"I'm willing to lead but I'm not willing to preside over people who are cannibals...."

"Frankly, Marianne and I could use a break."

Who said it?

Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln.

Perfect!

"If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."

"If you're willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me ... hey, you're more than welcome."

"President Obama is coming to town solely to raise money from the richest of the rich."

OWS protest Obama.

ADDED: Non-OWS folk ticked too.

New Media Meade... on the radio, for the first time.

Listen!

ADDED: The main subject is what Meade is talking about here: "Where does Brian Solomon go to get his reputation back?"

"Who cares about duplicate signatures in Wisconsin Recall?"

"Anti-recall forces will have to establish their own database and run checks for duplicates, in other words, do the government’s work for it."

AND: "Is Hulsey running for governor?" (Remember Hulsey? Hint: He used to run from...)

Need to shop?

May I recommend Amazon? (Purchases made through that link will result in a contribution to this blog, with no difference in the price you pay. Thanks for showing your appreciation that way. Believe me, I notice and am encouraged.)

ADDED: May I recommend this lens kit for iPhone 4 (and some other phones) and iPad? Wide angle, micro, and fisheye! You know my obsession with fisheye! I use this lens, which I highly recommend if you have a Nikon SLR camera. I prefer the big, harder-to-steal camera for an urban environment.

"Fiction just doesn't reach me the way nonfiction does."

"Even when nonfiction tries to be engaging by using personal narratives, I often lose patience with the details and just want the writer to get to the abstract point."

What kind of writing reaches you?
	Fiction, because of the concrete details about people and things.
	Fiction, when it conveys valuable abstract ideas.
	Nonfiction, when there is concrete detail about people and things.
	Nonfiction, when there are valuable abstract ideas.
pollcode.com free polls

"No political correctness, no caring about anyone's feelings... or any of that - these are just ideas, finally free..."

"... and they must (and will) be dealt with. Fortunately, people do laugh at what he says," says Crack Emcee about Patrice O'Neal:

[H]is mind is one of the best examples of why the black male experience can be so difficult to integrate into the American WASP experience. His comedy is almost an x-ray of why black guys must be contained** by the wider society - there's no barriers on his brain.

Patrice O'Neal, who died yesterday, at the age of 41.

Mark Steyn on Newt Gingrich: "It’s all ‘profoundly, dramatically deeply compelling.'"

"All the action is in the adverbs. One of my problems again with Newt is like he’s bursting with ideas that sound all as if they are coming from a self-help manual. If you remember back in his [heyday], he had something called 'The Triangle of American Progress.' And that evolved into the 'Four Pillars of American Civilization,’ which in turn expanded into the ‘Five Pillars of the Twenty-First Century.'"

Audio here.

ADDED: The bracketed "heyday" above replaces the Daily Caller's "hay day." Did you think someone's "heyday" had something to do with hay? Were you picturing something like this:



No! You are wrong:

heyday
late 16c., alteration of heyda (1520s), exclamation of playfulness or surprise, something like Mod.Eng. hurrah, apparently an extended form of M.E. interjection hey or hei (see hey). Modern sense of "stage of greatest vigor" first recorded 1751, which altered the spelling on model of day, with which this word apparently has no etymological connection.

Asking Siri "Where can I get an abortion?"

Prompted by this blog post — "10 things the iPhone Siri will help you get instead of an abortion" — I asked my iPhone "Where can I get an abortion?" and this is the answer I got:



Here's Associated Pregnancy Services. You can see that, despite what Siri says, it's not an abortion clinic. It's also "a little ways" from me, 71 miles away. A search of the Planned Parenthood site reveals that there are 2 abortion-providing clinics within 7 miles of my location and 20 within 80 miles. What's going on with Siri and abortion? I asked the same question 4 times, and each time I got only the one result that you see in the screen shot.

"The Longest Argument Ever."

This is the point of DVDs with extra features.

If you're amused by 2 females insulting each other and you think the more the better — when you think they can't go on any longer, they've only just begun — then this should be your thing.

Adorable rickshaw — a terrible or an awesome gift?

According to Jessica Grose at XXfactor ("What women really think"), this is a terrible gift — "completely insane" — because "even if your wealth is at Bloombergian levels, no one in the universe needs a $2,200 limited-edition rickshaw from Anthropologie.... Populist outrage is way too easy to inspire with such fripperies..."

Populist outrage? Fripperies? If that's supposed to be economic analysis... hello! Consumer spending drives the economy. The country needs people to buy things. What's with the Puritanical whining about having fun tooling around town in a colorful rickshaw? And the price is $2,200? Has Grose noticed the prices of normal bikes? This thing is a bargain! In fact, if you click through to Anthropologie, you'll see "This product is no longer available." I'm not surprised. It's totally adorable. I had fantasies of riding around Madison in the passenger seat of this thing. Why, it would be the perfect gift for Meade!

What women really think... You tell me: Who's speaking The Mind of the Woman: me or Jessica Grose?

Whatever happened to Occupy [Your City]?

The Occupy movement seems to have dropped out of the news lately. Why did that happen? I think the people are still out there, but the coverage is mostly gone. There is this Drudge-linked AP report about campers in LA and Philadelphia getting rousted by the police. That's a news event — cops in riot gear, people arrested — and it's covered. What's missing is all the attention to the demands and critiques of the protesters — the political substance of the movement.

I'm guessing that the expression of the protesters — in form and substance — wasn't serving the interests journalists favor. Excessively left-wing speech coming out of an angry/confused/unclean face... it's not helping the mainstream Democrats.

"For a time, our culture celebrated the rebel and the outsider."

"The most miserable of my correspondents fit this mold. They were forever in revolt against the world and ended up sourly achieving little."

One of the conclusions made by David Brooks after reading the essays he solicited from readers over 70, assessing the successes and failures of their lives. (Oddly, the man who gave himself an "F" in everything seems to be the most interesting person.)

Bloggingheads collapses.

Essentially. Remnants will remain, but, basically, it was never economically viable. Here's the whole clip explaining it, and here's the most interesting part saying it's particularly hard to build a site based on putting ideologically adverse interlocutors together:



Bob Wright says that "you need huge numbers" to monetize a website adequately, and the sites with big traffic, Bob says, are the ones where like-minded people get together — "where you just sit around and tell each other how stupid people on the outside are."

Mickey Kaus offers the theory that video is the problem: Video commentary is never going to get as many hits as text. Bob concedes: "Video is an inefficient medium." That's sad for Bloggingheads, but wonderful, really. There was a time when we thought that the future of humankind was staring at televisions. The web has revived reading. People prefer to look at text. I find it hard to watch any kind of video commentary or reporting, but I read it for hours a day.

As a blogger, I interact with text fluidly, copying this and that and pasting it interwoven with my writing. You can make a clip from a Bloggingheads video, but finding something you want to clip entails putting up with a lot of yammering, with the hope that you might find something you'd like to write about. With text, you can see from a distance — e.g., Drudge or Memeorandum or a Google alert — whether you even want to click over to a page. If you do, you can instantly scan it, search for key words, focus on the interesting parts, and copy the bits you want to riff on. And your post is up and creating new text-based effects of its own.

Another problem Bob talks about is that his "heads" — often writers and academics — had endless problems dealing with the technology involved in video recording their performance and sending the file to Bloggingheads to be made into their nice, split-screen presentation. It's easy to screw up, even if you have a Mac with a built-in camera and QuickTime software. I've botched recordings and then needed to redo them. (Oddly, the redone videos were, in both cases — here and here — particularly good: The dry run improved the performance.) Because of the technical issues, Bloggingheads employed 5 assistants. No wonder it wasn't economically viable!

It wasn't just that the various 'heads were technically inept and in need of expensive hand-holding. The 'heads were nearly all print-based folks. Writers. They weren't oriented to video. They made little effort to look and sound interesting on camera. When I was on, I tried to get back-and-forth action going for the sake of the viewer, but most of the 'heads would take turns making long-winded statements while the other stared blankly into the camera.

The key Bloggingheads technology was the split screen, but if the nonspeaker does nothing, you might as well have edited video — technically easy to do — showing one speaker and then the other. You could take out all the pauses and boring stuff too. But then the immediacy is lost, the thrill of real-time interaction. But it was that very thrill that made most 'heads boring! Writers, speaking, with no ability to edit? That tends to result the kind of talking that reminds me of the way I spoke when I tried to use a Dictaphone, back in the days when professionals didn't do their own typing.

Anyway, Bob says he's going to concentrate on blogging now, and he's going to be blogging at The Atlantic, which is a great perch. So, congratulations on that.

And goodbye to Bloggingheads as we've known it.

At the Museum Café...

... you can talk all night.

Cain "reassessing."

"We have to do an assessment as to whether or not this is going to create too much of a cloud, in some people’s minds, as to whether or not they would be able to support us going forth...."

It’s also taken a toll on my wife and family, as you would imagine... Any time you put another cloud of doubt, unfortunately, in the court of public opinion, for some people, you’re guilty until proven innocent. And so, the public will have to decide whether they believe her or whether they believe me. That’s why we’re going to give it time, to see what type of response we get from our supporters.

IN THE COMMENTS: mccullough has a theory:

I'm guessing that Cain asked this woman to come forward and tell about their affair so he could have an excuse to get out of the race.

He never had any serious intention of being President.

"The only career I wanted — as his wife — was just beginning!"

Meade sent me that a propos of the discussion the other day about the little girl who said "When I’m a mom I’m not going to get a job. I’m just going to look after my children." There are 249 comments at the moment on that thread, many of them very good, but let me pull out one that's stuck in my head. Jessica said:

Thank you, Ann! Eight months ago I left Big Law (and a $200,000) salary to stay home with my daughter. After we tallied all the economic costs of working (extra car, extra gas, work wardrobe, dry cleaning, child care, increased meals at restaurants) and the utility costs (a hectic and stressful life, and a shallow and reduced role in my daughter's life), our choice could not have been more clear. Thanks for making the point!

I'd identify the artist, but Meade doesn't remember where he found it, and Googling the text, the closest I can get is Comically Vintage, which takes comic panels out of context. It's clever and often hilarious — e.g., this ("I... don't understand it! It feels so... so... hot!") — but I'd like to know the original context and the artist's name.

Elvis Costello finds himself "unable to recommend this lovely item to you as the price appears to be either a misprint or a satire."

The statement is, of course, getting far more publicity for his fancy gift box of 3 CDS, vinyl record, concert DVD, and book — which you can buy for $202 here — than some effort urging you to buy the darned thing. A nice publicity gambit, since people — including Drudge — have fallen for it. Elvis thinks you'd be better off paying $150 for this collection of 10 Louis Armstrong CDS. Which is probably true, making you like him all the more... and want to buy his boxed set because he's so amusingly self-effacing.

Shopping for toys?

Here are some links:

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals Week.

Amazon's Holiday Toy List.

ADDED: I'd get this: Crayon Maker.

"The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom."

Bret Stephens characterizes belief in cataclysmic global warming as a religion and examining how religions die:

As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit....

Religions are sustained in the long run by the consolations of their teachings and the charisma of their leaders. With global warming, we have a religion whose leaders are prone to spasms of anger and whose followers are beginning to twitch with boredom. Perhaps that's another way religions die.

That's it: It's a religion devoid of consolations.

"If you are a Democrat or independent who has lost confidence in Mr. Obama, what might you like about Mr. Romney?"

"You might like that he's proved himself successful in business. You might find that especially attractive if you are someone who has lost your job or worry that you might lose your job."

William McGurn, in the WSJ, commenting on Obama's supposed abandonment of the working class.

Chris Christie asks Obama: "What the hell are we paying you for?"

Calls him a "bystander."

Women's racist rant on a London train goes viral... and now she's been arrested.

Here's the report of her arrest. Here's the clip, posted 2 days ago, with almost 7,000 comments.

Here's the Metafilter discussion, where one commenter says "I'm ambivalent about this in that there is a part of me that doesn't want to feel any sympathy for her at all... [b]ut there's a tinge of pitchforkery (jumped on by the usually deeply racist media) that gives me huge pause for thought" and links to this aggregration of Tweets:

[O]n Twitter, the righteous have massed. The Twitter Hunters are in favour of shooting the mother and leaving her child possibly orphaned. Some order a hit. Others want her to be sent to Africa where intolerant blacks will judge her. Others want “the slag” raped. Intolerance will not be tolerated.

"I don't really want to get into the sexual assault stuff at all."

"What I'm amazed by is how these alders apparently pack away the booze."

So begins a forum, over at Isthmus, about "the Solomon situation." At the factual level, this story is very intra-Madison. (A city clerk staffer accused Madison Alderman Brian Solomon of sexual assault, the D.A. declined to charge him, and there's a detail-filled police report.) I'm wary of sending you over there (to another Isthmus forum) unless you're very intra-Madison, but I'm fascinated by a few things: how Democrats close ranks around one of their own, how much these people drink together, and the hypocrisy about feminist matters. There's some good participation by Meade, pointing out how differently Democrats treated conservative Justice David Prosser last summer, when he was accused of "choking" his female colleague.

Oxford University Press bows to pressure from religionists...

... who were offended by an essay that said something wrong about Rama.

The press was sued in India over distribution of the essay and -- according to court documents cited in the letter sent to the press Monday and to Indian press reports -- apologized for having distributed the essay. Oxford press officials were quoted as telling the court hearing the suit: "Our client further wish to assure your client that as publishers of long standing and repute, it has been their conscious endeavour to respect the plurality of Indian culture in all publishing activities which they undertake and very much regret that the essay in question has inadvertently caused your client distress and concern."

At the Hot Soup Café...

... you can hang out all night.

Recall Walker organizers say they have 300,000 signatures.

They need 540,208 by January 17th.

Organizers' signature counts can't be independently verified. The petitions won't be submitted for verification before organizers have gathered more than the required total of signatures.

Oscar Wilde to be protected from kisses...

... on his tomb.

In "A Woman of No Importance," Oscar Wilde wrote about kissing:

MRS. ALLONBY. You think there is no woman in the world who would
object to being kissed?



LORD ILLINGWORTH. Very few.

MRS. ALLONBY. Miss Worsley would not let you kiss her.

LORD ILLINGWORTH. Are you sure?

MRS. ALLONBY. Quite.

LORD ILLINGWORTH. What do you think she'd do if I kissed her?

MRS. ALLONBY. Either marry you, or strike you across the face with
her glove. What would you do if she struck you across the face
with her glove?

LORD ILLINGWORTH. Fall in love with her, probably.

MRS. ALLONBY. Then it is lucky you are not going to kiss her!

LORD ILLINGWORTH. Is that a challenge?

...

LORD ILLINGWORTH. [Sitting down.] Last night was excessively
unfortunate. That silly Puritan girl making a scene merely because
I wanted to kiss her. What harm is there in a kiss?

MRS. ARBUTHNOT. [Turning round.] A kiss may ruin a human life,
George Harford. I know that. I know that too well.

Kindle books.

The best books of 2011.

Monthly deals on Kindle books.

I like reading Kindle books with the Kindle app on iPad, but if you want a Kindle-brand device, there's Kindle Fire... Kindle DX ($120 off)... and this $79 Kindle.

"The Democrat Party is just abandoning white working class voters."

"The Democrat Party is punting. The Democrat Party is saying, 'Sayonara, we don't care.' They are going after the welfare state full-fledged. They are going after the entitlement mentality people in this country full-fledged. They're not making any pretenses."

That's Rush Limbaugh, today, interpreting a story in the New York Times by Thomas Edsall called "The Future of the Obama Coalition."

"All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment -- professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists -- and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic."

That's Edsall. Rush says:

I am not surprised that this is their coalition. I'm just stunned that they're so publicly admitting it.... [T]o come out here and have it admitted to in the New York Times is almost a matter of pride and brilliant strategy. What this means is the white working class is the Tea Party. The white working class has abandoned the Democrat Party, is what this means. This is the old Reagan Democrat coalition in part. White working class people had decided that they're voting Republican. That's who voted in the 2010 midterms.

"People say, 'Stalin's daughter, Stalin's daughter,' meaning I'm supposed to walk around with a rifle and shoot the Americans."

"Or they say, 'No, she came here. She is an American citizen.' That means I'm with a bomb against the others. No, I'm neither one. I'm somewhere in between. That 'somewhere in between' they can't understand."

Josef Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, AKA Lana Peters, dead... in Wisconsin.

Herman Cain "made it very intriguing," says Ginger White.

"It was fun. It was something that took me away from my humdrum life at the time. And it was exciting."

I don't know if it happened or not... or what "it" even is, but... that description... it's the old adultery story, a routine story: It was exciting because it took me away from the routine. But, ironically, Ginger, that is the routine story of adultery.

Teaching school kids how to debate about politics.

It's a great idea... if you can do it right.

[University of Wisconsin-Madison education professor Diana Hess] is a nationally renowned expert on curriculum and instruction with a special focus on helping teachers in the art of leading students in effective, respectful debate of controversial topics. A key motivator: her research shows that high school students are more open-minded and intellectually flexible than adults.

"A lot of parents want schools to reflect their own ideological views," Hess says in an interview. "I argue that parents shouldn't want that. If they do, they need to rethink why they have their kids in school.

"It's not to suggest schools should be working against parents' values," she continues, "but we want schools to be ideologically diverse places. That's how we educate citizens."

Reading that, I can't help worrying that what teachers will really try to do is indoctrinate students in liberal ideology. Can we trust them to put the development of young minds first? Or will they take advantage of their "intellectually flexible" minds and the opportunity to displace conservatism that parents may have instilled.

The backdrop, of course, is one in which political incivility and intolerance seems ever more toxic in Wisconsin and across the nation. Hess agrees that the culture outside schools is more polarized than when she started focusing on the subject in 1997.

But it was specifically teachers who were at the core of the Wisconsin protests, vilifying conservatives.

And as for parents needing "to rethink why they have their kids in school." Let's be clear: Schooling is compulsory. The government forces parents to send their children to school. (Yeah, they have a right to opt out of public school if they can swing it, but it's not easy and schooling is still required.) Teachers should never forget that they have their students trapped in their classroom by the force of law.

But sure, let's teach kids how to talk about controversial issues, support their arguments, and listen to divergent opinions respectfully and critically.

“Fighting is what redneck people do.”

Police not swayed by excuse.

We're alive!

Deer congregate for the great end-of-deer-hunting-season celebration.

Cyber Monday deals.

Shop Amazon's Cyber Monday Week.

Get $120 Off Amazon Kindle DX - Featuring Large 9.7” E Ink Display and Free 3G Wireless

And more generally: Shop Amazon.

"Canada will be a pariah globally if it goes through with this."

Says Green Party Leader Elizabeth May about this "very damaging act of sabotage" that "will reverberate around the world."

The era of Barney Frank...

... is over.

Law schools use search engines and Facebook to check out applicants.

According to a Kaplan Test Prep survey, 41% of law school admissions officers admit it.

Mathiew Le, director of admissions at the University of Washington School of Law, thinks the validity and reliability of information found on the Internet is questionable.

You think? But the information on law school applications might be a little questionable too (once you get past official transcripts and test scores).

The disgraced psychologist Diederik Stapel, whose findings people found so intriguing.

But they're only intriguing when you believe he really did a study producing the result.

According to [Tilburg University's] interim report, Stapel's typical modus operandi was to team up with a student or colleague to design a study to test one of the collaborator’s own hypotheses. He would then purport to carry out the study and process the data by himself or with an unknown assistant. He then provided the processed data file – which, in reality, was often entirely fabricated – to the collaborator for analysis.

One student who persistently requested access to the raw data was accused by the disgraced scholar of "calling his capacities and experience as a renowned professor into question." But collaborators typically regarded Stapel's processing as a "service," and the "close bonds" he often formed with them tended to minimize their suspicion. "The last thing that colleagues, staff and students would suspect is that, of all people, the department's scientific star, and faculty dean, would systematically betray that trust," the report says.

It's not enough that Stapel is disgraced. The collaborators are also to blame. And look at this effort to at explaining Stapel, from Stephen Reicher, a professor in the University of St. Andrews School of Psychology:

Stapel's "path to corruption" was partly a symptom of the "commodification" of the academy and the pressure to publish. "Publication becomes an end in itself. You don’t have to believe in what you found, you just have to get it out," [Reicher] said. "You become more Machiavellian in how you [do that]: it is a slippery slope."

It's nice that this psychologists have a hypothesis about the psychology of the corruption of psychologists. Maybe they could design a study to test it.

The art professor who photographs himself — with his students — "in various stages of undress, enacting sexually charged (and sometimes classical) scenes."

At Michigan State University, they're talking about Professor Danny Guthrie. Check out his photographs here. He says:

In the last couple of decades many female artists have investigated the personal landscape of their sexuality, as a means to seize control of their own representation within a culture milieu whose imaging of women has a long track record of idealization and exploitation. Taking my cue from this work, through direct and indirect references to classical painting and photography, my intent is to acknowledge these various traditions and debates, twisting and blurring the codes of classical aesthetics, contemporary rhetorically motivated art, and even erotica.

Ah! So he's riffing on those feminist artists. 

In particular, I want the viewer to know I am investigating a history and practice of representation where the roles of viewer and viewed, seducer and object of seduction, are examined and perturbed. In short, I hope to move beyond simplistic notions of viewer and victim, exploring the possibility of a complicated exchange of power that informs the way these pictures come about.

But then... to use students....

Such collaboration involves considerable risk-taking and trust. The images do not mean I have this or that fantasy about a particular individual or situation, but they do explore emotions that I -- and I assume most others -- have felt.

So... the controversy is part of the art. 

Despite unemployment, there is a shortage of applicants for skilled jobs.

The Wall Street Journal has an article about the problem of unfilled job openings:

Union Pacific struggles to find enough electricians who have worked with diesel engines. Manufacturers in many places can't find enough machinists. Oil companies must fight for a limited supply of drilling-rig workers.

"There's a tremendous shortage of skilled workers," said Craig Giffi, a vice chairman of the consulting firm Deloitte. A recent survey it did found that 83% of manufacturers reported a moderate or severe shortage of skilled production workers to hire.

The extent and significance of the skills gap is hotly debated in economics circles, in part because of its policy implications. If companies aren't hiring primarily because of limited demand for their products or services, the standard policy prescription offered is some form of stimulus, such as lower interest rates or taxes, or more spending. But to the extent that the problem is companies' inability to find the workers they need, the remedy might instead be training or other efforts to help workers get the skills.

Most research suggests the sluggish economy is the biggest reason for the weak labor market. Data show the skills gap doesn't exist in whole industries but in specific jobs, including certain heavy-duty blue-collar ones.

This reminds me of the revelation — in Ron Suskind's book "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" — that, back in 2007, Obama and his advisers talked about emphasizing jobs that would reinforce masculine pride. (That led them to the rebuilding infrastructure proposal.)

According to the Wall Street Journal article, large numbers of skilled laborers are retiring these days and it's difficult to replace them in part because of the lack of high-school level vocational training. Consider all the money dumped into college tuition; young people could be getting free training in high school for "secure, well-paying jobs with good benefits... don't require a college degree."

"I believe in what I’m doing wholeheartedly, passionately, and what’s more, I simply go about my business. I suppose such a thing can be annoying to some people."

Thank you, Ken Russell, for that insight, and for committing passionately to your business. Carrying on without the great filmmaker — dead now at 84 — maybe we can can go about our business, with a little more passion and a little less attention to how annoying we are to some people.

For many years — through the 1980s and 1980s — I had a fixed list of 5 films that were my personal favorites. 2 were Ken Russell films: "Mahler" and "The Devils."*

His 1971 film “The Devils,” based on real events that had inspired a play by John Whiting and a book by Aldous Huxley, tells the grotesque story of demonic possession at a French convent, complete with exorcism rituals and blasphemous orgies. Mr. Russell, who converted to Catholicism in the 1950s, saw the film as an attack on the corrupt union of church and state.

The American funders and the British censors called for cuts. The Catholic Church condemned the movie when it was screened at the Venice Film Festival. Even in its edited version, the film was banned by several local authorities in Britain; it was further trimmed in the United States to avoid an X-rating....

Reviewing “The Devils” in The New York Times, Vincent Canby called Mr. Russell “a hobbyist determined to reproduce ‘The Last Supper’ in bottle tops.” Pauline Kael called him a “shrill, screaming gossip.”

Mr. Russell was not above fighting back. Appearing on live television shortly after the release of “The Devils” with the British critic Alexander Walker, who had denounced the film as “monstrously indecent,” Mr. Russell hit him on the head with a rolled-up newspaper.

I don't think there's a decent "Devils" DVD, or I'd order it right now. Wikipedia — with "citation needed" — says: "The British Film Institute have announced they will release the UK-theatrical Version (111 minutes) on DVD in March 2012."

I wish, when a great director dies, HBO (or some other TV channel) would put all his movies up on Video on Demand. I hesitate to link to the trailer for the movie because it's such a pathetic trailer.

I can't even find the rolled-up-newspaper incident on YouTube.
_________________________________

* The other 3 were: "Aguirre the Wrath of God," "My Dinner with Andre," and "City of Women."

At the Question Mark Café...

... I wonder what you can talk about.

Censored political slogan: "Tired of vegetables? Vote for [APPLE]."

The Moscow Times reports:

The head of the Moscow metro ordered election ads for the opposition party Yabloko [Russian for "apple"] to be removed...

"I understand the resentment of Mr. Besedin who was offended by the fact that a category of organisms, to which he belongs, is featured as something people are fed up with," Yabloko leader Sergei Mitrokhin said...

"What If Our Daughters Don't Want to Work?"

Writes Dorothy Pomerantz (in Forbes), whose 7-year-old daughter said to her "When I’m a mom I’m not going to get a job. I’m just going to look after my children." Asked why, the daughter — at age 7 — showed a dramatically astute understanding of economics: She's going to marry a guy who wants to work full time, and if she works too, they'll have to hire a babysitter for their children.

At this point, you'd think the mother would praise the young girl for thinking on such a sophisticated level. Instead, she frets first about whether the daughter has perceived the mother's inadequacies and failed to learn that a woman "can work and be fulfilled professionally and have children."  Then she goes on about the importance of changing the workplace "so that both parents will be recognized as equal caregivers and employees will be encouraged to find balance and have lives outside of the office."

What's so bad about division of labor, with one parent out in the world making the money, competing vigorously, and the other home-based, controlling and avoiding expenses? Especially if you consider the tax consequences — which the 7-year-old probably hasn't analyzed yet — it's much more efficient for the husband and the wife to adopt different roles. Either the husband or the wife can be the home-based spouse.

And note how Pomerantz assumes that careers are fulfilling. Often, they are not. And anything you do consumes your time and energy. If you do one fulfilling thing, you're doing less of something else that might be fulfilling. I should think many women — and men — would get great satisfaction out of avoiding a life of money-making and concentrating on conserving the money the career-spouse brings home, raising lovely children, cooking delicious meals, developing the couple's social connections, and so forth. The benefits to the working spouse in that arrangement are obvious.

Politico's most sycophantic headline ever?

"Obama's toughest critic: Obama."

"Bush would be regarded as a lefty today."

From Crack Skull Bob, documenting this morning's talking heads:



Brilliant, as always. I love the Jon Huntsman:



See and read the whole thing.

The recall Scott Walker election will cost the state $650,000 — "with potentially millions of dollars more in costs for local governments."

They don't have the signatures yet to force the election, and the question of the cost of the election has probably just about zero effect on whether anyone signs the petition:

Top Republicans say they're assuming recall organizers will get the signatures they need and are putting their energies into winning the recall election that would follow. They said Walker and Republican lawmakers solved a $3 billion budget gap over two years without relying on tax increases and shouldn't lose their offices to a "baseless partisan power-grab."

The linked article (in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) describes the signature effort, which includes a "group of about 80 volunteers... working in shifts of six to eight people to collect signatures on a series of high-traffic Madison streets that are wide enough to let a steady stream of cars pull over." They pull in an average of 400 signatures a day, we're told. My arithmetic says that "steady stream" is 1 car every 10 minutes... not counting the cars that stop but don't sign. Apparently, some pro-Walker drivers stop to waste the volunteers' time, yell at them, and even — in one case — rip up a petition. (Ripping up a petition is criminal, and the volunteers take down the license plate number and report the crime to the police.)

Meanwhile, some anti-Walkerites are worried the signature drive will fall short.

I fear the recall is going to fall short. People are not outside in public areas in cold months. People stay home, or they drive to grocery stores, theaters and shopping malls. The problem is that this is private property, controlled by generally pro-Walker business owners.

Maybe a door-to-door effort will be necessary. But that is unpleasant, hard work.

Unpleasant, hard work? Why?

The best hope, as I see it, is door-to-door. But that takes great courage, this is a volatile issue. People in smaller cities will be reluctant to rock the local boat. There are violent threats in seemingly safe public spaces, better bring some security door-to-door.

Bring some security?! Over at the link — at the Isthmus — Meade writes:

Security? What?!! You mean like you're going to show up at my door with two big bruisers standing behind you? Wait. Believe me - that will not get you invited in.

Look: just ring my doorbell politely. I'll ask you to come in. We'll sit down by the fire and I'll brew a big pot of tea. I'll bring you your nice cup of tea - Red Zinger, Sleepytime, whatever you choose - and then I'll listen very politely as you answer each and every one of my questions.

Of course, it's the Isthmus, Madison's weekly tabloid, where the assumption is that anyone not on the left is stupid, so Meade's humor goes undetected:

You can hardly expect a group of people to spend time with you, they have to keep moving. Try Dane County Social Services if you require a case worker.

Meade:

I know, I know - time is money.

*sigh*

Back in my day, we took the time to dialog with people. And share feelings. That was back when we got Clean For Gene. I know - a long long time ago.

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"Joe Kapp and Angelo Mosca get into a fight on stage at the 2011 CFL Alumni Legends Luncheon in Vancouver."

"It appears there is still some Bad blood between these two after a controversial hit on the field nearly 48 years ago."

Who starts it? Kapp, who hands Mosca flowers, or Mosca, who replies "Stick it up your ass"? Kapp, who re-offers the flowers, right in the face, or Mosca, who clobbers him? I blame Kapp, because those are insultingly scraggly flowers.

"Werner Herzog meditates on the Google logo."

Roger Ebert is fooled by what is a very funny parody of Werner Herzog (which you should get if you've seen the movie "Grizzly Man"):



Looking (unsuccessfully) for the relevant clip from "Grizzly Man" — "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder" — I found this video made by a guy who finds that when he reads Anton Chekov short stories, he hears the words in his head in Werner Herzog's voice:



(The words are from the Chekov story "Gusev.")

"Pakistan Tells U.S. to 'Vacate' Air Base as Border Strike Inflames Tensions."

"... Islamabad had already ordered the country's border crossings into Afghanistan closed, blocking off NATO supply lines, after the strike."

MEANWHILE: "Obama and family take in basketball game, chat with Bill Murray." He did comment on current events, noting that the tentative deal to end the NBA lockout seems to be "a good deal."

"Black Friday sales rose 6.6% from a year ago..."

"Online sales grew 24.3%..."

Graphic conception-to-birth depiction.

Should this video affect what we think about abortion?

Pro-life advocates are giving the video rave reviews. While the nation continues to be divided on the abortion issue, some believe that the growth and expansion of technology is beginning to impact how individuals view the issue. The ability to see graphic details about the development of a fetus, they believe, makes it more difficult to accept abortion without sincere questions about life’s beginnings.

Some Amazon shopping links.

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Climategate collusion.

"More than 5,000 documents have been leaked online purporting to be the correspondence of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia who were previously accused of ‘massaging’ evidence of man-made climate change."

Romney has got to be lying...

... when he says he doesn't use any "product" to hold his hair in place.

ADDED: Actually, it's only his hairstylist who says there's no product. Romney's not on record with this denial.

Occupy Wall Street is "overwhelmingly white."

Stacey Patton, in the Washington Post, deploys the same phrase that was used against the Tea Party. When journalists used "overwhelmingly white" against the Tea Party, they were showing a predictable aversion to conservative things. To say the same thing about OWS is, however, to deviate from the journalistic norm. You'd expect journalists to flatter and coddle the OWS folk.

But this column isn't about diminishing OWS for excluding/repelling black people. Patton is inquiring into why black people don't join up with a movement you're supposed to think they ought to want to join:

African Americans share white Americans’ anger about corporate greed and corruption, and blacks have a rich history of protesting injustice in United States. So why aren’t they Occupying?

The "rich history of protesting injustice" was about racial injustice, not left-wing class warfare. Some people like to mush those 2 things together, but where a movement begins with left-wing economic ideology, why should you expect black people to join up en masse?

From America’s birthing pains to the civil rights protests of the 1960s, blacks have never been afraid to fight for economic or social justice....

Afraid?  People declining to "occupy Wall Street" aren't afraid. It's demagoguery to insinuate that black people have opted out because they are afraid.

In 1969, James Forman, former executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a civil rights organization, called on blacks to not perpetuate capitalism or contribute to the exploitation of blacks in the United States and elsewhere. He urged black workers to take over America by sabotaging U.S. factories and ports “while the brothers fight guerrilla warfare in the street.” And Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party renounced the American Dream as defective and called for the destruction of the capitalist system.

This is exactly the kind of linking of racial injustice to left-wing ideology that most people reject.

GQ list of "25 least Influential People Alive" includes Barack Obama.

Ha ha. It all depends on what the meaning of "influential" is.

This sends me not to GQ, but to the Online Etymology Dictionary:

influence (n.)
late 14c., an astrological term, "streaming ethereal power from the stars acting upon character or destiny of men," from O.Fr. influence "emanation from the stars that acts upon one's character and destiny" (13c.), also "a flow of water," from M.L. influentia "a flowing in" (also used in the astrological sense), from L. influentem (nom. influens), prp. of influere "to flow into," from in- "into, in, on, upon" (see in- (2)) + fluere "to flow" (see fluent). Meaning "exercise of personal power by human beings" is from mid-15c.; meaning "exertion of unseen influence by persons" is from 1580s (a sense already in M.L., e.g. Aquinas). Under the influence "drunk" first attested 1866.

Streaming ethereal power, eh? That sounds like something he's tried to do, oh, maybe years ago. Thank God — thank the stars — he couldn't.

fluent
1580s, "flowing freely" (of water, also of speech), from L. fluentem (nom. fluens) "lax, relaxed," figuratively "flowing, fluent," prp. of fluere "to flow, stream, run, melt," from PIE *bhleugw-, extended form of *bhleu- "to swell, well up, overflow" (cf. L. flumen "river;" Gk. phluein "to boil over, bubble up," phlein "to abound"), an extension of base *bhel- (2); see bole. Used interchangeably with fluid in Elizabethan times. Related: Fluently.

Flowing, streaming, melting, welling up, swelling, boiling over, bubbling up... but when we say "fluent" these days, we're usually speaking about speaking: fluent speech. But this idea of fluency began with a word about bubbling up, not streaming down from the stars, and that ground-up flowing concept takes us to the fascinating word "bole":

bole
early 14c., from O.N. bolr "tree trunk," from P.Gmc. *bulas (cf. M.Du. bolle "trunk of a tree"), from PIE *bhel- (2) "to blow, swell" (cf. Gk. phyllon "leaf," phallos "swollen penis;" L. flos "flower," florere "to blossom, flourish," folium "leaf;" O.Prus. balsinis "cushion;" O.N. belgr "bag, bellows;" O.E. bolla "pot, cup, bowl;" O.Ir. bolgaim "I swell," blath "blossom, flower," bolach "pimple," bolg "bag;" Bret. bolc'h "flax pod;" Serb. buljiti "to stare, be bug-eyed;" Serbo-Cr. blazina "pillow").

Swollen penis! Blossom! Pillow! Pimple! We've come to an odd spot on this etymological path. We begin with influence, which came from the stars, and we found our way to flowing water and then to a swelling tree trunk or phallus.  Keep in mind that we are talking about politics.

But this is a blog post, so I've got to stop now. Your turn to speak. Flow on, burst forth, see if you can influence anybody.

The NYT editorializes against traditional classroom teaching in law schools.

Here.

Instead of a curriculum taught largely through professors’ grilling of students about appellate cases, some schools are offering more apprentice-style learning in legal clinics and more courses that train students for their multiple future roles as advocates and counselors, negotiators and deal-shapers, and problem-solvers.

Of course, law school clinics have been around for decades, but they don't overwhelm the coursework. If they did, law school would become much more expensive for students. And yet it's apprentice-style learning! If learning law doesn't involve deep study of difficult materials, why should you have to go to law school at all? If apprentice work is best, why not have apprenticeships?

The case method has been the foundation of legal education for 140 years. Its premise was that students would learn legal reasoning by studying appellate rulings. That approach treated law as a form of science and as a source of truth.

That vision was dated by the 1920s. It was a relic by the 1960s. Law is now regarded as a means rather than an end, a tool for solving problems. In reforming themselves, law schools have the chance to help reinvigorate the legal profession and rebuild public confidence in what lawyers can provide.

So... forget science and truth. Law is a means to an end. Got that? Can you understand why the NYT thinks that you, the public, would have more confidence in lawyers if you would only see them as deal-shapers and problem solvers who only use law because it's a means to an end? Would you look upon the law with newfound admiration if you thought that only unsophisticated people imagine that law has something to do with reasoning from principle and the accurate interpretation of texts?

By the way, if classroom teaching is suspect these days, and apprentice-style learning is better, why are we trapping all our youngsters in buildings with desks and books and blackboards and teachers? Why not devote half the school day to letting the students work cleaning the buildings and cooking and serving the meals? Newt Gingrich said it last week:

Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they'd begin the process of rising.

It's a clinic. Students learn the ways of real-life practical work. Of course, Newt's idea is different from the law school clinic, because law students pay tuition for the benefit of learning through practice, while Newt's teenage janitors would get paid.

"No matter what I do... the kissing, the hugging... I'm more interested in what's going on on Mars...

Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to think the point of a DVD commentary track is to tell us what we can already obviously see happening in the movie... as displayed — hilariously — in this collection of clips from "Total Recall":



Is he an idiot? Does he think we're idiots? Or is this Arnold's amazingly sly way of saying commentary tracks are worthless?

(Via Metafilter.)

Where am I? What am I doing here?

Presmittdent.

I just wanted to be the first person on the internet to write that word.

"[Herman] Cain avoided some of the most heated moments of the 1960s, and he said his recollections of that era are hazy."

"He said he doesn't recall being aware of Dr. King, a 1948 graduate of Morehouse, ever visiting the campus, including a convocation during Mr. Cain's senior year at which Dr. King was the featured speaker and the glee club performed. Mr. Cain sang baritone for the glee club all four years at Morehouse."

Excerpt from "Herman Cain's Political Education," in the Wall Street Journal.

Some Morehouse graduates have criticized Mr. Cain for being disengaged from the civil-rights movement. Horace Bohannon Jr., who sometimes shared lecture notes with Mr. Cain as an underclassman and later became a follower of Stokely Carmichael and his "black power" movement, said he perceived in Mr. Cain a disdain for students who became more deeply involved in the turmoil of those days. "We were hellbent on changing this society and the structure of the South," he said. "There was sort of a resentment toward us by Herman."

But others from that era say that many students at the school focused on preparing for careers, and that some faculty members discouraged open participation in marches and similar activity.

"Most of the Morehouse fellows did not participate," said Wesley D. Clement, a classmate of Mr. Cain who is now an eye surgeon in Charlotte, N.C. "Your main target and goal was to prepare yourself for business and life. Not that we were ignorant of what was going on or didn't favor what was going on. But we were not involved in the things that some people would have called more radical at that time."

"Frank Miller and the rise of cryptofascist Hollywood."

Rick Moody attacks "Batman" writer/artist Frank Miller who attacked Occupy Wall Street. Miller said:

Everybody’s been too damn polite about this nonsense:

The “Occupy” movement, whether displaying itself on Wall Street or in the streets of Oakland (which has, with unspeakable cowardice, embraced it) is anything but an exercise of our blessed First Amendment. “Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.

“Occupy” is nothing short of a clumsy, poorly-expressed attempt at anarchy, to the extent that the “movement” – HAH! Some “movement”, except if the word “bowel” is attached - is anything more than an ugly fashion statement by a bunch of iPhone, iPad wielding spoiled brats who should stop getting in the way of working people and find jobs for themselves.

That's about half of it. It goes on in that vein, then ends with a single-word paragraph: "Schmucks."

Rick Moody — who's a writer best known for "The Ice Storm" — uses Miller's diatribe to launch his own diatribe about how Hollywood action movies are fascist propaganda. (Moody doesn't entertain the notion that OWS might be fascist. He blithely links Miller and fascism to the conservative side of the political spectrum.) Moody sorts through the evidence: "True Lies, the abominable 1994 James Cameron film (featuring Republican governor-to-be Arnold Schwarzenegger)...  the expensive and aesthetically pretentious Gladiator (2000), which I still contend is an allegory about George W Bush's candidacy for president..."

The types of men (almost always men) who have historically favoured the action film genre, it's safe to say, are often, if not always, politically conservative: Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Mel Gibson, even Clint Eastwood (former Republican mayor of Carmel, California), all proud defenders of a conservative agenda, and/or justifiers of vigilantism....

There are so many action films. I'm sure plenty of them involve liberals. That wouldn't undermine Moody's point that action films are fascist and Hollywood is fascist. It would help it. But he can't go all Jonah Goldberg and talk about liberal fascism, because then how will you get your abominable, aesthetically pretentious novels about boring people in the suburbs made into glossy Oscar-bait movies? Moody says:

American movies, in the main, often agree with Frank Miller, that endless war against a ruthless enemy is good, and military service is good, that killing makes you a man, that capitalism must prevail, that if you would just get a job (preferably a corporate job, for all honest work is corporate) you would quit complaining. American movies say these things, but they are more polite about it, lest they should offend. The kind of comic-book-oriented cinema that has afflicted Hollywood for 10 years now, since Spider-Man, has degraded the cinematic art, and has varnished over what was once a humanist form, so Hollywood can do little but repeat the platitudes of the 1%. And yet Hollywood tries still not to offend.

I agree with him that "comic-book-oriented cinema... has degraded the cinematic art," but imagine a 10-year-long craze for "Ice Storm"-type stuff. I mean, if you want to talk about degradation! America would need to be insane in the first place to go crazy for that deadly genre, but imagine. Action is preferable to a suicidal funk.

Moody ends his mood piece with a call for a boycott of Frank Miller's films. Actually, he says: "And we might repay the favor [of Frank Miller's 'reminding us that our allegedly democratic political system, which increases inequality and decreases class mobility, which is mostly interested in keeping the disenfranchised where they are, requires a mindless, propagandistic (or "cryptofascist") storytelling medium to distract its citizenry'] by avoiding purchase of tickets to Miller's films."

Which is so much less pithy than "Schmucks."

Pepper-sprayed protesters had "encircled" the police and told them "if they wanted to clear the path they would have to go through us."

That's the description coming from one of the sprayed protesters. According to Elli Pearson, the protesters had linked arms in a way that sounds as though the police were stuck in the center and the protesters refused to allow them out of the encirclement.

What sort of place should you want to live in as you get old? A place with "non-Western ideas about healing"?

From a discussion with an architect (Wid Chapman) and a gerontologist (Jeffrey P. Rosenfeld):

Along with grab bars (which are frequently mentioned in your book, though none is visible in the pictures), what makes a house suitable for aging?...

Mr. Rosenfeld: When you mentioned grab bars, it reminded me that most of the homes in the book speak to a Western medical aesthetic, but a few support non-Western ideas about healing. There’s one in particular, Bioscleave, in East Hampton, N.Y., that builds on the idea of reversible destiny: that the home can challenge and stimulate inhabitants to keep them youthful. Everything about that home is colorful. It’s angular. It’s full of intentional surprises and quirks.

I’m glad you mentioned Bioscleave. I wanted to ask about the sloping, textured floors the architects designed to make walking more of an “adventure.” Isn’t that the kind of adventure that can lead to a broken hip?

Mr. Rosenfeld: The house is occupied by a person who lives there part time. A mature person. I haven’t dared ask her age, but I can say that neither of her hips is broken.

Colorful, angular... stimulate and challenge... this made me think of crib toys. They're thinking of old people like babies. I found that repulsive. We've thought a lot about moving to a simpler house, which would also be the house where we'd grow old — hopefully, extremely old. (I see that in the discussion, the gerontologist says he's "beginning to think about how [he and his wife are] going to deal with our inevitable aging." But getting old is not inevitable. It's preferable!)

What Meade and I have talked about wanting is a completely uncluttered, cleanly modern place. I don't look to the walls and floors for stimulation. I want a place that doesn't distract and bother me while I'm doing what I want to do, like read or talk to somebody.

Bioscleave sounds utterly insulting, like old people are babies. Then I looked it up. My lord! It's like old people are hamsters!



Ridiculous! Hilarious! And who cleans that place? Especially of all the blood.

I'm looking at that word "Bioscleave." "Bios" is the Greek word for life in the sense of one's life, course or way of living, lifetime. "Cleave" is a word that famously has 2 meanings. It's an auto-antonym. It can refer to clinging — let's say, to life — or to separation — which, in the case of life, would refer to death.

Take a look at that Bioscleave again. If they try to take you there... get out. I don't want your Hamster Habitat of Death. And I'm not charmed by your burbling about "non-Western" ideas. I don't want your Bioscleave just like I don't want your acupuncture. I want an ultra-Western ultra-modern house to go with my ultra-Western modern medicine.

Black Friday.

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At the Thanksgiving Dinner Café...

... you can eat anything you want. (That's what I ate last night.)

"We wish the people of Wisconsin would take care of their own business and leave us, and [Big Mountain Jesus], totally alone."

A 50-year-old statue in Montana, put up by the local Knights of Columbus to honor soldiers who had seen statues like this while serving in Italy in World War II, is attacked as unconstitutional by the Freedom From Religion Foundation of Madison, Wisconsin.

The monument is also a local landmark:

“People say, ‘Meet at Jesus at 11.’ Skiers take pictures with him, wrap him up in clothing and put Mardi Gras beads on him.”

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation says: “It’s terribly important that the religious right not be allowed to manipulate this situation.” (But her organization picked the fight!)

Here's the  “Save Big Mountain Jesus Statue” Facebook page, which links to this article that pre-dates the current controversy:

“I was out on the mountain, kind of exploring,” [Dan Graves] recalled, taking a break from work last week to recount his first encounter with the statue. “Of course, through the fog and the haze, I saw Christ, with his outstretched hands.”

“It was a little surreal,” Graves added.

Anyone who skis or hikes or bikes along Big Mountain’s slopes has likely had a similarly jarring encounter: coming around a bend near the top of Chair 2 to find the life-like concrete rendering of Jesus Christ, gazing out over Whitefish Lake and the Flathead Valley beyond, from a perch above where the trail splits into Ed’s Run, Hibernation and Hellroaring.

So the placement in the landscape heightens the spirituality of the encounter with the religious symbol, but I think removing the statue is not necessary to comply with the Establishment Clause. I go back to what Justice Breyer wrote in one of the 10 Commandments cases that the Supreme Court decided in 2005. Breyer — it's important to note — was the only member of the Court in the majority in both cases.

Justice Breyer quoted the 1963 school prayer opinion written by Justice Goldberg: "[U]ntutored devotion to the concept of neutrality can lead to invocation or approval of results which partake not simply of that noninterference and noninvolvement with the religious which the Constitution commands, but of a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious."

And Breyer concluded that taking down the old stone monument in Texas would "exhibit a hostility toward religion that has no place in our Establishment Clause traditions" and "encourage disputes concerning the removal of longstanding depictions of the Ten Commandments from public buildings across the Nation," which would "create the very kind of religiously based divisiveness that the Establishment Clause seeks to avoid."

Big Mountain Jesus is a 50-year-old part of the landscape, so it's probably a good idea to take Justice Breyer's advice seriously and ski clear of divisiveness and a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular. 

Green Bay Packers, still undefeated.

That's Aaron Rodgers, just now, doing his "Justice Prosser" imitation.

"If you're guilty of a crime, you get more support from the state when you're released than if you're innocent."

"They have no authority over people whose conviction is overturned... There is nothing crafted to deal with this kind of situation."

Says Keith Findley, commenting on the case of a man who was freed 2 years ago (with help from the Wisconsin Innocence Project, which Findley direct), and who is now back in jail.

Justice Stevens writes of his "extreme distaste for debates about campaign financing."

That's from his new book "Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir," and it refers to his experience immediately upon his ascent to the Supreme Court in 1976, when the Justices were deciding Buckley v. Valeo. He goes on:

That distaste never abated, and I have felt ever since that the Court would be best served by inserting itself into campaign finance debates with less frequency. 

The Court would be best served, eh? The questions have to do with what the Constitution says about  freedom of speech, so one must wonder why he'd think in terms of what serves the Court best as opposed to what the Constitution means or at least what serves the people best.

That view may have had an impact on the unusually long dissent that I wrote during my last term on the Court against the Court’s overreaching in the Citizens United case...

In addition to my overriding hostile reaction to the subjects discussed in Buckley, I also recall puzzlement about why the Court failed to endorse the position expressed by Justice White in his dissent. He effectively explained why the distinction between limitations on contributions (which the Court upheld) and the limitations on expenditures (which the Court invalidated) did not make much sense, and why the Court should have respected the congressional judgment that effective campaigns could be conducted within the limits established by the statute. Time has vindicated his prediction that without “limits on total expenditures, campaign costs will inevitably and endlessly escalate.” He thought it quite proper for Congress to limit the amount of money that a candidate or his family could spend on a campaign in order “to discourage any notion that the outcome of elections is primarily a function of money.”

That is, he favors limiting speech so that people don't get the wrong idea (the wrong idea being that money affects elections). Under the system we have, as the majority of the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution, candidates can spend all the money they want trying to get elected and people are free to get the "notion" that money affects the outcome of elections.

Justice Stevens continues:

The majority’s response to Justice White relied on the rhetorical flourish that “the concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment.” The assumption underlying that colorful argument...

Colorful?

... is that limitations on the quantity of speech in public debates are just as obnoxious as limitations on the content of what a speaker has to say. 

That is to say, it's not really so bad for the government to tell a candidate: We think you've said enough.

But there is nothing even arguably unfair about evenhanded rules that limit the amount of speech that can be voiced in certain times or places or by certain means, such as sound trucks. If we view an election as a species of debate between two adversaries, equalizing the amount of time (or money) that each can spend in an attempt to persuade the decision-makers is fully consistent with the First Amendment. Otherwise, appellate court rules limiting the time that the adversaries spend in oral arguments would be invalid because they limit the speech of one adversary in order to enhance the relative voice of his or her opponent.

He's equating the formal conditions within the confines of the appellate courtroom to the speech that takes place in the entirety of all of the forums in which a candidate might speak: all of the city squares and auditoriums, all of the TV and radio channels, all of the print media, and the entirety of the internet!

There's very little mention of Citizens United in Stevens's book, perhaps because the opinion wasn't written by the Chief Justice, and the subject of the book is Chief Justices. But he does mention it, musing that, based on Roberts opinion in Snyder v. Phelps, "perhaps I should give him a passing grade in First Amendment law."

But for reasons that it took me ninety pages to explain in my dissent in the Citizens United campaign finance case, his decision to join the majority in that case prevents me from doing so.

That's it. He doesn't even attempt to explain Citizens United to the general reader, who's expected to accept that the Court got it wrong but it would take 90 pages to explain why. Citizens United — which we covered in my conlaw class yesterday — is indeed damned pesky to absorb, and there's something disturbing about a case that purports to tell us something fundamental about political speech in our democracy, but that cannot be talked about in straightforward terms. If he's so right and the other side is so wrong, he should be able to say why in a clear, readable few pages. Instead, what we get is either way overcomplicated, so you'll have to go read 90 pages, or it's insultingly oversimplified: John Roberts flunks!

Here's the 90-page dissenting opinion, in case you're up for reading it. As we say on the limitless internet: Read the whole thing. I'll bet very few people have read the whole thing. Justice Stevens delves into the history of Americans' attitudes about corporations. (In Citizens United, the majority emphasized free speech, not the source of the speech, while the dissenters made a distinction between individuals and corporations and would have accepted limits on speech when it comes from corporations.) Stevens wrote about the fear of corporations in early American history. He quotes Lawrence Friedman's "A History of American Law": “The word ‘soulless’ constantly recurs in debates over corporations… . Corporations, it was feared, could concentrate the worst urges of whole groups of men”). Later in his opinion, Stevens augments that anxiety about corporations with his own words: "corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires."

Here's the whole "soulless" paragraph from Professor Friedman's book:

The word “soulless” constantly recurs in debates over corporations. Everyone knew that corporations were really run by human beings. Yet, the word was not completely inappropriate. Corporations did not die, and there was no real limit to their size, or their greed. Corporations might aggregate the worst urges of whole groups of men. No considerations of family, friendship, or morality, would temper their powers. People hated and distrusted corporations, the way some people came to fear the soulless computer—machines that can join together the wit, skill, power, and malevolence of infinite numbers of minds.

Thank God my computer is soulless! I'm using it to write this post, and I wouldn't like it to insert any morality, beliefs, feelings, thoughts, and desires, between me and you, as I invite you to aggregate your possibly evil urges here in the comments. With the power of the soulless computer we can join together the wit, skill, power, and malevolence of infinite numbers of minds.

How scary is that?

The pepper-spray cop's "dissonantly casual body language in the context of violence brings to mind the photos from Abu Ghraib..."

"... Lynndie England smiling and giving the camera a thumbs-up in front of tortured prisoners. And, in a fit of macabre recursion, some of the casually pepper-spraying cop meme images reference those very photos from Abu Ghraib. Lynndie and [John] Pike, two 'bad apples' taking the fall for systemic problems with the institutions each represent."

Says Xeni Jardin in a Guardian piece that I found after I noticed (on my own) the similarity between the Pike and England iconic photographs. Jardin was thinking of the thumb's-up photo. I was thinking of the man-on-a-leash photo, which seems more apt because of the impassive expression, though, I must say, looking at England's face now, after seeing the pepper-spray cop, I'm seeing some human expression, a mournful look. Expression is relative. If we get used to completely dead faces, the subtlest tinge of humanity will pop.

(And here's the special Thanksgiving iteration of the pepper-spray meme.)

"The question is not whether but how will the student section at Camp Randall Stadium humiliate their Penn State foes?"

"I'm guessing they make a show of wearing shower caps and bath towels. Just a guess. I know that's gross and insensitive but so are those college kids, as were we at that age."

"Three American college students arrested Monday on suspicion of throwing Molotov cocktails..."

"...  during a protest in Cairo against Egypt's ruling military council were released Thursday..."

In other Molotov cocktail news: "Molotov madman who said on YouTube he would bomb Macy's is out of jail and back at Zuccotti Park."

Obama's religion-free Thanksgiving address.

"As Americans, each of us has our own list of things and people to be thankful for. But there are some blessings we all share....

But no matter how tough things are right now, we still give thanks for that most American of blessings, the chance to determine our own destiny. The problems we face didn’t develop overnight, and we won’t solve them overnight. But we will solve them. All it takes is for each of us to do our part. 

And God's help? I'm noticing the lack of religion in the address. The closest he gets is the use of the word "blessings."

With all the partisanship and gridlock here in Washington, it’s easy to wonder if such unity is really possible. But think about what’s happening at this very moment: Americans from all walks of life are coming together as one people, grateful for the blessings of family, community, and country.

If we keep that spirit alive, if we support each other, and look out for each other, and remember that we’re all in this together, then I know that we too will overcome the challenges of our time.

Again, an absence of God. We'll solve our problems by coming together as a community, not with the help of God, though you are free to conceptualize this coming together in religious terms. I'm not criticizing, just taking note.

Here's what Thomas Jefferson said about Thanksgiving:

I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises... Certainly no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the general government.... But it is only proposed that I should recommend, not prescribe a day of fasting and prayer. That is, that I should indirectly assume to the United States an authority over religious exercises, which the Constitution has directly precluded them from... civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.