"Was the problem that had no name possibly the lack of Wi-Fi?"

Noreen Malone gets a grip on what Betty Friedan — on behalf of suburban women in general — was bellyaching about in "The Feminine Mystique." She's responding to a piece by Emily Bazelon, which we talked about in a long comments thread yesterday. Malone says:

I grew up with a whip-smart mom who stayed at home with us, and so I always approach discussions like these with a bit of a chip on my shoulder, alert to any slights whatsoever against the choices and life mission of someone I so love and admire — even if I don’t plan to make precisely the same ones. But more of it is probably generational. For recession-scarred twentysomethings, staying at home or taking menial jobs is involuntary, but not because social mores dictate that women can’t achieve: It’s because so few of us, regardless of gender, have gotten hired at jobs Friedan might consider fulfilling...

I’m sure Betty wouldn’t be happy to see all the expensively educated young women of Brooklyn, where I live, spending their free time taking floral-arranging classes and knitting and fussily setting up their living rooms just so....

What's so wrong about paying close attention to the details of the beauty of your environment? Fussy... there's a word. When is intense, attentive work deemed fussy? This is a word that has long been used against women and against gay men. Is a person supposed to be interested in something other than what he or she finds interesting? Why? Who says what the proper foci of interest are in this world? Some people are more sensitive to the visual specifics of their environment. It's not as if the people who aren't spend their lives plumbing the meaning of the universe. Perhaps the interior decorator is closer to the core of what truly matters than the corporate lawyer. 

Now, I've derailed onto the subject of the word "fussy." I just had a long conversation with Meade about his associations with the word. Knowing nothing of the context in which I'd encountered the word, he associated it with objects — specifically drawings and handmade pottery — that are inferior because they have been overworked. I prompted him to think of calling a person fussy, and he said "a baby." Time to check the Oxford English Dictionary (which I can't link to). The first meaning applies to "persons, their habits and actions": "Fond of fuss, moving and acting with fuss; habitually busy about trifles." Examples:

1831  T. Moore Mem. (1854) VI. 201   Lucky for him that he is so little of an irritable or fussy nature.
1850   Fraser's Mag. 41 163   She is fussy and fidgetty (if there be such words).

The third meaning relates to things: "Of dress, etc.: Full of petty details. Also, in dressmaking language, without depreciatory implication; With many flounces, puffs, pleats, etc."

1858   J. G. Holland Titcomb's Lett. i. 92   Let every garment be well fitted.. fussy in no point....
1896   Westm. Gaz. 7 May 3/1   The fussy sunshade is much beflounced with lace-edged chiffon.

Flounces, puffs... Hear the homophobic echoes. Anyway, the etymology of fussy is obvious. It's just a -y added to fuss. What's the etymology of fuss?

Perhaps echoic of the sound of something sputtering or bubbling, or expressive of the action of ‘puffing and blowing’. 

The 2 oldest examples for fuss:

1701   G. Farquhar Sir Harry Wildair iii. i. 21   Ah! I hate these Congregation-women. There's such a fuss and such a clutter about their Devotion.
c1730   Ld. Lansdowne Wild Boar's Def. in Wks. (1732) I. 140   With your Humanity you keep a Fuss; But are in truth worse brutes than all of us.

And now, I am fully off track, looking for the full text of Lord Landsdowne's very cool poem "The Wild Boar's Defense," which I'm going to type out in full, because I'm only seeing images of book pages and I want to make it more available. The wild boar wants to be free:

A boar, who had enjoy'd a happy reign
For many a year, and fed on many a man,
Call'd to account, softening his savage eyes,
Thus suppliant pleads his cause before he dies:

"For what am I condemned? My crime's no more
To eat a man than yours to eat a boar.
We seek not you, but take what chance provides,
Nature and mere necessity our guides:
You murder us in sport, then dish us up
For drunken feasts, a relish for the cup.
We lengthen not our meals: but you much feast;
Gorge till your bellies burst — pray who's the beast?
With your humanity you keep a fuss,
But are in truth worse brutes than all of us.
We prey not on our kind; but you, dear brother,
Most beastly of all beasts, devour each other:
Kings worry kings, neighbour with neighbour strives,
Fathers and sons, friends, brothers, husbands, wives,
By fraud or force, by poison, sword, or gun,
Destroy each other, every mother's son!"

My Wi-Fi took me there, in my unfussy riffing this morning. I suppose I could tie it all up somehow. Husbands, wives... destroy each other.

Who's the beast?

"My name is Emily Bazelon. I’m a feminist. I’ve never read Betty Friedan’s book—until now."

Says Emily Bazelon (on the occasion of the 50-year anniversary of "The Feminine Mystique").

I'd never read the book myself until recently. My reason for not reading it was that I'd regarded it as something that addressed the troubles of my parents' generation. I went to college in 1969, when everyone was reading "Sexual Politics" and "The Female Eunuch." "The Feminine Mystique" seemed really old fashioned — about June Cleaver and her cohort.

Here's Bazelon:

[W]hat hit me was Betty’s howl of frustration. It’s primal, and you feel its desperate force on almost every page. God, did she feel trapped among the slipcovers of the suburbs and in the pages of the women’s magazines she wrote for, where big ideas and questions were entirely unwelcome. The only way to escape was to pulverize the image of the Happy Housewife Heroine who is the title of Chapter 2. Betty’s fiercest critique in this book is of the “mistaken choice” she thinks traditional gender roles forced middle-class women and their husbands to make....

What made me dislike the book — when I finally read it — was that Freidan was not in the role of the housewives she purported to understand so well. She was in the role of writing for women's magazines. She didn't like the limited topics that were the stuff of that kind of magazine. She makes an assumption that women who buy a magazine are only interested in the topics covered by that magazine. But that's absurd! If you bought a magazine about cooking/childcare/fashion, that wouldn't mean you aren't interested in politics or science or whatever else is supposed to be more important. You might have other magazines — or books — for that.

Why the assumption? It might be frustrating for a journalist who's interested in politics to crank out material about topics she doesn't care about, but it was wrong to project those frustrations onto the unknown women who bought the magazines for their own purposes and used the information in those magazines in their individual private lives — perhaps to make a nice dinner efficiently so there would be time to read a good book in the extra time one can make in a day when you don't have a job. The notion that A Job belongs at the center of everyone's life is a huge scam, and the blithe rejection of the 1-earner marriage was an amazing, tragic shift in American culture. The equality of women — the ambition and the fulfilment of women — did not demand that we all get a job.

When Roe v. Wade came out, Justice Ginsburg believed the motivation behind it was fighting overpopulation.

Emily Bazelon gets clarification directly from the Justice about a remark she made in 2009 that seemed perhaps to favor abortion for population control. Justice Ginsburg reframed her point this way:

“I was surprised that the court went as far as it did in Roe v. Wade, and I did think that with the Medicaid reimbursement cases down the road that perhaps the court was thinking it did want more women to have access to reproductive choice. At the time, there was a concern about too many people inhabiting our planet. There was an organization called Zero Population Growth.... In the press, there were articles about the danger of crowding our planet. So there was at the time of Roe v. Wade considerable concern about overpopulation.”

That is, she intuited the Court's motivation, which she says she was wrong about — as she observed in the old remark and repeats now — because the Supreme Court later, in 1980, upheld the political decision to exclude Medicaid funding for abortion, in Harris v. McRae. Ginsburg's 2009 quote was:

[Roe v. Wade] surprised me. Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.

These remarks conflate the Supreme Court and Congress. It could have been that concern about overpopulation motivated the Court in Roe, as it pushed back the states' power to ban abortion and put abortion in a relatively positive light as something women had a right to do. That created the political space within which Congress might have opted to fund abortions for poor women. All that happened in Harris v. McRae was acceptance of the political reality that did ensue, the decision not to pay for abortions. The Supreme Court failed to predict the political fallout from Roe. The Court could still, at the time of Roe, have believed that it was enabling Congress to undertake population-control policy. When Harris v. McRae arose, the Court had new information and a new question to answer. It declined to extend Roe to mean that Congress was obligated to fund abortions as part of Medicaid.

Bazelon blithely concludes:

The history lesson is this: There was a feminist women’s rights argument for legal abortion in the 1970s, which the Supreme Court accepted in Roe v. Wade. And there was a separate and distinct argument about preventing population growth by being pro-abortion, made by groups like Zero Population Growth, which the court did not accept, not in Roe and not later.

The women's rights argument is presentable and defensible. Abortion for population control was and is too ugly — and too close to racism — for comfort. What is uncomfortable is suppressed. In that sense the denial is admirable. But Bazelon's instruction on the "history lesson" is too pat and too sanitized to be taken uncritically.

"Have I mentioned that David Plotz constantly tells me that Paul Ryan bears a resemblance to my husband?"

Says Emily Bazelon, as she tries to cast Paul Ryan as another Sarah Palin. He's "a cute young thing with bright blue eyes." Good looks... must be like Sarah Palin...??? And her husband... says one Plotz. (To plotz is to faint from excitement.)

Of course, Ryan's deep grip of the specifics is not at all Palin-like. No one will be worrying about whether he knows how far away Russia is, even though he has no foreign policy experience, or can handling the prep for his debate with Joe Biden. Come to think of it, odds are that he will ice Biden, right? 

It's so hard to say what you want to say! Oh, well, my husband's really cute!

Hey, imagine if Sarah Palin had written a post as flighty and disconnected as Bazelon's.

How did the jury find Dharun Ravi guilty of "bias intimidation"?

Ravi had spied on his Rutgers College roommate, Tyler Clementi, who proceeded to jump off the George Washington Bridge:

“It was pretty hard to think about Tyler, because he wasn’t present to give his thoughts,” said Kashad Leverett, 20, of South Amboy, N.J., after he and 11 other jurors delivered a guilty verdict on all charges, including invasion of privacy and bias intimidation, on Friday. “But in the evidence that was provided, it showed that he believed he was being intimidated because of his sexual orientation.”...

Clementi believed. But how does that reflect on Ravi?

The bias intimidation charges were the most difficult to agree upon, jurors said. And what tipped the scales there, they said, was that Mr. Ravi had discussed spying on Mr. Clementi not just once, but repeatedly, even inviting his online friends to watch Mr. Clementi and the other man in a second encounter.

That, said Ms. Audet, is what elevated the case from one of teenagers behaving cruelly and insensitively to a crime.

“To attempt a second time, is what changed my mind,” she said. “A reasonable person would have closed it and ended it there, not tweeted about it.”

Cruel and unreasonable, but why is it bias intimidation?

An important component of the bias intimidation charges was whether Mr. Clementi felt bullied. Jurors said he left ample evidence that he did: he complained to his resident assistant, he went online to request a room change, he saved screen shots of Mr. Ravi’s more offensive online posts, and he viewed his roommate’s Twitter feed 38 times in the two days before he killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge.

“We’ll never know exactly what he was feeling,” Ms. Audet said. “I can only assume.”

Obviously, Clementi could not be cross-examined.

Mr. Ravi’s lawyer pointed to apologetic texts that Mr. Ravi sent Mr. Clementi, in which he said he had no problem with homosexuality and even had a close friend who was gay....

Mr. Leverett, a student and Twitter user himself, was unmoved. “I can’t speak for everyone on the jury, but me, personally, I believe it was something where he realized what he did was wrong, and it was just too late to amend for what he did.”

Of the apology, Ms. Audet said: “My first impression was to believe what he said. Then, as we started reading stuff, we found things in there that I interpreted more as covering. The friend he claimed was a good friend in high school, that person was never presented as a defense witness. If that person had come forward and said, ‘Hey, we’ve been good friends, and he knows I’m gay and he doesn’t have a problem with it,’ that might have swayed me in the other direction.”

That sounds like Ravi was found guilty because he couldn't disprove a motivation that was inferred based on Clementi's subjective perception. And yet the defense was deprived of much of the evidence of Clementi's subjective state of mind. Emily Bazelon writes:

The suicide note he left behind, along with three Word documents with telltale names—“Gah.docx,” “sorry.docx,” and “Why is everything so painful.docx”—weren’t turned over to the defense or made public. (According to the judge, they weren’t directly relevant to the case against Ravi.)

Not directly relevant? But indirection, coming from Clementi, is what convicted Ravi.

In an earlier article, before the conviction, Bazelon wrote:

If I was on that jury..., I’d want to know what he has to say for himself all these months later. How should we think about the spying from his point of view? Ravi has said he was concerned about M.B.’s scruffy appearance because he’d left his iPad in his room. Maybe, but it’s pretty unconvincing that’s the entire explanation. He was clearly both freaked out and titillated by the idea that gay sex was going on in his bedroom. And if that’s an understandable reaction from an 18-year-old, I’d like to hear Ravi parse out why in his own words.

That sounds like a presumption of guilt, based on a failure of the defendant to testify. Do the liberal values about the rights of the accused evaporate when there's an opportunity to take a stand against homophobia?

Bazelon doesn't mention it, but the "scruffy" M.B. was a 32-year-old man. I could see being freaked out that a scruffy, much older man kept coming to your dorm room to have sex with your roommate, whether the sex was gay or straight. It wasn't just gay sex in the abstract, but a particular sexual situation, involving a specific person who really did not belong in Ravi's private space.

And what did that that specific person, M.B., have to do with the suicide, the suicide that inflamed the jury with pity? Shouldn't the jury have read the suicide note and “Gah.docx,” “sorry.docx,” and “Why is everything so painful.docx”? But the judge excluded that evidence.

Appeal.

Obama's position on the Guantanamo detainees will forever be to have no position.

Obviously, the man is trying to get reelected, but it's so absurd to pose as if standing on principle, when you're not willing to say or do anything at all. Here's the news story about Obama — from his vacation outpost in Hawaii — signing a military spending bill and saying "I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists.”

The White House had said that the legislation could lead to an improper military role in overseeing detention and court proceedings and could infringe on the president’s authority in dealing with terrorism suspects. But it said that Mr. Obama could interpret the statute in a way that would preserve his authority.

The president, for example, said that he would never authorize the indefinite military detention of American citizens, because “doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a nation.” 

But isn't that what he's been doing with his authority — holding the detainees indefinitely? Or is he somehow not authorizing it. It's just happening, because he's not affirmatively acting to end the indefinite detention. Is passivity and wishy-washiness consistent with "our most important traditions and values as a nation"? Or is emitting pompous blather like "our most important traditions and values as a nation" the really important tradition he's upholding?

He also said he would reject a “rigid across-the-board requirement” that suspects be tried in military courts rather than civilian courts.

So, you don't seem to have a plan to try the detainees, and you won't reject the notion of military courts or embrace the lofty but impractical idea of civilian courts. You just reject a "rigid across-the-board requirement" of military courts. It's fine to want to preserve the presidential discretion here, but it's another example of Obama's policy of no policy. He does not want to be pinned down about having to do anything at all, which makes it look like he's going to hold the detainees without trial indefinitely — i.e., until the end of his presidency — and he wants to be able to do that without admitting that it's an actual policy of his. Because it's not. It "would break with our most important traditions and values as a nation." So he can't be doing that. But he is, but he's not authorizing doing that. So he won't defend it. In fact, he wants to be in a position to rail against the very policy that he is... not authorizing... just following.

You mean "leading from behind," as they say?

No, no, that would be too bold. Leading from behind! Oh, no, not me. I'm just biding my time, out here on my island, waiting for my limited term to expire, while you folks over there on your island bide your time, indefinitely....

ADDED: Let's go back to January 27, 2009, one week into the Obama presidency. I'm talking with Slate's Emily Bazelon, and she's certain Obama is about to close Guantanamo, and I feel that I can detect in his statements that he's giving a sop to people like her and he's not going to do anything:



Now, it's 3 years later. Obama's first and probably only presidential term is rolling to a close, and he hasn't done anything with the detainees. (And if you're about to slam me in the comments, once again, for voting for Obama, let me say: Imagine if John McCain had become President and Guantanamo were still open, how thoroughly steamed Emily and her ilk would be now.)

"On Justice Samuel Alito: Conservatives Can Have Empathy Too!"

The Wall Street Journal law blog acknowledges this Emily Bazelon piece.

This reminds me of what I wrote (in a NYT op-ed) when Bush first nominated Alito. Describing 2 cases in which he "displayed a sensitivity to the needs of adherents of minority religions" that was missing from the Supreme Court decision that, as a lower court judge, he had to apply, I went on to say:

Yes, chances are that a Justice Alito will please conservatives more often than liberals.... Still, [liberals] should give serious study to his record; they may discover that there are varieties of judicial conservatives, just as there are varieties of political conservatives, and that Samuel Alito is not Antonin Scalia.

Speaking of conservatives and empathy, Rush Limbaugh monologued about that last week:

By itself, what does sitting around caring about something accomplish? Now, if it motivates you to do something that's an entirely different thing. I find that most people, particularly people on the left, want plaudits, they want gold stars, they think of themselves as superior people just because they care....

I don't worry about things that I have no control over. I used to, big time. I can't tell you the shackles I had on myself worrying about all kinds of stuff. I was worrying about what might happen next year if I did this or did that. There was nothing more paralyzing in my life than to worry about stuff I had no control over. And in the process, I actually limited what I could control.

Obama orders Justice Department to drop its defense of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Politico reports:

“After careful consideration, including a review of my recommendation, the president has concluded that given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny,” [Attorney General Eric] Holder said in a statement.

“The president has also concluded that Section 3 of DOMA, as applied to legally married same-sex couples, fails to meet that standard and is therefore unconstitutional. Given that conclusion, the president has instructed the department not to defend the statute in such cases. I fully concur with the president’s determination.”

(Last fall, I was very critical of Obama's willingness to defend DOMA in the courts.)

ADDED: Watch me — last October — criticize Obama for fighting against gay rights in the courts:



Hmmm. October... Had to win some votes back then.

"Barack Obama is the most partisan politician since Richard Nixon."

Says Victor Davis Hanson, explaining why call for "civility" is bogus:

His brief Senate record, his health-care partisanship of 2009, his snickering amid audience applause after the “inadvertent” middle-fingering of Hillary Clinton, and his polarizing metaphorical speech (e.g., knives, guns, kicking ass, getting angry, getting in their face, hostage takers, trigger fingers, tearing up) all attest to that.

That Obama is a postracial mellifluent Chicago politician does not mean that he is not a Chicago politician. That he blasts the “fat cats,” the “stupidly” acting police, and the limb-lopping surgeons, or that his attorney general calls the American people “cowards,” is typical, not aberrant. For 2012, President Obama will have raised $1 billion in cash. He knows from 2008 (“cling to guns or religion,” “typical white person,” “gun to a knife fight”) that his own emotionalism and polarization both earn him cash and create the “them” against “us” (minorities, youth, gays, women) binaries that might draw attention away from an agenda that a majority simply does not want. Obama has always used polarizing politics, coupled with calls for bipartisanship, to great effect, and he surely — as we just saw again in October 2010 (“punish,” “backseat,” “enemies”) — cannot stop now....

Indeed, hours after President Obama’s calls for a new landscape of civility, Rep. Steven Cohen (D., Tenn.) was comparing Republican opponents of the health-care legislation to Nazis from the House floor, while Slate published a screed by Emily Bazelon on  “Why I Loathe My Connecticut Senator,” with serial expressions of how she “loathed” and “despised” Sen. Joe Lieberman.

I talk about the appellate argument in the Prop 8 case with Emily Bazelon.

The argument in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals took place yesterday, and Emily and I gabbed about it this morning for Bloggingheads.

I was in a fisking mood over the weekend.

I had to go after:

1. Robert Gibbs defending Obama's stance on Don't Ask Don't Tell.

2. Maureen Dowd attempting to portray Sharron Angle as a "mean girl."

3. Bill Maher trashing white men who love women like Sarah Palin.

4. Bill Maher portraying Christine O'Donnell as an irritating screwball.

5. Emily Bazelon tarring Christian fundamentalists with homophobia.

Here's where I defend Christian fundamentalists from the charge that they are homophobic bullies.

In case you didn't watch the whole diavlog, you might want to see this 3-minute segment near the end:

"They're All Bullies and Whores!"

Ha! Emily Bazelon and I talk about the election, the gay rights cases, the gender card, what you can say about women, Christian fundamentalism and anti-gay harassment, and all the complexity that doesn't fit into your ideological templates. Feast your eyes and ears on 28 minutes of bullies and whores:

I'm in the NYT.

Here.

Emily Bazelon talks with me on Bloggingheads — about the Kagan nomination.

The topics the bhtv editors identify are:

The enigma of Elena Kagan
Will she be able to win over the court’s conservatives?
The Supreme Court as “women’s work”
Six Catholics, three Jews, zero Protestants
Ann defends Kagan on military recruiting
Predictions for the confirmation hearings

But there's much more. Try it. Only 20 minutes.

I'm slightly frazzled... but I'm doing this thing anyway.

Bloggingheads, with Emily Bazelon, talking about a Supreme Court without a Protestant, why Obama should pick an out-and-proud liberal, the causal connection between bullies and suicide, and those terrible Tea Partiers.

Emily Bazelon and Dana Goldstein talk about Lori Gottlieb's "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough."

I'm embedding this because I can't embed the diavlog that I did last week with Gottlieb herself. "Marry Him" is the book I was talking about back here, where I responded strongly to someone who said that books based on Atlantic magazine articles aren't worth much more than the original article. (Here's the original "Marry Him!" article.) And I said:

I just paid $25+ for a 300+-page book that was an expansion of an article from The Atlantic. I did that for a Bloggingheads diavlog, and — you'll see when it's up — the author scolded me for skimming. Did that open the door for me to scold her for padding? Readers and writers — we all have our tactics and must guard our own interests. You pad. I skim. Or I take a look in the bookstore and put that thing right back on the pile. Unless I'm scheduled for a diavlog. In which case, I tough it out. Up to a point. Then I just scream. On my blog.

But you won't see when it's up, because it will never be up, because Gottlieb's side of the diavlog disappeared somehow. Technical difficulties, I'm told. All that work of skimming 300 pages and talking for 47 minutes.

The book is written in a breezy, chatty style, but I couldn't get a conversation rolling at all. When I asked questions based on what was in the book, she mostly said read the book, it's in the book, etc. etc. I was trying to get past the actual contents of the book and to understand her motivation for writing it. Did she really want to get married? Would she really settle for Mr. Good Enough? If so, why wasn't she married yet? Was she really giving women good advice?

Gottlieb relied heavily on social science surveys about how married people are happier, but married people are the people who got married. You can't say, then: The people who aren't married would be happier if they got married too. They are the people who couldn't find what they felt they wanted or couldn't find real love in their own hearts or inspire it in others or had a greater skepticism about the value of relationships or who put a lot of stock in personal freedom or any number of other things. It was irrational to extrapolate that marriage would make them happy too. Even assuming those surveys about who's happy are sound (or even say married women are happier than single women).

ADDED: Look, some NYT reporter spent an evening with Lori Gottlieb and got just about nothing interesting out of her. Here, you can see me in real time, trying to get Lori Gottlieb to talk about something less trivial than how tall or short people are. This is late in the conversation, and I am struggling to remain decently gracious:



AND: Let me give you 2 more of my clips. In this one, I'm trying to get at Gottlieb's complaint about feminism (and getting nowhere):



In this clip, I invite Gottlieb to talk about divorce.



Could you tell what the other end of the conversation was like? At first, Gottlieb didn't understand what I was saying. She thought I said that she'd already written something called "Divorce Him." (I wonder if "good listener" is one of the factors we should toss out in our search for Mr. Good Enough.) When she got my question, which was whether she would also advise married women to divorce men who had stopped being good enough, she was clear that the answer was yes. She said "You're not dead" very sarcastically. The idea that marriage is a permanent commitment seemed not to be ping-ponging around anywhere in her head. You stay with that man to the extent that he serves your interests.

I coin a phrase — "Find Your Todd Palin" — in this new Bloggingheads, with Emily Bazelon.

Topics:

Why did Scott Brown win?
Health care bill: too extreme/not extreme enough
Brown’s keys to victory: sexiness and a pickup truck
As wives become the breadwinners, what happens to sex?
Ann’s husband chimes in on powerful women finding mates
Retroactive matchmaking: Elizabeth Edwards and Todd Palin

Ann's husband chimes in... ha ha...

"Obama admits Guantanamo won't close by Jan. deadline."

WaPo headline.

Well, then, I have won the bet I made with Emily Bazelon last January:



And I'm glad Guantanamo will be kept open. It's needed and useful. But Obama is being weaselly about it:

"People, I think understandably, are fearful after a lot of years where they were told that Guantanamo was critical to keep terrorists out," Obama said. Closing the facility, he added, is "also just technically hard."

Obama came to office pledging to shut a detainee facility that had become a symbol for prisoner abuse at the hands of American officials. He signed orders to shut the military prison by January 2010, but White House officials quickly encountered resistance from members of Congress opposed to moving prisoners to U.S. soil and from other countries they had hoped would accept detainees.

It's Bush's fault for making people fearful, don't you know? It's not that he's actually come to see the value of the place.

There was also a tangle of legal issues involving what to do with suspected terrorists who had been tortured in prison in a way that jeopardized the integrity of the evidence against them, or who for other reasons could not stand trial.

Last week, the administration announced that it will try five Guantanamo prisoners -- including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-declared mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- in federal court in New York. The fate of dozens of other detainees remains in limbo.

So, presumably, this new announcement was timed to follow last week's announcement that KSM would be tried in NYC. Maybe what came first was the realization that Guantanamo would need to remain open, and then something was needed to placate those who put their hope in Obama that he would close the place. Oh, what will we do? I've got an idea! Let's put on a show! Let's try KSM in NYC!

"Well, remember, this was the speed diavlog. You should have heard the long version, the one that killed my computer. That was hot."

My response to the commenter at Bloggingheads who said, "I must admit, when I saw the headline, 'Ann and Emily remember their bad-girl days,' I got my hopes up."

We had to start over. The first 12 seconds of Take 2:



And in the high-speed do-over, we gave only 1 minute and 38 seconds to our bad-girl days:



As for the long version, it died along with my computer, and I'm not really sure what I divulged. It certainly was not, as one dorky commenter at Bloggingheads guessed, that I "drank a lot of alcohol in college." My response to that libel:

Really? Drinking was not at all the practice of the day in my little corner of the University of Michigan, known as East Quad. We mocked squares elsewhere on campus who drank and went to football games and the sort of thing you kids today might think of as wild. We thought of you as "straights."

***

I disclaim responsibility for anything I'm writing here as I'm recovering from toe surgery and — legally! — high on opiates.