Take this patriotism test.

First, watch this ad:



Now, here's the question:

At what point did you get chills?
	Within 4 seconds -- the sight of the flag.
	At 7 seconds -- "America is an idea."
	Around 12 seconds -- "Liberty! Freedom!"
	Around 15 seconds -- "Free enterprise!"
	Around 18 seconds, when the flag faded and the boy looked worried.
	Toward the end, on seeing "Romney/Ryan."
	Never.
pollcode.com free polls

"Political women can’t shake their attraction to bright shades of red and blue because of the subtext of patriotism."

"Teenagers dart from one aesthetic tribe to another in search of the most comfortable fit. Rarely do people create their own style vocabulary."

Letterman says to Obama "You haven’t seen me naked," and Obama responds "We’re going to keep it that way."

They also talked about how "great" Obama looks, how "good" he feels, how much he weighs, and how "sharp" he looks. The 2 guys had to talk a lot to fill up the entire show. They talked about the 47% thing of Mitt's...

“If you want to be President, you have to work for everyone,” Obama said. “This is a big country. And people disagree a lot. But one thing I’ve never tried to do and I think none of us can do in public office is suggest that because someone doesn’t agree with me that they’re victims or they’re unpatriotic.”

Did Mitt say anybody's unpatriotic? No. Here's the full transcript of the "secret" Romney speech to donors. The word "unpatriotic" (or "patriotism" or "-patriot-" anything doesn't appear.) Did Romney call people "victims" because they "don't agree" with him? No. The word "victim" appears like this:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. 

He doesn't call them victims. He calls them "dependent" and says they "believe that they are victims." Obviously, Romney thinks they are wrong about that. And Romney's not calling them dependent because they don't agree with him. He's saying because they are dependent, they take the political position that says they are entitled to what they've become dependent on, and therefore they'll vote for Obama. I'm not saying Romney's right about all those things. Surely, some people accept government benefits that they qualify for — like unemployment compensation — but would prefer a government that doesn't provide such lavish benefits and might give conservatism a chance if they heard it explained well. I'm just saying Obama distorted what Romney said in the "secret" video. 

But as long as I'm being technical about rhetoric: Obama's distortion appeared in a statement about what he himself has "never tried to do" and that no one in public office should do. He doesn't say and this is what Romney did. So he has deniability. That was elegantly done, because you don't realize that he didn't directly say what it feels like he said. And yet he got the distorted accusation into your head. He made you feel that Romney said something he didn't say: Romney cruelly and falsely called the people who don't agree with him unpatriotic and victims.

After the Letterman taping:

Obama attended a cash grab at the Waldorf-Astoria, where about 200 deep-pocketed Dems paid at least $12,500 per family. Last stop was Jay-Z’s Chelsea hotspot, the 40/40 club, for a $40,000-per-plate affair that was expected to net $4 mil.

The President took the stage with “Jay-Z and Beyoncé, who wore a red dress....

He compared his upbringing to that of Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s.

“We remember what it was like not having anything,” he said. “We know people just as talented as us who didn’t get that same break.”

If you're successful, you got a "break." Plenty of people are "just as talented" — do they work hard? — but unlike Jay-Z and Beyoncé and Obama, they just didn't get lucky. That sounds a lot more like calling them victims than what Romney said.

If anybody's really listening.

Live-blogging Day 1 of the Democratic Convention.

4:58 CT: Just setting up a post, to be added to over the course of the evening. Please join the conversation.

6:53 (I'm beginning with recorded material from about 2 hours ago. I'll be catching up.): "Being asked to pay your fair share isn't class warfare. It's patriotism," says Newark Mayer Cory Booker. He gets a huge ovation that turns into a "U.S.A." chant. They're "U.S.A."ing at the idea of patriotism, presumably. Not taxes. Oh, but paying taxes = patriotism. Or, specifically, being asked to pay is patriotism. Who is the patriot in that grammatical construction? I think it's the folks who are asking other people to pay.

7:11 (Still catching up.): Gov. Bev Perdue sounded hoarse and a bit sick as she vowed to deliver North Carolina to the Democrats. A film about health care. A young man whose parents died in a way that supposedly might have been avoided if we'd had Obamacare. They were both scientists, he says, so I'm not clear why they did not have health insurance.

7:19: The chair of the Congressional Hispanic Congress, Charles Gonzales, uses the motto "e pluribus unum" — out of many, one — to mean that all the people become one, instead of the idea that the states were brought together into one nation. The idea that the people merged into a single entity — that sounds like fascism to me. Oddly, as it repurposes the old motto, it expresses the old fashioned idea of the melting pot.

7:30: White males of the gubernatorial kind — Quinn & Kaine.

7:32: A black speaker wedged in — the mayor of Charlotte — before the next pale male. But it's a big one, so I'll go light on the fast-forwarding I'm using to try to catch up to live. It's Harry Reid.

7:36: Reid wants us to fear the Tea Party. They are "extremists and ideologues who leave no room for reason," and they're taking over the Republican Party.

7:42: Nancy Pelosi is introduced along with all the Democratic women of the House. There's disco music playing. The hell? Then I detect that it's "I'm Every Woman." Again with this creepy merging of individuals into the whole.

I'm every woman, it's all in me
Anything you want done, baby
I'll do it naturally
I'm every woman, it's all in me
I can read your thoughts right now
Every one from A to Z

See what I mean? That's creepy when it's the government. When it's some lady you're having sex with, I guess it's sexy.

I can cast a spell
With secrets you can't tell
Mix a special brew
Put fire inside of you
But anytime you feel
Danger or fear
Instantly I will appear, 'cause
I'm every woman

Now, that's just scary when it's a whole horde of government women coming at you. What is this "special brew"? Soma? But anytime you feel/Danger or fear/Instantly I will appear... Nancy Pelosi will appear?! I can sense your needs/Like rain on to the seeds/I can make a rhyme/Of confusion in your mind... no, no, no, no that's not what I want to hear from the government!

8:03: Speaking of scary... it's Jimmy Carter (on film). He's well made-up, well preserved, and well modulated. But he seems like a nice man, there, doesn't he? And he tells us Barack Obama and Joe Biden will lead us to a better future.

8:18: Huge storm here! We just lost power for a few minutes. I lost a whole paragraph of snark about Teddy Kennedy. A young Kennedy — Joseph P. Kennedy III, running for Congress — said the spirit of Teddy was with us here today. I had some prime snark! Did Teddy bring this terrible storm that drowned all my Mary Jo Kopechne material?

8:25: NARAL! It's Nancy Keenan, for "safe, legal" abortions, with "dignity and privacy." A woman should not be forced to have an ultrasound "against her will." And "rape is rape." President Obama had "the courage to stand with Sandra Flook" (is that how we're pronouncing it now?). "Women in America cannot trust Mitt Romney."

8:33: I've caught up to Rahm Emanuel. "The American auto industry is not just surviving..." Hmm. He professes to know with "absolute certainty" that something will happen in the future and "land with a thud on the Oval Office desk." Who do you want there? He's saying that like it's obvious.

8:38: It's Obama's little sister Maya and Michelle's older brother Michael. Nice. Lovely. But let's skip the details.

8:45: I'm finally completely caught up. Lily Ledbetter is speaking. This is the question of "equal pay for equal work," but the Supreme Court case she lost was a matter of interpreting statutory language about how soon you need to bring a lawsuit. I feel sorry for her, but I'm also uneasy about her as an icon representing things that are not what the court case was about.

8:48: Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, is able to compare himself to Romney, who was, a while back, the governor of Massachusetts. He's yelling and screaming about the economy. Obama has been wonderful!!!

8:53: "I will not stand by and let him be bullied out of office!" Patrick propaganda.

8:55: Wow, everyone looks really sweaty. Did the AC break down?

9:03: Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley. I have no idea why this man has been given this prominence. Here's his question for Republicans: "How much less do you really think would be good for this country?"

9:07: Time for the keynote address at last. It's Julian Castro, the mayor of San Antonio.

9:17: Castro seems like he could have been a speaker at last week's GOP convention. He keeps talking about "hard work" and even "rugged individualism." But then he says "Like many of you, I watched last week's Republican convention, and they told a few stories of individual success. We all celebrate individual success, but the question is: How do we multiply that success? The answer is President Barack Obama."

9:22: Castro gets a refrain going: "Mitt Romney says no."

10:00: Michelle Obama is wearing an orange dress that in the close-up looks like a bathing suit. Lots of shoulder and arm display. Her speech goes on and on, filled with stuff that has no relationship to the question of whether Barack Obama should be reelected. He thinks his little girls are important and he's proud of them and eats dinner with them and counsels them about their middle-school friendships. Okay. I phase out. What's the point of all this? Then — this seems near the end — she starts doing this fake stuttering (as if she's talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-g-generation): "A-a-and he reminds me, he reminds me that we are playing a long game here..." (Meade says: "Not 9 holes, it's 18 holes.") "A-a-a-and that change is hard. A-a-a-and change is slow and it never happens all at once but that eventually we get there. We always do. W-w-w-w-we get there, because of folks like my dad." (Earlier in the speech she described her father.) "Folks like Barack's grandmother. Men and women who-who said to themselves, I-I may not have a chance to fulfill my dreams, but maybe my children will, maybe my grandchildren will. See-see-see, so many of us stand here tonight because of their sacrifice...." Arghhhh! This is the same thing we heard last week. It's so earnest. Stage-y earnest. But what does it say? Who should be President?!

10:16: Michelle's speech goes on a long time. I don't really see the point of it. There's a theme of waiting patiently with the expectation that our children or their children will have a better life, but what does that mean for the election? It seems to say that we should reelect Obama despite the lack of economic progress. She speaks of "unwavering hope grounded in unyielding struggle." Now there's this choked-up quality in her voice as she says she's "Mom-in-Chief," doing what's "best for our girls." It's getting very hammy. Vote for my husband. That's the end. And then the music comes up: "Move your body... move your little hips...." What?!

10:26: An unusually young woman comes out to do the closing prayer, and it goes on for almost 4 minutes. "As a young woman of faith and a leader...." Who is she? The executive director of Blood: Water Mission. I don't really understand what that is — and I did Google it — so I'm left assuming that the Democrats are simply hot to reach out to young women. 

"Shopping for a new car, I see that they all look bloated and sloppy, bulkier than need be."

"Restaurants serve mega-portions, sodas are bigger. And have you been on a NYC subway lately? The number of people taking up two seats has increased exponentially. There's nothing patriotic about eating and drinking yourself sick, but our cars and toasters have that same look. America the insatiable. And those of us lucky enough to have health insurance are paying the brunt of other people's overindulgence."

A comment on a NYT column about the proposed NYC ban on extra-large sodas. The column takes the attitude of mocking the "American soft-drink industry" for making "appeals to patriotism" in its lobbying against the ban. The column sounds the anti-business and pro-good-health themes the NYT typically finds fit to print. The comment reveals the dark side of those themes: lowly disgust for citizens with obesity and an irrational fear that the overweight are intruding on the rest of us and draining us of our wealth.

"I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that's the America millions of Americans believe in."

"That's the America I love."

Said Mitt Romney according to Doonesbury, which made fun of it, and Language Log's Geoffrey K. Pullum was initially inclined to mock, and then thought about it, and realized he agreed with it.

One thing that gave him second thoughts is that his co-blogger Mark Liberman had already processed the quote, using the sublime technique of sentence diagramming. Which is nice.

But the more important basis for second thinking is that when you get to Liberman's old post, you find out that Romney didn't even speak those words. Mark Steyn did, and he was purporting to paraphrase Romney, for humorous effect. Pullum found out he was laughing at Steyn and Steyn was trying to make us laugh, and suddenly the quote wasn't funny anymore. Pullum, the liberal, was initially enjoying laughing at Romney — and his vapid dorkiness — and then he found out he was laughing at something a big right-winger — Steyn — had intended as a joke. Hey, that's not funny!

Pullum regains his sense of self-liberalism and goes into 4th of July mode:

It's nearly the 4th of July.... I love being back in America. It's like slipping into an old pair of shoes that really fit.... I don't think I can find anything mistaken in the passage. I think I believe in that America too. God bless it, anyway.

His post ends with a note that it's completely rewritten, because he apparently had originally assumed Romney did say those words, hadn't seen Liberman's old post, and went the mockery.

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

A quote that came up in conversation just now. I had to look it up to get it verbatim and was delighted to see it came from Samuel Johnson, whom I happened to quote yesterday. Nice to get a second use so soon for a newly created tag, referring to someone long dead. I hesitate to add new tags on individual names, and when it's someone buried in history, it seems like a particularly bad idea.

But I wish I could replicate the conversation that led Meade to paraphrase the quote. He said "Patriotism is the last bastion of the scoundrel." Which makes me wonder: What's the difference between a refuge and a bastion?

refuge
late 14c., from O.Fr. refuge, from L. refugium "a taking refuge, place to flee back to," from re- "back" (see re-) + fugere "to flee" (see fugitive) + -ium "place for."

bastion
1560s, from M.Fr. bastillon, dim. of O.Fr. bastille "fortress, tower, fortified, building," from O.Prov. bastir "build," perhaps originally "make with bast" (see baste (1)).

The dictionary man chose the better word for his aphorism. And Meade's deviation says something about his relationship with patriotism. I love the details in the etymology of those 2 words — fleeing versus a fortress. We'd puzzled some of that out before checking the wonderful Online Etymology Dictionary. Fascinating to look closely at a word and find the dead metaphor. It's easier to discover "fugitive" inside "refuge" than "bastille" inside "bastion," which shows the reward of paying even closer attention to things.

But let me try to summarize the conversation that led us to that quote.

1. I was saying how impressed I am that the American people genuinely care about the Constitution and that we believe our elected representatives must abide by it. I was thinking of this poll that showed that only 20% of American voters think the individual mandate is constitutional and only 37% think the Supreme Court should uphold it. That, despite the media effort to treat the challenge to the law as trivial or worse and to promote the idea that it's embarrassingly retrograde to think courts should enforce constitutional limits on Congress's enumerated powers.

2. After I used the word "sacred" to characterize the way Americans think of the Constitution, Meade expressed suspicion about regarding worldly things as religious, and I agreed, noting the way we Americans have come up with our own alternative to ancient ideas about monarchs embodying God's will.

3. We talked about how, when we were young, coming out of the culture of the 1960s, we thought of "patriotism" in a negative light. It was all about mindless deference to power (which, I note now, is the opposite of what constitutional limits on government represents).

4. Meade comes up with the quote.

When Mennonite pacifists meet "the stereotypical God-and-country Midwestern" patriots.

There's a current controversy about playing the nation anthem at Goshen College, a Mennonite school in Indiana. There, the tradition was pacifist and the anthem was not played.

About a year and a half ago, some athletes approached the president, James E. Brenneman, to ask if the anthem could be played before some games. Dr. Brenneman, a former pastor who has led Goshen since 2006, said yes, “as an expression of welcome to the half of our student body who are part of other religious traditions,” he told [the NYT reporter]....

Dr. Brenneman stressed that even when the anthem was played, “it wasn’t like you would see at a pro football game or the World Series, with the F-16 fighters flying overhead.” The music was played, without anyone singing the lyrics over the public-address system, and the anthem was followed by the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi (“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. ...”). This was Goshen’s “way of saying, if we are going to do it, we won’t do it as they do it elsewhere,” Dr. Brenneman said....

In 2009, Goshen unveiled a marketing campaign called “Peace by Peace,” emphasizing its pacifist roots. “Not everyone was enamored of this marketing campaign,” Dr. Berry said. “That included some folks in the athletic department, and the reason was that for sports — soccer is a bit of a different animal, but for baseball, golf and particularly basketball — Goshen College recruits students who aren’t from a Mennonite or Anabaptist background. And they reflect a little more of the stereotypical God-and-country Midwestern approach to patriotism.”

Dr. Brenneman wished to “quibble” that the request to play the anthem “came in direct response to Peace by Peace.” And Dr. Berry acknowledged there was more at stake than athletes’ gripes. There is a theological question, “which was that if we talk so much about peace, that will make it hard to attract non-Mennonite students.”

“And if we can’t attract non-Mennonite students, are we being hospitable?” Dr. Berry said.

Hospitality is, like pacifism, a core Christian virtue, and some Mennonites believed that playing the anthem was justified to help students from other backgrounds feel welcome.

After a year of "really intense dialogue," the college adopted the policy of playing "America the Beautiful" before sporting events.

I love the emphasis on hospitality and conversation. Really beautiful. Thank you, Mennonites.

"9/11 anniversary programming: Is there too much of it?"

Ken Tucker scolds you for asking:

The argument against the volume of 9/11 programming, which has cropped up on various blogs and in newspapers such as The New York Post, has been articulated most reasonably by Brian Lowry in Variety. In a piece titled “Cacophony of voices dull anniversary,” Lowry writes, “So many networks have scheduled specials, movies, even entire themed weeks centered on Sept. 11 that they risk trivializing the event, making it equivalent to... Halloween or Christmas episodes… networks with no logical connection to the story have piled on, defensively or opportunistically. Either way, it’s unnecessary.” Lowry concludes: “TV’s immersive approach to marking the anniversary unwittingly seems more reminiscent of another tower — the biblical one in Babel.”...

Too much? You mean, as opposed to airing Big Brother three times a week? Or the hours and hours of Bravo’s various Real Housewives franchises also coming this same week? It’s “too much,” too numbing, to replay footage of the planes going into the World Trade Center towers, but it’s not too much to air two hours of Bachelor Pad and two hours of America’s Got Talent, which combine to form four hours of entertainment that are numbing in a different way, not emotionally but intellectually numbing?

So... if you're going to be numbed, get numbed the lofty way? I think it's fine to preempt the usual junk on TV, but the problem is trying to make something profound and, as so often happens, making junk anyway. That is the definition of profanity.

And one other thing: After 10 years of remembering what happened on the day we sustained a great loss in a war, have we ever — as a nation — celebrated a victory? I remember when President Bush tried to do that. And he was crushed by criticism so harsh that it has served as a warning: never ever savor a victory. Now, it's: "we don't... spike the football... that's not who we are."

And who are we?  Is our preferred self-image the collapsed towers?

"I'd have strongly preferred that Osama bin Laden be captured rather than killed so that he could be tried for his crimes and punished in accordance with due process...."

Glenn Greenwald hews to lefty principles.

But if he in fact used force to resist capture, then the U.S. military was entitled to use force against him, the way American police routinely do against suspects who use violence to resist capture. 

Read that again and try to picture the scenario in Greenwald's dream of justice.

But those are legalities and they will be ignored even more so than usual. The 9/11 attack was a heinous and wanton slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians, and it's understandable that people are reacting with glee over the death of the person responsible for it. I personally don't derive joy or an impulse to chant boastfully....

Greenwald primly eschews "the emotional fulfillment that comes from vengeance and retributive justice."

I think there are many, many Americans, including myself, who experienced not glee and paroxysms of patriotism but a dignified sense of closure, a calm reaffirmation of confidence in our military, and simple but strong approval of the continued determination of the executive branch of government.

Did the anti-Tea Party protesters boo the national anthem at the Madison rally yesterday?

I'm seeing some assertions about this on blogs and in YouTube videos, and it's wrong if not unfair and deceptive. I don't have my own video, because I mishandled the button on my camera, but I was right behind the Tea Party crowd amid anti-Tea Party protesters who were making a lot of noise trying to drown out whatever was coming from the podium. They were, in fact, succeeding in their purpose so well that they could not hear when the national anthem began.

I started walking forward and it took a while for me to recognize the anthem. My observation was that those who could hear it were not booing. The "rockets red glare" line seemed louder, and there was a noticeable hushing that extended back into the anti-Tea Party areas of the crowd.

Meade and I have observed some of the most raucous rallies at the Capitol over the last 2 months, and the national anthem was sung many times, by the protesters themselves, and we witnessed respect for the anthem. In fact, you could go into the rotunda and start singing the anthem and people would go silent and even sing along with real feeling. They might have resented having to switch to solemnity when they were into raucousness, but they knew very well that they had to at least look like they respected the anthem.

Outdoors, yesterday, the acoustics were distorted, the anthem began unexpectedly, and the noisemakers were into their thing, drowning out the tea partiers. You cannot infer disrespect for the national anthem. But if you want to get back at people who are trying to drown you out, it's a good trick to start singing the anthem, while video-recording.... though maybe that's not properly respectful of the anthem.

"God Bless America and the Anthem? And the fly-by? Could you militarize this event just a tad more?"

"And what in the name of the FSM was the point of giving us both Sam Elliott and Michael Douglas for the pregame Heroic Voiceover Brigade? And, Michael Douglas, how exactly do we link JFK's inaugural, MLK's Dream speech, the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, Ali's KO of Liston in Lewiston, and this football game? A journey? More like a trip, actually. The pregame show was what Leni Riefenstahl would have done had she emigrated here as a child and gone to work for Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price."

So wrote Charles P. Pierce about the Super Bowl intro, and I almost didn't post that because I had to check the Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price reference  — is it "Mad Men"? yeah, sorry, I still don't want to watch it — not to mention the FSM reference — eh. It flicked my bloggable toggle switch and then came very close to toggling back. But I'm quoting it, really because I agree that they overdid it. Leni would have been much more insidiously subtle. But that's a good thing, right? You can defend against the ridiculously overdone. We can feel patriotic and festive in a mixed up clutter of history and pop culture, and then it's on to the football game.

The Pierce quote is embedded in this James Wolcott blog post. Wolcott is crankier than Pierce:

I had the pre-game on mute and every time I glanced up I wondered if we had declared war on Iraq or a hologram of Ronald Reagan was going to materialize on stage, raising a ruddy hand in blessing as Peggy Noonan ascended into heaven. The Super Bowl is bombastic enough without being a fanfare for World War III or IV, but who's counting? Or is it that the country requires this much self-affirmation now to reassure itself that it's still proud and virile? Maybe Stanley Fish can figure this out for us.

No link on the Stanley Fish reference, which is not something I can untangle with a Google search. I know who Stanley Fish is. I'm even in the middle of reading his new book, "How to Write a Sentence." (Check it out: I just wrote a sentence!) I'll assume Wolcott means to say something like: All those words and images require interpretation and Fish is the interpretation-meister.

But let's try to answer Wolcott's question: Does the country require this much self-affirmation now to reassure itself that it's still proud and virile?

I anticipate, instead of real answers, your snarky reframings of the question, asking whether Wolcott needs to reassure himself that he's still proud and virile. Indeed, I got the impression that his paragraph paralleled Pierce's, that he was envious of Pierce's writing prowess and trying to outmatch it. Ending with that limp Fish, he failed, which probably explains the flailing about "the county" and its imagined self-esteem problem. It's so problematic, raising the flag.

Roxanna Green said Christina was patriotic and proud to have a September 11, 2001 birthday.

"It was very special to her. She would tell people she was born on a holiday. She would always try to the see the positive in it. She said it was a holiday because it gave hope and everyone came together."

Christina Green died in the Tuscon shootings yesterday.

AND:

Christina was an A student and was interested in politics, so her mother accepted the offer by her friend Susan Hileman to take Christina to the congresswoman’s town hall meeting. John Green told the Arizona Star-News that Christina was such a good speaker, “I could have easily seen her as a politician.”

But Christina also seems to have inherited her family’s baseball genes. She was on the Little League baseball team, its only girl, her mother said.

“She was an athlete, a good dancer, a good gymnast, a good swimmer,” her mother said. “She belonged to Kids Helping Kids charity and tried to help children less fortunate.”

Christina, a slender girl with brownish blonde hair, brown eyes and a gentle smile, also sang in the choir at St. Odilia Roman Catholic Church. At home she took care of pet geckos, but loved frolicking with the dogs and cats of neighbors and friends. In the big-dreams way of children, she told her mother she wanted to be a veterinarian and study at an eastern school like New York University.

The 33 Chilean miners, who know they will be trapped below ground for months, display their living conditions to the world...

... and sing the national anthem to express their appreciation that people have the courage to go to all the trouble of rescuing them.

Think of all the miners in the past who have been trapped and were not rescued. Imagine knowing even one human being was buried alive and not making the effort — whatever the expense — to get them out.

ADDED:

"This is our casino," the miner says at one point, showing a table where the miners, he says, had made some makeshift dominoes.

It is the best thing to do, under the circumstances. In the above-ground world casinos are deliberately constructed without windows.

"There's nothing between these ears."

Another detail from yesterday's Tea Party photographs:

"Thanks for loving America" = what Sarah Palin wants to say to you when you show up for her book tour appearances.

Because, you know, wanting to see Sarah Palin in the flesh equates with loving America.

Or is that "Thank you" as in "Thank you for not smoking"?

"God bless America, my friend."

Said by a bicyclist to a pedestrian, outside my Madison, Wisconsin window just now. He added, "You going to work?" and the pedestrian, apparently someone he knew, said "yeah." That was the entirety of the conversation.

I thought you'd like to know what people are saying in Madison this morning.

American motorcycle.

In Augusta, Kentucky.

"American owned."

A store in Kentucky.

"You've got that patriotism in ya, that people just so respect."

Says Sarah Palin to the "American Chopper" guy. And check out her sofa: