should have mentioned the band, but I think the people probably turned out for Obama and not The Decemberists. Who knows?

"J. Edgar Hoover is to be found at the far part of the Cub Room with his aide, Clyde Tolson."

Why do people go to nightclubs?... in The Year that Blog Forgot: 1945.

But there was still war going on, and here's the way the headlines looked this day in 1945.

Is Barack Obama "a walking, talking gaffe machine"?

Michelle Malkin marshals the evidence. I'm inclined to be a little lenient about gaffes, though I understand the urge to avenge Dan Quayle, who was — the legend has it — destroyed over the misspelling of a single word. A presidential candidate is constantly talking, responding to questions and situations ad lib, and he's going to make some gaffes. It can't mean that he's incompetent or an idiot. I love to post and laugh about these gaffes — like the "57 states" one — but it has almost no effect on what I think of the man. A good candidate should try to avoid giving his opponents this ammunition as much as he can, but there are more important things than avoiding ever saying anything wrong.

But there's one thing on Malkin's long list of gaffes that mattered to me:

Last March, the Chicago Tribune reported this little-noticed nugget about a fake autobiographical detail in Obama’s Dreams from My Father: “Then, there’s the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial awakening at age 9. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, the Life article and the photographs don’t exist, say the magazine’s own historians.”

I don't remember seeing that Chicago Tribune story. Malkin's piece — in the National Review — doesn't link to anything, but here's the article. I read "Dreams from My Father" and took it to be a truthful story. Obama makes seeing those pictures in Life magazine a pivotal event in his life:

He is 9 years old, living in Indonesia, where he and his mother moved with her new husband, Lolo Soetoro, a few years earlier. One day while visiting his mother, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Obama passed time by looking through several issues of Life magazine. He came across an article that he later would describe as feeling like an "ambush attack."

The article included photos of a black man who had destroyed his skin with powerful chemical lighteners that promised to make him white. Instead, the chemicals had peeled off much of his skin, leaving him sad and scarred, Obama recalled.

"I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation," Obama wrote of the magazine photos in "Dreams."

Yet no such Life issue exists, according to historians at the magazine. No such photos, no such article. When asked about the discrepancy, Obama said in a recent interview, "It might have been an Ebony or it might have been ... who knows what it was?" (At the request of the Tribune, archivists at Ebony searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama recalled.)

In fact, it is surprising, based on interviews with more than two dozen people who knew Obama during his nearly four years in Indonesia, that it would take a photograph in a magazine to make him conscious of the fact that some people might treat him differently in part because of the color of his skin.

Obama, who has talked and written so much about struggling to find a sense of belonging due to his mixed race, brushes over this time of his life in "Dreams." He describes making friends easily, becoming fluent in Indonesian in just six months and melding quite easily into the very foreign fabric of Jakarta.

The reality was less tidy....

Former playmates remember Obama as "Barry Soetoro," or simply "Barry," a chubby little boy very different from the gangly Obama people know today. All say he was teased more than any other kid in the neighborhood--primarily because he was bigger and had black features.

He was the only foreign child in the neighborhood. He also was one of the only neighborhood children whose parents enrolled him in a new Catholic school in an area populated almost entirely by Betawis, the old tribal landowning Jakarta natives who were very traditional Muslims. Some of the Betawi children threw rocks at the open Catholic classrooms, remembered Cecilia Sugini Hananto, who taught Obama in 2nd grade.

Teachers, former playmates and friends recall a boy who never fully grasped their language and who was very quiet as a result. But one word Obama learned quickly in his new home was curang, which means "cheater."

When kids teased him, Obama yelled back, "Curang, curang!" When a friend gave him shrimp paste instead of chocolate, he yelled, "Curang, curang!"

Zulfan Adi was one of the neighborhood kids who teased Obama most mercilessly. He remembers one day when young Obama, a hopelessly upbeat boy who seemed oblivious to the fact that the older kids didn't want him tagging along, followed a group of Adi's friends to a nearby swamp.

"They held his hands and feet and said, `One, two, three,' and threw him in the swamp," recalled Adi, who still lives in the same house where he grew up. "Luckily he could swim. They only did it to Barry."

The other kids would scrap with him sometimes, but because Obama was bigger and better-fed than many of them, he was hard to defeat.

"He was built like a bull. So we'd get three kids together to fight him," recalled Yunaldi Askiar, 45, a former neighborhood friend. "But it was only playing."

Obama has claimed on numerous occasions to have become fluent in Indonesian in six months. Yet those who knew him disputed that during recent interviews.

Israella Pareira Darmawan, Obama's 1st-grade teacher, said she attempted to help him learn the Indonesian language by going over pronunciation and vowel sounds. He struggled greatly with the foreign language, she said, and with his studies as a result.

The teacher, who still lives in Obama's old neighborhood, remembers that he always sat in the back corner of her classroom. "His friends called him 'Negro,'" Darmawan said. The term wasn't considered a slur at the time in Indonesia.

Still, all of his teachers at the Catholic school recognized leadership qualities in him. "He would be very helpful with friends. He'd pick them up if they fell down,'' Darmawan recalled. "He would protect the smaller ones."

Third-grade teacher Fermina Katarina Sinaga, now 67, has perhaps the most telling story. In an essay about what he wanted to be when he grew up, Obama "wrote he wanted to be president," Sinaga recalled. "He didn't say what country he wanted to be president of. But he wanted to make everybody happy."

When Obama was in 4th grade, the Soetoro family moved. Their new neighborhood was only 3 miles to the west, but a world away. Elite Dutch colonists once lived there; the Japanese moved in during their occupation of Indonesia in World War II. In the early 1970s, diplomats and Indonesian businessmen lived there in fancy gated houses with wide paved roads and sculpted bushes.

Obama never became terribly close with the children of the new school--this time a predominantly Muslim one--where he was enrolled. As he had at the old school, Obama sat in a back corner. He sketched decidedly American cartoon characters during class.

"He liked drawing Spider-Man and Batman," said another friend, Widiyanto Hendro Cahyono, 46. "Barry liked to draw heroes."

Uh oh. I'm quoting way too much. And there's much, much more really interesting stuff — really humanizing stuff. Much better material than you'll find in "Dreams from My Father." Thanks to Michelle Malkin for prompting me to pull this thing out of the archive! For whatever reasons, Obama wrote a book framing his life story as a story about the search for racial identity. I think it was probably what the publishers wanted from him, and it may have also seemed like a good way to build his career. He's much more lovable in the Chicago Tribune version — even if it does call him out on the Life magazine story.