At the Wildflower Café...

... you can talk about whatever you like.

(Photos taken today in Governor Nelson State Park, on the north shore of Lake Mendota.)

"... Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

A lengthy and ravenous kiss on a dark and stormy night.

"You stupid ignorant son-of-a-bitch dumb bastard..."

100 movie insults in 10 minutes. NSFW:

Black raspberries.

(Enlarge.)

Hand-picked in the wild, today.

"President Barack Obama has attacked House GOP Leader John Boehner for comparing the financial crisis to an ant."

Yeah....

Once again, Obama is drifting aimlessly and out of touch. Unless something is done about ants, man as the dominant species on earth is done!

Am I sorry not to be live-blogging the Kagan hearings today?

I don't want to slog through the Senators reading their questions to the nominee. It's such a slow-motion ritual. Her answers are so predictable. But what I find most annoying is the Senators' inability to do proper followup questions to force her to get past the predictable. For example, from my live-blog yesterday:

Senator Kyl [reads] Obama's empathy statement — you can read it here: In 5% of cases, Obama said, "adherence to precedent and rules of construction and interpretation will only get you through the 25th mile of the marathon," and one must at that point rely on "one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy." Kagan is forthright: "It's law all the way down." She says that several times — and I note that her statement isn't really at odds with what Obama said. A good follow-up question would have been: But do you think that law includes a component that comes from deep values and human empathy? The secret answer is: Yes.

If I had a written transcript, I would pick out one thing after another like that and write the text of the missing colloquy.

Why don't the Senators do better? Yeah, they are scripted, but the nominee's answers are predictable enough that the followups could be scripted too, more or less. And that's assuming the Senators are too dumb or timid to think on their feet. (Technically: on their asses.  We say "asses" now in polite company, of course, after this and this. It's standard American speech in 2010.)

I think it's more likely, in fact, that Kagan is being given a pass, and that the Senators from both parties have their reasons for giving her a pass. It's related to the unavailability of a transcript, I'm guessing.

Who really has an interest in attacking Kagan? I think that it is the strong ideological progressive who doesn't care much about the political fate of the Democratic Party. Can you see why? I'll try to spell it out later, but, right now, I need to get out in the real world....



And we know where the ripe black raspberries are!

"Wisconsin Supreme Court upholds gay marriage ban."

"In a 7-0 ruling, the court on Wednesday ruled that the 2006 constitutional amendment was properly put to voters in a statewide referendum. The court rejected a lawsuit that claimed the amendment violated a rule that limits referendum questions to a single subject. The lawsuit, filed by a voter opposed to the amendment, argued that gay marriage and civil unions were two different subjects."

Bittman's list of 101 fast grilling recipes.

Great, and I think you could do most — all? — of these on a panini grill inside and even more quickly. I was amused by Bittman's video demonstrating how to make a real grilled cheese sandwich — actually grilling it...

... but you don't need a plate on top with a can weighing down the plate and you don't need to flip it and do the other side if you have a panini grill. (Here!
that's the panini grill we use. But if I were buying something today, I'd get this — because we eat a lot of pancakes at Meadehouse. Note: Making a purchase at either of those links will automatically and without additional cost to you help support my work on this blog.)

"When Ann Althouse Gets Ahold of Those Archives..."

Hmm. Yeah. Thanks for reminding me of that incident. I would be curious to see what was said about me then. Was there jubilation that this video clip could be used to attack me? A plan to pick a spin and stick to it? An agreement to deprive me of links forever and ever? I'd like to know. I mean, I can imagine it on my own, but it would be fascinating to have the transcript.

I need more text! The internet is withholding the texts I want to blog. And I know those texts are longing to be free.

***

Did you know the phrase "Information wants to be free" has its own Wikipedia entry?

The expression is first recorded as pronounced by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984, in the following context:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Ah, but now that Andrew Breitbart is offering $100,000 for the full Journolist archive, the paradoxical desire of information can finally be fulfilled! It can be both free and expensive!

Why am I having such a hard time finding a transcript of the Kagan hearings on line?

I want to catch up with what I missed of the hearings, without slogging through all the video — the video is very nicely presented on line at C-Span — and in a form I can cut and paste for blogging purposes. But I can't find a transcript!

Could someone point me to a transcript of the first and second day hearings so before my thoughts come to rest on the theory that the media don't want us to be able to comb through the text?

The text! The text is important when we're talking about the Constitution!

"If you’re worried about your own stuff being released..."

(No! This is not another post about the National Enquirer story!)

".... you don’t really safeguard it by not selling out to Breitbart — you just ensure that if one of the 400 other members does, you won’t get the $100K."

The National Enquirer article on the Gore accuser is out.

... with a cover photo of the accuser holding a zip lock back with something inside that the tabloid labels "her stained pants."

"Do the math."

Have you noticed no one says that anymore?

What viral video will break out from the Kagan hearings?

I see Drudge is featuring this clip, just over one minute long, in which you hear Senator Coburn making a memorable, colorful point and — for the clip-viewer — overshadowing Elena Kagan's perfectly conventional profession of dedication to judicial restraint:



The clip is taken out of context, and now it has a vigorous life of its own.

I'm wondering what other clips are gathering strength on YouTube and what sort of political career they will have. Here are clips that went up today.

Kos and Research 2000.

"While the investigation didn't look at all of Research 2000 polling conducted for us, fact is I no longer have any confidence in any of it, and neither should anyone else. I ask that all poll tracking sites remove any Research 2000 polls commissioned by us from their databases. I hereby renounce any post we've written based exclusively on Research 2000 polling."

Okay. So then... this one?

• 39% of Republicans want President Obama to be impeached.

• 63% think Obama is a socialist.

• Only 42% believe Obama was born in the United States.

• 21% think ACORN stole the 2008 election....

We all talked about that. It was garbage?! Here's what I had to say at the time (boldface added):

Yes, we have to stop first and wonder how good are the Daily Kos/Research 2000 pollsters. I picked up this story at Talking Points Memo, where there's no information about why I should trust this poll. How did they locate their 2,000 "self-identified" Republicans, who, TPM tells us represent "the psyche of the minority party's base"?...

Here's the Kos post announcing the results of the poll. It begins with this mind-boggling sentence:

"As I've mentioned before, I'm putting the finishing touches on my new book, American Taliban, which catalogues the ways in which modern-day conservatives share the same agenda as radical Jihadists in the Islamic  world." It turns out this poll was designed to help him with that theory.

How independent and reliable is Research 2000?

Now, Kos is distancing himself from Research 2000. But I want to know the whole story. What's going on with that book of his?

"I know the reality of life for Afghan women."

"If these women were treated with justice, I don't think 50% of them would be in [this prison]. They are here because of problems in the family or personal vendettas."

"Welcome to the Journolist Top Secret Progressive He-Man Wingnut Haters Club and L33t H4xoR Chat Room."

Ha.

Andrew Breitbart offers $100,000 for the full Journolist archive — with a promise to keep the source secret.

Surely, somewhere among the 400 members of that former discussion group, there is someone who feels motivated to fulfill the desire of the information to be free. I've listed reasons why I think it would be doing a good thing to make the archive public, and now there is an additional motivation — $100,000. Now, virtue is mixed with venality. But virtue is mixed with venality when it comes to keeping the archive private. The motivations for not disclosing are not pure. People are protecting their careers, hoping for favors from powerful and well-placed co-Journolisters. Breitbart has added economic incentive to the other side of the balance, and he fortifies his offer of payment with an ethical argument:

Ezra Klein’s “JournoList 400” is the epitome of progressive and liberal collusion that conservatives, Tea Partiers, moderates and many independents have long suspected and feared exists at the heart of contemporary American political journalism. Now that collusion has been exposed when one of the weakest links in that cabal, Dave Weigel, was outed. Weigel was, in all likelihood, exposed because – to whoever the rat was who leaked his emails — he wasn’t liberal enough....

ADDED: Mediaite thinks it's "unlikely" that any Journolister will spring for the $100,000. I don't really understand her argument. It only takes one person to decide to disclose.  I think it's obvious someone with a mix of motives, including a desire for $100,000, is likely to do it. There's a great argument for transparency and freeing information — for the public good. I, personally, believe that argument. And it's impossible for me to believe that in a group that size, with that many people, people who are in competition with each other, that there isn't one person who feels on the outs and isn't interested in protecting anybody. Indeed, human nature being what it is, there are probably a few people who would love to see some of the prominent Journolisters exposed as... whatever the exposure would expose them as.

AND: Then there's the nothing-to-see-here-move-along gambit: Jonathan Chait insists that the conversations were "mundane..... requests for references... instantaneous reactions to events, joshing around, conversations about sports, and the like...." Matthew Yglesias portrays it as talk about sports,  links to published articles, and "failed efforts to get an interesting discussion going."

At the White Petal Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want. I've been live-blogging the Kagan hearings, so do go down here and check the updates. I'm going to take a break from live-blogging though, because it's a tad tedious and because I have a life that isn't entirely lived in front of the computer monitor. I'll pick up later with transcripts and video clips.

The scary fruit salad.

Look what Meade made!



(For full enjoyment, enlarge.)

"They couldn’t have been spies. Look what she did with the hydrangeas."

An emailer who understands my taste in quotes points me here.

IN THE COMMENTS: traditionalguy says:

When their blue hydrangeas turn pinko, then your neighbors are likely Russian spies.

The Kagan hearings.

Here's the live stream. Yesterday was tedious beyond words, and, accordingly, I wrote nothing. Today, there's some potential for a spark or 2, and I'll do some live-blogging here.

8:03 CT: Senator Leahy invites Kagan to talk more about her parents. This is an incredibly soft softball question, and Kagan receives it the right way: as an opportunity to exhibit her warmth and humanity. Her face immediately radiates what looks like real love for her parents, and her words go straight to what is relevant: Her parents embodied and taught the values that will make her a fine judge. Kagan seems fully at ease and far more natural than the stuffy Senator. She gestures. She seems affable. Leahy is scripted and speaks in a gruff tone. His words are supportive but he sounds like he's scolding her.

8:09: Kagan is wearing a gray jacket. It's tailored with lapels like a man's jacket. Perfectly standard and stunningly dull and undistracting. I approve. Away with the goofy big-collared "political blue" thing she had on yesterday. She's speaking like a law professor, explaining how to do constitutional interpretation. Leahy is trying to drag her through his stodgy script, but she is seizing control. I sense the presence of a lawprof — being generous to a student who's asked a question and pulling the discussion to a more sophisticated level. The level of expression here is excellent.

8:45: Senator Sessions is taking an aggressive tone, interrupting Kagan in a way that doesn't make a very good impression. He quotes E.J. Dionne and [name needed] who have labeled Kagan a "legal progressive," and Kagan says she doesn't know what that term means and would like to decide for herself what labels apply to her. Instead of supplying a definition for "legal progressive," Sessions bluntly insists the meaning is known. Kagan keeps her cool and decisively wins this round. Someone give Sessions a clear definition of the term and a way to ask particular questions to determine if she fits within it.

8:51: The question of the way Kagan, as Harvard Law School dean, handled military recruiting has come up twice now. Leahy stopped Kagan from talking about the law school's specific policy and steered her into a much more general discussion of the great value of the military and respect for individuals who choose a material career. Sessions is now pushing Kagan on the legal position she took. Did she comply with the Solomon Amendment (which required schools to give equal access to military recruiters)? Kagan claims to have followed the amendment. Sessions smiles, but testily snaps: "You didn't do what the DOD requested!" Kagan is good at remaining poised and calmly re-explaining her position, which contains no whiff of antagonism to the military or even to the Solomon Amendment. She is displaying a judicious, careful approach: She needed to balance the school's anti-discrimination policy, the importance of providing full access for the students to military recruiters, and respect for the Solomon Amendment as interpreted by the Department of Defense. There is absolutely zero hostility to the military or to the law. She's not giving Sessions anything to turn against her. There's no righteous criticism of Don't Ask, Don't Tell or assertion of the law school's right to maintain its anti-discrimination policy despite the Solomon Amendment. His time running out, Sessions lets loose with his frustration: "I know," he says emphatically, that you opposed Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

9:09: Now, it's Wisconsin's own Herb Kohl. Rest time!

9:13: Kohl's laughable question: "I'm sure you're a woman of passion — Where are your passions?" He seems to be channeling Obama's empathy idea and wants her to identify some social or political issue that she's excited about pursuing through judging. Kagan, wisely, restates her devotion to deciding cases according to the law. This isn't a job where someone should come in with a particular substantive agenda and try to shape that job to meet that agenda, Kagan says (unsurprisingly).

9:36: Cameras in the Supreme Court would be great — for the Court and the people, she says.

9:40: Senator Hatch is now questioning Kagan about Citizens United. This is a good time to watch live.

9:53: As Hatch stresses the effect of the McCain-Feingold law on small corporations that would like to express an opinion at a time close to an election, and Kagan reminds him that her job as Solicitor General is to defend acts of Congress. When Hatch presses her on whether the law violates free speech rights, Kagan quips: "Senator Hatch, you should be talking to Senator Feingold."

10:57: I skipped Dianne Feinstein. Then, there was a break. Now, we're up to Senator Kyl. He's reading Obama's empathy statement — you can read it here: In 5% of cases, Obama said, "adherence to precedent and rules of construction and interpretation will only get you through the 25th mile of the marathon," and one must at that point rely on "one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy." Kagan is forthright: "It's law all the way down." She says that several times — and I note that her statement isn't really at odds with what Obama said. A good follow-up question would have been: But do you think that law includes a component that comes from deep values and human empathy? The secret answer is: Yes.

11:10: Kyl is trying to get at whether Kagan is biased against corporations and would find ways to favor the little guy, but there really isn't a way to drag out a confession like that. Kyl is using things Justice Thurgood Marshall said, citing her great praise of the man whom she clerked for, and asking her if she'd say that too. She's able to finesse this: Marshall was wonderful, but she's her own woman. And, of course, the overarching theme of every hearing on a Supreme Court nominee: She's going to decide cases according to the law.

11:22: "How do you decide who's 'on the side of the angels'?" Kyl asks, repeatedly pushing Kagan on a phrase she used in her notes when she was a law clerk. Kagan asserts (and I hear shakiness in her voice) that it meant who was on the right side of the law.

11:56:  Russ Feingold notes that the lack of Supreme Court Justices from the Midwest. How will Kagan, a New Yorker, understand the people of the Midwest? Answer: She's lived in Chicago and something along the lines of being very good about understanding whatever she needs to understand.

12:02: I'm taking a break from the live action. I'll catch up with transcripts and recordings later.

Sunset, June 28th, 2010.

(Reverse chronological order. Picnic Point. Madison, Wisconsin.)

"Just suck it up; otherwise, the world's going to be destroyed from global warming."

Advice given.

At the Serenity Café...

... if you think of anything, let me know.

Watching the Elena Kagan confirmation hearing.

Here's the live stream, which begins at 12:30 ET. You'll also be able to watch non-live. After all the new Supreme Court cases this morning, I'm not going to park myself in front of the screen and watch the Senators read their statements, which should take all afternoon. I'll catch up later and do some commentary, but I need to go live in the physical world for a little while. Please comment on the hearings in this post.

This is...

... weird.

ADDED: "Third-string leftish narcissistic bed wetter blogger Michael Roston, who unprovably claims that he is a member of Journolist, links to this post as evidence of … something. Who knows. When they get agitated, they get incoherent."

Roston, among other things, says:

Thus the often-fact-challenged Ann Althouse says that she wants to acquire the JournoList archives to complete an ‘academic study’ (sorry: what’s the UW Law School’s interest in JournoList?) and lesser conservative bloggers start fundraising to help her buy them.

Fact-challenged? Me? That's funny coming in a sentence with the words "academic study" in quotes. The words don't appear at the link — not by me or anyone else. Roston apparently just threw that in as if it might bolster some implicit half-baked argument that the University of Law School has to have an "interest" in anything I might choose to write.

AND: Roston has added:

Correction: Ann’s right – it was the blogger who linked to her, and not Althouse herself who said that the study she wanted to do was ‘academic.’ She’s absolutely right in the first instance, there’d be nothing ‘academic’ about the ’study’ she contemplated. I apologize for even hinting that her partisan exercise had any academic intentions. And while I may have messed that up, at least I don’t fall for hoaxes like this one.

Now, Roston has me saying that there is nothing that would be academic about the book I would write. Of course, I never said that either. He seems to find it very difficult to speak without making things up. If you read my original post, you can see that I offered to analyze the material in an intellectual way and indicated what my approach the material would be. I said I was interested in "human nature and how social and political systems work" and so forth. Roston lurches from one misstatement to the next. He accuses me of wanting to do a "partisan exercise" perhaps because it's the only thing he knows how to do.

The Court's new separation of powers opinion.

Here's the opinion in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, in which the conservative Justices — Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito — take the strong position on enforcing the constitutional principles of separation of powers, and the liberal Justices — Breyer, Stevens, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor — take the position of judicial restraint.

It's a question of restricting the President's power "to remove a prin­cipal officer, who is in turn restricted in his ability to remove an inferior officer, even though that inferior officer determines the policy and enforces the laws of the United States." (The law that sets up this new structure, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which regulates the accounting industry.)



Chief Justice Roberts writes:

We hold that such multilevel protection from removal is contrary to Article II’s vesting of the executive power in the President. The President cannot “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” if he cannot oversee the faithfulness of the officers who execute them. Here the President cannot remove an officer who enjoys more than one level of good-cause protection, even if the President determines that the officer is neglecting his duties or discharging them improperly. That judgment is instead committed to another officer, who may or may not agree with the President’s determination, and whom the Presi­dent cannot remove simply because that officer disagrees with him. This contravenes the President’s “constitutional obligation to ensure the faithful execution of the laws.”

Dissenting, Justice Breyer writes:

[T]he question presented lies at the intersection of two sets of conflicting, broadly framed constitutional principles. And no text, no history, perhaps no precedent provides any clear answer....

When previously deciding this kind of nontextual question, the Court has emphasized the importance of examining how a particular provision, taken in context, is likely to function....

[A] functional approach permits Congress and the President the flexibility needed to adapt statutory law to changing circumstances....

[T[he Court fails to show why two layers of “for cause” protection—Layer One insulating the Commis- sioners from the President, and Layer Two insulating the Board from the Commissioners—impose any more serious limitation upon the President’s powers than one layer....

Thus, the majority’s decision to eliminate only Layer Two accomplishes virtually nothing.

The Christian Legal Society loses its 1st Amendment challenge to the accept-all-comers policy required by Hastings Law School.

Justice Ginsburg writes for the majority in Christian Legal Society v. Hastings College of the Law, answering yes to the question: "May a public law school condition its official recognition of a student group — and the attendant use of school funds and facilities — on the organization’s agree­ment to open eligibility for membership and leadership to all students?" The CLS wanted to restrict membership to those who would sign a "statement of faith" and to exclude those who engage in "unrepentant homosexual conduct."

Justice Ginsburg expresses deference to the law school's reasonable and "viewpoint-neutral" policymaking:

Hastings... could reasonably expect more from its law students than the disruptive behavior CLS hypothesizes—and to build this expectation into its educa­tional approach. A reasonable policy need not anticipate and preemptively close off every opportunity for avoidance or manipulation. If students begin to exploit an all-comers policy by hijacking organizations to distort or destroy their missions, Hastings presumably would revisit and revise its policy.

That final "if" is important, and it takes a lot of the wind out of the sails of the dissenting opinion written by Justice Alito. From the dissent:

In response to the argument that the accept-all-comers-policy would permit a small and unpopular group to be taken over by students who wish to silence its message, the Court states that the policy would permit a registered group to impose membership requirements “designed to ensure that students join because of their commitment to a group’s vitality, not its demise.” With this concession, the Court tacitly recognizes that Hastings does not really have an accept-all-comers policy—it has an accept-some-dissident-comers policy—and the line between members who merely seek to change a group’s message (who apparently must be admitted) and those who seek a group’s “demise” (who may be kept out) is hopelessly vague.

The majority is deferring to the law school, and not preemptively dealing with this other situation which hasn't happened and which it would prefer to trust the law school to deal with if in fact it ever does happen.

***

Note: Justice Ginsburg was present in Court for the announcement of today's opinions, even though her husband died yesterday.

Alito: Heller "points unmistakably" to the conclusion that the Second Amendment applies to state and local government through the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause.

In this morning's opinion in McDonald v. City of Chicago, Justice Alito writes for a majority, explaining the doctrine of incorporation with useful clarity. The question to be answered is: "whether the right to keep and bear arms is fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty... or as we have said in a related context, whether this right is 'deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition" (page 19 of the opinion).

Applying that standard:

Our decision in Heller points unmistakably to the answer. Self-defense is a basic right, recognized by many legal systems from ancient times to the present day, and in Heller, we held that individual self-defense is “the central component” of the Second Amendment right.... (stating that the “inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right”). Explaining that “the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute” in the home, we found that this right applies to handguns because they are “the most preferred firearm in the nation to ‘keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family”.... Thus, we concluded, citizens must be permitted “to use [handguns] for the core lawful purpose of self-defense.”

Heller makes it clear that this right is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”

Justice Alito — at page 42 — rejects the 4 factors that Justice Breyer, in his dissenting opinion, argues should affect incorporation:

First, “there is no popular consensus” that the right is fundamental; second, the right does not protect minorities or persons neglected by those holding political power; third, incorporation of the Second Amendment right would “amount to a significant incursion on a traditional and important area of state concern, altering the constitutional relationship between the States and the Federal Government” and preventing local variations; and fourth, determining the scope of the Second Amendment right in cases involving state and local laws will force judges to answer difficult empirical questions regarding matters that are outside their area of expertise. Even if we believed that these factors were relevant to the incorporation inquiry, none of these factors undermines the case for incorporation of the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.

The Supreme Court closes its Term today.

I want to read the case announcements in real time on SCOTUSblog, but it seems to be maxed out at the moment. I know I'm only making it worse by linking, but I'm doing it anyway.

(Too bad neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times is front-paging real-time coverage. There's a deluge of web traffic with nowhere to go.)

UPDATE: Here's the SCOTUSblog post. The Second Amendment case is out:

Erin: Alito announces McDonald v. Chicago: reversed and remanded
10:04
Tom: Gun rights prevail
10:05
Erin:
The opinion concludes that the 14th Amendment does incorporate the Second Amendment right recognized in Heller to keep and bear arms in self defense
10:05
Tom: 5-4
10:05
Erin: Stevens dissents for himself.  Breyer dissents, joined by Ginsburg and Sotomayor.
10:05
Tom: The majority seems divided, presumably on the precise standard
10:06
Erin: The majority Justices do not support all parts of the Alito opinion, but all five agree that the 2d Amendment applies to state and local government.
10:06
Erin: Alito, in the part of the opinion joined by three Justices, concludes that the 2d Amendment is incorporated through the Due Process Clause.
10:07
Erin: Thomas thinks the Amendment is incorporated, but not under Due Process.  He appears to base incorporation on Privileges or Immunities.
Tom: The difference between the majority and Justice Thomas doesn't affect the fact that the Second Amendment now applies to state and local reguation...
10:08
Erin: The McDonald opinion is here.

"Well, I'd like to know whether they are defaming me on JournoList."

That's something I blogged back in March 2009.

I'd still like to know. Don't I have a right to know what a gang of 400 journalists are saying about me, as they endeavor to shape my reputation, decide that all the good people must avoid linking to me, or whatever it is they do?

If I were to bring a defamation suit based on Ezra Klein's lie "Ann Althouse sure has a lot of anti-semitic commenters," I would seek access to the Journolist archive, and I believe I would get it. There is no privilege that would shield this information from discovery. Lawyers, argue with me if you think I'm wrong.

I'm not the litigating type — though when I practiced law, I worked in the litigation department — and I am not threatening to sue. I am saying this to make one more argument for why the Journolist archive needs to be made public.

"Why I Denied David Frum’s Website A Spot In The Blogads Conservative Hive."

John Hawkins explains:

Now, as a general rule, I try to be very open minded about who gets into the Blogads Conservative Hive. If they're generally friendly to conservatives and seem to have a mostly conservative audience, I don't mind having them on board. So, aside from conservative blogs, there are Libertarian blogs in the Hive and there are blogs I'd call center-right. It goes without saying that there are plenty of issues where members of the Hive, myself included, don't see eye-to-eye.

I'm in the Blogads Conservative Hive, so I can vouch for that!

Guys like Frum want to have it both ways. Being a "Republican" / "conservative" who tells liberals what they want to hear about the Right is a career niche —and it can pay big dividends....

[W]hy is David Frum getting a column at CNN? How is it that Time has a guy like this writing for them? What's the purpose of putting a guy like Frum on TV as opposed to all the genuine conservatives who dwarf his traffic and can obviously draw a bigger crowd?...

[T]he mainstream media loves "conservatives" and "Republicans" who will trash whomever the Left hates most. So, if you're willing to talk about how Sarah Palin is a hick, Glenn Beck is a crank, Rush Limbaugh is bad for the country, and the Tea Party is bad for democracy, the mainstream media will reward you and because conservatives pride themselves on being open minded, they'll all too often give you a pass for your atrocious behavior — especially since the MSM doesn't insist you play their game all the time. As long as you're willing to say what they want about the people they hate the most, they'll reward you with a cover story at Newsweek and then in your off time, you can churn out a few articles to point gullible conservatives towards while you're trying to guilt them into taking you seriously by crying "epistemic closure!"

I Googled "epistemic closure" and got, first, "'Epistemic Closure'? Those Are Fighting Words," a NYT article featuring a photo of Frum. So what's that fight all about?

The phrase is being used as shorthand by some prominent conservatives for a kind of closed-mindedness in the movement, a development they see as debasing modern conservatism’s proud intellectual history....

([Julian Sanchez of the libertarian Cato Institute] said he probably fished “epistemic closure” out of his subconscious from an undergraduate course in philosophy, where it has a technical meaning in the realm of logic.)

Blech. What an ugly phrase and what a pointless and irritating explanation for it. It's pretentious, but the usage is actually inaccurate. How off-putting and unhelpful!

Back to Hawkins:

Long story short, everybody has to make a living. But, I'm not interested in helping people like Frum play this little game where they try to cripple conservatives publicly while coming around on the back end to milk us for money. If Frum wants to be a dancing monkey for the Left, let them come up with the money to pay for the tune.

ADDED: "NOTE TO DAVID FRUM: Google doesn’t own BlogAds." Ha. Frum had written: "Hawkins is the person entrusted by Google to determine who may join the conservative blogads cloud." You'd think Frum would figure out the basics of blog advertising before attacking Hawkins. BlogAds is its own company, and Hawkins took the initiative to set up a "hive" that he called "Conservative" to attract buyers.

If Elena Kagan worked a "Miracle at Harvard," what effect might she have on the Supreme Court?

An essay by University of New Mexico lawprof Kevin K. Washburn:

For most of the past fifty years, attending Harvard Law School was a miserable experience....

During Elena Kagan’s tenure as dean, a miracle occurred. Harvard Law School was transformed. Today, students embrace the institution. The professors engage with one another. And the school’s widely discussed dysfunctions are distant memories. Kagan accomplished this miracle by modeling two important and traditional American values: hard work and community. Kagan was known for walking the halls tirelessly to learn the views of her bright and independent colleagues and to seek consensus. She broke the gridlock between faculty political factions that had atrophied the academic life of the institution. Even more importantly, she transformed the student experience. This essay seeks to describe Kagan’s transformational leadership and provide insight as to the specific changes Kagan made to accomplish the miracle.

Let's take this all as true. Kagan has skills that worked brilliantly in the context a dean transforming a deeply dysfunctional, highly elite law school. But how will those skills apply in the context of an individual Justice on the Supreme Court? When a troubled law school brings in a new dean, it is looking for leadership and transformation. But there is no reason to think that the Supreme Court Justices look toward the newcomer for leadership at all, and she arrives to fill the seat that was vacated, not with any problem to be solved and institution to be transformed.

Wisconsin's Sean Duffy — "a lumberjack athlete who has been both a county district attorney and a star of MTV's 'Real World'... trying hard to become the next Scott Brown."

WaPo has a big article.

Duffy is expected to win a primary in September against Dan Mielke, a farmer and self-declared "tea party" candidate who had previously challenged Obey and lost. Mielke is trying to make hay of the wilder Duffy moments caught on tape by MTV, saying they reflect "Hollywood" values....

Duffy would rather not get into the details of the reality show, saying it doesn't reflect who he is now. But he admits that "The Real World" played an important role in his life. Through MTV he met his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, a conservative Latina from Arizona who appeared on the third season of the series, in San Francisco, in 1994. Their courtship and canoodling -- during their time on MTV's "Road Rules: All Stars" -- was captured on camera.

They continued their minor celebrity status after the show, appearing in "The Wedding Video," a movie-length spoof of reality television produced by another "Real World" alum. Joining in the low-budget mockumentary about two men getting married was a spur-of-the-moment decision that Duffy tells Wisconsin voters that he wouldn't make today.

Can Wisconsin folk comprehend the complexities of modern media — including the half-truths of edited "reality" shows and the fiction that is mockumentary?

Robert Byrd has died.

Here's the long obituary for him in the New York Times. It's worth reading the whole thing, and I'll just excerpt a few things that happened to strike me for one reason or another:

[He called West Virginia] “one of the rock bottomest of states.”...

Mr. Byrd was the valedictorian of his high school class but was unable to afford college. It was not until he was in his 30s and 40s that he took college courses. But he was profoundly self-educated and well read. His Senate speeches sparkled with citations from Shakespeare, the King James version of the Bible and the histories of England, Greece and Rome....

Referring to the Line-Item Veto Act, he said:

“Gaius Julius Caesar did not seize power in Rome,” he said. Rather, he said, “the Roman Senate thrust power on Caesar deliberately, with forethought, with surrender, with intent to escape from responsibility.”

The Supreme Court later found the act unconstitutional, a violation of Separation of Powers, though not in the first case it considered on the subject. The first case, which bore Senator Byrd's name — Raines v. Byrd — was rejected for lack of standing. The members of Congress who brought suit were held not to have standing to challenge the constitutionality of the bill Congress had passed because it caused "no injury to themselves as individuals." The obituary doesn't mention this case.

Back to the obituary:

In 2007, at the unveiling of a portrait of Mr. Byrd in the Old Senate Chamber, former Senator Paul S. Sarbanes of Maryland, a colleague of 30 years, recalled that Mr. Byrd had taught him how to answer when a constituent asked, “How many presidents have you served under?”

“None,” was Mr. Byrd’s reply, Mr. Sarbanes said. “I have served with presidents, not under them.”

I hope every member of Congress would answer that way.

In the early 1940s, he organized a 150-member klavern, or chapter, of the Klan in Sophia, W.Va., and was chosen its leader at a meeting. After the meeting, Joel L. Baskin, the Klan’s grand dragon for the region, suggested that Mr. Byrd use his “talents for leadership” by going into politics.

“Suddenly, lights flashed in my mind!” Mr. Byrd later wrote. “Someone important had recognized my abilities.”...

His opponents used his Klan membership against him during his first run for the House of Representatives in 1952; Democratic leaders urged him to drop out of the race. But he stayed in and won, then spent decades apologizing for what he called a “sad mistake.”

He went on to vote for civil rights legislation in 1957 and 1960, but when the more sweeping Civil Rights Act was before Congress in 1964, he filibustered for an entire night against it, saying the measure was an infringement on states’ rights. He backed civil rights legislation consistently only after becoming a party leader in the Senate....

Mr. Byrd was born Cornelius Calvin Sale Jr. on Nov. 20, 1917, in North Wilkesboro, N.C. His mother died the next year in the influenza epidemic, but before she did, she asked his father to give him to a sister and brother-in-law. They adopted him and renamed him Robert Carlyle Byrd, then moved to rural West Virginia.

So old that his mother died in the flu epidemic of 1917.

As a boy, living on a small farm, he helped slaughter hogs, learned to play the fiddle and became a prize-winning Sunday school student after the manager of the local coal company store gave him two pairs of socks so he could attend without embarrassment.

In 1937, Mr. Byrd married Erma Ora James, his high school sweetheart. She died in 2006, after 68 years of marriage....

He was never a particularly partisan Democrat. President Richard M. Nixon briefly considered him for a Supreme Court appointment. Mr. Dole recalled an occasion when Mr. Byrd gave him advice on a difficult parliamentary question; the help enabled Mr. Dole to overcome Mr. Byrd on a particular bill....

Mr. Byrd always carried a copy of the Constitution. He said his second-proudest accomplishment was legislation requiring every educational institution receiving federal aid to observe the anniversary of the signing of the Constitution on Sept. 17 by teaching students about it.

I don't think Congress monkeying with the curriculum of public schools is very respectful of the Constitution. Ironically. That's especially bad coming from someone who presented his opposition to the Civil Rights Act as a matter of states rights.

When the Senate was struggling to agree on rules for the impeachment trial of Mr. Clinton in 1999, Mr. Byrd warned that the Senate itself was also on trial.

“The White House has sullied itself,” he said, “and the House has fallen into a black pit of partisanship and self-indulgence. The Senate is teetering on the brink of that same black pit.”

When, in 2005, Republicans considered banning the filibuster on judicial nominations, he warned that such an action would change the “nature of the Senate by destroying the right of free speech it has enjoyed since its creation.”

In “Losing America,” he wrote that the Senate without the filibuster “will no longer be a body of equals.”

“It will, instead, have become a body of toads,” he wrote, “hopping up and down and over one another to please the imperious countenance of an all-powerful president.”

A body of toads, hopping up and down and over one another to please the imperious countenance of an all-powerful president.

***

Now, how will his seat be filled? It appears that, under West Virginia law, because the vacancy has occurred before July 3rd, there will be an election this year. If Byrd had survived until this Saturday, the Governor would have appointed his replacement, and that person would have continued in office until 2012.

Let's take a closer look at that hydrangea.

Now, good night, my little flowers.

Camille Paglia — opining on the failing libido of the American female — has something to say about "new age" and "men in shorts."

Men in shorts is, as you probably know, an Althouse theme, and New Age is the obsession of our beloved commenter Crack Emcee. Here's the Paglia:

The real culprit, originating in the 19th century, is bourgeois propriety. As respectability became the central middle-class value, censorship and repression became the norm. Victorian prudery ended the humorous sexual candor of both men and women during the agrarian era, a ribaldry chronicled from Shakespeare’s plays to the 18th-century novel. The priggish 1950s, which erased the liberated flappers of the Jazz Age from cultural memory, were simply a return to the norm.

Only the diffuse New Age movement, inspired by nature-keyed Asian practices, has preserved the radical vision of the modern sexual revolution....

Nor are husbands offering much stimulation in the male display department: visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife. The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. 

Paglia is dithering. Good Lord! Isn't she embarrassed to enthuse about the Rolling Stones one more time? And much as I enjoy her company in my crusade against adult men dressing like children, her inane bow to "the diffuse New Age movement, inspired by nature-keyed Asian practices" makes it all feel hit and miss.

***

On adult men looking like enlarged boys, my favorite description is still Tom Wolfe's:

[H]e had on a short-sleeved shirt that showed too much of his skinny, hairy arms, and denim shorts that showed too much of this gnarly, hairy legs. He looked for all the world like a seven-year-old who at the touch of a wand had become old, tall, bald on top, and hairy everywhere else, an ossified seven-year-old, a pair of eyeglasses with lenses thick as ice pushed up to the summit of his forehead -- unaccountably addressing thirty college students....

"Gainer blogs are an offshoot of a fat-pride movement..."

"... that has bubbled up in response to what its proponents consider to be a pointless and hysterical national fuss over obesity. In this view fat is a form of social protest, an outcry against the manipulations of a diet-industrial complex."

At the Hydrangea Café...

... I once read a description of hydrangeas as "bosomy." I never forgot that.

The entire Journolist archive needs to be made public.

1. We need to see the full context, in order to understand the part that is already public.

2. Journalists should not suppress information when the reason is only to serve their own private interests.

3. The mainstream media needs to return to high principles of neutral, professional journalism.

4. The mainstream media needs to distance itself from high-school-style cliquishness and grow up if it is to retain a readership.

5. The presumption should always be in favor of more information.

6. ...

"Scary Obama" makes me feel that Drudge is quite intentionally try to make us feel...

... immensely creeped out that Obama is President.

I'm not involved in any sharing of ideological talking points.

For example, I don't know what Glenn Reynolds means by "I've got your man right here" in his post that links to me. I'm not involved in any conservative bloggerly equivalent of Journolist, nor has any fellow blogger of note ever emailed me to suggest that I get on the same page with others to serve some larger goal.

I genuinely don't know whether Glenn is doing some sort of Alpha Male routine, whether he's tweaking Weigel as a Beta Male or if he's serious that David Weigel is the Journolist member with the best justification for sending me the whole Journolist archive (after I requested a Journolist "Deep Throat").

Now, it does make sense to me that Weigel should do it. He's been hurt, shot down. So he might feel like striking back in some extravagant way. But, more important, he's the one with the biggest interest in getting the whole archive out. His statements have been leaked out of context, and what he wrote might seems quite moderate if we could read what everyone else was saying — if we could understand the culture of Journolist.

Our need for the full context, in order to understand the part that is already public, will be #1 on a list — help me add to it — of why the entire Journolist archive needs to be made public.

"Marty Ginsburg was known in Supreme Court circles as Justice Ginsburg’s secret weapon."

"Justice Ginsburg herself can sometimes be shy, awkward, and introverted, but her husband was gregarious, charming, and a great entertainer.... Martin Ginsburg’s passing is undoubtedly a great loss to ... Justice Ginsburg, to whom he was married for 56 years...."

Reading this, I put my face in my hands for several minutes and cried.

At the Cutest Bunny Café...

... aw, aren't you cute?

"Why are Emile and Marguerite Bouin still married? They cannot stand each other."

"This is evident from the moment we meet them, isolated and wordless before a beautiful fire. Their only correspondence is an occasional invective jotted on a scrap of paper — this discreetly flicked across the room to the recipient's lap."

This 1967 novel — "The Cat" by Georges Simenon, which I loved when I read it in the 70s — seems to presage texting.

***

It was made into a movie with the most archaically artsy trailer imaginable.

When only medical marijuana is legal, you end up with a hell of a lot of sick people.

Seems like everyone has terrible headaches.

In Colorado, where a constitutional amendment legalizing medical marijuana was passed in 2000, hundreds of dispensaries popped up and a startling number of residents turned out to be in “severe pain,” the most popular of eight conditions that can be treated legally with the once-demonized weed.

More than 80,000 people here now have medical marijuana certificates, which are essentially prescriptions, and for months new enrollees have signed up at a rate of roughly 1,000 a day.

Oh! The pain! The intractable pain! Who knew the excruciating suffering that tortured Coloradans for so long?

The linked article also details the pesky government regulation that comes with legalization. What did you expect? One longs for the day when the stuff was illegal, there was no regulation to protect anybody from their suppliers, and if you wanted it, your only option was to break the law. Back then there was one kind of dishonesty, the manly dishonesty of breaking the law...



... and not this other weasely form of dishonesty, lying about headaches.

"As he drove the getaway car carrying the four men, Dwight Armstrong abruptly pulled over. I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'You have to look.' And there, above campus, was this huge fireball going up."

Karl Armstrong, remembering his brother, who is dead now, at the age of 58. Dead at the age of 33, in 1970, in Madison, Wisconsin, was Robert Fassnacht.

"Say something nice instead of being a smartass all the time."

Bite me. When the powerful seek to work their will upon us and demand that we be nice about it, that's the right response: Bite me. Even if he were the one being nice about it, we shouldn't have to put up with it without complaint.

I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - "Bite me!" Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, "Bite me!" Then we'll figure out what to do about the recession and the taxes and the oil spill. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "Bite me."

Tom Goldstein predicts the outcomes (and the authors) of the final 4 Supreme Court cases of this Term.

To be announced tomorrow morning:

1. Bilski v. Kappos:

The only Justice who has not issued a majority opinion from [the November] sitting is Justice Stevens, which makes him the very likely author. Justice Stevens tends to take a narrow view of patent rights...

I ultimately predict that the Bilski majority opinion will be authored by Justice Stevens and that the decision will be very significant in its narrowing of the scope of method patents.

2. Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board:

[N]either the Chief Justice nor Justice Kennedy has authored an opinion from [the December] sitting... [but] Chief is ... unlikely to leave himself without an opinion in a sitting.

If I’m right, that means that the PCAOB’s structure is likely to be invalidated as unconstitutional. At oral argument the Chief Justice asked no questions of counsel to the plaintiffs and was hostile to the defense of the statute....

3. McDonald v. City of Chicago:

[T]he only Justice not to write from [the February] sitting is Justice Alito....

I predict that Justice Alito will write the Court’s opinion in McDonald recognizing that the Second Amendment is incorporated [in the 14th Amendment and thus applicable to state and local government]....

4. Christian Legal Society v. Martinez:

Neither Justice Stevens nor Justice Ginsburg authored an opinion from [the April] sitting....

Though it is very difficult to tell, I think that the most likely outcome in these circumstances is that Justice Ginsburg will issue a majority opinion in favor of Hastings Law School on the relatively narrow basis that the plaintiffs stipulated that the school had a neutral “all comers” policy that did not discriminate against this group but instead provided that all groups must accept all students

We shall see. It's a big Supreme Court day tomorrow. The Court's Term ends, with the retirement of Justice Stevens, and the hearings on the Kagan nomination begin.

1. "I take them seriously; they’re building something brand new, something that defies conventional wisdom. If readers get a deeper understanding of these people, their strategy, and their ideas, then I’m doing my job."

2. "Honestly, it’s been tough to find fresh angles sometimes–how many times can I report that these [tea party] activists are joyfully signing up with the agenda of discredited right-winger X and discredited right-wing group Y?"

The public (1) and the private (2) David Weigel (if by "private," one means in the company of 400 of your bestest friends, at least one of whom is ready to tea-bag you before you teabag him).

ADDED: Glenn Reynolds, noting the photograph, says "Check out the photo if you want to see the face of modern journalism. In your nightmares . . . ." This is the photograph:

Enough discord! Here's the cutest little bunny rabbit of all time.

Of all time!



Look at that tiny white dash on his tiny forehead! Look how he destroyeth not the garden, but nibbleth on a fallen sprig!

MORE: You know you want more, or do you fear that your brimming heart will burst with love?

Algirdas Brazauskas — "He was an honest man, a charismatic leader and outstanding politician."

"The memory of the first president of independent Lithuania will remain in the hearts of the people."



IN THE COMMENTS: bagoh20 begins with some decent-enough generic snark:

No matter who the subject, I find it hard to consider "outstanding politician" to be anything but an insult. I'm a bigot about politicians.

But it is not right for this occasion. Irene brings the gravitas:

Brazauskas was no ordinary, career politician. He became a politician as a result of extraordinary times. He was a courageous man who inspired the citizens to stand up to an awesome power.

Lithuania was under the Soviet yoke between 1944 and 1991. A documentary, Red Terror on the Amber Coast exposes these times. There now is a museum in the capital, Vilnius, dedicated to preserving the history of the Soviet genocide.

Many members of my family fled Lithuania in June 1944. Those who did not get out were deported to reeducation camps in the Gulag.

I'm not a journalist. I'm an intellectual. Compared to John Cole anyway.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Madison, U.S.A.

It was a great day to stroll by the lake and maybe take a plunge:



You could sail or wear a balloon hat:



Eat a brat:



But what's this? Inside?! The Rathskeller is packed. (As are many other locations around town.)



All eyes are focused on that drop-down screen:



It's the World Cup, U.S.A. versus Ghana:



It was great to hear chants of "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" in Madison.

The reconstructed wigwam.

Built in Whitefish Dunes State Park on the location of — according to a sign there — "a large summer village during the Late Woodland Indian occupation (AD 500-900)."

Jeffrey Goldberg says "I've been leaked postings from JournoList before — wonderfully charming things written about me..."

"... I haven't had the opportunity to use them, but would be happy to if the need arose. Why anyone would think that a listserv with 400 people is private is beyond me. It's McChrystal-level naivete."

Ha. And somebody must be scared. He's got your email and he knows how to use it.

John Cole paraphrases, scornfully: "I’m not against using my perch at the Atlantic to publish someone’s private emails to viciously destroy their character and career, but what really bothers me is if someone makes a joke privately!"

The Journolisters — including Cole? — must be desperately trying to discipline each other not to leak. And yet the evidence is — if Goldberg is to be believed — that the leaks have been going on all along. Whenever someone not on the list was talked about, somebody in that 400 may have seen fit to let that person know what was being said. Think of all the reasons you might decide to forward the email. You might know the person being talked about and think they needed to be be alerted about some scurrilous accusations or plans. You might object to what was being said or dislike the person saying it and want to do something about it without drawing attention to yourself.

It's really too late now to get the 400 listmembers into line. Stuff has gone out. People like Goldberg have it and will use it when they decide it's right. You can try, like Cole, to say that using it will be vicious and destructive, but presumably, the email was vicious and destructive, which is probably why it got forwarded! And, anyway, you can't beat that many people into line. In that huge group are some writers who take orders, but there have to be others who are vindictive or careless. Some may be unsuccessful and jealous. Some may believe staunchly that information wants to be free or that a list of 400 is pretty much a public list with no valid restrictions. You can't control them all.

And there is, it seems, a new, smaller list being formed without the dangerous riffraff. The true insiders are determining what the scope of the inner circle is. And the others, the left-behinds? Well, they're sitting on a pile of hot, nasty words written by the cool kids who just shut the clubhouse door on them.

ADDED: Cole responds to this post and I respond to that here.

"Wondering if the myth of Dedalus and Icarus has ever been thought of as the first science fiction story."

Page 38, "The Last Novel," by David Markson.

"Who knows what song will run through your head when you're dying?"

A question and an answer from a movie.

Bloody hell. I'm going to die to Boney M.

Proto-blogging in 1816.

From "The Last Novel," by David Markson:

Keats stayed up all night on the occasion when he actually did look into Chapman's Homer — and then composed his sonnet so swiftly that he was able to messenger it to a friend to read before breakfast.

You read something quickly. It inspires you to write something quickly and then to get it out instantly to be read. That is blogging, and Keats got as close to that as one could in 1816. But he was reading George Chapman's translation of Homer and writing a sonnet that people will read as long as there are people who can read. That's all very grand, compared to blogging. To counterbalance, the blogger gets the instant writing out to thousands, and Keats only got his poem out instantly to one person.

But would Keats have read Homer and written a timeless sonnet if he could have blogged?

***

I read the first 82 pages of Markson's book out loud as Meade drove the TT up to Fish Creek, Wisconsin and back — via Whitefish Dunes — Thursday and Friday. I stopped reading at page 82 last night at about 9 when the last of the daylight failed. The book is composed entirely of snippets like the one quoted above, and if I'd gotten to the next snippet, it would have been:

Fish feel pain.

Ah! The fish theme! How apt!

Actually, I'm lying. Lying out of love of aptness. For your sake, dear Reader. That fish snippet is at the very bottom of page 82. It was the second to the next one. The next one was really:

If it were up to me, I would have wiped my behind with his last decree.

Said Mozart — after a demand by the Archbishop of Salzburg for more brevity in his church compositions.

There's another Mozart one that led to some laughter and conversation. On page 21:

I wish you good night, but first shit in your bed.

Reads another Mozart letter to Anna Maria.

***

Let me get the jump on the comments and say yes, I know that Kurt Cobain sang "It's okay to eat fish/'Cause they don't have any feelings." And yes, these days, on hearing "Homer," one doesn't think of the Greek poet anymore, one thinks of "The Simpsons." That's what TV and blogging and everything modern has done to us. 

Remember, walking in the dunes?

This is Whitefish Dunes State Park, and that water — with a riptide just waiting to drag you to your death if you don't have the presence of mind to swim parallel to the shore — is Lake Michigan.



If you dawdle on the stairs, you might notice this orchid-like vine, and if you're married to a horticulturist, he might tell you it's sweet pea, which it is:



And if you're old like us, you might feel compelled to sing the old Tommy Roe song. The video at the link is nice. You see Roe performing and interacting with a girl in the audience. "Pause at exactly 1:43...the look on her face & eyes as he whispers in her ear..priceless!! :)" says a comment. Another comment comes from "Itsmewithroe," who says:

Actually, Tommy Roe was lip singing. 

I.e., lip synching.

We could hear the recording, and he was whispering. Even he was strumming his guitar, but it was a quiet strum. We were all told to sing the song along with him. If I had known the camera was on me all that time, I would have been so embarrassed. I thought the camera was on everyone.

No. That's not his daughter. the blond in the back, she had a blue & white sailor type 2 piece bathing suit. Tommy Roe had no children. I remember now. It was the summer of 67. I've been talking about that day all my life. I was in ecstasy. I never knew the camera was on me. The producer/director, who ever he was, stage the girls behind me in position. I wonder if I could upload my pictures when I was a kid on this site.

Ha. The producer knew what he was doing. The girl is adorable. And what a great bubblegum song of that era. Roe's best song, however, was "Sheila." It was a cool enough song that The Beatles saw fit to cover it, pretty much in the original form.

But back to Whitefish Dunes. I was going to do a spiffy segue. You know, something with...



... but... well, that counts, according to my rules of blogging.

We were lying on the beach, and a guy came over and asked me if I was Ann Althouse. I confessed and he introduced himself — we'll call him Dr. Steve — and said he loved reading the blog. So, then, hi, Dr. Steve. You know, you said something that invited an answer and I let silence be the answer, but then as Meade and I were walking back across the dune...



I experienced l'esprit de l'escalier — staircase wit — literally on the stairs.

This name for the phenomenon comes from French encyclopedist Denis Diderot’s description of such a situation in his Paradoxe sur le comédien. During a dinner at the home of statesman Jacques Necker, a remark was made to him which left him speechless at the time because, he explains, l’homme sensible, comme moi, tout entier à ce qu’on lui objecte, perd la tête et ne se retrouve qu’au bas de l’escalier: a sensitive man like me, overwhelmed by the argument levelled against him, becomes confused and can only think clearly again [when he gets to] the bottom of the stairs.

Blogging is great for people afflicted with l'esprit de l'escalier, because I can answer Dr. Steve here. He said: "I can never quite figure out your political persuasion."

The late riposte: "I am not persuaded."

At the Green Bay Café...

... you can meander into anything you want.

"Journolist is done now," says Ezra Klein.

"I'll delete the group soon after this post goes live. That's not because Journolist was a bad idea, or anyone on it did anything wrong. It was a wonderful, chaotic, educational discussion. I'm proud of having started it, grateful to have participated in it, and I have no doubt that someone else will reform it, with many of the same members, and keep it going."

So it's not done. It just got too big. And it needs a new name.

"Haven't had a burger in a while. Lunch with Obama at Ray's Hell Burger."

Dmitry Medvedev tweeted.

"She said she was meeting with a rape crisis unit, stuff like that. She said it was a high authority person who has a lot of power. She was scared of him."

The Gore accuser made a contemporaneous statement to her friend, according to the friend.

What is the evidentiary weight of a contemporaneous statement like this? It was taken very seriously when aimed at a notable conservative.

At the Lotus Café...

... you can emerge now.

"The president-elect would be very pleased if you appointed Valerie and he would be, uh, thankful and appreciative."

"They're not willing to give me anything but appreciation -- f--- them." Blagojevich. The trial continues.

After Barack Obama friend Valerie Jarrett publicly pulled out of contention for the U.S. Senate seat appointment, Rahm Emanuel... wanted Blagojevich to know the list of Senate candidates "acceptable" to Obama, according to testimony Thursday in Blagojevich's corruption trial.

They were: Tammy Duckworth; Illinois state comptroller Dan Hynes; U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. and U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, according to Blagojevich's former chief of staff John Harris.

Harris told the ex-governor of the discussion in a secretly recorded phone call Nov. 12.

On the call, Blagojevich calls the list "B.S."

Harris testified the former governor believed Obama's list to be political cover.

"If that became public, the president-elect would want the list to represent a diverse group of individuals," Harris explained from the stand.

"I felt like a session man most of the time. Ray wanted complete control of everything. He was a control freak."

Said Pete Quaife, the bassist for one of the best bands ever, The Kinks. I've lifted that quote from what is, unfortunately, his obituary. He was 66.

Rory.

Just Rory.

Burn, Davey, Burn — The Self-Immolation of David Weigel.

Consider poor, conflicted David Weigel. Hired by the Washington Post, he had the trappings of prestige and therefore he deserved the admiration of the cool young journalists of Washington, D.C. But his assignment was to cover the conservative movement, and that threatened to make him toxic, a man to be shunned. He needed a way to wriggle — to wiggle-Weigel — into the good graces of the cool kids. He had to show that he was covering conservatives, but he was not one of them.

He could try to do that subtly, and without deviating from the good-faith performance of his assigned task, perhaps by writing in a neutral, questioning style about what was going on with the righties these days and carefully raising doubts, undermining foundations, and strategically inserting a knife blade now and then. But would they get it? Didn't he need something a little more emphatic... and a little hipper?

So David started letting his need for lefty approval express itself on the email list, the Journolist, where the cool kids were being intimate and snarky. But those other kids were not tasked with covering conservatives. While they might have been embarrassed if the mean things they wrote in the email were ever leaked, they didn't have careers founded on their suitability for covering conservatives. The risk poor Dave took was of an entirely different nature. Why, Dave, why? Why did you risk the plum job?

“Honestly, it’s been tough to find fresh angles sometimes–how many times can I report that these [tea party] activists are joyfully signing up with the agenda of discredited right-winger X and discredited right-wing group Y?” Weigel lamented in one February email.

In other posts, Weigel describes conservatives as using the media to “violently, angrily divide America.” According to Weigel, their motives include “racism” and protecting “white privilege,” and for some of the top conservatives in D.C., a nihilistic thirst for power....

Of Matt Drudge, Weigel remarked, “It’s really a disgrace that an amoral shut-in like Drudge maintains the influence he does on the news cycle while gay-baiting, lying, and flubbing facts to this degree.”

He also said:

“This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.”

Such nastiness doesn't hurt Matt of course. Matt drops another link, gets all the traffic, and moves on. Ironically, it is Dave who is undone. Having shown us his vivid hostility to the conservatives he was supposed to explain to us, we no longer have any reason to read him. Having destroyed the appearance of his capacity to enlighten us, he has lit the flame of his own self-immolation.

UPDATE: Weigel resigns.

Various readers suggest that the email-leaker was after Dave’s job. I think the WaPo should have a no-journolister rule for Weigel’s replacement, which would solve that problem, among others.

Indeed. One of the problems that might be somewhat solved is the cheeky smugness of the young journalists. The exclusive little club turned deadly for one of its members. And isn't funny how people who should be in the know still don't get modern technology. Tiger Woods brought down by texting, Dave Weigel by email, etc. etc.

AND: In smugger days:

David Weigel|6.14.10 @ 5:01PM|#

Well, I really enjoyed the two and a half years I spent here, and I'm constantly confused as to why mentions of my name lead to a lot of schoolyard insults. I really can't figure out why they do it -- lack of fulfillment seems like a good enough theory. After all, I'm here, and they're where I left them in 2008.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to return to my rewarding job and large circle of friends. I don't know how my ego will ever recover...

(Thanks to C3 for pointing to that.)

Visions of seemingly impossible things.

Did you know you can watch the sunset over Lake Michigan from Wisconsin?



And what is this? The camera has somehow taken a mysterious photograph:

"This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire."

Wrote the WaPo's Dave Weigel, who covers conservatives but writes things he's ashamed to see get beyond the confines of the lefty "Journolist" email list.

"Real couples are satisfied with making love for between 3 and 13 minutes – and can find anything over 10 minutes tiresome."

Less than 1 or 2 minutes is, however, "too short."

At the Shy Sunflower Café...

... catch a glimmer of happiness.

"Althouse wows audiences with her bee knowledge."

"She has a passion for informing the public about bees and encourages everyone to consider setting up a hive on their property if they can.... Althouse helps folks get started with their own hives: ordering the bees, purchasing materials and setting up the hive.... In January, Althouse ran for American Honey Queen of the American Beekeeping Federation and was first runner up. The five other state honey queen contestants voted her Miss Congeniality, and anyone who knows her would not be surprised at this. She’s modest to the degree that she didn’t mention this honor in the interview."

The modest and adorable Maya Althouse, of Rebersburg, Pennsylvania.

Drudge digs in, and The Smoking Gun has the transcript depicting Gore as "a giggling 'crazed sex poodle.'"

Drudge. Smoking Gun:

In a bizarre statement to police, the Oregon woman who claims that Al Gore fondled and groped her during a massage session described the former Vice President as a giggling "crazed sex poodle" who gave a "come hither" look before pouncing on her in a Portland hotel suite. In a taped January 2009 interview with cops, the 54-year-old woman, a licensed masseuse... detailed her alleged October 2006 encounter with Gore at the Hotel Lucia.... It is unclear why, two years later, she approached Portland police and sought to memorialize her allegations against Gore, who she portrayed as a tipsy, handsy predator who forced her to drink Grand Marnier, pinned her to a bed, and forcibly French kissed her. The woman's statement--which could be mistaken for R-rated Vice Presidential fan fiction--describes Gore as a man with a "violent temper as well as extremely dictatorial commanding attitude besides his Mr. Smiley Global Warming concern persona." After fleeing Gore's suite, the woman returned home to discover, a la Lewinsky, "stains on the front of my black slacks." Suspecting that the stains were Gore bodily fluids, the woman made sure not to clean them.