Lawyer hopes his client will die soon.

"He's now 69 years old. His health is not great and all I can tell you is that I hope he doesn't have to serve anywhere near that time." — Phil Spector's lawyer, referring to the 19 years in the 19 years to life sentence.

The last survivor...

... perishes.

"Make certain [Obama] doesn't run around East Harlem unidentified."

Charles Rangel jokes about the NYC cop shooting.

"George Tiller, a Wichita doctor who was one of the few doctors in the nation to perform late-term abortions, was shot to death on Sunday..."

"... as he attended church.... Wichita police said that the shots were fired from a handgun in the church lobby during the morning service."

Obama takes his wife on a very expensive date.

To dinner and a show — in New York City.

An outrageous expenditure and inconvenience or fun and helpful for New York?

Susan Boyle loses on "Britain's Got Talent."

Fame has a narrative arc.

In this case, it feels like the right story. A woman comes out of nowhere, is embraced by the world for her naive goodness, gets a bit of a swelled head and acts bitchy instead of sweet, and plummets back into the obscurity from which she emerged.

Or not obscurity, really. She will melt into an undreamy life of second-rate fame — with bad records, dull reality show stints, etc.

"Given that record, it seems absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking."

Says Tom Goldstein, who's done the work, reading all the cases relating to race:

[I]n an eleven-year career on the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor has participated in roughly 100 panel decisions involving questions of race and has disagreed with her colleagues in those cases (a fair measure of whether she is an outlier) a total of 4 times. Only one case (Gant) in that entire eleven years actually involved the question whether race discrimination may have occurred. (In another case (Pappas) she dissented to favor a white bigot.) She participated in two other panels rejecting district court rulings agreeing with race-based jury-selection claims.

So the reverse-discrimination claim is one of the very few cases where she stood out from the other judges. It's notable that that was a case that turned on free speech rights — and the speech in question was speech Sotomayor presumably disgrees with vehemently:

Pappas v. Giuliani, 290 F.3d 143 (2d Cir. 2002), involv[ed] an employee of the New York City Police Department who was terminated from his desk job because, when he received mailings requesting that he make charitable contributions, he responded by mailing back racist and bigoted materials. On appeal, the panel majority held that the NYPD could terminate Pappas for his behavior without violating his First Amendment right to free speech. Sotomayor dissented from the majority’s decision to award summary judgment to the police department. She acknowledged that the speech was “patently offensive, hateful, and insulting,” but cautioned the majority against “gloss[ing] over three decades of jurisprudence and the centrality of First Amendment freedoms in our lives just because it is confronted with speech is does not like.” In her view, Supreme Court precedent required the court to consider not only the NYPD’s mission and community relations but also that Pappas was neither a policymaker nor a cop on the beat. Moreover, Pappas’s speech was anonymous, “occur[ring] away from the office on [his] own time.” She expressed sympathy for the NYPD’s “concerns about race relations in the community,” which she described as “especially poignant”....

But she upheld the rights of the employee as grounded solidly in the constitutional law of free speech. So let's think clearly about the real working of this "empathy" Obama has touted. Stop jumping ahead to the assumption that Sotomayor stretches the law to decide cases in favor of people who tug her heart strings and look at the record.

At the Incommunicado Café...

... I'll be incommunicado — for a time — so please carry on. I'll still monitor comments so don't think you can get away with any of those (few) things I delete. But have fun. Do your thing. Let it all hang out. Whatever turns you on.

The Great Glen Way.

Nina's in Scotland, knocking herself out, hiking the Great Glen Way — with lots of photographs and narrow escapes.

The best of Jay Leno.

I don't much like Jay Leno, but after all these years, a "10 Best" set of clips has got to be pretty good. Let's check out the best of — the surprisingly smutty — "Headlines":

Obama defends Sotomayor: "I'm sure she would have restated it."

Well, of course, she would have restated it if she'd thought, when she said it, that it would be used by opponents of her Supreme Court nomination the way it's being used today. But that's why the original quotation is so interesting and deserving of analysis.

Yet it was not an unguarded spontaneous outburst. It was a carefully written speech delivered to a particular audience. Sotomayor was saying the things that would be well-received by her audience. Indeed, I have trouble getting roused by her statement — "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life" — because I've been immersed for a quarter century in the kind of law school environment that she addressed. Here, we sympathetically smile and nod at such things. We nurture racial analysis. We create a school of thought and hire people to write about Critical Race Theory. What Sotomayor said was actually a weak, feel-good version of the kind of racial talk that is widespread in the legal academy.

Sotomayor was invited to give that speech, I assume, because she is Latina. It was for publication in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, in a symposium called "Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation." She had to address the topic. She did so in a notably non-radical fashion. She was appropriate for that occasion. Now, it sounds bad to people who don't hear this sort of thing in the ordinary course of life, but I think it says very little about how racially Sotomayor's mind works or how inclined she is to dispense racial favors from the bench.

Still, those who want law to be color-blind have an fine opportunity to play off that quote. Whether calling Sotomayor a "racist" is the best rhetoric is another matter. I would recommend characterizing Sotomayor's thinking as "racial" (rather than racist). And lets have a real debate about whether law and public policy should have a racial or a color-blind character. It's an important issue, and it can be used to define Obama in contrast to whatever 2012 candidates the Republican Party may produce.

The roadside memorial at the Anderson ferry.

Should memorials mark the place where a person died? If so, what standards apply? Is it wrong to nail a stuffed rabbit and paper butterflies to a cross? What if every place where a person died – in the entire history of humanity — had a marker with a name on it? Would you be sitting on one right now? Ever thought about how many people have died on your front lawn (over the past 1 million years)? Ever thought about the fact that somewhere on earth is the place where you will die? Visualize an invisible marker there with your name on it. Where do you think it is? Perhaps you sleep on it every night. If you knew that in fact you did, would you find that comforting?

"Authorities say an 82-year-old man choked his 74-year-old girlfriend..."

Oh, for the love of God...

"... because he was unhappy with the way she loaded a dishwasher."

When do we ever learn?

"What am I going to tell the president when I tell him his teleprompter is broken? What will he do then?"

The President's teleprompter is a running joke — the Vice President reminds us.

"I felt she could be very judgmental in the sense that she doesn’t let you finish your argument before she jumps in and starts asking questions."

A lawyer (Sheema Chaudhry) said that about Sonia Sotomayor (as reported in this NYT article). Well, sounds like she'd fit right in on the Supreme Court. That's exactly what those oral arguments are like. And give me a break. A judge is "judgmental"?

The oral advocate is benefited when the judge makes it clear exactly what the sticking point is for her. Pay attention and respond, if you can. I've read many Supreme Court cases that turn on the very point that a key Justice pushed the losing lawyer around with at oral argument. It's an opportunity. Use it. Don't whine about it. Let the judge be judgmental and the lawyer be lawyerly.

Another lawyer, Gerald Lefcourt, said: "She used her questioning to make a point... as opposed to really looking for an answer to a question she did not understand." Again, this is typical of Supreme Court argument. So she made her point, and she wasn't having any difficulty understanding something? That's a signal to the lawyer to make a point that tops hers. Make a better argument. Having a position and revealing it at oral argument — which occurs after the judge has studied all the arguments in the written briefs — happens all the time in the Supreme Court. It doesn't mean that the judge is close-minded. It means the judge is prepared and using the argument time efficiently. The lawyer needs to up his game.

Sheema Chaudhry also said : "She’s brilliant and she’s qualified, but I just feel that she can be very, how do you say, temperamental.” And Gerald Lefcourt said that, compared to the other judges on her court, Sotomayor is "more strident and much more vocal." Strident, temperamental... I hear gender in these words. I have no idea what Chaudhry and Lefcourt actually experienced, but this is the way people talk about strong women.

Judge Guido Calabresi, a former dean of Yale Law School who taught Ms. Sotomayor there and now sits with her on the Second Circuit, said complaints that she had been unduly caustic had no basis. For a time, Judge Calabresi said, he kept track of the questions posed by Judge Sotomayor and other members of the 12-member court. “Her behavior was identical,” he said.

“Some lawyers just don’t like to be questioned by a woman,” Judge Calabresi added. “It was sexist, plain and simple.”

Frankly, I wouldn't mind if Sotomayor was an unusually caustic and argumentative judge. There's no reason why the female needs to be the one who's most deferential and polite. In fact, it's good for some women to equal or outdo men in the verbal jousting. Badgering lawyers, it's not just for Scalia anymore. Bring on Sonia to scare them from the liberal side.

(Really, does anybody care if lawyers are intimidated?)

I'm so excited about...

... this.

Go ahead. Make my 200 seconds.

"Gay marriage currently is not legal, under U.S. law. I bet a lot of straight men wish that applied to them..."

"... so they could go out there and have some torrid, unabashed monkey sex, as much as they could. You know, that sounds pretty good, right?"

Comedy show or serious conservative magazine?

"That's like saying the 'secret' to good sex is a partner. Or genitals."

Ezra has had it.

Archie picks Veronica!

Oh, no!

Do we know what Sotomayor thinks about abortion rights?

Some people assume Obama wouldn't have picked her if she doesn't support abortion rights, but is that really the case? White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, has said that Obama “did not ask... specifically” about her position. It may be politically useful that her opinion isn't known, and yet that may mean that she'll turn out to be a surprise (as Souter, the man she's replacing was in his time).

None of the cases in Judge Sotomayor’s record dealt directly with the legal theory underlying Roe v. Wade — that the Constitution contains an unwritten right to privacy in reproductive decisions as a matter of so-called substantive due process.

Of course, a Court of Appeals judge is bound to Supreme Court precedent, which includes that theory, but a case applying it might reveal how enthusiastic a judge is about it.

In a 2002 case, she wrote an opinion upholding the Bush administration policy of withholding aid from international groups that provide or promote abortion services overseas.

“The Supreme Court has made clear that the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position,” she wrote, “and can do so with public funds.”

That says nothing beyond the simple fact that she was bound by precedent and powerless to overrule it.

In a 2007 case, she strongly criticized colleagues on the court who said that only women, and not their husbands, could seek asylum based on China’s abortion policy. “The termination of a wanted pregnancy under a coercive population control program can only be devastating to any couple, akin, no doubt, to the killing of a child,” she wrote, also taking note of “the unique biological nature of pregnancy and special reverence every civilization has accorded to child-rearing and parenthood in marriage.”

That is pretty consistent with both the pro-life and the abortion rights position. (In fact, it's a good illustration of why we shouldn't say that those who favor abortion rights are "pro-abortion.") Someone supporting abortion rights might object to valuing the father's interests equally with the mother's, and someone who is pro-life might object to seeing abortion from the perspective of the parents and not the unborn child. Still, she's mostly using pro-choice language: she calls the unborn child a "pregnancy," and she equates it with "a child" (i.e., a born child) when it is "wanted." But then again, this is the language of the law embodied in the Supreme Court decisions that bind her.

[I]n a 2008 case, she wrote an opinion vacating a deportation order for a woman who had worked in an abortion clinic in China. Although Judge Sotomayor’s decision turned on a technicality, her opinion described in detail the woman’s account of how she would be persecuted in China because she had once permitted the escape of a woman who was seven months pregnant and scheduled for a forced abortion. In China, to allow such an escape was a crime, the woman said.

All you "empathy" opponents — think about that.

Then there's the fact that Sotomayor was raised as a Roman Catholic. (Indeed, she will be the 6th Catholic on the Court.)

... Hispanics include a higher percentage of abortion opponents than many other parts of the Democratic Party’s coalition. Judge Sotomayor’s parents moved from Puerto Rico.

“At the very least, she grew up in a culture that didn’t hold the pro-life position in contempt,” [said teven Waldman, the editor in chief of BeliefNet.com].

David Savage and Peter Nicholas note:

Sotomayor... has listed herself as a member of Childbirth Connection, a group that helps young mothers prepare for caring for a baby.

Two years ago -- in a case of concern to women's groups -- she joined an appeals court ruling that upheld a school district's policy requiring teachers to notify a parent if they saw that a girl was pregnant. The court said that the teachers had no legal basis for objecting to the policy....

If Obama was seeking to avoid an abortion battle during the confirmation process, Sotomayor would seem a logical choice because of her lack of record on the issue. Another finalist to replace Souter, Judge Diane P. Wood from Chicago, had a strong public record of supporting abortion rights. Wood dissented a decade ago when the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Wisconsin's and Illinois' bans on what opponents call "partial birth abortion."

Students who hug too much.

Should they be stopped?

A measure of how rapidly the ritual is spreading is that some students complain of peer pressure to hug to fit in. And schools from Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching — or citing hallway clogging and late arrivals to class — have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule....

“If somebody were to not hug someone, to never hug anybody, people might be just a little wary of them and think they are weird or peculiar,” said Gabrielle Brown, a freshman at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School in Manhattan.

Comforting as the hug may be, principals across the country have clamped down. “Touching and physical contact is very dangerous territory,” said Noreen Hajinlian, the principal of George G. White School, a junior high school in Hillsdale, N.J., who banned hugging two years ago. “It was needless hugging — they are in the hallways before they go to class. It wasn’t a greeting. It was happening all day.”

Needless hugging? Don't we need a hug?

"200 years that changed the world."

(Via Tigerhawk.)

Drudge is delightfully Drudge-y this morning.

Does it even matter what that refers to? It's this AP article:

"I do see this opportunity for climate change to be ... a game-changer," [Nancy Pelosi said at Tsinghua University in Beijing]. "It's a place where human rights — looking out for the needs of the poor in terms of climate change and healthy environment — are a human right."

To achieve this, Pelosi said governments would have to make decisions and choices based on science.

"They also have to do it with openness, transparency and accountability to the people," she said. "Everyone has to have their situation improved by it."

I love the photographic-editorial cleverness of making Pelosi's environmental greenness remind us of this:

"Thank God for La Mer and Retin-A and Pilates — and, yes, hot sex..."

"... which is good fun and may be no more than a Maginot Line against the inevitable, but that’s not nothing. And my hair, honey-highlighted for years now, has the swank length of mermaid youth—which is how I plan to keep it no matter what proper pageboy is age-appropriate. No question, there are physical facts about my age that are undeniably delightful. I am much sexier now than I used to be—I suddenly have this voluptuous body where I used to just be skinny and lithe. Really oddly, a couple of years ago I got serious breasts, to the point where people think I’ve had them surgically enhanced, which I certainly have not. Still, I think, the honest truth is that I’m just not as pretty as I used to be. Something has abandoned me. I don’t know what that thing is—they’ve been trying to jar it and bottle it for centuries—but it’s left, another merciless lover. My hips are thicker, my skin is thinner, my eyes shine less brightly—will I ever again glow as if all the stars are out at night just to greet me? What finally falls away, after enough things don’t go as planned, is that look of expectancy—which, when worn down to pentimento, is revealed to be exhaustion."

Elizabeth Wurtzel is doing that complaining/bragging thing again. This time, the problem is she's getting old, but she's still way prettier than you, she hopes you know. She's 41, by the way, which seems young to me, but perhaps — do I remember it properly? — that's a time when the fear of aging and death spikes.

Via Jezebel, who says:

As she explains with characteristic candor, she was always a beautiful child, a "hot number," a woman who traded on her looks. And she misses it. While she sees the danger and futility of valuing beauty overmuch, she can't help it: panic trumps insight and she doesn't seem eager to stop it. And it's scary to see a smart and accomplished woman so openly in the thrall of others' opinions.

"Republicans would be foolish to fight the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court..."

"...because she is the most conservative choice that President Obama could have made," says E.J. Dionne, whose assertion shouldn't be trusted.

IN THE COMMENTS: traditionalguy said:

Dionne's advice is letting the cat out of the bag. The Progressive wing will gladly push for withdrawal of her nomination if the repubbies continue to posture and vent over a few imperfections in Sonia's speeches. Then Obama could really un-load on them with his next choice. The nomination of Sotomayor needs another "just like Bush" tag.

Ah, yes. Just like Bush did with Harriet Miers and then Samual Alito. As kentuckyliz suggested, we ought to call Sotomayor Sorta-Miers.

At the Kitty Cat Café...

... take the time to notice the white blossoms that have fallen in the yard.



... and anything else at all...

A professor told Bill Clinton that "great men often require less rest than ordinary people, some sleeping no more than five hours a night."

"Clinton adopted that pattern."

Hmmm... and what if some professor had told him that great men do not attempt to become great by copying the personal habits that professors tell them are common among great men? (E.g., Great men require frequent blow jobs.)

AT&T unfair to Adam Lambert?

"Representatives of AT&T helped fans of ["American Idol" winner Kris] Allen at the two Arkansas events by providing instructions on how to send 10 or more text messages at the press of a single button, known as power texts. Power texts have an exponentially greater effect on voting than do single text messages or calls to the show’s toll-free phone lines. The efforts appear to run afoul of 'American Idol' voting rules in two ways. The show broadcasts an on-screen statement at the end of each episode warning that blocks of votes cast using 'technical enhancements' that unfairly influence the outcome of voting can be thrown out."

War memorial?

What do men want?

I keep thinking about this fascinating comment, written by rhhardin in last Friday's post "Women are unhappier than ever":

[Women are unhappy] from doing stuff women are not interested in, encouraged by the idea that women ought obsess on the same stuff as men, as if what was satisfying ought to be the same across the sexes.

Unhappiness is aided by a tendency to find stuff for men to fix, whose survival value is testing of potential mates for reliability and fondness. Finding stuff for men to do requires finding something that's wrong.

In a perfect world, that's followed by showing the man who was out on the quest that you're satisfied with him, which makes him happy.

This story is told over and over in Get Smart, wildly popular with males in the 60s.

I think being in touch with feelings is really just looking for stuff that needs fixing, the initial move in the dialog.

To help you think about that:

"If you make the roofs white and if you make the pavement more of a concrete type of colour rather than a black type of colour..."

"... and if you do that uniformally, that would be the equivalent of... reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars in the world by 11 years – just taking them off the road for 11 years."

"Is Karl's bewilderment with the world endearing?"

Ricky Gervais responds to a question about Karl Pilkington:

It is, because you know there is no malice. He says ridiculous things like, the Chinese don't age well, and gays should have their own toilets. But even though on the face of it that could be incredibly offensive, you can't get offended because you can't get offended when a toddler says something either. He doesn't really understand what he is saying. Everything is in the form of a question.

Sometimes there is an arrogance in his ignorance. For example, I explained to him on "Natural History" that we're 98.6 percent genetically identical to a chimpanzee. And I said we're closer to a chimp than the chimp is to a gorilla. Karl went "no way," I said, yes it's true. He said "no, if I look at them, I'd think the gorilla is more like us." I said "You'd be wrong. The chimpanzee is 98.6 percent genetically identical to a human. That's only 1.4 percent difference." And Karl went, "well that's gotta be the arse then."

The Sotomayor-is-not-a-real-judge meme.

Let this William Warren cartoon represent what I'm calling a meme because I'm seeing it everywhere:



When a white man gets onto the Supreme Court, it's because of his legal credentials, because he got no points for diversity, but when a woman or a member of a minority group makes it onto the Court, she (or he) will be forever marginalized as an embodiment of the quality or qualities that clinched the appointment, even though excellent legal credentials were required for her to make it into the pool of finalists. Don't you see how unfair this marginalization is?

The fact that Sonia Sotomayor is female and Hispanic and that she got the nomination because of that does not nullify or degrade the legal credentials that she also has. It is wrong and unfair to say that it does.

Now, it's a separate question whether being female and Hispanic is supposed to play a part in constitutional interpretation. Both Obama and Sotomayor have made statements that suggest they believe something that many lawprofs say all the time: That a judge's background experiences and understandings play a role in answering hard questions of interpretation.

If you don't think that is true, think deeply about why you disagree. What do you know about the how human mind works that makes you think that our reasoning is abstracted from our real-world context? Don't tell me that you just feel sure that's what judges ought to do. The question is what human beings do, not what you wish they could do and would do.

And frankly, I think that if judges could reason about legal texts abstracted from the real world, they would make all sorts of intolerable, ridiculous decisions that would lead us soon enough to replace them with more practical judges. If your wish came true, it would only be temporary.

It's also a separate question whether Presidents should make Supreme Court appointments based purely on legal credentials. Is there some idea that all possible nominees could be ranked and the President ought to choose #1? Assuming some absolute rank order is possible — and I don't think it is — would you want to limit him that way? Why? What if it meant that the next 100 judges would be white males from upper middle class backgrounds? I think that would be intolerable.

Why did the White House select this photo of Sotomayor for its website slideshow?

Here's the whole slideshow — which is labeled "Sotomayor Bio."

An emailer calls this to my attention saying: "I don't think you should post about this, but why would they put in this photo where you can see all the way up her skirt??"

Well, I am posting about this, and I wouldn't say "you can see all the way up her skirt." You can see that Sonia Sotomayor wears a skirt and crosses her legs in a relaxed and casual way that lets you see some leg. The photo also has her smiling prettily, with her hair in relaxed ringlets, one of which falls gently into her eye. Her left hand is devoid of any relationship-manifesting rings, but she's wearing long dangling earrings, and the hand is unclenched and draping gracefully.

Get the message? She's a woman. A womanly woman, fully embodying womanhood — even as she is not married, she's wearing a professional suit, and she's at home with the law books.

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian, who has expertise in art, writes:

Her knee looks like a giant grey Idaho potato hovering in the foreground. The arm of the chair repeats the shape on the right of the frame, making it look like her other knee, which in turn makes it look like her hand is dead center in her enormous crotch, pawing at her cooch. You avoid those things in portraiture. Also not good to crop her right arm off. It implies that she's an amputee.

He is right, of course, but that isn't the answer to my question why the photograph was selected.

ALSO IN THE COMMENTS: Andrew Koenig said:

My first thought was of this famous picture of J.P. Morgan...

... in which the light reflecting from the arm of his chair makes him seem to be holding a dagger.

The photo is by Edward Steichen. The effect was accidental, but in this case, we love it (as much as Morgan hated it). The important thing is to have an eye not just for what you are hoping to capture in a photograph — such as Sotomayor's femininity — but also for the accidental imagery that others may notice. See what can be seen and then decide if you want to use a photograph.

"Prop. 8 will go down, San Francisco (is a) big queer town."

Screams screamed in San Francisco today, as Prop. 8 did not go down.

[W]ord of the court's ruling filtered through the crowd at about 10:05 a.m., and within minutes about 50 broke off and marched to Van Ness Avenue, where they formed a ring in the roadway at Grove Street, blocking the city's major north south artery.

Soon more than 150 protesters had linked hands in the middle of the avenue and chanted "Marriage is a civil right" while dozens more looked on. Ministers with the group blessed each protester on the head as blocked cars, trucks and buses honked at the group.

Members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a long-time gay activist group, walked through the crowd smearing glitter on the foreheads of demonstrators. Two trumpeters and an accordion player filled the air with zydeco music.

The California Supreme Court upholds the state's same-sex marriage ban.

Proposition 8, approved by California voters, stands.

Rush Limbaugh advises Republicans to "take it to the mat" and fight Sonia Sotomayor as strongly as possible.

Not because she can be defeated, but because "the people need to know what Obama really believes in, and this is how it can happen." This is a "golden opportunity," he said on the radio just now. "Will Republicans do it? That's another question."

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian writes:

And why not? Those of us who believe that philosophy and ideology trumps race and sex as proper measures of a person's competence to hold high office will get branded racists sooner or later, so why not get it over with?

Obama got into office partially because of the success of this foul sort of racial extortion, so of course he's going to continue to use it as a political tool.

It's time for the Republicans to show that they can be as vindictive and nasty as the Democrats have been during every Republican Supreme Court hearing in the last 20 years or so. What have they got to lose?

That reminds me. Rush called Sotomayor a racist. He quotes something she once said — "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life" — and declaims "So here you have a racist. You might want to soften that. You might want to say 'a reverse racist.'" He adds that Obama is "the greatest living example of a reverse racist and now he's appointed one."

ADDED: Here's the transcript of the show. Let me extract another tidbit:

[T]he odds that she could be stopped are long. Perhaps the biggest pitfall she faces is her own confirmation hearings. She might slip up there and might say something that would give the opposition a home run. But even then they're going to have to be willing to take advantage of it. By the way, do you know that Obama opposed both Roberts and Alito? Barack Obama opposed them both, and in both cases -- of John Roberts, the current chief justice, and Samuel Alito -- he said, "Oh, they're perfectly qualified and they've both got perfect judicial temperament. But I'm going to vote against them," because to him it's about ideology. It's about liberalism. He thought these two guys were conservatives, and it didn't matter to him what their judicial temperament or qualifications were. He voted against both of those.

I thought Obama was wrong to vote like that, and I can see how he deserves to have it come back to bite him. If confirmation is about agreeing with the ideology, then Republicans might want to vote against Sotomayor. But confirmation should not be about ideology, and conservatives ought to want to prove that principle by their votes. Use the confirmation hearings to delineate what liberal judicial ideology is and why people ought to reject it. Then get a good presidential candidate for 2012 and make Supreme Court nominations an issue. Is that too hard? Does that take too long? Too bad! You say you want a Justice who will tell the truth about what the Constitution means. But here's something about what the Constitution means: The President has the appointment power.

Mary Roach says a lot of surprising things about orgasms.

Via Andrew Sullivan, who focuses on the sonogram of a fetus masturbating and says "Just a small effort to get K-Lo's head to explode." Odd. I would have thought that the fact that fetuses masturbate supports the pro-life side of the abortion debate.

That thing Sonia Sotomayor said about courts making policy.

The video:



"Court of Appeals is where policy is made." We're going to hear that line dissected, attacked, and defended over and over. Let's talk about those words.

And let's also talk about the interesting mannerism of placing one's left hand inside one's clothing up around one's shoulder. I know someone who does that at times, and I've given a lot of thought to what it signifies. I have my theory, but I'll save it until some of you weigh in.

4 reasons I'm glad Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor.

1. Finally, a Supreme Court Justice with a [last] name longer than 3 syllables. (Thanks to downtownlad for noting the possible distinction and my son John Althouse Cohen for confirming it.)

2. Finally, a Hispanic Supreme Court Justice... and we won't have to keep talking about how some day there ought to be a Hispanic Supreme Court Justice.

3. We'll get back to the historical high water mark of women on the Court. Wow! To hit 2 again!

4. Jeffrey Rosen gets his comeuppance.

CORRECTION: James Taranto on #1:

Blogress Ann Althouse claims that Sotomayor will be the first justice with a four-syllable last name and credits her son for confirming this. But it isn't true. John Althouse Cohen apparently is too young to remember Justice Willis Van Devanter.

I'll bet John thought his middle name was Van.

Sotomayor!

It's Sotomayor!

ADDED: Tom Goldstein analyzes the political dynamics of the nomination. He says Obama will not need to "invest additional political capital" over confirmation.

... Republicans cannot afford to find themselves in the position of implicitly opposing Judge Sotomayor. To Hispanics, the nomination would be an absolutely historic landmark....

... Sotomayor has an extraordinarily compelling personal narrative. She is a first generation American, born of immigrant parents. She grew up in a housing project, losing her father as an adolescent, raised (with her brother) by her mother, who worked as a nurse. She got herself to Princeton, graduating as one of the top two people in her class, then went to Yale Law. Almost all of her career has been in public service–as a prosecutor, trial judge, and now appellate judge. She has almost no money to her name.

Goldstein thinks Republicans will (should?) wait until Obama's next nomination to stage a fight — the way the Democrats went easy on John Roberts and fought hard against Samuel Alito.

To the extent that there is opposition, it will fall into 4 categories, Goldstein says: 1. that she's not smart enough, 2. that she's "a liberal ideologue and 'judicial activist,'” and 3. that she's "unprincipled or dismissive of positions with which she disagrees," and 3. that she's "gruff and impersonable." Goldstein outlines the response to these 4 arguments.

Here's what I think conservatives should do: Accept that she will be confirmed, but use the occasion to sharpen the definition of conservative judicial values and to argue to the American people that these are the better values.

"Would I like to be on the Supreme Court? You bet I would. But not enough to have trimmed my sails for half a lifetime."

Said Stanford lawprof Pam Karlan, who doesn't expect to get the nomination. (Insiders listed the final 4 as: Sonia Sotomayor, Diane P. Wood, Elena Kagan, and Janet Napolitano.)

The link is to a NYT article about how Obama is not headed toward picking someone who will "excite the left."

While it is possible Mr. Obama has a surprise in the works, those on this list are cut from molds similar to those of the two Clinton appointees, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. They are liberal on most issues that divide the court — and surely too liberal for many Republican senators — but have not been the outspoken leaders of the legal left that advocates crave.

“He’s not going to go in that direction,” said Bernard W. Nussbaum, who was Mr. Clinton’s first White House counsel and oversaw Justice Ginsburg’s appointment. “I don’t think that he’s worried about the left. I think he’s doing the same thing we did.”

The political dynamic remains the same. It's readable and strong. And Obama is like Clinton.

It's too bad that Court appointment elude the strongest, most interesting legal thinkers. The best individuals will say what Karlan meant to say: That she didn't want to spend her life adjusting what she had to say to get into the position to catch the political wind.

It's not too bad, however, that the left will be denied excitement (which would be super exciting for the right as well).

"Obama to Announce Supreme Court Nominee at 10:15 a.m. ET."

News flash!

"What makes a photo of something in America 'Americana'?"

That's something I twittered yesterday, after reading Michael Hasenstab's comment: "Thanks for posting the beautiful Americana photos on Memorial Day weekend."

I'm getting some answers over there. BXGD/Jason (the commenter) says:

Basically anything that would make a young person want to go live in a city.

Rschrim says:

If they're from the NY Times, guys drinking wearing elephant masks is Americana, ie. Redneck. I'd say that's their slant.

I don't think that's what Michael H is about. But it does remind me of a recent controversy — wish I could find it easily — where the NYT used a photograph of some awful-looking people to illustrate a story about rural Americans.

Anyway, what do you think: What kind of photographs are "Americana"? Why were mine (if they were)? Is it that you can see I have an outsider's perspective and am somehow looking down on people? Did I somehow project the attitude that was attributed to Barack Obama when he spoke of Americans who get bitter and cling to guns and religion?

"Why does Ann want to crush freedom?"

"Why does she support making young fans of goofy Eurovision contestants cry?"

Roses are much friendlier than poison ivy.

I walk in Augusta, Kentucky, down by the Ohio River.

ADDED: The hymn playing in the second half of the video is "Faith of Our Fathers." That's also the name of a Philip K. Dick story. Wikipedia has an article on the Dick story, but not the hymn. That says something, doesn't it?

IN THE COMMENTS: Traditionalguy writes:

Memorial day is for a remembrance of the real heroes who really died for us. This is the one day we don't push marketing myths and science fiction tales from the wide world of commerce and politics. So it is fitting to see poison ivy, roses, Faith of Our Fathers, and the Ohio River all just being themselves.

"When I worked at Newsweek in the late 90s, I used to wonder at how all these talented people could sit at their desks in a sort of haze..."

"... it was as if a soul-deadening gas was permeating the offices."

Says Mickey Kaus, pondering the problems of magazines that summarize the week's news.

Broken windows, graffiti, flood damage.

Augusta, Kentucky.

Log cabin closeup.

A sign says: "Log Cabin/1750-1850/Moved from Beasley Creek/Mason County/1974."

Sauerkraut Balls.

Would it be bad of me to say I don't want to eat here? What are you having? The gumbo? I'll have the cheeseburger with nothing on it — except the cheese...

Ferry 'cross the Ohio.

Here she is, Miss America.

"I was beginning to realize that the only way to make this evening bearable would be to ask André a few questions."

"Asking questions always relaxes me. In fact, I sometimes think that my secret profession is that I'm a private investigator, a detective. I always enjoy finding out about people. Even if they're an absolute agony, I always find it very interesting."

A line from "My Dinner With Andre."

Do you use this conversational technique? Do you use it when — like the movie character Wally — you're feeling nervous? Do you like it when you realize that someone else is using it on you?

It's the new Bloggingheads — with me and Hanna Rosin.

Topics:

The cleverness of Obama’s Notre Dame speech
Ann: Obama will be the same as Bush on torture
Explaining Cheney’s growing popularity
The politicization of the Supreme Court as a good thing
“American Idol”: Did the Christians gang up against the gay guy?
Why women are still unhappy

Here's the link to the bhTV page, where you can see some links to the things we discuss, an apology for what you'll see are some technical glitches, and the comments on that site — which will almost surely be people hating on me.

You'll also find the context for the out-of-context "breasts, breast, breasts" clip from back here.

American motorcycle.

In Augusta, Kentucky.

"American owned."

A store in Kentucky.

We crossed the Ohio River into Kentucky and ended up in the town of Augusta.

There's a somber after-the-flood feeling:



(The great flood was in 1997.)

There were beautiful old historical buildings — like the Rosemary Clooney homestead — but many moldy and dilapidated places.

People worked on their gardens, though. Sometimes in an incomprehensibly manic style:



That's a goldfish pond with fountains at the extreme left.

And the people seemed pretty friendly:



And, yes, I asked the man in the elephant mask if I could take his picture. He said: "Sure, let me put the beer down," and I said, "No, the beer is fine."

"His father would refuse to drive him to soccer practice because he thought using a car to travel somewhere to exercise was ridiculous."

And now, 19-year-old Alex Liebman, has taken a year off from college to work on an organic farm.

This will be Mr. Liebman’s third farm internship. He has come to love the muscle fatigue that sets in at the end of a day. The rhythm of farm life is a welcome break from cellphones and Facebook. And the work makes him feel as if he is doing something to better the world.

“I’m not sure that I can affect how messed up poverty is in Africa or change politics in Washington,” he said, “but on the farm I can see the fruits of my labor.”

“By actually waking up every day and working in the field and putting my principles into action, I am making a conscious political decision,” he added.

Are you raising your child to be a farm hand?

Or maybe you are a farmer, in which case: Do you want a farm hand like Alex Liebman?

The RNC takes great raw material and, trying to whip up a viral video, makes an embarrassing piece of trash.

Everyone's talking about this:



Taylor Marsh goes on about the implied "Pussy." Don't even think Pussy along with Pelosi.

Crooks & Liars detects an "assassination fantasy": "we look at Pelosi down the barrel of a gun, hear shots fired, and then watch blood drip down our screens..."

Is there any defense of this idiotic video? Do you look to Allahpundit at Hot Air?

I would have posted this sooner but I ended up locked in a two-hour Twitter battle over it....

Oh. Okay. He was doing important things over in Twitter. Twitter is a great way to get people who write too much to throw much of their time and energy down the rathole. There's no way I'm going to go in there and try to piece together that conversation. Whatever it was, it doesn't matter anymore.

But here's the belated response on the blog:

The RNC does occasionally display suicidal tendencies... but I can’t believe they intended to call Pelosi a “pussy” knowing how offensive it is, how many votes it could cost them, and how outrageously outraged the media would be on her behalf as a way of changing the subject from her lies about waterboarding.

I think they intended to call Democrats pussies. That's why it ends with the on-screen words "Democrats Galore." The idea is: The Democrats are pussies — meaning sissies. But it just doesn't work because that's not the way "pussy" is meant in "Pussy Galore."

Epic poor judgment and incompetence.

"You know that onion from 'Green Organs'?"

Just something I said while listening to "McLemore Avenue" (Booker T. and the MG's) — an amusing recording, but really nothing more than a completely literal instrumental version of "Abbey Road." It's a pretty simple commercial idea for a record — we'll do the songs everyone already likes, play our instruments better than the Beatles (do they?) — plus: that organ from "Green Onions." Or as I like to say: that onion from "Green Organs."

"I pushed him off because jumpers like Chen are very selfish."

Threatening suicide on a bridge jams up the traffic for 5 hours and leads to a new manifestation of road rage.

"Their action violates a lot of public interests. They do not really dare to kill themselves. Instead, they just want to raise the relevant government authorities' attention to their appeals."

UPDATE: The video. Interesting to see how it actually played out... compared to what I pictured.

"When was the last time you considered lubing up your brows?"

This is another little example of the tiny craziness of women's magazines. There's something about the writing and the inane specificity of this advice that just kills me.

The writers are sort of trying to make us laugh — lubing up your brows — but also, it seems, seriously trying to make us worry about something — a "trouble zone" — that we've never even thought about — the skin under our eyebrows. Hey, think about it! Each eyebrow — I refuse to use the word "brow" to refer to the hairy facial arch — has its own mini scalp! It might get dandruff.

And then there is the problem of the inappropriate sexual innuendo: lubing up. I guess they get tired of telling us to moisturize. They brainstorm endlessly for synonyms. There's lubricate. So then let's make it cutesy and sexy. But it's absolutely unsexy. Imagine learning that your romantic partner dutifully adhered to a twice-a-day regimen of care for her eyebrow-scalps.

"I wanted to see how green I could be, how lightly I could tread on the earth."

Living in 144 square feet — and trying to prove the point that that's all the space anyone needs. Indeed, if you've got more, maybe you're "paralyzed" by all of your "stuff."

Though I think Elizabeth Turnbull's house is scary small, I'm intrigued by small houses. So much depends on a pleasing layout, views of the outdoors, and editing one's possessions. And then there's the question of why you are doing it. Are you being austere to save money or because you think it's wrong to consume too much? Is it fun and aesthetically pleasing? Or are you tending to your soul in some exciting/lofty way?

"Tell the chef to ditch the extra oil and substitute an extra sprinkle of herbs."

I have a love-hate relationship with the writing in women's magazines. I've read a lot of them — mainly, because for 2 years (before I went to law school) I had a job that required me to read all the women's magazines, month after month. I try not to let them upset me. I try to laugh. And often I do laugh. In fact, when I had that job — it was a day job, back when I fancied myself an artist — we laughed a lot. Everything seemed absurd. The most absurd thing I ever read was the idea that you could knit the string that bakeries tie around cake boxes into dishrags.

That quote up there is from a recent issue of some health/fitness magazine for women. The concern is that Chinese restaurants might put a lot of oil in their dishes, and the advice is to ask the waiter to "tell the chef to ditch the extra oil and substitute an extra sprinkle of herbs." Now, what I want you to do is: Next time you go to a Chinese restaurant, say that to the waiter: "tell the chef to ditch the extra oil and substitute an extra sprinkle of herbs." You must say that verbatim. You must use the words "ditch" and "sprinkle." Then come back here and tell me all about it.

It's not as silly as knitting bakery string into dishrags, but it's something that I'd nonetheless like to refer to as a bakery-string dishrag. It's just crazy women's magazine talk. No one in the history of the world has ever knitted a bakery-string dishrag. And no sane person would ever say to a Chinese waiter to "ditch" oil or add "an extra sprinkle of herbs." Unless they were on a mission from the Althouse blog. Please! It's so much easier than knitting a dishrag from saved string.

"When a [bridge] partner starts to slip, you can’t trust them. That’s what it comes down to."

"It’s terrible to say it that way, and worse to watch it happen. But other players get very annoyed. You can’t help yourself."

Very old people play bridge and stave off dementia.

"High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become 'knowledge workers.'"

"The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses."

I greatly enjoyed this essay by Matthew B. Crawford, which is adapted from his book "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work." Crawford is highly educated and has worked in information economy jobs and the sort of jobs you learn to do in shop class. He's got a lot to say about what these different kinds of jobs have to offer. I do have 3 criticisms, however.

1. Crawford's hands-on real-world job is working in his own business as a motorcycle mechanic and his reward-for-going-to-college job was cranking out abstracts of scholarly articles that he couldn't understand for $23,000 a year. So the "real world" job was particularly good and the "information" job was particularly bad. You've got to concede that there are plently of good, bad, and middling jobs in both categories and to match up 2 good ones or 2 bad ones or 2 middling ones to make a fair comparison about what different sorts of work do to your soul.

2. Crawford had a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, so he is not just another guy that got shuffled into college on the theory that the whole economy is going to be about knowledge and you're going to have to fit into it. He had big hopes of an academic career, and ending up in that article-summarizing job must have hurt him in ways that have little to do with how average guys who could have learned trades feel when they end up slotted into Dilbert cubicles. Now, the plight of those average guys is tremendously important, but Crawford is not one of those guys. His experience was different. He belonged in a university, but the job market in academia is tough.

3. Crawford has written a book about it all, and book-writing is an "information" job. So he can't really say that working with your hands is completely fulfilling. He had to think about and analyze his experience and make it into an intellectual project. That's fine, but this making it into a book is a proper part of the story about his soul that he wants to tell. It's not in the essay. Maybe it's in the book.

What does Obama mean by "some short-term investments in health care"?

He's talking about how we're "operating in deep deficits" and why it is therefore important to distinguish between short-term and long term spending:

So we've got a short-term problem, which is we had to spend a lot of money to salvage our financial system, we had to deal with the auto companies, a huge recession which drains tax revenue at the same time it's putting more pressure on governments to provide unemployment insurance or make sure that food stamps are available for people who have been laid off.

So we have a short-term problem and we also have a long-term problem. The short-term problem is dwarfed by the long-term problem. And the long-term problem is Medicaid and Medicare. If we don't reduce long-term health care inflation substantially, we can't get control of the deficit.

So, one option is just to do nothing. We say, well, it's too expensive for us to make some short-term investments in health care. We can't afford it. We've got this big deficit. Let's just keep the health care system that we've got now.

Along that trajectory, we will see health care cost as an overall share of our federal spending grow and grow and grow and grow until essentially it consumes everything...

Okay, but why is his health care proposal classified as a "short-term investment"? Isn't it long-term spending? I'm not talking about whether it's a good idea or not, but just whether he's bamboozling us by calling it both "short-term" and "investment."

At the Grass Closeup Café...

... you can relax and take it easy. And maybe wonder why I ever took a picture like this. There is a reason, of course. There's a reason for everything. You crazy fool!

Mystery video clip.

Context to be provided later.

ADDED: Here's the context. The clip is in the first few minutes.

I'm telling you for the last time.

If there is a troll here who talks too much, don't talk to him. That's what he wants and that makes him talk more. Don't post to bitch about it. If you do, you are the problem. Get it? You are the problem.

ADDED: If you want to interact with another commenter, go right ahead. But if your point is to make him stop, don't get him fired up by talking to him. And don't debate with him and also tell me I should do something to get rid of him. If you consider someone a troll, don't talk to him. On the other hand, if you are worried that you might be the troll, put that energy into writing better comments. Be concise and interesting. Be creative or funny or something. 

Women are unhappier than ever.

According to a new study.

That's what we get for being more in touch with how we feel — we notice it, we admit it to ourselves and others. And we get attention because of it. If men were/are sad, who would know? Who would care?

But the linked blog post, by Meghan O'Rourke, asks — assuming it's really true that women are less happy than men and less happy than they were 35 years ago — why would this be so?

[T]he drop in happiness is pegged to an anxiety caused by the plethora of choices available (Barry Schwarz's paradox of choice) and women's feeling that they have to perform well across more categories. This is not exactly the same as struggling to balance so-called work and life (i.e., children): The study's authors are quick to point out that the decline in happiness is consistent across many categories, irrespective of marital or employment status or whether you have young children....

Oh, how I loathe this liberal meme about choice and happiness! Though liberals believe fondly in "the right to choose," they also love to say that choice makes us sad — but they only seem to mean that choice in the economic sphere is bad. (Notice how it softens you up to accept the crappy car the government wants you to drive and the good-for-everybody health care system it would like to provide.)

Anyway, why are women so sad? I think it's because we think about our feelings so much and care so much about being happy.

What happened in the twilight down there in the bottoms.

Our resident animation master Chip Ahoy took my photo from the Twilight Café and played out its forboding mood:

It was worth losing "American Idol" to not have to sing that crappy "No Boundaries" song.

When Adam Lambert heard he'd lost, he hugged Kris Allen and said "You have to sing that song now."

Ha ha. The winner has to close the show with a rendition of the special finale song, which is always bad — always bad in the same damned way. One difference this year was that the song was written by Kara DioGuardi — who's also on the judge's panel. (A terribly irritating intrusion on the show, by the way.)

Kris said:

"I was like ‘Ohhhh gosh!' I was like ‘OK, just sing it!’ I thought it went OK.”

You just know the 2 of them talked before the big results show and decided it was a win-win situation: Either you get to be the American Idol or you get to avoid singing that damned song.

“I like the song. It’s tough to sing, I’m not gonna lie. It’s a rough song, but Kara's a great writer,” Kris said. “It was so much fun working with her in the studio. She’s a lot of fun to work with.”

Kara's a great writer... but even great writers write a lot of crap.

Here's Kris performing the onerous task.

(Also in the linked article: Kris won by a lot.)

Disney's animatronic Obama: "Young children watch this, and you want them to feel a sense of identification with the president."

Since when are American children expected to identify with the President?

Do you notice anything about the picture of Obama that's on Drudge right now?

I know the impression it made on me. I showed it to my tablemate and, without any prompting, he said exactly what I had thought.

IN THE COMMENTS: Roger von Oech said: "Louis Farrakhan — all the way. The teleprompter makes it look like a bow tie."

At the Twilight Café...

... talk to me about your fears. Last night, I was afraid of coyotes, skunks, poison ivy... scary trees....

"If fine speech-making, appeals to reason or pleas for compassion had the power to move them, the terrorists would long ago have abandoned the field."

"And when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don't stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along. Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for — our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity."

Cheney responds to Obama. Read the full text.

The red-winged black coyote.

"The American people are not absolutist, and they don’t elect us to impose a rigid ideology on our problems."

"They know that we need not sacrifice our security for our values, nor sacrifice our values for our security, so long as we approach difficult questions with honesty, and care, and a dose of common sense. That, after all, is the unique genius of America. That is the challenge laid down by our Constitution. That has been the source of our strength through the ages. That is what makes the United States of America different as a nation.... I can stand here today, as President of the United States, and say without exception or equivocation that we do not torture, and that we will vigorously protect our people while forging a strong and durable framework that allows us to fight terrorism while abiding by the rule of law. Make no mistake: if we fail to turn the page on the approach that was taken over the past several years, then I will not be able to say that as President. And if we cannot stand for those core values, then we are not keeping faith with the documents that are enshrined in this hall."

Obama the moderate pragmatist. He's oh-so-different from Bush and also — let's not be rigid and ideological — really also exactly the same. He's going to do everything right and get everything done, and whatever it is he does, you can be sure that it's not torture and it's within the rule of law, because he's standing near these documents and Bush was terrible.

"It’s like you are getting less fabric and less workmanship for more money... Isn’t this the same as the semi-constructed jacket syndrome?"

Men in shorts — very expensive men's shorts.

Jeffrey Rosen loves Diane Wood.

After what he said about Sotomayer, this is ardent admiration:

After nearly 14 years on the appellate court, she has proved to be such an impressive match for her conservative colleagues that it appears that, of all the current Supreme Court candidates, her temperament and moderate, incremental liberalism most resemble Ginsburg's. "She is very careful, she is respectful of precedent, she is a craftsperson, and she is fairly incremental in her approach," says Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago and the author of a book on the suppression of speech during war. "I think she does believe that the role of judges, in part, is to ensure that the oppressed and the disenfranchised and dissenters get a fair shake in the political system, which would be a significant part of the moderate liberal element of Diane. But she's certainly not in any way result-oriented."

Don't worry, conservatives!

"As a college professor, I've heard many excuses for plagiarism over the years, but I don't believe that I've ever heard one quite that lame."

Language Log shows why you shouldn't believe Maureen Dowd. People just don't remember that sort of thing verbatim. Or is the non-lame response: Everyone these days understands that "talking to" includes emailing and IM'ing?

Certainly, in blogging, we say "X said" to mean "X wrote." And I see that I just said "we say" to mean "we write"... And I just said "I just said" to mean...

Oh, enough! Let me say instead that I didn't even bother to blog the Maureen Dowd "plagiarism" story (until now) because I don't consider that kind of thing serious plagiarism. It's sloppy and embarrassing, but it's completely unintentional and not a deliberate effort to pass off someone else's writing as one's own.

It was dull prose, not an eloquent phrasing or snappy quip. So this was was the sort of faux-plagiarism that constantly threatens all of us in these days of quick cutting and pasting. You think you know what is a quote when you're compiling your notes, but maybe later you see it and think it's yours.

Now, I like to believe I'll remember what blocks of text I dropped into my documents, and if I'm not too rushed or I think I might forget, I put quote marks or indentations to remind me what's not mine. Also, I think if I look back on something that I didn't write, I'll recognize that it's not my style.

But it's possible to slip up, and what Dowd did looks like exactly the sort of thing that can only be a slip.

The real fault is not making it a point always to write sharp, distinctive prose. Prose like the stuff Dowd lifted called out for rewriting. She might not have known to think I can't use that because I didn't write it. But should should at least have thought I can't use that because it's dull.

It's sad, because Dowd tends to err in the other direction — rewriting things into the snappiest possible prose. That quirk should have saved her from this slip. It didn't this time. She's been embarrassed. That's all.

Photos from Rome.

Very enticing. And more the next day. With plenty of ice cream, etc.

Blackberries.

Yummy.

"There are people out there motivated by religious hatred, hatred against Jews frankly..."

"... but the good news is that the N.Y.P.D. and F.B.I. were on top of this from the very beginning."

The simple rules.

Via Metafilter. Via Jac.

The "American Idol" upset.

View the last 5 minutes of the show.

Why did it happen? The Daily News has some theories. There's also a poll — where "Adam's look didn't appeal to Middle America" is currently winning, with "Adam's sexuality played a role" coming in second. Isn't "Adam's sexuality played a role" just a blunter way of saying "Adam's look didn't appeal to Middle America."

I think there may have been a sense among many of the hardcore voters — and they're the ones who matter, what with almost 100 million votes on the finale — that the American Idol should be a good role model for kids. In the final comparison between Kris and Adam, Kris Allen was the good boy whom they could picture as their own son or their high school boyfriend. That's the nature of the show.

Some of the voters surely thought that the idol, the role model, shouldn't be (or seem) gay, but I wouldn't get too bent out of shape about it. Adam Lambert did extraordinarily well and was embraced and eagerly loved. I didn't see any nasty homophobia on line that was about trying to make him lose — or win (there was no equivalent of the "vote for the worst" campaigns that in previous years have raged among the show's haters). And Kris was really sweet and natural standing alongside Adam week after week and talking about what good friends they are and so forth. That has been part of his role modeling.

IN THE COMMENTS: 2 gay males — Treacle and Palladian — make the same point: They prefer the Kris type. [Is Treacle gay? He hasn't be explicit.]

"American Idol" — the last show, and I'm not watching.

But I'm reading the live chat at Throwing Things.

Guns.

Guns!



Guns!1!!!1

At the Staring-at-the-Ceiling Café...

... you can ventilate your grievances... perceive the patterns...

"Ross serves as a putter... where Plaintiff needs a sand wedge..."

The magistrate goes crazy with the golf jokes as he dismisses the ridiculous lawsuit Andrew Giuliani brought against Duke University for kicking him off the golf team.

Plaintiff's promissory estoppel claim... brings to mind Carl Spackler's analysis from the movie Caddyshack (Orion Pictures 1980): "He's on his final hole. He's about 455 yards away, he's gonna hit about a 2 iron, I think."

I'm going to have to use a household drill to make a hole in your boy's skull.

Said the country doctor, who'd never attempted such an operation before but was following the directions of the neurosurgeon on the telephone.

Blood clots liberated, the boy was saved.

Diane Wood?

That's what Intrade says.

"Exceptionally nonsensical bounteousness" confuses David Post.

Why? Isn't it obvious? The internet is written for robots.

"You know when I first got together with Susan..."

How to be gay on TV.

Love Land...

... demolished.

Is the bad economy good for artists?

The NYT interviewed a lot of artists and extracted the insight that not being able make money unleashes creativity. Starving artists, you know. They are the good guys. The patrons they would kowtow to are the bad guys.

[Artist Cadine Navarro said] that she hoped the economic pressure would weed out “market-oriented art that is being churned out by the bulk. Onward!”

When the patrons disappear, art flourishes. Do you believe that?

"It is a shame. But you have to come to a realization around here that at this point in time, the N.R.A. gets the votes."

"Either you are going to bring down the whole Senate and never do anything or you or going to swallow hard and say, ‘I will just vote my conscience on those amendments and speak out until people get a hold of their senses.’ ”

Senator Boxer said. The bill permits us to carry concealed guns in National Parks.

"People who routinely pay off their credit card balances have been enjoying the equivalent of a free ride..."

You need to see it that way, so you'll understand why you should pay interest from the time you pay for something with a credit card. I'm one of those people that pay the entire balance every month to avoid paying any interest, and being told I've been taking a free ride all these years does not soften me up to pay my supposed fair share to support the credit card system. I just won't use the card if that's the deal. I'll switch to a debit card or pay cash.

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin said:

The reason not to ever use a debit card is that in case of fraudulent charges, you're the one out the money, so help is hard to find.

With a credit card, they're the ones out the money because you simply don't pay the contested charges, and everybody is really motivated to help you clear the thing up.

Don't give up that protection easily.

I'm instantly convinced not to use a debit card!

AND: I'm instantly unconvinced as John Lynch said:

I protect my debit card by simply not keeping much money in the account its drawn from. If I'm making more than a trivial purchase, I transfer the money from another checking account, which costs nothing at my bank. So, if someone gets my number it's no big deal because all they can steal is lunch money. There's no overdraft allowed on that account, either.

And TMink said:

I was recently charged $810 on my debit card to the WalMart in Seneca, South Carolina. This occured while I was home in Nashville. Seems I was part of the Heartland Compromise.

My bank refunded the $810 quickly and kindly.

"I have a little confession: I don't like ['A Change is Gonna Come']."

Kim Cosmopolitan confesses (in the Throwing Things recap of last night's "American Idol" finale):

I'm sure that flags me as a social reactionary or something, but I don't like the song...

Ha ha. Yeah. I do like that song so I don't have that problem, but I certainly would be careful about expressing dislike of it. (Lyrics. Here's Sam Cooke singing it. And here's Adam Lambert singing it in last night's finale.)

It's like: Don't you care about civil rights? Really: Don't you hate when there's some work of art — e.g., "Schindler's List" — that you don't even want to risk looking at with a neutrally critical eye? Don't you hate when a work of art comes to you encrusted with moral/political importance that denies you the freedom to say it's bad? Well, say it's bad then! Fight back. It's a matter of moral and political importance.

Anyway, back at Throwing Things, Adam responds to Kim:

I'm just going to assume that the people who don't like Adam will find his "A Change Is Gonna Come" indulgent. I guess I was hoping for that little wink that acknowledged the gravity of the change Sam Cooke was singing about and which Lambert presumably was connecting with in his own interpretation. But he cut both the "too hard living but I'm afraid to die" and "go downtown"/"don't hang around" verses, the latter of which especially would have brought that home, and so what we were left with was a song sung well but without the depth that could have made it transcendent. What change, Adam?

Transform a song about black people into a song about gay people? Gay people aren't born by the river in a little tent. Would you buy a glammed up gay guy asking for sympathy for his troubles in words written about poverty and race discrimination? I guess it's possible to do that, but also probably in bad taste to horn in on the unique suffering memorialized in "A Change Is Gonna Come."

Not buying shoes.

Yesterday, I was looking at some shoes in a store, contemplating buying them, and a little bearded salesman came over to me and said: "These are great shoes. They're made to dissolve in landfills, and no animals were used."

What should I have said?

"Kris from American Idol should have definitely shaved his creep-stache before performing tonight."

With no TV, I'm reduced to "watching" on Twitter again. Snatching at shreds. Tell me stuff I don't know.

"He was such a lovely doggy/And to me he was such fun..."

"... But today as we played by the way/A drunken man got mad at him/ Because he barked in joy/ He beat him and he's dying here today."

UPDATE: Oops.

"President Barack Obama's allies in the Senate will not provide funds to close the Guantanamo Bay prison..."

"... until the administration comes up with a satisfactory plan for transferring the detainees there, a top Democrat said Tuesday."

Key word: "allies." Obama doesn't want to close Guantanamo, but he doesn't want to be the one to say it, and these people are giving him cover. Well played... reasonably well played, that is. I mean, I see right through it.

"Shrew Shot Venom Through Blood-Red Teeth."

My favorite headline today.

The black coyote.

For Althouse blog insiders only.

"Treacle, we'd like to introduce you to our very good friend Titus."

"They should have listened to the warnings from the ants."

They should have listened to the warnings from the ants.

Jeffrey Toobin has at Chief Justice John Roberts.

In the New Yorker.

1. Things Roberts did to Deputy Solicitor General Neal K. Katyal during the oral argument in the voting rights case: a. "pounced," b. "removed his glasses and stared down at," and c. "was relentless in challenging.”

2. The tone of Roberts's questions aimed at a lawyer arguing in favor of a city's affirmative action policy: "belligerent."

3. What Roberts is like compared to Scalia: "extreme" and more "effervescent."

4. Why Roberts's style is inconsistent with the self-image as an "umpire" that he promoted at his confirmation hearings: "In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff." And "Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."

5. I skimmed the rest of the article.

IN THE COMMENTS: Juris Dentist said:

On the Althouse blog:

1. We went to the laundromat!

2. We took a drive.

3. We took a walk.

4. Boo hoo, why does Jeffrey Toobin get to write articles that should be written be me!!!

5. I skimmed the rest.

At the Peony and Stink Bug Café...

... the beautiful and the ugly can intermingle casually.

"I had the thought last week that this entire thing is charade designed to sell a book."

Yeah, my thought too. That's why I didn't blog about "My Personal Credit Crisis" — by Edmund L. Andrews — when I read it last week. And it's a long article. It's very rare that I go all the way through a long article and refrain from blogging it. Normally, I taste things, and the decision to consume them in full is automatically a decision to blog them. But I felt aggressively hostile to giving Andrews any attention. It was a readable article. I'll give him that. But I wanted to smack him.

AND: Neo-Neocon wants to smack him too. In the comments, Beth said...

I read this with disbelief. This guy, after child support, was bringing home less than $3k a month, and his fiancee at the time had no job at all, and it made sense to borrow HALF A MILLION BUCKS???? He keeps saying how easy it was to borrow it, but until months after the bills actually start coming in, he never thought about how hard it would be to pay back. That's the kind of thinking I've seen in friends with manic depression, in a manic phase.

It seemed to me that the guy did whatever he could get away with. And now he writes a confessional memoir about his shamelessness with the NYT as his springboard.

"Vice president Cheney does not have a death squad. I have no idea who killed Mr Hariri or Mrs Bhutto," Seymour Hersh said.

Okaaaay.

What is this madness in The Nation?

The GOP has lost people in every demographic group except...

... frequent churchgoers.

"For me, I hope that having the Christian vote doesn't help with anything."

Said "American Idol" finalist Kris Allen.

[Allen is] a 23-year-old college student who has worked as a worship leader at the New Life Church in his hometown of Conway, Ark. "I hope it has to do with your talent and the performance that you give and the package that you have. It's not about religion and all that kind of stuff."

So... some people think they are voting for religion and — what? — against some presumed immorality of Adam Lambert?

Lambert, a 27-year-old theater actor from San Diego who once worked in the Los Angeles cast of "Wicked," heartily agreed. He said he does not think the contest "has anything to do with your religious background, what color you are, your gender. It doesn't have anything to do with that. It's about music....."

Music and your package. That's what Kris said.

How can one computer kick another computer off the WiFi?

Maybe someone can help me with this. I have several computers, but I like using my MacBook Air around this house. It works fine with the WiFi here when I'm the only one on, but if the other person uses his MacBook (the original MacBook), it breaks my connection. Using the Network Diagnostics application, I can restore my connection, but it will break again, perhaps the every time the other user clicks from one website to another. If I get on one of my older laptops, I don't have the problem. My own old MacBook (original MacBook) interferes with my Air exactly the same way. When we're at our other house, I don't have this problem. I also have this problem at some cafés but not others.

How can this happen, and what could fix it?