The Crack Emcee doesn't buy Romney's "claim to humility, and that condescending-as-hell 'sad eyes' routine..."

"... with the slightly tilted head and wan grin, is as grating today as ever - four years of that is going to be excruciating - as are the cutaways to his wife, who has the eyes of a bald eagle deciding what chunk of flesh to tear next."

I'm extracting a description that made me laugh from what is more or less a positive review of Romney's speech.

"According to my Facebook profile, I'm doing about as well as their stock price..."

"... my "outreach" is -80%, whatever that, and 'outreach,' means."

"Some of the stuff in [Sarah Jessica Parker's] house was shabby chic, and let’s just say, Anna [Wintour] wanted less shabby, and more chic."

This is completely mundane to me. Of course, a house that a real family lives in is different from the norm for a glamorous lunch party. Whether Anna Wintour or some less divine stylist is doing the redoing, it must be redone.

But it became hilarious when Rush Limbaugh — who had never even heard the term "shabby chic" — tried to get his mind around it.

Have you ever heard of the term "shabby chic"?  That is how the New York Post describes Sarah Jessica Parker's house. The decor is shabby chic.  I've never heard it, either.  I don't know what it is.  But they had... It's in the Post. Apparently, people were over there Windexing doorknobs.  This place is made out to be an absolute pigsty that Anna Wintour had to go into and clean. No, I'm telling you that's how it's written.  There are people cleaning the doorknobs, washing the windows, taking a piano upstairs, moving furniture out, moving furniture in. 

Etc. etc. After the break, he's got a definition of the term — it's from Wikipedia, though he doesn't say so — and he's quoting and riffing:

"Shabby chic is a form of interior design where furniture and furnishings are either chosen" because they look old and worn out, with "signs of wear and tear." Or if they're new items, they're made to look that way. Flaking paint, dents, little chunks taken out of the wood table in the kitchen. I have pictures of some of this stuff.  It looks like you'd run into it in one of Hatfield or McCoy's cabins.  At least to me. "At the same time, a soft, opulent, yet cottage-style decor, often with a feminine feel is emphasized to differentiate it from genuine period decor."

Anyway, Anna Wintour didn't like it. She got it out of there.  It's not even her house.  It's Sarah Jessica Parker's place.  Anna Wintour shows up, and she probably said, "I'm not going in there.  I am not setting foot in this place! I'm not having my picture taken in a place like this."  So the story goes on. She moved the piano upstairs. They were spray painting stuff, washing doorknobs inside and out.  They're making the place sound like a pigsty. 

Limbaugh obviously wants it to be that Parker is a big old slob, but "shabby chic" is a decorating term that has nothing to do with things being filthy or even messy. And "one of Hatfield or McCoy's cabins"... that's a way to say "hillbillies" without saying "hillbillies." Limbaugh wants to say: this is the case of the biggest fashionista in the room calling another fashionista a hillbilly. The material is not there, because "shabby chic" is a technical decorating term. (My Google image search tells me it's very heavy on the color white.) But Limbaugh nevertheless follows his original impulse, that Wintour and her people insulted Parker by calling her home "shabby."

IN THE COMMENTS: I say: "Note to commenters: References to Parker's resemblance to a horse have been done, done, and overdone. Come up with something new." And Crack Emcee says: "Glad to oblige," and — quoting me "The material is not there, because 'shabby chic' is a technical decorating term. (My Google image search tells me it's very heavy on the color white.)" — says "Oh, that shit is HEAVY alright." Indeed!

ADDED: An antidote to the heavy at Crack's link. By the way, we're repainting our house, and we're repainting black and white. What we need to survive... together alive...

"Crack's Top Ten Suggestions For What Meadhouse Can Do To Keep Me Entertained."

The Crack Emcee was really inspired by my comment "Remember, Meade and I need to do some road trips for your entertainment, and it's a big deal to do that customized Sprinter to suit the sensitivities of an old lady professor-blogger."

Note: The "Clarence Thomas" tag is not a mistake.

Judge Posner includes a photograph of Bob Marley in an opinion and sloughs off worries about copyright.

The case was about dreadlocks (and the prison officials who cut them off), and Posner said his use of the photo fit the "fair use" doctrine:

"It's not as if we're selling our opinions in competition with a photographer... Using the photo in a judicial opinion couldn't conceivably be hurting the copyright holder."

Posner did not give the photographer credit, though it's a commercial photographer who uses Getty Images to collect fees. But Posner just grabbed the photo from the internet. He says "With the Internet, it's extraordinarily easy to find photographs of anything," so there's a good chance he encountered the photograph on a website that didn't name the photographer.

Posner seems to think it's quite fun to toss photographs into judicial opinions. It reminds me of the way some judges like to quote song lyrics or lines from movies. Blogging, I always feel that it's more questionable to use an image that someone else created than it is to cut and paste a block of text, but why should that be? I quote blocks of text all the time, but I remember, when I started blogging, worrying quite a bit about whether it was acceptable to copy that much text, so I'm relieved to hear a judge take a broad view of fair use and set an example.

Here's an opinion where Posner includes a picture of an ostrich with its head in the sand and a picture of (presumably) a lawyer with his head in the sand as he criticizes a lawyer who failed to cite a case that should have been cited. The lawyer filed a grievance against Posner for funning with him like that. The grievance was dismissed, and Posner offers the classic nonapology "I'm sorry he was upset by it."

There's more going on here than copyright. There's also the idea that judges are supposed to be neutral and sober. They wield power against real individuals, and it's a power that's supposed to come solely from law, not from any will of the judge's own. In that light, when the judge displays that he's enjoying the experience or playing to the crowd, entertaining the audience, we may fear that he's doing something wrong. This is why most judicial opinions are so godawful tedious, as the judges all sound alike and phrase everything in the dullest possible way. And there are no pictures!

This reminds me. We lawprofs have to make students read these texts, and we use casebooks that have edited the tediously verbose writings down, but the casebooks are still ponderous — in more ways that one. I'd like to take iBooks Author — an amusing new app — throw all the cases I assign into it. (All the judicial opinions are in the public domain, so there's no copyright issue at all.) Edit the cases down, summarize some things, and embed some pictures in a Posneresque way.

For example, take Griswold v. Connecticut (the old birth control case that flummoxed Mitt Romney in the debate the other day). There's a point in Justice Harlan's concurring opinion where he writes:

The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment stands, in my opinion, on its own bottom.

That's just begging for a photograph grabbed from the internet.

Should Althouse use iBooks Author to write a Posneresquely amusing Constitutional Law casebook?
	No. It would be undignified and unserious and thus not usable in a real law school class.
	Yes. Students (and other readers) will love it.
	No. It won't be that good. It might be annoying. And Althouse has better things to spend time on.
	Yes. I'd like to see Althouse's creative energy drained away in this idiotic project.
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IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt said:

Posner is The Crack Emcee of judicial opinions?

"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.

"You're Gonna Pay."

Everyone's talking about the anthem of the ages.

ADDED: The Crack Emcee is talking about it. And not in a nice way.

"But a marriage is between two people and – this is going to come as a shock to some women..."

" ... you’re not in it."

Should people who don't know Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin talk about their marriage?
	No. A marriage exists within a sacred closed circle of 2.
	No. We don't know enough to have an intelligent opinion.
	No. Leaving them alone will help them avoid divorce and divorce is bad for society.
	Yes. It's an interesting subject to speculate about even without full information.
	Yes. A spouse needs to hear from others in order to make good decisions.
	Yes. A marriage is intermeshed with society and that makes a high-profile marriage a public issue.
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Crack plays Instapundit...

... with Instapundit. There's a funny but NSFW image at the link. BTW, I think Crack is wrong about why Glenn doesn't link to him. I think Glenn's mind and Crack's mind are just far enough out of sync that... well, maybe one day, one of them, all of a sudden will realize he's on the wrong page or on the right page but the wrong note, and he's got to get in sync with the other one to understand what’s happening in this country. And it will be blogged.

ADDED: Crack, could you take a look at this?

AND: The link in the "ADDED" section was wrong for many hours yesterday, I apologize. Corrected.

ALSO: Instapundit acknowledges that his site was sending out malware vibes yesterday. Sorry I passed that along. I kept noticing a nasty window popping up when I tried to go to his site, but it took me a long time to notice that I'd entered it here.

"There Goes Your Corpse Again."

A cool little recording by The Deadly Snakes. Amusing use of the "Be My Baby" riff. (You can buy the whole album here.) I'd never heard of this group, but I like this kind of music, which tends to play on the "Underground Garage" channel on satellite radio.

Cue Crack Emcee to come in and tell me this kind of music sucks. (Hey, did you see he got Blogger to restore his blog?)

"Let's play dress up. Let's pretend... these are special people..."

"... That's what the royal family is. It's a huge game of pretend."

Jerry Seinfeld, asked about Kate and William's wedding, embedded chez Crack Emcee, whose blog Blogger has flagged as offensive, which means you now have to consent to be exposed to Crack (unless he comes over here, as he is wont to do, and exposes himself.)

"Unlike probably everyone else watching Charlie Sheen these days, we think this 'train wreck' (as some are calling it) is probably the best we've seen him..."

"... and (having mutual friends) we applaud him mightily for it. He looks and sounds more like his father than ever. His nothing-can-take-me-down attitude, in the face of this wimpy, middle class, wet rag nanny state finger-wagging opinion is winning. This is a man, owning his actions and insisting everyone else come clean and take responsibility for theirs as well.... [A]ll too often, we see too many powerful beta males in this country... We've become a cautious, conformist, inoffensive, non-risk taking, arrogant, lying bunch of NewAge pussies who think if any woman... says she or others don't approve, then some form of public contrition and apology is called for. Well, screw that. Neither she, or the public, are Charlie Sheen's mother and even if his parents disapprove, he's a grown-assed man who refuses to be a part of whatever milquetoast existence the rest of you think is good for gaining social approval from a worthless feminized culture-killing clique. He didn't ask for it, doesn't need it, and isn't angling for it. He's a man. He's rich. And he's free."

That's Crack Emcee, taking a macho look at Charlie Sheen.

It's funny, I was just saying to Meade that people don't rant against "conformity" anymore — not like they did in the 50s and 60s. What got me going wasn't Charlie Sheen. It was my Bloggingheads with Timothy Noah, which, for various reasons, made me think about the way liberals, including liberal media folk, talk to each other and feel emotional rewards for saying what they all say back and forth to each other. They become so immersed in this feeling of belonging that they don't even hear the things that are not the things that they've been saying back and forth to each other. And my question is: Why does that feel so good? Why doesn't that immersion feel like drowning? Why don't you want to surface into the air and be free — to think about everything, from any perspective, and to find out for yourself what is true and what is good? You are a human individual: Don't you want that?

"I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States..."

"... against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."

That's the wording of the oath of office taken by members of Congress, used yesterday as Chief Justice John Roberts "presided over a closed-door ceremony in the offices of the soon-to-be House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, to swear in his staff a day before Republicans are scheduled to take control of the chamber."

I'm linking to the NYT, where the first comment is "did he cry?" Boehner, famously, cries easily, and I think the oath actually is the sort of thing that would move him to tears. Read it. Seriously. Does it reach you in a deep place that gives rise to tears? If not, why not?

How many members of Congress take that oath with mental reservation and purpose of evasion and don't even feel a twinge of conscience when they say those words? How many members of Congress take that oath and it's just words — written more than a hundred years ago — and they don't even have a spark of awareness of what they are promising to do, so the purpose of evasion doesn't even flicker across a synapse?

IN THE COMMENTS: The Crack Emcee says:

And, after all that, you're surprised how I talk about marriage?

Strangely, the news that Russ Feingold will teach a course at Marquette Law School got me looking back at a post I wrote in 2005 about a lecture he gave at Wisconsin Law School, and I see that the lecture focused on the congressional oath and I brought up the issue of the marital oath:

I would never have said this out loud, but I couldn't help thinking how interesting it was that Feingold shaped his whole lecture around the sanctity of the oath, when just a few days ago he announced that he was getting a divorce, his second. Was I the only one who thought how strange it was to hear a man piously invoke a passionate fidelity to an oath when he had -- so conspicuously -- gone back on the marriage oath twice?\

But I like Senator Feingold. I do think he's a good man. I don't presume to know what happens to people in their marriages, and I am divorced myself. Nevertheless, he could have discussed his devotion to the Constitution from some perspective other than the fact that he'd sworn an oath. Taking an oath to the Constitution, after all, is not the strongest reason to support it.

"Last but not least, I'd like to thank Droopy (Robert Wright) for bringing us bloggingheads so we can actually see who we've been reading."

"It does tell us something to be able to see these awful people. Except for, of course, Mickey Kaus, there's no one I could see being a friend of mine, offline, and - after seeing them here - would ever want to read again. Bloggingheads is providing a valuable service in that way."

Hey! What about me?!!

"Religion doesn't do policy. All my decisions were based on policy and so they should be..."

"... and you may disagree with those decisions but they were made because I genuinely believed them to be right."

Said Tony Blair, as if a religious person can think about what what he believes is right without religion being part of the idea of what is right. That Blair blur happened in a debate with Christopher Hitchens, who asked:

"Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs, to appeal to our fear and to our guilt — is it good for the world?...

"To terrify children with the image of hell ... to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?...

In the end, the audience got to vote on who won the debate, and Hitchens got 68% — 68% of those who would go to a debate — in Toronto — about whether or not religion is a force for the good.

(Via Crack Emcee — "Kick Ass: You Believers Are Little Kim Jong-Ils.")

11.

11!

"I wanted to express something in the outer world that I feel inside... We seem to have lost that understanding of the whole of nature and the universe as a living entity."

Prince Charles feels a sense of purpose.

Is that really so terrible?

"Chakra Con."

"It took these latest revelations of sexual impropriety to get anyone to question whether Al Gore - a man who, for years, made one bogus, scare-mongering thing after another - is someone trustworthy enough for us to have listened to. Again: how does that happen?"

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....

"Gah! I'd rather hear the Insane Clown Posse attempting to sing KISS song backwards in Chinese."

The Crack Emcee has strong opinions about music and he does not want to hear "that arrogant adulterous asshat hypocrite douchebag."

And read Crack's blog. He's always ranting hilariously about something. And the pictures are unreal.