Johnny.

I'm finally getting around to watching last night's Letterman show, the tribute to Johnny Carson. God, we loved that man! And David Letterman does such a good job with a show like this. He's got that sweet, funny humility of his. David does a monologue and then reveals later that all the jokes were written by Carson and sent on to Letterman. One guest on the show talks about how, after his retirement, Johnny read the newspaper and wrote jokes for his own amusement. Somehow the choice was made to send the jokes on to Dave.

Hugh Hewitt on "The Dennis Miller Show."

Hugh Hewitt was on "The Dennis Miller Show" tonight talking about his book "Blog." Miller defines a blog as "a sort of online stream-of-consciousness thing." There are all these millions of blogs, but Hewitt says the "top tier, two, three hundred of them make a difference." Hewitt was good at fast talking a lot of facts about things blogs are doing these days, but it all went by pretty fast, in a bit of a blur.

"American Idol," in Cleveland and Orlando.

We're in Cleveland: The first performer is Jacklyn Crum, who's only 16 and who tells Paula she loves her because she's pretty. She's obviously scared but she sings beautifully. Simon and Randy start hedging about her inexperience, but guest host LL Cool J says you've got to start somewhere and, with Paula's yes, she makes it.



Up next is one of the least attractive women ever to appear on the show. I assume she's going to be great, because otherwise it would be too mean to shine the spotlight on her. She looks 50 but she's only 18. LL Cool J laughs out loud. She's singing "I Could Have Danced All Night" with no pop quality at all. They all like her voice, and Simon lectures her about how you just can't go into pop music and look as bad as she does. They are nice to her as they reject her. LL gets up out of his chair and goes over and hugs her. So far, LL is a total sweetheart, a male Paula.



There's a big montage of bad singers. Then we get Scott Savol, who talks a little like that Sling Blade guy. He sings "Superstar." He says his dad doesn't think he can amount to anything. He's got a lovely voice, but again, lacks the looks. "You've just proved your dad wrong," Simon says. He makes it.



A mime is next. She silently mimes an Aerosmith song. Lotsa jokes about how she's better than most.



A farm boy comes out in overalls and sings the Charlie Chaplin song "Smile," which he identifies as a Nat King Cole song. They love him.



The Jackson sisters. They are very large, but charismatic. First, Lashunda. No! She cries. Leandra is next, crying, knowing her sister didn't make it. She sings "Summertime," but it's all off key, much worse than Lashunda. They are nice to her. LL gets up again to hug her and they all get up and hug her. We see her come out crying.



Briana Davis is next, dressed in lots of stripes, singing "Phantom of the Opera" beautifully ... until she gets to the high notes, which are a horror. But they all like her and she gets through.



"Aw, we all love this boy," I say about Anthony Federov. I've seen him on the teasers and thought was going to be the new Clay. They start saying he reminds them of Clay Aiken. As a boy, he had a tracheotomy and was told he might never speak again. Okay, we love him.



For the second half of the show, we're in Orlando. First up, Marissa Ganz sings "White Boys" from "Hair." She's white, so ... what is really the point of this song choice? She's horrible. They are aghast. "I don't know if that's good or bad." It was bad. She's followed by some other terrible people.



Vonzell Solomon sings "Chain of Fools." She fancies it up beyond belief, but she's good. She's trying touchingly hard. They love her.



Dezmond Meeks tries to do James Brown, "I Feel Good." He's wearing two-tone shoes. Paula loves him. Randy is not convinced. Simon thinks it's stagey and says no. So Paula "feels like quittin'." Paula asserts that he did James Brown better than James Brown, which is so not true. Simon has said no. Randy agrees based on Paula, and he makes it. He seems like a sweet kid. He overdid it, but how was he supposed to know where the line was between overdoing it and performing? Our hearts go out to him.



Note that they put two cities together tonight. I guess Cleveland and Orlando were the worst cities in the auditions. Tomorrow's San Francisco. Just one city. So presumably better than tonight's slightly subpar show.

Continued fallout from the "Quick, change that headline!" post.

On Sunday, I posted about the NYT changing a headline on an article about the voting in Iraq. Its original headline had been "Amid Attacks, a Party Atmosphere on Baghdad's Closed Streets," which took us to an article by Dexter Filkins and John F. Burns that began:

After a slow start, voters turned out in very large numbers in Baghdad today, packing polling places and creating a party atmosphere in the streets as Iraqis here and nationwide turned out to cast ballots in the country's first free elections in 50 years.



American officials were showing confidence that today was going to be a big success, despite attacks in Baghdad and other parts of the country that took at least two dozen lives. The Interior Ministry said 36 people had been killed in attacks, Agence France-Presse reported.



But the violence did not seem to have deterred most Iraqis. In Baghdad, Basra in the South, the holy Shiite city of Najaf and even the restive Northern city of Mosul, Iraqi civilians crowded the polling sites, navigating their way through tight security and sometimes proudly displaying the deep blue ink stain on their fingers that confirmed they had voted.

That original headline represented the article fairly. I praised the Times's headlines earlier that day as "a subtle mix of positive and negative," giving us "a sense of the importance of what is happening [without allowing] the bad to overshadow the good." A number of prominent bloggers, linking to the Filkins-Burns article, drew special attention to the "party atmosphere" language in the headline. Later in the day, I noticed that the headline had been changed to "Insurgent Attacks in Baghdad and Elsewhere Kill at Least 24," which completely failed to convey the gist of the article, the text of which had not changed. (The headline became even more negative later: "Attacks in Baghdad and Elsewhere Reportedly Kill Several Dozen.") I thought the headline change was worth blogging, along with my observation that it was "pathetic" -- pathetic to pick out the negative from an article full of positive.



Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly somehow saw fit to launch into an attack, calling me a "wingnut" and delivering an irrelevant lecture about how newspaper headlines are written and websites updated. You certainly can't tell from reading his garbled post that I was writing about changing the headline on the same article and changing it to something that did not fit the article. I've exchanged some emails with Drum, who has an elaborate justification for putting an inappropriate headline on one article so that the whole mix of headlines on the main page that day would not be excessively positive. There was violence in Iraq, the theory goes, so one of the headlines needed to refer to violence, and since there was some reference to violence in the Filkins-Burns article, that was a good place to put the negative headline. I think that may be the best thing that might be said in defense of the Times, though I still have a problem with it. But I have much more of a problem with Drum, who -- despite his lecture about how websites can be frequently updated -- has not seen fit to update his post and make it clear that he misrepresented my post. Frankly, he owes me a public apology, on his website, for calling me a wingnut and for ridiculing me based on his own misreading (or deliberate misrepresentation).



Now, I see that Howard Kurtz at The Washington Post has reprinted Drum's post, nearly in its entirety, without any criticism of it, passing along Drum's insult and distortion. I know it's in quotes, but I'd really prefer not to see myself referred to as a "wingnut" in The Washington Post!



UPDATE: Poliblogger writes that Drum should apologize.



ANOTHER UPDATE: Howard Kurtz quotes part of this response in his Wednesday column. He also quotes this post, which says something I really do care very deeply about.



YET ANOTHER UPDATE: One of the comments over at the Washington Monthly link abuses me for not allowing comments on my blog, which is just rich: I was forced to cancel the comments function over here because I had no way to block the commenters who were resorting to abusive, ugly forms of expression that I did not want on my blog. You can go over there and see the kind of comments that are being made about me, which would be smeared all over my blog if I had comments. Here, I explain why I cancelled the comments. It's a little funny to me to reread that post today, where I summarized the nasty things that commenters were saying about me, becuase some of the comments over there at Washington Monthly fit the categories I came up with last spring, especially: "I claim to be a moderate, but I'm only posing as a moderate for some nefarious reason."



Some people who haunt comments pages are parasites: Why don't they have their own blogs and just link? Because they aren't good enough on their own to attract visitors. Some of them are so bad it's almost funny, like the one today who is saying:

Professor Ann Althouse is a faux moderate in the style of Jeff Jarvis and Michael Totten. She has discovered that the Right pays a hell of a lot better than the Left, and is promoting her own fortunes as fast as she can by sucking up. Like Totten. And like Jarvis. And like them, she has absolutely nothing good to say ever about liberals or liberalism, while making googly eyes at those big strong conservatives, while expressing dismay at the criticism she gets from the left. It's a transparent pose. She completely lacks integrity. Winnable? Anyone who can look at the bunch of criminals in the White House currently and remain neutral is stupid. Someone who just pretends they are in order to line their pockets is beneath contempt.

I hope Jarvis and Totten know this character is on to our little game of sucking up to right wingers for those big cash payouts.

Those crazy jury verdicts.

I wonder when we'll ever hear the end of this.

Things retrieved from a car wreck.

Nine days ago, I wrecked my car. I was physically and mentally together enough to retrieve some things from my car -- my handbag, the hang tag for parking on campus, the registration and insurance materials. But there were still some things left. Yesterday, we went over to the towing company's car lot and had a chance to empty out the car. A man who worked there helped me eject the cartridge from the CD player, and I was glad to find a shopping bag -- from Soulman -- in the trunk to stuff all the various items in. Today, I dumped all these things on my living room floor:















There's the gold flower that was in the vase by the steering wheel and landed on the car's floor after the crash. Dumped out of the Soulman bag, it lands on top of the image of an autumn leaf on the cover of the atlas, where it looks so fallen, so over. Simultaneously, a man comes to the door to deliver a bouquet of flowers. It's from the man who sold me the new car, the car I must transfer my love to. Do I feel a new thrill with my new love, Silvio? Ah, I'm still a bit shaken from the accident. I bought Li'l Greenie to replace a boring old car (a Honda Civic), and I felt such a happy thrill as soon as I started driving him around. People would smile at the cute fun car. It was July, and I drove with the windows down and the moon roof open, and played music that went with the car: the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Kinks, even Herman's Hermits.



My new car is so much more adult. But it's a sports car! It should be a big thrill. I'll tell you something about a sports car, something I didn't really understand before. It does not give you an exciting sensation of speed. What it gives you is a feeling of solid ordinariness at a high speed. Seventy feels like thirty-five. Silvio gives me security, along with a sense that now I -- and not just those other people -- have a luxury car. So, quite the opposite from the feeling I got from Li'l Greenie, Silvio gives a feeling of privileged adulthood, serious maturity. But perhaps it's too soon after the accident to feel overwhelmed with thrills and fun. We need to go on a long honeymoon together, Silvio and I.



I pick up the atlas from the living room floor and look for some routes out into the beautiful landscapes of the west.

A February morning.

Welcome to February everyone. It's another gray day here in Madison. I'm trying to get around to reading the newspaper, but I'm also preparing for my 9:30 Fedjur class. The subject is the "independent and adequate state ground doctrine," and that means Bush v. Gore has come up again. Last time I taught it, I commented on the impossibility of teaching it properly, because it's so complicated, and everyone comes to it with deeply entrenched convictions. I feel a little mellower about it at the moment, perhaps because the subject is coming up in the upper level course and not the first year Conlaw course.



It may seem as if I haven't been posting this morning, but in fact, I've been hanging around in the update sections of recent posts. So if you are looking for some fresh new Althouse material, check the updates here, here, and here.