"Another Atlantic-sponsored party where ordinary guests get to stand in a separate area and watch the higher-ranking guests talk to each other."

"Somebody over there thinks Americans like that sort of thing."

That's Mickey Kaus, via Instapundit.

I'd like to see the Atlantic make a TV show out of it, the way Playboy did with "Playboy After Dark" and "Playboy's Penthouse." I'd stand in a separate area willingly if I could watch Lenny Bruce:



"I was talkin' to the chicks and all of a sudden they just floated off... This is a kind of an interesting party. You know, I first figured it would be like sort of a TV you know typical uh fake party, you know. But it's kind of good party feeling to it with some pretty chicks which is a good composite here... That's what grooved me about the show, that is, it's actually a party, so that whatever happens at a party, you know, within limitations."

Was anyone blabbering at that level at the Atlantic party?

You know, Lenny Bruce is really sort of you know hard uh to kind of transcribe there's all these extra like... words.

Bin Laden worried that the "human lawn mower" "conflicted with his vision for what he wanted al-Qaeda to be."

"The idea was to attach rotating blades to the front of a pickup truck and drive the contraption into crowds."

This is what WaPo forefronts in the article headlined "Bin Laden’s last stand: In final months, terrorist leader worried about his legacy," but if you keep reading to the very end, you'll see that the main image problem that troubled him was false oaths:

When Pakistani American Faisal Shahzad tried to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Times Square in May 2010, his attempt, widely hailed by jihadists, drew a surprising rebuke from bin Laden, who took a rare break from his self-imposed seclusion in central Pakistan to denounce Shahzad. 

It wasn’t the prospect of civilian deaths that upset bin Laden, but rather the fact that Shahzad had planned the act after swearing a loyalty oath to the United States as a newly naturalized citizen. 

“You know it is not permissible to tell such a lie to the enemy,” bin Laden wrote... Complaining of the “negative effects” to al-Qaeda’s image, bin Laden noted that jihadists already were under suspicion in parts of the world for “reneging on oaths, and perfidy.”

"The Shrinking Law School."

Downsizing.

The NYT reports that "officials involved" in hiring Elizabeth Warren "all said that she was hired because she was an outstanding teacher, and that her lineage was either not discussed or not a factor."

What would you expect them to say?

“To suggest that she needed some special advantage to be hired here or anywhere is just silly,” said Jay Westbrook, chairman of business law at the University of Texas.

But you see, in faculty hiring, the question isn't whether this particular candidate is good enough. The question is why does this person with excellent credentials get selected from the pool of applicants who all have excellent credentials? Why did Warren move up the ranks of the law schools the way she did?

Her identification as a member of a minority group in the Association of American Law Schools directory would help. Why are the schools reticent about saying that they consider minority status a plus factor in hiring? Why aren't they out-and-proud about diversity? Law schools have fought for the proposition that diversity is a compelling state interest, justifying racial discrimination.

For Professor Westbrook to scoff that it's "just silly" to "suggest that [Warren] needed some special advantage" is to clumsily insult all the people who have gotten hired (or admitted as students) because of the diversity efforts of law schools. Those other people needed some special advantage, but oh, no, not her.

Is this reticence about the decency of affirmative action happening here because they want to help Warren in her Senate race? Is it because if she didn't really have that factor going for her but the schools used it, then... well... who, really, is hurt? Who was the next person in that pool of applicants? No one knows. Look away.

Hey, but who else might be cheating, claiming minority status that's not really true? Now, now, you're not supposed to think about that. It's quite unseemly, isn't it? Impolite.

Ousted from the Don Miller parking lot, where will Occupy Madison go?

Cap Times reports — in an article that says it was posted at 2:45 pm yesterday:

“It was an intolerable situation,” Mayor Paul Soglin said Monday evening of the Occupy Madison homeless encampment on East Washington Avenue, after a Dane County judge declined to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent the city from closing it down.

It's so annoying to try to follow the news from this once-halfway-decent newspaper. I almost passed up this article because I wanted to know what happened last night. But here's the news from Monday night, posted mid-afternoon on Monday.

“The kind of health issues and crime problems we had on this site are not covered by the First Amendment, I think that’s very clear,” Soglin said. 

He said that the city would wait until noon Tuesday to evacuate the site, to give people a chance to pack their things and leave. 

Police calls to the Occupy site at a city-owned former car dealership in the 800 block of East Washington Avenue included some serious incidents, Soglin stressed. “We are treating the site as a hazardous waste site -- no employee going in is going to touch anything. We’ve had numerous reports of needles.”

Why was this allowed to go on so long?

About an hour earlier...

Earlier than what? "Monday evening"?

... Dane County Circuit Court Judge Amy Smith told pro-bono lawyers who sought a temporary restraining order in the name of three homeless people that they had not provided convincing evidence that clearing the site would trample the occupants’ First Amendment rights of assembly and free speech. In fact, there was evidence that occupants had participated in protests at other locations in the city while living at Occupy Madison, Smith pointed out.

Oh, good lord, why was this a difficult issue? The protesters have left the city with a hazardous waste site to clean up and they made us waste our scarce money defending ridiculous lawsuits. You know the old lefty slogan "Property is theft." These lefties have me thinking: Protest is theft.

At about the time that Soglin spoke with reporters at a community budget session at Wright Middle School on the south side about a dozen protesters gathered in the hallway outside Soglin’s office in the City-County Building downtown were ordered to leave by police officers. All but one man -- Allen Barkoff, 69 -- obeyed; he was arrested and charged with trespassing.

Barkoff — we were talking about him yesterday.

What was the point of all the patience and tolerance? At some point, it would need to end and it would, predictably, end badly. Now, they've got until noon today, and then the city moves in. Brilliantly, the day is May 1st, which has long been planned as a big protest day. I can see in the social media that there's an effort to draw a crowd to the Occupy site at noon (and then to march to the City County Building for a rally). Good luck to Mayor Soglin — who's now the protesters' enemy. (We saw a "Recall Soglin" sign at the Occupy site yesterday. Another sign said: "We were evicted from our homes, Mayor Soglin.)

ADDED: Here's what we saw:

How rare is it to get 3 home runs and a triple in one game?

It just happened last night for the second time in 50 years. Fred Lynn did it in 1975, and last night, it was Ryan Braun. (At Petco Park, where it's unusually hard "early in the season when the 'marine layer' off the Pacific Ocean envelops the spacious facility in a thick, damp shroud." In fact, Braun was the first person to hit 3 home runs in one game at Petco Park.)

It would be better to get 4 home runs, but it's much more unusual to get 3 home runs and a triple. Triples are much rarer than home runs. And — did you realize? — the triple has become rarer over time:

With the exception of the almost extinct inside-the-park home run, the triple is rarest of hits. This was not always So. For more than fifty years after the founding of the major leagues, the home run was the rarest hit, followed by the triple, double, and single. The logic behind this was obvious: The farther a batter struck the ball, the more bases he could reach. 

Even such changes as overhand pitching and enclosed ballparks did nothing to affect the natural order of hits. From 1901 to 1929 the average distribution was: 76.9 percent for singles, 15.2 percent for doubles, 5.3 percent for triples, and 2.7 percent for homers. In the pre-Ruthian years, there were roughly three to four times as many triples as homers. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of everyday players who ended their careers before 1930 had more three-base hits than home runs. This list includes Home Run Baker, Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Joe Jackson, Eddie Collins, Tris Speaker, George Sisler, and Sam Crawford; the latter holds the career record for triples with 312. 

The heyday of the three-base hit was the nineteen-teens. The newly built concrete-and-steel parks had huge outfields and distant fences, with foul lines often in the 370-foot range and with center-field fences more than 450 feet away. Although a new ball was used after 1910, it was dead by modern standards and often doctored by the pitchers, so outfielders played shallow. Balls hit over their heads or line drives in the gaps (especially in the early innings before the ball got soft) could roll to the deepest part of the park. With pitching dominant and low scores common, the strategy of the times was that it was often worth the risk of stretching a double in order to get one base closer to home.... 

The emergence of the home run in the 1920s was the death knell of the three-base hit. This event was no accident, but a conscious effort by the team owners noting the correlation between the increase in home runs and the rise in attendance. The baseball establishment assisted the triples-to-homer shift in two significant ways. First, the architecture of the ballparks was changed. The outfield fences were moved in, shortening the distance for a home run and reducing the length of outfielders' throws to third. The second alteration was the ball. In the 1920s it was given a more resilient center and many more new balls were used per game. When the "rabbit ball" was introduced in 1930, batting averages and home runs skyrocketed. 

By 1920 the ratio of triples to home runs had dropped from three or four to one to only two to one. By the late 1920s triples and home runs were virtually even. In 1929 home runs surpassed triples for the first time. Over the years the gap has widened. In the late 1940s there were about 2.5 home runs for every triple. A decade later that ratio was more than three to one, and by 1988 there were almost four round trippers for every three-base hit – a level of domination the triple never enjoyed over the homer.

More at the link.

Obama's new slogan is not only the Wisconsin motto... it's the "No Labels" motto.

The previous post talks about how the new motto is the Wisconsin motto. Adding my new "mottos" tag to old posts, I ran across a post from December 2010 about No Labels, a top-down "grassroots" movement:

No Labels was created by two Washington consultants, the Democratic fund-raiser Nancy Jacobson and the Republican image-shaper Mark McKinnon, and its slick opening event featured throngs of journalists, free boxed lunches and a song written for the occasion by the pop sensation Akon. The group’s slogan, printed on T-shirts and banners, summarizes its purpose this way: “Not left. Not right. Forward.”

Lots of names at the link, nearly all Democrats. There were Republicans, but as Byron York noted at the time:

For some reason, most of the Republicans who showed up were recently defeated officeholders: South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis, Delaware Rep. Mike Castle, and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist.

Where's No Labels now? Absorbed into the Obama campaign? It's more likely that they are so forgotten that their previous use of the motto had no effect on the Obama campaign's motto choice.

Here's the Wikipedia article on the group, which released a "Make Congress Work action plan" in December 2011. Did you notice? It's a 12-point plan... a 12-step program:

1. Automatic pay docking for Congress if the federal budget is not passed on time
2. An up-or-down vote on all presidential appointments within 90 days of their nomination
3. Changing the rules of the filibuster so as to make the process more difficult to accomplish (by having filibustering senators stand on the floor and speak as long as they can), as well as elimination of filibusters of motions to open debate.
4. Anonymous discharge petitions
5. A five-day workweek in Congress
6. Institution of Question Time between Congress and the President
7. An annual fiscal report delivered to a joint session of Congress, after which everyone present must sign the report
8. A code of conduct banning the taking of pledges from special interest groups
9. Bipartisan monthly gatherings to be held off-the-record.
10. The establishment of bipartisan seating
11. The establishment of a Bipartisan Leadership Council to be made up of the Speaker of the House, the president pro tempore, and Majority and Minority leaders of both houses, and two slots per house for other members to be decided using a lottery
12. The banning of incumbents taking part in negative campaigns against other incumbents

Interesting. Not very grassrootsy, but what do you think?