Ooo..

...oops.

It was a very sunny day today in Brooklyn.

I took the long way... under the train...



Out into the open...



Let's go...



Surf's up...



You know, the East River isn't a river...



It's part of the Atlantic Ocean.

Coffeehouse.

This post is a coffeehouse. Have your conversation here. It's a beautiful Saturday here in New York City. I'll be back at some point with some photos, but, please, carry on without me.

"It takes a special kind of political and moral idiocy to choose such a moment to wax nostalgic for [Vietnam]."

Christopher Hitchens can't stand George Bush -- especially "his contented assumption that 'faith' is, in and of itself, a virtue":

This self-satisfied mentality helps explain almost everything, from the smug expression on his face to the way in which, as governor of Texas, he signed all those death warrants without losing a second's composure.

It explains the way in which he embraced Russian President Vladimir Putin, ex-KGB goon, citing as the basis of a beautiful relationship the fact that Putin was wearing a crucifix. (Has Putin been seen wearing that crucifix before or since? Did his advisers tell him that the US president was that easy a pushover?)

It also explains the unforgivable intervention that Bush made into the private life of the Schiavo family: leaving his Texas ranch to try and keep "alive" a woman whose autopsy showed that her brain had melted to below flatline a long time before.

Here is a man who believes the "jury" is still "out" on whether we evolved as a species, who regards stem cell research as something profane, who affects the odd belief that Islam is "a religion of peace."

But he still thinks Bush was right to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless, he's damned sure Bush is an idiot for comparing Iraq to Vietnam.

When Huckabee pardoned Keith Richards.

Everybody is a fan:

Former Arkansas governor and now presidential candidate Mike Huckabee sounded almost indignant last week describing how police in his home state charged Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards with reckless driving back in the 1970s. When Huckabee met Richards last year, he righted that perceived wrong by pardoning the rock star. Cynics accused Huckabee of giving the famous special treatment, saying he wouldn't pardon the average citizen. To which Huckabee responded: "No, I wouldn't. . . . But here's the deal: If you can play guitar like Keith Richards, I'd do it for you."

And here's the video of Huckabee basking in his memories of Keith. Put up with the commercial, because the video shows Huckabee glowing with love for the guy and even imitating his English accent. And how often do you get to hear a presidential candidate laughing off the notion of equal justice under the law?

The blog book tour.

Oh, come on, is it any more humiliating than slogging around to Borders bookstores all over the place and hoping for a decent crowd? It's like this:

[A]n author pops up on a series of blogs, usually over days or weeks, variously writing guest posts, answering questions from the host or sitting for a podcast, a video interview or a live chat. The blogs’ readers may comment and leave more questions. Ideally, they follow links to the author’s Web site and to an online retailer like Amazon....

Many publishing houses have now hired Web-savvy publicists or outside blog tour “producers.” Some blog tour producers say they have, from time to time, paid bloggers to review an author’s book as part of a tour. Bloggers may or may not reveal this detail. Producers also say they may try to dissuade bloggers who want to post a negative review. But in general, negativity is hard to find on a blog book tour. Gushiness — on the part of authors, bloggers and readers — is not.

“Wow — I can’t begin to tell you how excited I was when Michelle Rowen invited me along to do a guest spot on the Midnight Hour,” wrote Amanda Ashby, a romance author, who, like Ms. Rowen, is a member of the Girlfriends’ Cyber Circuit, a group of about 40 authors who have blogs and regularly promote one another’s books. In this post on Ms. Rowen’s blog, Ms. Ashby was chronicling her attempt to land a publishing deal for her novel “You Had Me at Halo.”

“The book sounds fantastic and is one I’ll definitely have to pick up soon,” said a poster named Cory in the blog’s comments section.

“Thanks so much, Cory!!” Ms. Ashby responded.

Those two exclamation points say it all, don't they? You can't trust those bloggers. Unlike mainstream editors, who never calculate self-interest when they decide how negative they want to go.

"Fashion is bourgeois, girly, unfeminist, conformist, elitist, frivolous, anti-intellectual..."

Unless it's not:

Particularly in academia, where bodies are just carts for hauling around brains, the thrill and social play and complex masquerade of fashion is “very much denigrated,” [said Elaine Showalter, the feminist literary critic and a professor emeritus at Princeton.]. “The academic uniform has some variations,” she said, “but basically is intended to make you look like you’re not paying attention to fashion, and not vain, and not interested in it, God forbid."

But let's get to the meat of this article, written by Guy Trebay for the NYT, the part about Hillary:

[F]ashion is ... often used as a weapon, a club wielded by those who forget that we are saying something about ourselves every time we get dressed — not infrequently things that fail to convey the whole truth.

Why else was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign moved to attack the fashion critic of The Washington Post for attempting to read the candidate’s clothes? The editorial blitz that followed Senator Clinton’s outraged response to some blameless observations about a slight show of cleavage on the Senate floor was instructive, as was Mrs. Clinton’s summoning up of feminist cant about the sexism of focusing on what a woman wears to the exclusion of her ideas.

For some reason, Trebay declines to name the WaPo fashion critic. (Jealous?) Anyway, of course, it's Robin Givhan. (Here's the Bloggingheads segment where I talk with Robin about the Hillary cleavage to-do.) Back to Trebay:

But clothes are ideas; to use a fashionism — Hello! Scholars like the art historian Anne Hollander have spent decades laying out the way that costume serves to billboard the self. One would have thought that few people understand this truth as well as the woman occasionally known as Hairband Hillary, who, after all, assiduously recast her image from that of demure and wifely second-banana to power-suited policy wonk, dressed to go forth and lead the free world.

Well, of course she knows, which is why her campaign mobilized against Givhan. (More Bloggingheads about that, if you're up for it.)