"He leads by being there."

"The important thing is fear."

At the Mellow Madison Café...

... this was the vibe last evening. We're off to soak up the new vibe. It's a lovely day. You can do what you want, but if you want a place to talk about something, anything, that's what this is.

"The Obama White House is too white"... so it keeps "tripping over race rather than inspiring on race."

Says Maureen Dowd:

The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Google, they weren’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn’t return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong....

The president appears completely comfortable in his own skin, but it seems he feels that he and Michelle are such a huge change for the nation to absorb that he can be overly cautious about pushing for other societal changes for blacks and gays. 

(Gays! Where did that come from?)

His closest advisers — some of the same ones who urged him not to make the race speech after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright issue exploded — are so terrified that Fox and the Tea Party will paint Obama as doing more for blacks that they tiptoe around and do less. “Who knew that the first black president would make it even harder on black people?” asked a top black Democratic official....

“The president’s getting hurt real bad,” [Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina,] told me. “He needs some black people around him.” He said Obama’s inner circle keeps “screwing up” on race: “Some people over there are not sensitive at all about race. They really feel that the extent to which he allows himself to talk about race would tend to pigeonhole him or cost him support, when a lot of people saw his election as a way to get the issue behind us. I don’t think people elected him to disengage on race. Just the opposite.”

Dowd ends by recommending that Obama hire Shirley Sherrod for a newly created position called "Director of Black Outreach."

"No one in recent pop memory has been a greater enemy to the authentic than Lady Gaga."

No one? What about Madonna?

From the start of her career Madonna was a savvy pop trickster, using outrageous imagery as a distraction while smuggling ideas about religion and social politics into her music. Most of the Gaga generation, however, is interested in distraction as an end in itself.

As a 60s person, I'm highly amused by this presentation of the 80s as the standard what was once real in popular culture. Madonna was fake as a means to an end, but Lady Gaga is really fake, and fake is what's real now. To my 60s ears, that sounds like something Andy Warhol would say.

Lady Gaga has become successful by adhering to the belief that there’s no inner truth to be advertised, or salvaged: all one can do is invent anew.

It wasn’t that long ago when artifice appeared to be on its last leg. In the mid-to-late-1990s female performers especially were in a confessional place, a movement captured and branded by Lilith Fair, the summer tour package founded in part by Sarah McLachlan that ran from 1997 to 1999.

Wait. People took Lilith Fair seriously? 11-year-old girls, maybe. Seems to me it was mostly abhorred.

The last couple of years have seen the first wave of 1990s nostalgia, which might explain in part why Lilith was resurrected this year. But Lilith aesthetics haven’t aged well....

Do we say hasn't aged well about something that was never pretty?

"I know it's about a lesbian couple, but give me a break."

Ha.

"Almost all judicial decisions... can be assigned an ideological value."

"Those favoring, say, prosecutors and employers are said to be conservative, while those favoring criminal defendants and people claiming discrimination are said to be liberal."

If you can get past that sticking point, you can code everything into an immense database, produce some amazing-looking charts, and reach conclusions like "Court Under Roberts Is Most Conservative in Decades." You can then see into the future:

If the Roberts court continues on the course suggested by its first five years, it is likely to allow a greater role for religion in public life, to permit more participation by unions and corporations in elections and to elaborate further on the scope of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Abortion rights are likely to be curtailed, as are affirmative action and protections for people accused of crimes.

Affirmative action is likely to be curtailed? But you just said decisions favoring employers are conservative, and decisions in favor of persons claiming discrimination are liberal.

IN THE COMMENTS:Paul Zrimsek said:

Almost all judicial decisions can be assigned a molecular weight, too, provided you don't object to talking nonsense.

1 sunset... in 3 parts.

1:



2:



3.



(On Lake Mendota, this evening.)