"Obama plans to 'listen,' not present Mideast peace plan: Kerry."

Don't present. Vote present.

Actually, I'm being unfair. SOS Kerry didn't use the old Obama-hater's buzzword "present." He said "sort of plunk":

"We're not going to go and sort of plunk a plan down and tell everybody what they have to do... I want to consult and the president wants to listen."

The insinuation is that those who present actual plans are clods.

Remember how Kerry, when running for President, was always supposed to be the man of nuance, in whose delicate hands we should place the troubles of all of the world? It was supposedly so important to snatch the power out of the clumsy paws of George Bush.

UPDATE: Saying hello to Secretary Nuance: "Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday fired a rocket into Israel for the first time since a cease-fire reached three months ago ended an Israeli offensive against the militant Islamist group Hamas...."

Robin Givhan is sick of hearing about Michelle Obama's clothes.

Robin Givhan. If the robin is the first sign of spring, Robin Givhan being sick of the topic of Michelle's clothes is the last sign that the Obamas are about to depart the scene.
Ah, but wait. It's more nuanced:

To be clear, there is still plenty to be written about the first lady and her wardrobe choices....

Mrs. Obama’s lean and sculpted arms were admired, not simply from an aesthetic perspective but because they acknowledged that she was from a generation of post-Title IX women who....

For a lot of women in their 30s and beyond, who often felt estranged from the fashion industry, Mrs. Obama provided encouragement and reassurance....

But somewhere along the way, the attention lavished on the first lady’s wardrobe became indiscriminate....

[T]he flood of Joan Rivers-style verbiage about her day-to-day wardrobe has overwhelmed those nuanced conversations. Fashion is fun. But the nonstop attention to Mrs. Obama’s wardrobe isn’t fun; it’s exhausting. It’s too much. And it’s pointless....

Givhan has much more to say about the deep meaning of the way Michelle Obama looks. But the peons simply must hush up.

49% of likely voters want "strict legal interpretation" of the Constitution.

And only 21% think that's what we're getting. 60% think the Supreme Court is giving us the so-called "living" version of the document.

Male voters are more inclined to favor strict interpretation of the Constitution, while female voters prefer more legal flexibility and tend to see it as a living document. Most voters under 40 see the Constitution as a living document; most older voters think the Constitution should be strictly interpreted.

Why are women like younger folk and men like older folk? Strict/flexible — what's that about?

What, exactly, makes some people express beliefs in the value of flexibility — or is it "living" — and others in the value of strictness? It would be simplistic to think that women (and young people) are themselves loose and flexible, while men (and old people) are strict and inflexible, because we learn perhaps only what feelings superficially attract them and how they like to think about themselves. I'm tough and neutral/I'm nuanced and merciful. So you say.

Prompted by this forum discussion at Isthmus the other day, I (and Meade) took a quickie Myers-Briggs test. Interestingly, Meade and I got the same result. But I think the test is a bit absurd. The questions test how you think about yourself, not what you really are. Even if we were to accept that there are 4 dimensions of personality and only 2 ways to go within each dimension, you couldn't know where you really are. For example, in the 3d of the 4 dimensions, you can be "thinking" or "feeling." But I suspect the folks who ended up with "thinking" were at least as emotional in response to the relevant questions as those who got pegged as "feeling." What makes a person say yes to "You trust reason rather than feeling"?

"Reason" sounds right... but what drives you to answer the way you think is right? How soberly and clearly have you analyzed where you have put your trust — really, as you live your life? Putting the question that way makes me think the more reason-based person is more likely to answer no to "You trust reason rather than feeling" than the person in the grip of impulsive emotion. Of course, I'm a reason guy! Yeah, and you believe in the strict legal interpretation of the Constitution. So you say. But can I watch you do it? Can I look into your brain, Justice Scalia, and see the reason-gears turn independently of emotion?

"And is it really good policy for Santorum to fill young adults with suspicions about higher learning..."

"... which rightly exists to challenge — in a healthy sense — what parents and maybe pastors have poured into them?" asks Frank Bruni.

If their beliefs survive that, then those beliefs can be seen as genuinely earned and are probably all the stronger for it. Santorum’s did. He went not only to college but also to two graduate schools, getting an M.B.A. from one and a law degree from the other.

But to listen to him talk about universities is to get the sense that he doesn’t trust others to emerge from such an obstacle course of unsavory influences as uncorrupted as he did. For safety’s sake, he’ll bless a little ignorance.

He’ll also massage facts. In explaining his Kennedy-induced nausea, he claimed that the former president had said that people of faith had no place in public life. What Kennedy asserted was infinitely more nuanced than that. He said people of all faiths were welcomed, so long as they weren’t slaves to their creeds.

Apparently, Santorum used bulimia against those ideas that the academics attempted to pour into him. Others digest what they've been fed.

Speaking of pukeworthy: "infinitely more nuanced." What is it about nuance that liberals love so much? And infinitely more nuanced? Ironically, that's quite crude. Infinitely? Kennedy had oodles and oodles of nuance. Or is it that Santorum, in Bruni's book, has zero nuance, so anyone with any nuance at all has infinitely more than Santorum?

And I love the way Bruni modifies his idea of challenging family and religious values with the phrase "in a healthy sense." There's no assurance of healthfulness!

And if challenge is so good, college students who were raised in liberal families with liberal or nonexistent religions are being horribly deprived!

"Wound licking is an instinctive response in humans and many other animals to an injury."

"Dogs, cats, rodents and primates all lick wounds. The enzyme, lysozyme which is found in many tissues is what is the aid for the wounds.... Wound licking can clean wounds and accelerate healing, so it can be thought of as a form of animal self-medication (zoopharmacognosy)."

Wow! What a great Wikipedia entry. I can't excerpt all the cool stuff, but here's a taste (if you know what I mean)(links within the passage omitted):

In an unusual case, an Oregon teacher was reprimanded after licking blood from wounds on a track team member's knee, a football player's arm, and a high school student's hand. An Oregon public health officer commented that "We do know that animals lick their own wounds, and it may be that saliva has some healing properties. But my very strong recommendation is that you confine yourself to licking your own wounds."...

The Saint Magdalena de Pazzi is said to have cured a nun of sores and scabs in 1589 by licking her limbs.... Pliny the Elder in his Natural History reported that a fasting woman's saliva is an effective cure for bloodshot eyes....

There are potential health hazards in wound licking due to infection risk... The practice of metzitzah during circumcision is controversial as it can transmit the herpes virus to the infant....

Dog saliva has been said by many cultures to have curative powers in people. "Langue de chien, langue de médecin" is a French saying meaning "A dog's tongue is a doctor's tongue"... appears in a 13th century manuscript....

To "lick your wounds" means to "to withdraw temporarily while recovering from a defeat."

The phrase was spoken by Antony in John Dryden's 17th century play All for Love:

“They look on us at distance, and, like curs
Scaped from the lion's paws, they bay far off
And lick their wounds, and faintly threaten war.”

Licked any wounds lately?

The word "law" only appears once on the NYT list of "100 Notable Books of 2011."

Maybe the New York Times is missing some great law books, but this is some kind of read on something that ought to matter to legal academics and other law folk.

What's the one book? It's "Rights Gone Wrong/How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality," by Richard Thompson Ford. Here's the NYT review of it by Jeffrey Rosen:

In “Rights Gone Wrong,” Richard Thompson Ford, a law professor at Stanford, argues that both the progressive left and the colorblind right are guilty of the same error: defining discrimination too abstractly and condemning it too categorically, with similarly perverse results....

Ford does not offer an equivocal, cautious, middle-of-the-road critique of civil rights law....

Ford ends his stimulating polemic by arguing for a more “nuanced” approach to civil rights. He calls for the return of thoughtful, pragmatic judges who will take the time to distinguish justified from unjustified acts of discrimination, rejecting selfish or perverse claims of “rights gone wrong” while protecting people from truly invidious indignities.

Noted.

"Is Barack Obama headed for some sort of meltdown?"

The Anchoress asks:

Is he clinging to his podium and teleprompters because he has lost his protective shields and does not trust himself without them? The starry-eyed adulation of the press has simmered down to a mere gaze of hopefulness and longing, accompanied by the barest of criticisms, and Obama translates that as the press being “against” him.

She's analyzing a lot of those photos at the WH Flickr page:

... I keep seeing these awful White House approved photos, and they daily jar me because they seem to reveal the president in very unflattering, troubling ways, like the work of an obsessed and Obama-hating photoshop expert.

They are mostly unflattering when seen by people who don't like Obama — admittedly, that's an increasing group. People who like him look at those pics and think they are wonderful.

And this reminds me of something I was saying the other day about liberals. Liberals — I'm generalizing — are so engulfed in their belief that they are the good people, the smart people, that they forget to step back and look at things from the perspective of people who don't agree with them.

Because of that they present not just photographs but ideas in ways that provide raw material for their critics. For example, when Obama enthused about the "blue pill"...



... he made it easy for Sarah Palin to make the devastating "death panel" charge.

Now, you might want to say that conservatives do the same thing — and cite Sarah Palin's "death panels" as an example. But the 2 things are really quite different. Obama thought he was being smart and reasonable and persuasive and imagined everyone feeling lifted up by the enlightenment he bestowed. But Sarah Palin — I think — knew she was inciting the other side. Sarah-haters would grab that stink bomb and run with it. They'd assume that she is an idiot who'd said something terribly stupid. Plunging forward with arguments they believed were — as usual — thoroughly smart and good, they'd propagate a phrase and thereby hurt themselves. Which is what happened.

It's ironic that liberals are the ones who like to say they are nuanced. But it's the opposite of nuanced to be so convinced of the goodness and the smartness of your words and your very being. It's simplistic and cartoonish. And dangerous. It leaves you open to attack when you don't anticipate how your words (and pictures) will appear to your opponents. And then when those opponents take your pretty pictures and words and turn them against you, oh, how it must hurt.

Poor Obama!

"The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle."

That sentence, written by Sarah Palin, is howlingly awful. Written by Barack Obama? Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Ha ha. That takes me back to last week... a very short snippet, forgive me:



(Click to continue if you want to hear me trash the liberal's self-love over nuance.)

AND: You know, I'll admit it: After I found out Obama wrote that sentence, it started looking better to me. I could feel this happening and I paid attention to the readjustment going on in my brain. Unlike some people, I am not inhibited about revealing it. It's what I'm interested in: how people think, how mental processes work, how opinions take shape. That, and not adhering to an ideology or supporting a party, is what I think about when I write about politics. I'm different from politicos like Goldberg, and I know that this difference can be very disturbing to them. I've got a hypothesis that when I've gotten into fights in the blogosphere and in the real world — like here — it's been because of this different orientation of mine. Oh, why won't liberals celebrate this difference? Just kidding. I know it drives them up a wall. It drives conservatives and libertarians up the wall too. It's disarmingly unpolitical.

Sullyboating, Swiftboating, sandals, sticks, stickage, and strawberries.

Sullyboating. It's not Swiftboating.

Let's see if I get Sullivan's argument - McCain's memory of a cross in the dirt is not a story about his courage or in his military record, and he may or may not have invented it in 2000 for political purposes; therefore, critics are not engaging in "Swiftboating" when they pick at it.

(Via Instapundit.)

Sullivan has tried to justify himself by displaying a campaign ad — an effective one — and noting that, there, we see the cross drawn in the dirt with a stick, but McCain has said the guard drew the cross with his sandal.

Could the campaign confirm that the ad itself is visually incompatible with the Salter story? Or were they unconcerned with such detail, assuming no one would be foolish enough to question a war hero's unconfirmable anecdote - and eager merely to show the deeper (and true) point that McCain relied on God to survive the unimaginable?

This incident is not part of McCain's military service - certainly not one he thought was in any way salient in his first 12,000 word account of his experience. It is part of his 2000 and 2008 campaigns and the religious mythology they coopted in order to appeal to a very specific audience. If a blogger cannot raise factual questions about a campaign ad and a campaign narrative, he's not really worth much.

My response:

1. If Sullivan's distinction bothers you, maybe you just don't have the appreciation for nuance that it takes to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate these days.

2. I think most people would laugh at the argument that a particular type of attack is legitimate so that bloggers will be worth more. What if the National Enquirer justified its publication of sneak pictures of a candidate in his hotel room on the theory that otherwise supermarket tabloids are not really worth much?

3. Wouldn't it be easier to say that what the Swift Boaters did was okay?

4. It can't help Obama to show that McCain ad over and over again for the purpose of arguing about a stick and a sandal. I think ordinary people — who aren't dumb enough to think we're looking at the original footage (or stickage, if you will) — would regard it as weirdly disproportionate to obsess over the detail of sticks and sandals. So let's take a film break:

The L.A. ban on new fast food restaurants in poor neighborhoods.

Isn't it outrageous to limit only the restaurants that cater to poor people?

The moratorium’s definition of a fast food business is any stand-alone restaurant that dispenses food, to stay or to go, and that has “a limited menu, items prepared in advance or prepared or heated quickly, no table orders, and food served in disposable wrapping or containers.”

The linked NYT article focuses on the way the definition includes "places of more culinary interest," like those with "cooks from Mexico and Central America making lamb barbacoa and pupusas" and those that make "a high-quality hot dog from cattle raised on pasture, served with fresh grilled onions on top."

The "high-quality hot dog" woman whines: “Our policy makers abhor nuance and the subtle but distinct qualities that differentiate fast food from food that can be served fast.”

As if the law isn't already ridiculously vague and hard to apply! You think it would be better with more "nuance" about where your pulverized cow once grazed and whether your onions were ever frozen?

The article does eventually get around to quoting someone sensible, Joe R. Hicks, a radio talk show host:

“The crime in all of this is that people are sitting around meddling into the very minutiae of what people are putting in their mouths,” he said.

He argues that the ban assumes the 500,000 people who live in South Los Angeles are intellectually incapable of deciding what to eat.

“It’s insulting, and you could almost infer a racial insult out of the interference,” he said.

Almost.

ADDED: For breakfast:

... three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise... two cups of coffee, a five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar and three chocolate-chip pancakes.

That's what Michael Phelps eats.

What does Barack Obama really think about affirmative action?

I read something that surprised me in today's Maureen Dowd column: "Obama didn’t even tell Harvard Law School that he was black on his application."

He didn't?

Googling, I find "Delicate Obama Path on Class and Race Preferences," by Rachel L. Swarns, which I glossed over when came out 3 days ago.

Why didn't I pay more attention to this? Something about that headline? Something about the first few paragraphs?

In 1990, as his fellow students rallied to protest the dearth of black professors at Harvard Law School, Barack Obama wrote a vigorous defense of affirmative action. The campus was in an uproar over questions of race, and Mr. Obama, then the first black president of The Harvard Law Review, decided to take a stand.

Mr. Obama said he had “undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action” in his own academic career, and he praised the intellectual heft and wide-ranging views of his diverse staff.

“The success of the program speaks for itself,” he said of the law review’s affirmative action policy in a letter published in the school’s student newspaper.

Mr. Obama, a Democrat, has continued to support race-based affirmative action, calling it “absolutely necessary” when he was a state senator in Illinois and criticizing the Supreme Court for curtailing it in his time in the United States Senate. But in his presidential campaign, he has unsettled some black supporters by focusing increasingly on class and suggesting that poor whites should at times be given preference over more privileged blacks.

I read about this far the other day. My impression was that Obama, like most students of that era, supported affirmative action — it's what all the good people do — and knew he'd benefited from it. And now, he's refurbishing his position to serve his political ends. The article goes on to talk about his well-known concessions about how perhaps affluent black kids like his own should not get in on the affirmative action. Yawn. [CORRECTED to read "should not get in on..." A typo.]

But keep reading — past many paragraphs:

Former classmates say Mr. Obama chose not to mention his race in his application to Harvard Law School to avoid benefiting from affirmative action, an assertion that his campaign declined to confirm or deny.

I don't remember reading that before. This is important. How would former classmates know this? He would have to have talked about it. They may be misrembering or misreporting what they heard from him (or heard second-hand), but if not, we know 2 things: 1. He declined to show his race on his application, and 2. He chose to talk about that with other students.

Actually, we don't really know #1, because: 1. He might have misremembered or misreported how he filled out his application, and 2. One could decline to answer the specific question about race on the application form but still reveal one's race in the personal essay. I would imagine that Obama's essay explained his unusual parentage and his story of life in diverse places dealing with all sorts of people. That is, I think that the Admissions Committee would have seen strong diversity factors in his application even if he declined to check a what's-your-race box and that they'd figure out that he would serve the school's interest in having darker faces among all the white faces in the classroom. In fact, I'm guessing the campaign doesn't want to talk about this point because of this complexity.

Obama may well have believed that it wasn't right for him, a son of a Kenyan man and a white American woman, to apply for benefits that were designed for the descendants of American slaves, and for that reason, declined to check the race box. But it's possible that Obama chose to hide his race on his law school application because he actually opposed affirmative action.

That he voiced his support for it when he was in law school may not mean that much, because it is so extremely common for law students to say nice things about affirmative action in order to get along with others and to be thought well of. And it's not surprising that as the president of Harvard Law Review, he would compliment his staff and not disrespect the individuals who got their places by affirmative action.

More nuance:

“His work was with those who didn’t have much, and they were black, Hispanic and white,” said Gerald Kellman, who hired Mr. Obama to help organize poor families in Chicago. “He never had much inclination to use affirmative action as a tool then. He wanted to level the playing field by providing early childhood education programs, access to good schools.”

Even as Mr. Obama embraced more traditional liberal views of affirmative action, he was rarely doctrinaire. As a student, Mr. Obama sometimes engaged in and sometimes avoided the bitter racial debates on campus.

As an undergraduate at Occidental College, for instance, he declined to get involved in student efforts to push for affirmative action and minority hiring. At Harvard, he spoke at a rally in support of students who condemned the school administration for failing to offer tenure to any of its professors who were black women.

But he and other editors at the law review were ambivalent when some students argued that women should benefit from the review’s affirmative action policy....

“He was clearly unambiguously in favor of affirmative action as a policy matter, but he recognized some of the ambiguities and the nuances in the argument that the most passionate affirmative action supporters often did not,” said Bradford A. Berenson, who served as associate White House counsel under President Bush and worked on the law review with Mr. Obama.

Mr. Obama was sympathetic to minority students who argued that affirmative action undermined them in the eyes of their white colleagues. But he said he never felt that way at Harvard.

“I have not personally felt stigmatized,” Mr. Obama wrote in his letter to the editor in 1990.

That changed after law school.

A federal judge once asked a friend of Mr. Obama’s whether he had been “elected on the merits” as law review president, Mr. Obama told The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education in 2001. He said the question came up again when he applied for a job as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

Mr. Obama has not described how he felt then. But as a state senator, he spoke with empathy about accomplished minority students at elite universities who sometimes lived “under a cloud they could not erase.”

There's some resonance with what Clarence Thomas has said:

But at Yale, Thomas sensed he was being treated differently by teachers and fellow students. The law school had a program that set aside a certain number of slots for minority students.

"I honestly, honestly believed that Yale thought that having a kid who came from working people in the South, who had grown up through segregation, that this kid who had prospered, who had done well every single place he'd ever been, whether an all-white school, all-black school, he's always done well. He will do well here. And it will benefit both him and Yale," Thomas says. "That's what I thought. Well, that isn't what it was converted to."

"It was converted to, 'Well, you're here because you're black,'" Thomas explains.

Thomas did well at Yale, graduating somewhere in the middle of his class, but he says it was the first time anybody had tried to put him in a box because of his race, and whatever benefits he accrued from being there were tarnished when it came time to graduate.

"You know, I was in debt. I needed a job. And I couldn’t get a job," Thomas says.

"Not even with a Yale law degree?" [Steve] Kroft asks.

"I couldn’t get a job. And I just saw the discounting of my degree happen before my eyes," Thomas says.

Asked why he thinks that is, Thomas says, "That degree meant one thing for whites and another thing for blacks…it was discounted."

"You write in the book that your Yale degree was worth 15 cents," Kroft remarks.

"Well, you know Steve, I have still a 15 cents sticker on the frame that my law degree is in," Thomas says. "It's tainted. So I just leave it in the basement."

Of course, as a Democratic politician, Barack Obama would never state his doubts about affirmative action in such a vividly harsh way — even if he thought exactly the same thing.

What does Barack Obama really think about affirmative action?

The fact is we don't know.

But we don't know a lot of things about Barack Obama.

John Kerry does a terrible job of representing Barack Obama on "Meet the Press."

As Joe Lieberman dominated every exchange, John Kerry seemed to think it would work to sit back and make Stan Laurel faces:



Kerry's performance hit rock bottom when he struggled to keep up with Obama's latest position on offshore oil drilling:

MR. BROKAW: Let's, let's talk about energy for a moment, if we can, because there have been several developments this past week that are important. A bipartisan coalition of 10 senators...

SEN. KERRY: Yes.

MR. BROKAW: ...five Democrats, five Republicans--want to expand offshore drilling and they want to end a tax credit on oil companies. Senator Obama, in the past, has often said that he's opposed to offshore drilling.... Now, having said that, here's what Senator Obama had to say over the weekend: "My interest is in making sure that we've got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices. ... If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage--I don't want to be so rigid that we can't get something done." I can already hear the bloggers saying, "Flip-flop." Here's a guy who just...

SEN. KERRY: Sure.

MR. BROKAW: ...a couple of months ago said, "No way we're going to do this," now he's opened the possibility of it again. Two weeks ago on this program Vice President Al Gore, who's the godfather in the Democratic Party of energy policies, said, "No way should we drill offshore."

SEN. KERRY: I agree with Al Gore, and I don't want to. But, but Barack Obama...

MR. BROKAW: You, you--so you don't agree with Senator Obama?

SEN. KERRY: Well, I don't agree--here's, here's what I think his position is demonstrating. He still believes we should not drill offshore.

What?!

MR. BROKAW: But he's prepared to do it if necessary.

SEN. KERRY: He has not changed--what he's prepared to do, Tom, is break America's gridlock by honoring a bipartisan effort if that is the only way to move us towards alternative and renewable fuels and, and, and an energy policy that's comprehensive. I think what you see in the response on this drilling is really the difference in how they might govern. Barack Obama doesn't want to drill offshore, doesn't believe it's the thing to do.

What?! So you're saying that Obama's newest statements on the subject are just some meaningless politicking that you won't even pretend to believe temporarily while he gets himself elected?

There's a very--there's a four-state carefully circumscribed proposal in that, that, in that initiative that, that could conceivably allow some drilling.

that, that... that, that...

Can anyone listen to this part? Kerry gives off the signal that he's going to blather and smokescreen and do that thing his erstwhile fans called "nuance" in 2004.

could conceivably allow some drilling....

But what? But we shouldn't believe it will lead to any drilling?

He doesn't want to do that.

He doesn't? So Obama muddied his position, opened himself up to the accusation that he's flip-flopped, and the take away point really is just that he doesn't want drilling? Thanks a lot, Kerry.

Obama, do not send Kerry out to represent you again. He's terrible.

But if that's what gets us to the energy independence and to the other efforts, I think Joe Lieberman actually supports--now, he didn't support drilling. He's changed and moves in that direction.

"He" — who? I can't even tell if he's talking about Obama or Lieberman. So the point is, I think, that Obama wants to get some legislation through and he's willing to accept some provision that happens to be in it because it only opens a possibility of drilling, and he doesn't support drilling? I thought Obama wanted people to think he was open to offshore drilling, but Kerry is squelching that belief. How is Kerry trying to help Obama?

But here's the bottom line.

Go to the transcript for the news that oil companies make too much money and need to be taxed more. Let's skip a step ahead, and pick up in the middle what Lieberman's saying when he gets the floor again:

... John McCain says we need to drill offshore. That's American oil, we need to bring it into the market to help lower gas prices and make us energy independent. Barack Obama says, this weekend, maybe, and, and, if, but. He did not endorse--he did not come out with a strong decision, Obama, and say, "I'm for offshore drilling." And I predict to you he'll find reasons not to be for it if this comes to a vote in the Senate.

SEN. KERRY: Are you for it now? Have you changed?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: I am for it...

SEN. KERRY: You've changed.

Oh, so Kerry was talking about Lieberman before. That's a distraction. We're talking about Obama and McCain, aren't we? Or is Kerry more concerned about the Senate-level debate about what legislation gets passed?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: ...because of the crisis. That's...

SEN. KERRY: You're now for it.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: ...absolutely right, because of the facts.

I want to take a minute from a personal perspective...

MR. BROKAW: Are you--you're--and you're not for it, Senator Kerry, under any circumstances.

SEN. KERRY: It is an absolutely fraudulent offering to America.

Is this helpful to Obama, who's been reframing his position?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: It, it is not.

SEN. KERRY: Drilling--let me tell you why. We only...

SEN. LIEBERMAN: My buddy here is filibustering this morning.

Yes, exactly! Kerry is being a Senator. Has he forgotten his role of helping Obama? But he wasn't invited onto "Meet the Press" to do his Senate work.

SEN. KERRY: We only have, we only have 3 percent of the world's oil reserves. Sixty-five percent of the oil comes from the Mideast. The problem with global climate change is oil. The problem for our security is our dependency on oil.

MR. BROKAW: So what you're saying...

SEN. KERRY: If we go out and drill more oil, even temporarily, when it doesn't come to the pump for about seven years, you're not dealing with the real crisis, which is moving America's innovation...

The same old Democratic talking points... I thought Obama trying to get away from that.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Well...

SEN. KERRY: ...and creativity, the creation of new fuel.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: ...here, here's the difference. Here, here's the difference. Senator Obama, Senator Kerry say no to offshore drilling, no to nuclear power and...

SEN. KERRY: No, I don't say no to nuclear power.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: OK, hold on. Senator Obama certainly does. John McCain says we got to have all of the above. In the short term, we need to drill for American oil where we can find it and get it safely. That's offshore. Secondly, John McCain has presented--and we need nuclear power. Secondly, John McCain has presented the most bold alternative energy--wind, solar, electric car, hydrogen car--proposals that are around today.

I want to say just a word about the, the racial question here. And I, I speak personally. In the first place, the McCain campaign is, to use Barack Obama's words, raising the question is he a risky guy? But it has nothing to do with his name or his skin color. It has to do with his lack of experience and bad judgment, his unreadiness to be president. When you use the expressions that Senator Obama did three times this week, you're making a personal insult to John McCain.

I, I know John McCain. I've been with him for 20 years, private and public. This man does not have a bigoted bone in his body. His wife and he adopted a baby from Bangladesh, who, who they love. It's just wrong for Senator Obama to have done that. It was right for the campaign to call him on it. Let me just add a final word, Tom. In 2000, Al Gore gave me the extraordinary honor of being the first Jewish-American to run for national office, and Al Gore said he had confidence in the American people that they would judge me based on my record, not on my religion. And I urge Barack Obama to have the same faith in the American people that they will judge him on his record, or lack of record, certainly not on his name or his race.

MR. BROKAW: All right. We want to move on if we can.

Yes, let's move on, now that Joe Lieberman has just done a triumphant 2-part dance on the supine carcass of John Kerry. And that's it for the discussion of oil drilling. Is Brokaw playing it straight, biased against Obama, or just painfully aware that John Kerry is pathetically incapable or perversely unwilling to help Barack Obama?

"It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose."

Writes Justice Scalia, for the majority, in the D.C. guns case, accoring to David Stout's report in the NYT [UPDATE: The link no longer goes to the David Stout article, which I can't find on line at all anymore!]

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority in the landmark 5-to-4 decision, said the Constitution does not allow “the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.”...

But the court held that the individual right to possess a gun “for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home” is not unlimited....

The ruling does not mean, for instance, that laws against carrying concealed weapons are to be swept aside. Furthermore, Justice Scalia wrote, “The court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”...

“The amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second clause,” wrote Justice Scalia. “The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms.”

Not at all, Justice Stevens countered, asserting that the majority “stakes its holding on a strained and unpersuasive reading of the amendment’s text.”

Stout informs us that Scalia "clearly takes pride in his writing as well as his reasoning" and in the same sentence writes that he applied "adjectives like 'frivolous' and 'bizarre'" to the dissenting opinion.

I wonder what "adjectives like 'frivolous' and 'bizarre'" Scalia used. Empty-headed? Featherbrained? flighty? Frothy? Giddy? Harebrained? Lighthearted? Scatterbrained? Silly? Gaga? Birdbrained? Dizzy? Cranky? Curious? Eccentric? Erratic? Freakish? Idiosyncratic? Odd? Outlandish? Peculiar? Quaint? Queer? Quirky? Singular? Strange? Unnatural? Unusual? Weird? Kooky? Screwball?

Oh... you mean he actually used the words "frivolous" and "bizarre"? I see.

Well, then I wonder how Stout knows Scalia "clearly takes pride in his writing as well as his reasoning." Did the use of the words "frivolous" and "bizarre" somehow imply that pride or is the evidence elsewhere and we're just supposed to know it? (Or do you just not want to plug his book?)

Oh, no! Reading Stout (and Liptak) today, I'm nagged by the question What would Greenhouse have written? Would Linda Greenhouse have inserted commentary about Scalia pride?

Not to be outdone, Justice Stevens called the majority’s interpretation of the Second Amendment “overwrought and novel” and said it “calls to mind the parable of the six blind men and the elephant”...

Would Linda Greenhouse have imputed that competitive motivation to Stevens's choice of words? Stout's writing has something of the problem that plagued Jeffrey Toobin's book "The Nine." For narrative effect, the Court is portrayed as a psychodrama. [UPDATE: Since my link now goes to the Linda Greenhouse report, you can read it and answer my question! The answer is: No.]

***

Stout tells us how McCain and Obama reacted to the case:

“I applaud this decision as well as the overturning of the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns and limitations on the ability to use firearms for self-defense,” Mr. McCain said in a statement, which contained a reminder that his Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, refused to join him in signing an amicus brief in support of overturning the district’s law.

Indeed, Mr. Obama’s view, expressed in a statement, was more nuanced than Mr. McCain’s.

More nuanced!

“I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms, but I also identify with the need for crime-ravaged communities to save their children from the violence that plagues our streets through common-sense, effective safety measures,” Mr. Obama said, predicting that the ruling would provide needed guidance for lawmakers.

Is that nuance or the same point Scalia acknowledged, that the rights don't preclude regulation? What I think is telling in Obama's statement is the mismatch between concern about "crime-ravaged communities" and "violence" on the one hand and, on the other, the desire for "safety measures."

After the California decision, will same-sex marriage become an issue in the presidential campaign?

I should do a proper post on the California Supreme Court decision that found a state constitutional law right against the state's ban on gay marriage. I should have done it yesterday, but I was moving from Brooklyn back to Madison, and I did not accomplish the timely, bloggerly thing. I'll get more legal later. Right now, I want to be political.

The decision has us thinking and talking about same-sex marriage again, and that will affect the presidential election. McCain, Obama, and Clinton all take the same position on the issue — a weaselly triad of ideas they hope are not too touchy: 1. give equivalent rights, 2. don't call it marriage, 3. leave it to the states. But this doesn't mean the issue won't have an effect.

Adam Nagourney writes:

Even if Mr. McCain does not wield [the issue] as part of his fall campaign — and his political associates said he almost certainly would not — history suggests that independent conservative advocacy groups would seize on the ruling to try to define Mr. Obama and his party [and Mrs. Clinton!?] as culturally out-of-step....

[T]here are differences of nuance in how the Democratic and Republican candidates talk about the issue that could have resonance with socially conservative voters. For example, Mr. Obama’s campaign explicitly said that he “has always believed that same-sex couples should enjoy equal rights under the law, and he will continue to fight for civil unions.”

In California, Mr. Brown is leading an effort to force a voter initiative that would overturn the court decision. If Mr. McCain decides to back such an initiative, it could provide a point of contrast that conservatives could use to hurt Mr. Obama.

Would McCain do that?

And an initiative could bring out more conservative voters at a time when Mr. McCain’s advisers see a small hope of putting California in play.

That would be big, but I can't picture McCain making that move. As Nagourney points out, that would set him against Governor Schwarzenegger.

But isn't there something subtler that McCain can do?

McCain only needs to stimulate feelings that things are changing too fast, that courts are taking over too aggressively, and that unknown, worrisome things might happen— unless stable, restrained judges are put in place. McCain is, in fact, already doing that. Yesterday's strong example of judicial activism resonates with what McCain has already said about judges.

I think the fear of rapid change will affect voters in the presidential election, especially since we expect the Democrats will control both houses of Congress. Do we really want a Democratic President too? Do we want, in addition to free-flowing legislative change, a President whose judicial appointments will be rubber-stamped in the Senate?

Now, Obama's message has been change. He's committed to that message, and it can be turned against him — a feat that becomes easier in the aftermath of the California decision.

Nuances of dog talk.

A dog listens to a recording of himself and a dog-friend barking. About midway through, you can see he's deeply absorbed in the nuances. With a follow-up cartoon:

Bill Clinton on Hillary Clinton: "Everything I'm saying here is my wife's position, not just mine."

Bill Clinton is out and about, burnishing his image, basking in the glow of attention. By the way, his wife is running for President. When he's not referring to that woman as "his wife," he likes to refer to her as "she":

"The reason she ought to be president, over and above her vision and her plans is that she has proven in every position she has ever had in life, whether it was in elected office or not, that she is a world-class genius in making positive changes in other people's lives."

Making positive changes in other people's lives.... It sounds so presidential so wifely.

World-class genius... Must we talk about that too? Two thoughts:

1. A man calls his wife a genius. Does it mean anything, even if he charges it up with the 90s modifier "world-class"? "World-class" actually detracts from it. If a man tells you his wife is a "great cook," are you more likely to believe it's anything more than the guy's preening about his own stature if he makes it "awesomely great"? If he tells you his wife looks like a model, does your mental image of her improve if he says she looks like a "super model"? A man is bragging about his woman: That places her ever more firmly in the position of his woman.

2. Remember the way people talked about John Kerry in 2004? Supposedly, he had a brilliant mind, full of "nuance" and "complexity." But, as I wrote at the time, the evidence was lacking. There was also some discussion back then about whether smarter actually is better for a President. But some people — dare I say, especially on the left? — are susceptible to the argument that the most intellectually brilliant candidate ought to win. And right now, these poor souls are being massaged by statements like Bill's about Hillary. So where's the evidence?

I've been reading Carl Bernstein's book "A Woman in Charge." Here's a passage:

By tenth grade, Hillary had realized that she was by no means the smartest member of her class, and that to compete at the top level of academic achievement she would have to work harder than others. She was an honor roll student by force of will, intense preparation, and dutiful study. Even with such extraordinary effort, her grade point average was too low to be among the top ten students in her class.

Meanwhile, Alan Greenspan's book "The Age of Turbulence" lavishes praise on Bill Clinton for his intellect (especially for his grasp of economics and his perception of how things would change in the future). Greenspan classes Bill Clinton with the smartest of all the Presidents he has known: Richard Nixon. Which brings us back to the point that "smartest" doesn't encapsulate what you really want in a President.

ADDED: I love found humor. I was just Googling around for some talk about the irritating adjective "world-class" — the usage panel does not accept it as "as a vague way of emphasizing magnitude or degree" — and I found this 2005 blog post from Brad Feld:

I heard the phrase "world class" three times today. I've decided to toss it on the scrap heap of "phrases that mean nothing to me anymore." I'm finishing up Friedman's The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century(which is awesome BTW - definitely a world class book – I’ll be done on my SF to Chicago trip Thursday night.) It dawned on me that the phrase "world class" isn't indexed against anything. No one ever says, "that's not world class, it's American class."...

In my first company, we talked briefly (I think about 60 seconds) about creating a mission "to be the best software consulting company in the world." After all the MIT / Brown / Wellesley people in my company laughed (“hey Brad, who gives a damn about a stupid vague unattainable mission like that?"), I / we realized that vapid phrases didn't inspire anything (except internal contempt). It took more than 60 seconds to come up with our mission, which was "We suck less."...

We delivered more often then not. So - while we never achieved that elusive "world class" status, we definitely sucked less most of the time. And - when I wandered down the hallways saying "guys - focus on sucking less - that's the key to our success", people rallied a lot more than if I had shouted "we are going to be world class" from the rooftops.

Of course, Bill Clinton can't be saying of Hillary, "She sucks less." But the truth is that's all most of us expect from a candidate, for them to suck less than the others.

"If this were a wedding, we'd be at the 'speak now or forever hold your peace' part."

"If you're a candidate hoping to get past her, the time for nuance and veiled references has passed."

Weddings... veils...

This woman for President business... it's driving you crazy, isn't it?

Too damned bad! It's too late! Maybe if you act fast... that's what they're saying... because they're political analysts — the quote above is from Steve McMahon, a former advisor to Howard Dean — and they'd like to have some relevance. So they're saying hurry, hurry, hurry... or it will be too late.

But it is too late. She's the Democratic candidate — unless you've got some dramatic new scandal... and even then....

Adjust. Give up. Deal with it. Resign yourself. It will be so much easier if you don't resist.

They loved what she said...

... but what did she say? Don't ask. They don't know.

Ann Rivers, 41, came away from [Hillary] Clinton's speech at a banquet held by the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People thinking that she and the New York Democrat had identical positions on Iraq: "Pack up all the stuff -- whatever we've got over there -- pack it up and leave," Rivers said in summarizing what she thought was Clinton's stance.

But Clinton's comments were more nuanced. "We must begin to end the war in Iraq and bring our troops home as quickly and responsibly as we can," the New York senator said. Her call to "begin to end the war" left Clinton substantial maneuvering room -- and since then she has refused even to commit to withdrawing all U.S. troops by 2013, the end of the next president's first term.

Nuance! We loved it in '04. And now it's New Nuance — with improved softening. You won't even notice where the finesse begins.

Oh, I'm nostalgic for John Kerry! You could tell when he couldn't fit his nuances together. He had enough shame that he stumbled a bit and let a rough edges show now and then. Those were innocent days...

"More Sex Is Safer Sex."

That's the name of the new book by Steven E. Landsburg and the name of his 1996 article arguing "that H.I.V. would spread less quickly if relatively chaste people each took on a few more sexual partners":

At a given bar on a given night, he wrote, these disease-free singles would then make the pool of sexually active adults safer. The article was based largely on an academic paper by another economist, Michael Kremer, theorizing that the spread of AIDS could be slowed in England if everybody with fewer than about 2.25 partners got around a bit more

The link is to a book review by David Leonhardt, who doesn't think much of what he calls the the economists' "imperialist movement" -- intruding their analysis into all sorts of human affairs:

[The book is] short on the nuance that comes from real human stories. Landsburg’s characters tend toward the hypothetical... and his arguments, as he puts it at one point, can sound like “idle Sunday dorm-room chitchat.”

This problem plagues many of the new economic imperialists: like the overly chaste singles who are supposedly contributing to the H.I.V. epidemic, they don’t get out enough. They are asking good questions about epidemiology and psychology, but they are not spending much time with epidemiologists and psychologists, let alone with the people who are the subjects of their academic research.

IN THE COMMENTS: One of the coolest things about blogging: the author of the book appears and defends himself (in a thread that hilariously begins with the comment "He was great on Barney Miller").

Candidates and torture... and blogger conference calls.

Here's an L.A. Times piece that discusses the emerging differences between the Republican candidates over the use of aggressive techniques in questioning detainees in the War on Terror.

The issue arose when the debate moderator, Fox News' Brit Hume, laid out a scenario in which suspects had been caught attempting to carry out a terrorist attack. The question was tailor-made for a response on the importance of being tough on terrorists, but McCain laid out a more nuanced reply colored by personal experience....

Giuliani and Romney both said they opposed torture. But when Hume raised the idea of water-boarding, in which a suspect is made to feel like he is drowning, Giuliani appeared to support it, and Romney said he supported "enhanced interrogation techniques." Both offered tough-sounding answers that drew enthusiastic applause from the Republican audience.

The article supplements material from the debate with descriptions of Giuliani's conference call with the bloggers yesterday:

Giuliani in his campaign has emphasized embracing Bush's aggressive anti-terrorism tactics and attacking civil liberties advocates as promoting a pre-Sept. 11 mind-set. He elaborated on his debate remarks during a Wednesday conference call with bloggers. He said he would leave the distinction between enhanced interrogation techniques and torture to "the people who do it," according to a report on the National Review's Web site. He described water-boarding simply as "aggressive," the report said.

Another blogger on the call, University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse, said that Giuliani stressed his differences on the issue with McCain. "His view is that we should figure out exactly where the line is and go right up to it," Althouse wrote, describing Giuliani's Wednesday comments. "He specified that was more than McCain was willing to do."

The LAT reporter -- Peter Wallsten -- called me to check my story. It's interesting to see this interaction between the candidates and the bloggers and then between the bloggers and mainstream reporters. But I wonder if the candidates will continue to want to play this way. Here I am collecting quotations and presenting them my way, able to insert opinion and ridicule and digressive material at will and then becoming a source that injects bloggerly material into the traditional news media.

The candidate is giving up some control and creating risks. On the upside, he is getting some publicity, perhaps looking savvy, and creating some good will. Maybe we'll think twice before criticizing him, either because the feeling of personal contact mellows our attitude or because we fret about getting excluded from the next phone call.

I wonder if it's only a coincidence that a blogger conference call with John McCain that was planned for today got canceled. Seeing how bloggers homed in on the torture discussion, he may not be up for it. From the L.A. Times article:

McCain aides acknowledged that there is a difference between the senator and his rivals for the nomination, particularly on the question of torture.

"There are enhanced techniques that I don't think bother him, but water-boarding certainly does," said McCain's longtime adviser, Mark Salter.

Salter said he watched Tuesday night as the audience remained silent throughout McCain's "full and sophisticated, nuanced" answer. But he noted that the audience applauded after McCain said that most military leaders oppose torture.

"If you polled it, the Rudy-Romney position would be more popular with Republican primary voters," Salter said. "But I think McCain can hold that position and get that respect. I don't think anybody thinks he would be weak in the war on terror. We don't have that problem."

"Nuance." There's an evocative word! I got mightily sick of hearing it used to patch over Kerry's exasperating waffling in 2004. Salter's wrong in saying that McCain's statement at the debate was "full and sophisticated, nuanced." It may have suggested that McCain has a sophisticated, nuanced view of the problem, but, being wholly abstract, it wasn't "full."

Does McCain really know what he wants to say when pushed on the details? If not, the way the bloggers bore in on the torture question with Giuliani may have made McCain's handlers cautious about putting the candidate in this strange new environment. Or maybe he really does have "a sudden conflict with official business." I understand the caution, but I thought McCain really was good on the blogger conference call we did on April 27th.

So, we shall see how eagerly the campaigns continue with this blogger conference call approach. I rather like it, because I like to observe and write about the process. If things go awry, that's just more to observe and write about. The campaign must be careful, but being too careful won't work, and the bloggers will write about you whether you talk to them or not.

And we shall also see how the candidates deal with the torture issue. Are we going to get down to the specific techniques and try to draw that line Giuliani was talking about? As I wrote yesterday, he said some of the techniques are "too gory even to discuss," so perhaps we won't. Are we to be satisfied with the vague sense that Giuliani would go farther than McCain or that McCain has more feeling about the individual subjected to the technique (because of his personal experience), while Giuliani has more feeling about protecting American citizens from harm (because of his personal experience)?

CLARIFICATION: That last question -- "Are we to be satisfied..." -- doesn't mean that the "vague sense" might be a good enough reason to prefer Giuliani over McCain. It is intended only to ask whether we will be satisfied with that level of specificity about the difference between the two candidates as we decide whether to support either of them.