In the NYC stop-and-frisk case, the 2d Circuit said the district judge Shira Scheindlin created an "appearance of partiality."

It stayed her order and removed her from the case.

The appellate court's 2-page ruling cited this NYT article in a footnote to criticize Scheindlin for the way the related-case rule has directed stop-and-frisk cases against the police to her ever since 1999, when she was randomly assigned the case dealing with the police shooting of Amadou Diallo. The NYT had this (last May):

In a city with dozens of Federal District Court judges, it is striking that a single judge has so many opportunities to rule on one of the Police Department’s signature crime-fighting tactics — a development that has frustrated city officials....

The language of the court rule leaves it to the discretion of individual judges to accept the case as related or not. It instructs judges to consider whether placing the cases in the same courtroom would result in conserving judicial resources, allow more efficient litigation or serve the convenience of the various parties.

The rule calls for related cases to have a “similarity of facts and legal issues” or to stem from the “same transactions or events.” But cases are not related merely because they involve identical legal issues or litigants....

The Democratic Party's Halloween-themed email: the "Nightmare" of Ted Cruz as President.

Received this afternoon from democraticparty@democrats.org, with the subject line "Senator President Cruz":

"Obama Officials In 2010: 93 Million Americans Will Be Unable To Keep Their Health Plans Under Obamacare."

Wow.

Are Republicans following a "don't be mean" strategy, and — if so — is a good strategy?

Yesterday Rush Limbaugh was complaining about the Republicans in Congress not going after Kathleen Sebelius.

She was sent out there today to absorb every bit of damage... but I don't know that the Republicans did much damage.

It's like they're afraid to. It's like there's still a fear of going after Obama, or going after Sebelius, just from the consultant level of the party or whoever's running the Republican Party. There seems to be some instruction that's gone out from on high to back off. "Don't even get close to making it look like it's personal! Don't be mean!... don't be critical, 'cause this thing's imploding itself, and it'll go down"...

But isn't that a good strategy for the GOP? Stand back and let Obamacare topple on its own. Don't give the Democrats the opportunity to blame Republicans or to distract people with their old go-to strategy: Portraying Republicans as mean.

Rush would prefer Republicans getting aggressive. Sebelius is "clearly the punching bag." "She's a sponge. She's supposed to soak it up and smile and take it." Riiight. Punching the 65-year-old lady is the way to go. Seems to me that if they sent her out there to be a "punching bag" (or sponge!) they were hoping Republicans would take hard enough shots to make her sympathetic. Which she so far is not.

Obviously, though, avoiding anything that anyone can ever call mean is a hopelessly ineffectual approach to a competition. Interestingly enough, it's something that has traditionally impeded females. And it's not even a good way to avoid meanness, this fear of being perceived as mean.

Years ago, my sons and I overheard a young girl yelling — over and over to someone who must have called her mean — "I don't want to be mean!" For years, in our house, we'd use that line "I don't want to be mean!" for various humorous purposes. Why are some people so shaken up, so manipulated by the horrible possibility that they might be mean?

So what should the congressional Republicans be doing? How to be effectual without fueling the other side's "Republicans are mean" game?

"I want to dust mop the floor."/"The front paw makes me want to eat ramen noodles."

"Nice view of the roof of her mouth."/"Getting that camera angle really low."/"The hair and the grass go together."/"Jeez, this is relaxing."/"There's grass on her tongue."

Things I said on first viewing Meade's video titled "Josie & Zeus":

Facebook is looking to collect data on where your cursor hovers and clicks.

Says Facebook analytics chief Ken Rudin, whose face looks like this:



At least he can't track my eyes and read my mind as I look at him.

Record the closest approximation of your thoughts.
	The face of evil.
	He must be rich, and yet his teeth remain unwhitened.
	He seems like a nice man.
	A generic white-man face. Nothing is gained or learned by seeing it.
	In the future we won't need faces. We'll have Facebook.
pollcode.com free polls

AND: You remember the past?

Poopy suits.

From the Navy's FAQ about submarines: Question #26 — out of 61 — "What clothes do you wear?"

When in port, crew members wear regular Navy uniforms. At sea, members wear one-piece blue coveralls called "poopy suits." They are very comfortable to wear and reduces the number of clothes the sailor has to bring to sea. Submarine crews usually wear sneakers or other soft bottomed shoes when at sea, as sound quieting and stealth are always foremost in a submariner's mind.

Huge oil discovery in Australia — more than in all of Iran, Iraq, Canada, or Venezuela...

... and about equal to Saudi Arabia.

ADDED: Link deleted based on comments about a sales pitch from the link.

The nightmare of flying just got a little more complicated.

"The Federal Aviation Administration will allow airlines to expand passengers' use of portable electronic devices during all phases of flight, the agency announced today, but cell phone calls will still be prohibited," says a "Breaking News" email from CNN.

I'm guessing the cell phones are still prohibited because we really cannot tolerate a plane full of people yakking on their cell phones. And yet... flying on a plane is an ordeal in the toleration of other people. Those of us who are too sensitive to endure it are not on that plane, which means that if you are, you're there with a plane full of insensitive people.

I know that's not completely true. Some people are forced to fly. Or rather: everyone on any plane has some reason to be there that outweighs the unpleasantness of the experience. It just takes more for some of us than others. And now we can use iPads and laptops to watch movies and play video games and work work work. The question for any given would-be passenger is: Does that add to the pro or the con side of flying?

In the future, the planes will be full of people who are there having weighed the pros and cons under the new rule. And when you see (or think about) what that's like, you'll have to redo your own weighing of reasons to fly against the unpleasantness of the experience. Am I going to be sitting between 2 guys playing video games while someone behind me pounds away on a laptop on the tray-table attached to my seat?

ADDED: I do realize that today's rule change relates only to the takeoff and landing phases and that devices have been common on flights for a long time. The "now" in paragraph 3, above, was intended to refer to the way things have been recently and awkwardly to the new extension of freedom to use devices. As for weighing the pros and cons of the new rule: If the absence of the use of devices was a comfort, it was only a small comfort, in part of the flight. Changing the rule at least ends the pestering by flight attendants. Overall, I like the rule change. I need reading or listening material on a plane, and I don't want to have to think about or to carry the weight of a paper book to tide me over during the takeoff and landing phases. I especially don't like being woken up half an hour before landing to be told to turn off the audiobook that enabled me to fall and to stay asleep.

"We use transgender as an umbrella term that includes people who are transsexual, cross-dressers or otherwise gender non-conforming."

A definition in the sidebar of an article titled "The Heart Wants What It Wants" — supertitled "We Are as We Are" and "Dating Trans?," which is teased on the front page of this new website Ozy under the heading "Tricky Topic: Dating a Transgender Person/Have attitudes about the fluidity of gender migrated much on the T in LGBT?"

For a website with a 3-letter name, that's an awful lot of titles, dragging us this way and that. What caught my eye — among the many things clamoring to catch eyes — was that side-bar definition that I used for the post title. That made me think: Who's not under that umbrella? Only people who are gender-conforming, which in my book — who wants to be a conformist, a gender stereotype? — is an insult.
The erstwhile minority could become the majority by repositioning the line.

But the article doesn't get us any further than telling us about some new Jared Leto-Matthew McConaughey ("Oscar buzz"), the price of some "sex reassignment" surgeries ("creating a penis is difficult and costly"), the fact that the Social Security Administration will now record your change of sex without proof of surgery (why not?), and finally — as we reach the last paragraph, still searching for the multiple teased topics — 3 questions, essentially only repeating the question raised in all those titles/supertitles/teasers.

So that's my first encounter with Ozy. Here's a Business Insider article about it: "Former MSNBC Anchor Launches Ozy, A Fresh News Site With Money From Laurene Powell Jobs."

Watson is the kind of person who is so charismatic, an interview about Ozy required a follow-up phone call. 

What? Is the reporter — Alyson Shontell — saying she was so dazzled by the in-person presence of this man who "wore a gray fitted T-shirt and a bright smile" to their in-person meeting that she needed another interview at some distance from this man's powerful force-field?

[Carlos Watson] is a great schmoozer and I admittedly fell for it during our first meeting. He escaped tough business questions the first time around.

Ha ha. I wonder how Laurene Powell Jobs is doing. Does it matter? She has Steve's billions to throw around however she wants, at whatever cute guys remain amongst the living, now that poor Steve has oh-wowed.

"I think most people would say, 'No, we don't need another news site,'" Watson says. "But if you asked them, 'Has there been a change, such that people are hungrier now to see more, be more and do more than before?' I think they'd tell you there has been. That's why Kickstarter exists. That's why Airbnb has such a robust business. There's a reason why there are things called 500 startups, and a reason startup accelerators are in every city. There's a reason why American Idol is still strong 15 years later. There's a hunger people have for both for themselves and in the world for what's next and what's new."

Are you still hungry? Or does this put you off your feed?

WaPo Fact Checker gives 4 "Pinocchios" to Obama's promise that you can keep your health care plan.

Glenn Kessler rejects the excuses and weasling:

[A]s White House spokesman Jay Carney put it: “It’s correct that substandard plans... are no longer allowed — because the Affordable Care Act is built on the premise that health care is not a privilege, it’s a right, and there should be minimum standards for the plans available to Americans across the country.”

But such assertions do not really explain the president’s promise — or Jarrett’s tweet ["FACT: Nothing in #Obamacare forces people out of their health plans. No change is required unless insurance companies change existing plans."]. There may be a certain percentage of people who were happy with their “substandard” plan, presumably because it cost relatively little....

The president’s statements were sweeping and unequivocal — and made both before and after the bill became law. The White House now cites technicalities to avoid admitting that he went too far in his repeated pledge, which, after all, is one of the most famous statements of his presidency.

I added a couple of clues...

... to that Althouse blog test from a couple days ago.

At Marley's Café...

... we don't want the top post to be about cats.

Those Dell laptops that smell like cat urine? Don't worry.

"The smell is not related to cat urine or any other type of biological contaminant, nor is it a health hazard."

Link goes to a BBC news item that ends "News of the issue spread after a link to the thread was posted to discussion site Reddit," which links to a Reddit thread where the top-rated comment refers to the BBC link to the comments thread and comments like "Clearly BBC journalists like to keep their fingers on the pulse of what's happening. Commendable attitude" and "Or they're desperately scrabbling for a source that isn't 'Marge from St. Ives said so' and don't think people will look too carefully..."

Who's giving up now? Early warning signs.

1. "The Art of Lying Down: A Guide to Horizontal Living," a book by Bernd Brunner that is an "ode to lying down... ranging from the history of the mattress to the 'slow living movement." It "makes an eloquent case for the importance of lying down in a world that values ever greater levels of activity," and presents lying down as "a protest."

2. A New Republic piece by Ben Crair about protesting against excessive activity by staying in bed. "When you’re in bed, everything seems too far away, even the other rooms of your apartment—and I live in a studio. My water intake dropped to almost zero, which I never noticed until I went outside on some errand and found myself desperately thirsty after a few minutes of leisurely walking. One evening, returning home, I planted my right foot on a step in the hallway, and lifted my left foot assuming it would follow, but nope: It went back down exactly where it had started."

3. There's this new essay in The New Yorker by Evgeny Morozov called "Only Disconnect/Two cheers for boredom," that begins with a reverie about a 1903 essay called "The Metropolis and Mental Life," that says closing the shades and "surrendering oneself to one's boredom on the sofa" is good response for people who "are pushed deeper and deeper into the hustle and bustle until eventually they no longer know where their head is." You'll need a subscription to read the whole thing, but I can tell you that Morozov is reading some new books that resonate with that old surrender-to-boredom-and-inactivity theme.

"I am as frustrated and angry as anyone," claims Kathleen Sebelius, apologizing... stalling for time...

"You deserve better. I apologize. I am accountable to you for fixing these problems, and I’m committed to earning your confidence back by fixing the site.”

In the Washington Post account, it says: "She pledged that the glitches are 'fixable.'"

Did she say "glitches"? I'd like to know, because I think they need to move on to a new word. "Glitches" is so 3 weeks ago. It was intended, back then, in the early days of HealthCare.gov, to calm us... to palliate... and it just doesn't work that way any more.

Also old and increasingly intolerable: politicians claiming to be as or more emotional that the people they are hurting.

At least Sebelius toned it down a step from Obama's "no one is madder than me." It's possible to step it up and present oneself as the angriest person. Even Obama did not go there. He merely said no one is madder. So maybe some people are equally mad. Sebelius's rhetoric seems milder, but in fact, it too is a claim of matching the level of anger of the most angry person.

I know it's the old empathy routine, but I have no empathy for them and their empathy routine. For one thing, these people are actually pretty calm, and given the amount of time they had leading up to the opening of the website, it's not believable that they approached their task with great energy and passion. It seems to me that the timeline was set for political reasons, to skirt the 2012 elections and to make good-seeming things hit at the point when it would help most for the 2014 elections.

For another thing, would you really want the angriest person in the world working on your incredibly complicated technical problems? I know most people don't experience the images in language as concretely as I do, but in my mind, when the President of the United States says there is no one madder than he is, I picture a total lunatic in the White House.



Okay, now, you can pull Kathleen's head out of the teapot. She's joined the fellowship of politicos who assure us they're at the top level of madness.

Hey! Teapot. Nice image:

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked....

Alice had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house...

The White House....

... it was so large a house that she did not like to go near till she had nibbled some more of the left-hand bit of mushroom.

Yeah, we're calling that "the blue pill." Obama said you're going to need it.

There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it; a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep....

"Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."

"You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter; "it's very easy to take more than nothing."...

"At any rate, I'll never go there again!" said Alice, as she picked her way through the wood. "It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!"

So... find a better tea party.

"why do i hate the sound of a dog cleaning itself?"

A search that brought someone to my blog this morning. What makes a person ask that question? You find a licking sound disgusting, but that's not the end of it. You ask why. That could be the beginning of some young person's serious intellectual exploration of human psychology. Or it could be just the next random thing that was just interesting enough to somebody who already had his fingers on the keyboard to do a little Google search.

By the way, the blog post of mine that came up in this Google search is quite helpful, giving you a key word: misphonia.

Bonus: Dog tongue pic, by Meade:

Pianist Maria João Pires horrified, frozen, as the orchestra begins a Mozart concerto other than the Mozart concerto she prepared.

Watch her dismay, and watch the conductor, Riccardo Chailly, push her to go ahead and play the concerto she didn't expect to be playing that night. Watch her regain her composure and play.



And if you're in the mood for more emotion and music, here's a baby listening to her mother sing and displaying an unearthly profundity of response:

Judge reads the local newspaper, gets second thoughts.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

A Milwaukee County judge had permitted the rare use of Wisconsin's "Delayed Registration of Marriage" in allowing the man, George Poniewaz, to avoid a charge that he had committed benefits fraud by getting years of health insurance for someone who wasn't his wife. The judge's ruling was issued after the woman died.

But after he read Poniewaz's convoluted back story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Circuit Judge Kevin Martens, who signed the registration, expressed serious second thoughts....

"Law attracts some very bright people. But it is not profound. It is one of the simplest professional fields."

"... The young are analytically sharper than the old but lack experience. In an analytically weak field, experience may be essential to successful problem solving."

Writes Richard Posner, the 74-year-old judge, in his "Reflections on Judging."

AND: In line with this stress on real-world problem-solving is this proposal for law schools:

Law schools should require students who lack a technical background... to take a course in accounting and a course in statistics; a course that places a field or fields of law in its (or their) technological context; and at least one course, elsewhere in the university, of a purely scientific or technical character, such as applied math, statistics, economics (at the level at which it employs calculus and statistical analysis), physics, physiology, biochemistry, organic chemistry, some branch of engineering, or environmental or computer science.... If room needs to be made in the curriculum by cutting or shortening other courses, there is a good place to start: it is called constitutional law. Dominated as it is by the most political court in the land, constitutional law occupies far too large a role in legal education.

Hitchens, animated, contemplates death and the afterlife.

(Via Bloggingheads.)

Scott Walker 47%, Mary Burke 45% — in the Marquette poll for next year's race for Wisconsin Governor.

"That's within the poll's margin of error of 3.5 percentage points, making it 'essentially a tossup,' said the poll's director, Charles Franklin."

The poll indicated that 50% of those surveyed had a favorable opinion of Walker and 46% had an unfavorable opinion of him. For Burke, 17% had a favorable view and 14% had an unfavorable view.

Obviously, people don't know much about Burke yet.

"How the Alger Hiss Case Explains the Tea Party."

By Cass Sunstein.

Most of those who have carefully studied the case, and who have explored evidence emerging long after the trial itself, have concluded that [Whittaker] Chambers was telling the truth and that Hiss did indeed perjure himself....

Chambers’ broader charge -- that liberalism was a species of socialism, “inching its ice cap over the nation” -- polarized the nation. His attack on the patriotism of the Ivy League elite reflected an important strand in American culture, and it helped to initiate suspicions that persist to this day.

Rush Limbaugh was just talking about Alger Hiss last month:

The Democrat Party and the left of the day loved Alger Hiss, and they hated Nixon for exposing him.  To this day, Nixon is hated for having exposed -- successfully exposed -- Alger Hiss as a communist spy working in the State Department.  He was at the high levels, and Nixon got him, and they hated Nixon for it....

At the Pink Spiked Café...

... we're out looking for trouble.

"Why China is turning to 'trial by television' in sensitive cases."

“This is a step backward for China.... This is law enforcement by political campaign; it is a political matter, not a legal one.”

"Chubby military personnel are getting liposuction to pass Pentagon's body fat test."

One plastic surgeon says "They come in panicked about being kicked out or getting a demerit that will hurt their chances at a promotion."

Another plastic surgeon says: "I've actually had commanders recommend it to their troops... They'll deny that if you ask them. But they know some people are in really good shape and unfortunately are just built wrong."

Sucking out some fat is a stopgap, desperate effort at approximating fitness. And yet the pressure is on to change the standards:

Fitness experts and doctors agree, and are calling for the military's fitness standards to be revamped, including the weight tables the Pentagon uses. They say the tables are outdated and do not reflect that Americans are bigger, though not necessarily less healthy.

Of course, Americans will lap up this expert opinion, along with every other item of comfort food on the plate.

The news from Madison, Wisconsin — as told in 3 headlines.

The Times of Israel: "Wisconsin man accused of beating Hebrew-speakers."

The Huffington Post: "Dumb American Accidentally Assaults Wrong Ethnic Group: Police Report."

Global Grind: "So This Happened: American Assaults 2 Hebrew-Speaking Men He Believed Were Speaking Spanish."

"That's an incredibly annoying song. Why are you playing that?"

I ask, and Meade says: "This is 'A Song To Play Every Time You See A Sexist, Racist, Or Homophobic Comment Online.'"

Me: "I would rather be called a 'fucking cunt' than have to listen to that song."

If you want to hear the chirpy irritatingness that I heard, you'll have to go — warning: it's Upworthy — here.

"Cleveland State Law Profs File Unfair Labor Practice Charge Alleging That 'Satanic' $666 Merit Pay Raise Was Retaliation for Union Activities."

"Faculty were placed in four merit raise bands — $5,000, $3,000, $666, and $0 — based on scholarship and scholarly influence (40%), teaching as measured by student evaluations (40%), and service (20%).... In a memo distributed to the central administration and copied to the entire faculty, one of the eight AAUP organizers alleges that:"

[The $666 figure] is a universally understood symbol of the Antichrist or Devil — one of our culture's most violent religious images. Implicitly, but unmistakably and obviously intentionally, [the Dean] used his powers to set faculty salaries as an occasion to brand his perceived opponents as the Antichrist.

What do you think of the $666 raise?
	If you got a raise, you should be thankful and keep quiet.
	It's obviously retaliation for union activities and there should be a legal remedy.
	This idiotic over-expression by the dean will be justly punished by expressions like my vote here.
	Lawyers and law professors are all satanic and deserve whatever evils they inflict on each other.
pollcode.com free polls

Judge Posner wrote a whole book and was, he says, surprised when everybody fixated on one sentence.

The "I plead guilty" one:

The sentence runs from the bottom of page 84 to the top of page 85, in a chapter entitled “The Challenge of Complexity.” The sentence reads in its entirety: “I plead guilty to having written the majority opinion (affirmed by the Supreme Court) upholding Indiana’s requirement that prospective voters prove their identity with a photo ID—a type of law now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention.” (The footnote provides the name and citation of the opinion: Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 472 F.3d 949 (7th Cir. 2007), affirmed, 553 U.S. 181 (2008).)

And now he has to write a whole article to explain to the damned cherry-pickers what it means in context. Of course, he can't be surprised that any sentence that can be used by people who already have things they want to say will be used, especially on a hot issue like voter ID. Anything you say in a book of law can and will be used against you.

A judge doesn't have to write a book revealing ways of thinking about the cases that don't show up in the written opinions. He has a right to refuse to write anything other than the required cases, clamped into the conventions of judicial opinion writing.

But Judge Posner obviously loves to write his books. Who puts out more outside-of-the-opinions writings about what's really going on in the opinions than Richard Posner? He must love even when people get things wrong. People are talking about his writings, and that creates an occasion for more writing, and then people will talk about that too, as we're doing now.

All the best to the great Judge Posner — understood or misunderstood — innocent or guilty. Thanks for all the books, including the new one, "Reflections on Judging," which I'm downloading so I can — I plead guilty! — rip sentences out of context and work my will on them, cranking out the verbiage in this grand fellowship of graphomania.

"Are Unmarried People Bad for the Economy?"

A Gallup-poll-instigated question.

When Obama said if you like your insurance, you can keep it, he knew millions would not be able to keep it.

Says NBC.

What if anti-bullying campaigns...

... encourage suicide?

"Any time I hear the wind blow..."

"... it will whisper the name Edna."

An Althouse blog test.

Here's a picture:



What does it mean?

ADDED: A starting point.

AND: "Meade, is that really you with the green pants? Cute, I love hipsters with skinny legs."

"Jodie Gummow, a 'senior fellow' at Alternet.org, takes a feminist cheap shot at America."

"The World Economic Forum released its annual Global Gender Gap Report for 2013 measuring gender disparity between men and women around the world . . . and disappointingly the United States didn't even make it in the top 20!"

Federal judge finds part of the new Texas abortion law unconstitutional.

"... Judge Lee Yeakel of United States District Court in Austin declared that 'the act’s admitting-privileges provision is without a rational basis and places a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus.'"

Texas was the 12th state to adopt a 20-week ban, which legal experts say is in conflict with Supreme Court decisions granting a right to abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb, usually at around 24 weeks. Courts have blocked such measures in the three states where they have been challenged, but they remain in effect in others.

At the Autumn Café...

... don't forget to look up. But watch out for the troll:



He might be taking pictures:

Banksy graffitis protest against the NYT for rejecting his op-ed mocking the new World Trade Center tower.

I got to his website from the NY Post, via Drudge, which takes at face value the statement "Today’s piece was going to be an op-ed column in the New York Times. But they declined to publish what I supplied. Which was this..."


Banksy's post says it was to be an op-ed, but it's not in the format of an op-ed. It's presented in the form of a front-page news story about the artist's opinion, not a column written by the artist, so I take it the mock-up of the NYT is just another artwork, a viral promo pointing to his graffiti (a photograph of which you can see at the first link, above).

But let's read the text anyway. Part of me resists artists who elbow me for attention, but that's not the part of me writing this blog post. We might ask: If this is in fact a rejected op-ed, why was it rejected? Well, obviously, it says "you've got to do something about the new World Trade Center," and that's too close to saying: Knock this one down too. It continues: "That building is a disaster," and how can you not think he's trying to do edgy comedy calling up memories of the disaster of September 11, 2001? The next line makes that obvious: "Well no, disasters are interesting."

Yeah, Artist Boy? Well, take your interestingness and go to hell.

That's my reaction after reading 2 paragraphs. But then I read on, and guess what? Artist Boy, self-professed lover of interestingness, goes on to natter out criticisms of the building that have all been aired extensively in the media as the reconstruction of the site has been debated over the years. Is Banksy familiar with any of that, or did he just wander over to America to start talking off the top of his head as if any of his thoughts are probably interesting?

I know. There seems to be a paradox: Why am I blogging about this if I don't find it interesting? It can't be interesting to say something is not interesting, can it? Yes, I'd say it is, if people are already acting as if it is interesting.

The plot to fit cars with devices to transmit your mileage to the government, so it can tax you based on miles driven.

Forget privacy. Privacy fails in the balance against the need to penalize you for getting a fuel-efficient car.

If you spend $1 million on your defense lawyer, how can you credibly claim you didn't even get the constitutional minimum, effective assistance of counsel?

Cynics will say, the way to do that is: 1. Get convicted because a well-paid lawyer wasn't able to persuade a jury to see reasonable doubt, and 2. Pay more money for more lawyers and persuade a judge of what you need to overturn the conviction. And super-cynics will add: 3. Be a Kennedy.

But just because you paid a million dollars doesn't mean your lawyer was any good. Michal Skakel picked a TV-talking-lawyer-head. And maybe that's exactly the screw-up a Kennedy would make — mistaking superficial appearance and fame and money for competence.

"The Lighter Side of Copyright Infringement."

Appropriating the panels Dave Berg drew for MAD and replacing the word balloons. (Via Metafilter.)

National Lampoon did it in 1971, and "'in 1991 or 1992,' Sam Henderson and some unnamed friends put together a zine titled The Lighter Side of Copyright Infringement, featuring Berg MAD art with rewritten, raunchy words in the balloons. (Henderson is proud that they found a font similar to MAD’s mechanical typography.)" And:

The editors of MAD began to practice Berg-détournement themselves when they introduced (in #487, March 2008) their “Darker Side of The Lighter Side” feature, a recycling of Berg’s images with new word balloons. Now Berg’s delicately-drawn characters deliver jokes about murder and sex offenders in the pages of the magazine itself. Late capitalism can recuperate and profit from anything, including the subversion of its own laws about property ownership, but the inspiration for “The Darker Side of The Lighter Side” goes back to the earliest comic-book issues of MAD, where Harvey Kurtzman wrote new, supposedly funny word balloons for previously published E.C. horror stories (“Murder the Husband!” / “Murder the Story!” MAD #11, May 1954) and slapped captions on pictures of babies (“Baby Quips!” MAD #13, July 1954) to save money on contributors’ wages and keep ahead of crushing deadlines.

Thought experiment: To fix Obamacare, Obama should bring in Mitt Romney.

Yes, the arguments against this rush to mind:

1. Romney is a member of the opposition party... but that's also a plus: We could have a real show of bipartisanship and of genuinely wanting to make this legislation work for the benefit of the American people, not just to make it look good at the right times and in the right ways to bolster the power of the Democratic Party.

2. When he was running for President, Romney said he wanted to repeal Obamacare...  but he was working with the preferences of the GOP base and needed to win the nomination. He distanced himself from his history of making Romneycare work by saying he'd been Governor of Massachusetts, working with the preferences of the people of Massachusetts. This suggests that he's a practical, able man who understands the task he's been assigned and sincerely applies his expertise.

3. Romney wouldn't want to help Obama, who defeated him in the election... but Romney's image is of a public servant who wants to do good works for the benefit of all. He isn't — or at least shouldn't — want to seem like a guy with a grudge.

4. Romney should stand clear of the spectacular collapse of Obamacare. Really? Isn't this like his signature achievement, saving the Olympics? The magnitude of the disaster and the importance of avoiding it are exactly what should attract Romney. "He saved the Olympics and he saved Obamacare" — wouldn't he want that legacy?

5. Obama wouldn't want Romney showing up on the scene now as the savior. Obama is too narcissistic, too peevish to call out to the older man for help. Maybe. But Obama would be the President, and he could look very magnanimous and wise. He could finally seem to be doing what a lot of us thought he was about when we voted for him in 2008 — bringing us together.

6. Everyone, right and left, would cry out in horror or at least puzzlement. And what a distraction that would be.

"60 Minutes had an absolutely devastating report on the Obama administration’s failure to protect Ambassador Chris Stevens and other Americans in Benghazi."

Writes Professor Jacobson, observing that "the heart of the report is that there were clear and unequivocal warnings which were ignored, and the Obama administration lied about these warnings after the attack."

Here's the video:



From the transcript:

Andy Wood: I made it known in a country team meeting, "You are gonna get attacked. You are gonna get attacked in Benghazi. It's gonna happen. You need to change your security profile.... Shut down operations. Move out temporarily. Ch-- or change locations within the city. Do something to break up the profile because you are being targeted. They are-- they are-- they are watching you. The attack cycle is such that they're in the final planning stages."

Lara Logan: Wait a minute, you said, "They're in the final planning stages of an attack on the American mission in Benghazi"?

Andy Wood: It was apparent to me that that was the case. Reading, reading all these other, ah, attacks that were occurring, I could see what they were staging up to, it was, it was obvious. We have learned the U.S. already knew that this man, senior al Qaeda leader Abu Anas al-Libi was in Libya, tasked by the head of al Qaeda to establish a clandestine terrorist network inside the country. Al-Libi was already wanted for his role in bombing two U.S. embassies in Africa.

CBS doesn't know the difference between J. Edgar Hoover and Herbert Hoover.

Today's "Face the Nation" had host Bob Shieffer interviewing Philip Shenon, author of "A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination." At one point, Shenon was talking about a memo FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote to the Warren Commission. Check out the ludicrous graphic at 0:21:



That's not J. Edgar Hoover! That's President Herbert Hoover!



Oh, journalism! What has become of you?

"Lou Reed, a massively influential songwriter and guitarist who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music, died today."

"The cause of his death has not yet been released, but Reed underwent a liver transplant in May."

He was 71.

I'm so sad to hear this. He has meant a lot to me for more than 40 years.

At Eddie's Café...

... you can talk about anything you want.

Embarrassingly lame joke Jennifer Granholm had ready for her "Meet the Press" effort to buck up support for Obamacare.

"First of all, the President is so mad about about this that he himself with go down and supervise the writing of code if this is not fixed by the end of November."



That's not just lame, actually. It's enraging. Who cares how mad Obama is? It's not like his overflowing emotions are fixing anything. Is his anger supposed to work as a painkiller when what we want is a cure? I think of this:



Quite beyond the irritating palliative medicine of Obama's choler, there's the flaunting of rank incompetence. Obama supervising the writing of code?! He knows nothing about writing code. The notion that he'd select himself as the supervisor of an activity about which he lacks any expertise only heightens our suspicion that he's been selecting the wrong people all along.

"Ted Cruz goes pheasant hunting in Iowa and says government shutdown was good 'because it got people talking.'"

Because Iowa's where you go to hunt pheasants.

I was going to write "Because Iowa's where you go to hunt peasants pheasants," on the theory that "peasant" isn't really an insult. It just means rural folk, but I looked it up in the (unlinkable) OED and changed my mind. It's been a term of abuse since the 1500s. My favorite abusive and old quote from the OED is:

1612 J. Taylor Laugh & be Fat sig. D7, Thou ignoble horse-rubbing peasant,..being but a vilipendious mechanical Hostler.

Horse-rubbing! I think I know know what that means. But how about vilipendious? It means contemptible. I looked it up in the OED and the only example of its ever having been used was "Thou ignoble horse-rubbing peasant,..being but a vilipendious mechanical Hostler."

Anyway, that ignoble, vilipendious, horse-rubbing peasant Ted Cruz seems to be running for President.

"A beard is a celebration of nature that brings appearance closer to that of untamed human animals..."

"... a Rousseau-esque gesture that was crucial to the age of Aquarius, a time when long-established norms of behavior collapsed and made public life a clearer expression of formerly unspeakable private desires. By contrast, the shaven and crew-cut athlete suggests a martial fury that is joyless—a grim, self-denying efficiency that may work in war but is exactly the opposite of the essence of baseball, which, for all its competitive ardor, is playtime...."

Just be careful that beard doesn't obstruct anybody.

(Wow, in the GIF at that second link, Middlebrooks looks like he's dancing The Worm.)

ADDED: "Immediately after we got off the field into our locker room, we congratulated Jim and said, 'Great call.' It's out of the ordinary, but when it happens, and it's the World Series, you expect to get it right."

Did God prank-call Scott Walker?

Slate columnist David Weigel has a piece titled "Why Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker Credits God for his Political Success." Weigel has Walker's new memoir, "Unintimidated," which has a bit in it about something we talked about back in February 2011 (during the big protests): A prankster pretending to be David Koch got through on the phone to Scott Walker, who talked to him for a while, even as he said things like "You gotta crush that union" to try to get Walker to blurt out something that would be used against him. From Weigel's summary:

[W]hen Murphy/Koch asked about the wisdom of “planting some troublemakers,” Walker said his team had “thought about that” but dismissed it.

Walker haters used that "planting some troublemakers" business as much as they could. (In March 2011, when Meade was physically attacked by protesters, a woman pointed and said "These are Walker plants.")

Back to Weigel, summarizing Walker:

The governor claims that he “hesitated” to take it, and “was upset that my staff had let the call get through to my office, making me look so silly.” He never actually “thought about” the fake troublemakers—he now writes that he “did not want to insult Mr. Koch by saying that we would never do something so stupid.”...

“Only later did I realize that God had a plan for me with that episode,” writes Walker. After his press conference, he picked up his daily devotional and saw the title for Feb. 23: The power of humility, the burden of pride.

“I looked up and said, ‘I hear you, Lord,’” writes Walker. “God was sending me a clear message to not do things for personal glory or fame. It was a turning point that helped me in future challenges, helped me stay focused on the people I was elected to serve, and reminded me of God’s abundant grace and the paramount need to stay humble.”

I can't really tell if Weigel (or the Slate headline writers) think Walker is getting too religion-y here and is claiming that God has special messages and plans for him. (Is Scott Walker a God plant?) I can't even tell if Walker is honestly describing his stages of processing the unpleasant incident. But I do think this account is conventional, mainstream religion. Something bad happens, and you realize that God had a plan. You extract a lesson that lightens the burden from the past and redirects you toward a future.

You don't even need God in the mix to indulge in this sort of positive thinking. What doesn't kill atheists makes them stronger — don't you know?

But Walker haters are going to want to use his religion talk against him. They use anything they can against him. I'm going to be looking out for this, because there's a tendency amongst the media elite to mock religion, to assume — like a governor assuming he's got true supporter on the phone — that everyone they're talking to thinks that anyone who feels God's presence in his life is weird, scary, and surely not to be trusted with the levers of power. They're quite wrong. Especially if they are writing on the internet, where everyone sees what they are saying.

And 90% of Americans believe in God — or as Gallup charmingly puts it "More Than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God/Professed belief is lower among younger Americans, Easterners, and liberals." (I love the "Continue to," which implies: Come on, people, after all the evidence, what's your problem?!)

At the Gustaf-and-Zeus Café...

... find your circle.

"If you are truly a feminine woman at your core, but don’t know how to let your femininity surface, you will end up unhappy, feeling miserable and depleted."

"It takes a lot of energy to reject a part of you that is there whether you like it or not. And even if you think you are happy, something will feel like it is missing some day. Why? Because you’re rejecting a part of yourself. Being able to claim your feminine energy is at the heart of your own happiness, and most definitely the happiness of your relationship."

From a post titled "How Most Women Reject their Femininity (and How you can stand out from the crowd)" at a website called "The Feminine Woman," written by Renee Wade. I stumbled into this the other day as I was participating in a Facebook discussion that got onto the topic of feminine beauty, and I went on a search looking for examples of the most feminine-looking face (not the most beautiful feminine face).
I'd remembered reading about a study that found that people thought a man's face was most appealing if it was slightly more feminine-looking than the average male face. I was wondering if the most beautiful female faces would be those exactly at what is the average among women or tending slightly masculine or tending slightly feminine. I know that the most extremely male-looking faces are experienced as ugly, but what about the most extremely feminine faces? I wasn't even sure what that would be. A very small, pointed chin? A tiny, tiny nose and gigantic eyes? I really don't even know.

I got sidetracked onto that "Feminine Woman" site, which I thought raised some interesting issues that I'd like to talk about. I'm not saying Renee Wade is a reliable expert or an impressive theorist in the realm of gender studies. I had a flashback to the "Total Woman"/Marabel Morgan phenomenon of the 1970s, which was, even then, ludicrously uncool.

I'd like to put aside the notion that women should be feminine — because that's what God or nature intended or because it's traditional or the foundation of society or whatever you (or somebody else) might think.

I'm interested in individual expression, freedom, and happiness.

Let's hypothesize that there is something internal and psychological that we've been calling "femininity" (because it corresponds generally to having the female body type). You have as much or as little of it as you have for whatever reason. With that understanding, reread the quote that begins this post.

Now, the question becomes: What does it mean to be extremely feminine?

And: What would it be like if those who are psychologically at the extreme of femininity were to feel supported and encouraged to openly and proudly manifest their femininity? Try to answer this question without confusing it with the efforts of those who don't actually have this inward orientation but who are aspiring to images and stereotypes about femininity out of social pressure or as a means of competition for other things they may want.

"NO BID CONTRACT: Michelle O's Princeton classmate is executive at company that built Obamacare site..."

Headline today at Drudge, linking here.

The link goes to The Daily Caller, where we learn that Toni Townes-Whitley is a senior vice president at CGI Federal and also graduated from Princeton in the same year as Michelle Obama. Given that over 1,000 highly able persons graduate from Princeton in any given year, it's not that amazing that you'd find a Michelle Obama co-grad somewhere at the executive level of a large corporation, so this story seems a bit dumb, unless...

Townes-Whitley and her Princeton classmate Michelle Obama are both members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni....

... unless your point is that black people are in a cabal.

Toni Townes ’85 is a onetime policy analyst with the General Accounting Office and previously served in the Peace Corps in Gabon, West Africa. Her decision to return to work, as an African-American woman, after six years of raising kids was applauded by a Princeton alumni publication in 1998.

Jeez, the writing in The Daily Caller is bad! So Townes-Whitley decided to return to work as an African-American woman? What was she before? A white man?

Look, I'm concerned about corruption and the appearance of corruption, but this is a low-quality effort at investigative journalism. And yet think of the traffic that story is getting with the Drudge link. The rewards are there for those who are hot to get them. Fine. You like that story? Then don't whimper about lefties' expressions of contempt for right-wing media.

Are you ready for a really glitzy version of the crudely animated TV cartoon "Mr. Peabody & Sherman."

Here's the trailer:



I especially appreciated the big faceful of armpit hair at 1:16. I remember that in the early days of computer animation hair was hard to do, so the characters tended to be insects or plastic toys. There's been so much progress since then, not that I've set foot into a theater showing a computer animation since I walked out of "Antz" because the closeup faces were making me ill.

The human faces in "Mr. Peabody & Sherman" are actually a lot like those insect faces that made me ill, except that they nail those smart-ass-kid expressions that — since the 1980s — TV has been teaching our children to make.

Of course, Mr. Peabody is a dog, so the hairs will have been minutely attended to. If I were to see this film — which I wouldn't, because I almost never go to the movies and I have a physical aversion to computer animation — I would be continually distracted by the constant minute wiggling and shimmering of the hairs as they — this is how I would think of it — show off that they can do hair.

ADDED:  Here's how the old TV cartoon looked. It was "crude" in the sense of its being done quickly and cheaply, but the drawing is actually quite vivid and charming. I love drawn cartoons, and I admire cheapness and quickness when the result is good, so I'm a bit sorry for using the word "crudely" in the post title. [AND: The particular "Mr. Peabody" cartoon I happened to find to link to there, which I just watched, has an Indian character of the smoke-um-peace-pipe sort that you'd never see today, and more strangely, there seems to be a swastika on one of the teepees.]

"At first she wanted to faint as she stared at the new face, smooth and freckled, stitched to her daughter’s pale scalp."

"But when [Carmen] Tarleton started talking in her old familiar voice — 'Can’t you just get in here?' — [her mother] relaxed."

“I said, ‘This is who Carmen is now,’ and it really looked beautiful,” she recalled. “Although it didn’t look anything like her, it was her face.”

Would you want to go out to a concert of Bach Suites in a space that is kept completely dark?

I mean, wouldn't recorded music be better? And it would be a lot less trouble than going out, your chair at home is probably comfier, and there would be no one rattling a program/opening a candy wrapper/coughing. No one other than you. At home, you're free to sneeze, take you music device into the bathroom with you, eat all manner of smelly foods, and even sing along, making up your own words that don't even have to rhyme or make sense. The room was humming harder/As the ceiling flew away.... You can call out for another drink. Because you're alone and no one cares about your outbursts. Or someone else is there, but they've resigned themselves to putting up with the likes of you. You with your coughing and sneezing and nonsense lyrics. What happens when you call out for another drink? Does that long-suffering wife/husband of yours bring a tray?

But let say you do want to get up off your sofa and amble down the sidewalks of New York City to the Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building at 5 East 3rd Street. I love the combination of Goethe and Wyoming. Especially on 3rd Street. That's not 3rd Street in Brooklyn, where, you may remember, I lived back in the early 80s. That's positively 3rd Street in Manhattan, where you've got a lot of nerve to enter a concert hall in the dark:

After of years of investigation, the Suites are removed from the concert hall and placed in an unilluminated space, in which the cellist repeatedly plays them over a period of ten days. Through the extended timeframe and the elimination of any visual input, the listener and the playing musician are unified within the same visual and musical space.

Scurry over there — would you? — if you're within scurrying distance, and let me know if you became unified with the musician by virtue of your presence in "the same visual and musical space." The "visual space" is nothingness. You can close your eyes while listening to your iPod, and imagine the cellist playing with his eyes shut. But he's not there, and it's not happening now, so unification requires more imagination. Still, this mystic state might be more achievable in the absence of the distraction of finding your way around in the dark.

Uncertainty about the original creative intentions of the Suites invites perpetual debate and allows imaginative free reign for redefining the environment in which they are played. 

I'm distracted reining in my imagination and reigning over my imagination about the old rein/reign pedantry. But proceed:

Bach Suites in the Dark removes the Suites from the concert hall [and] explores their malleability and the notion of practice in which they are rooted. 

Most people know the Suites from recordings — like this — so the notion of removing them from the place where you never needed to go invites us into the even-more-imaginary place in the past when people had no recorded music.

"Even if the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act fails spectacularly, single payer is not going to happen in America anytime soon."

"Here’s why: Most Americans have insurance, and most Americans like that insurance. That’s why the administration designed such a complicated, kludgy system; they had to at least be able to claim that all the people who had insurance they liked would be able to keep it.... People are loss-averse; they worry more about losing what they have than they do about some unproven potential gain. If Obamacare’s insurance reforms break the market, that calculus still won’t change: Most people will still have insurance they like, and they will not be willing to give it up in order to solve problems in the individual market.... Even if the individual market functionally disappears, most people will still be covered.... Ironically, single payer seems much more plausible if the system succeeds...."

Megan McArdle rejects the conspiracy theory that Obamacare was meant to fail to get us to single payer.

"Removing comments... affects the reading experience itself: it may take away the motivation to engage with a topic more deeply..."

"... and to share it with a wider group of readers. In a phenomenon known as shared reality, our experience of something is affected by whether or not we will share it socially. Take away comments entirely, and you take away some of that shared reality, which is why we often want to share or comment in the first place. We want to believe that others will read and react to our ideas."

From "The Psychology of Online Comments," by Maria Konnikova.

At the Cloudy Day Café...

... come out and play.

"Dr. Ed Friedlander displays his tattoo with a medical directive to not use CPR."

Caption on a photo on an Atlantic article subtitled "An ICU physician on taking time to discuss with patients how they see their final days."

It is scary to ‘nudge’ a patient toward an end-of-life decision. But maybe that’s what it means to be a doctor — knowing our patients and helping lead them toward the decisions that are most consistent with their wishes. And nothing is scarier than the status quo.

Also new at the Atlantic website today: "Death Is Having a Moment/Fueled by social networking, the growing 'death movement' is a reaction against the sanitization of death that has persisted in American culture since the 1800s."

I've got a feeling death will be having a "moment" until the last of us Baby Boomers has departed.

"I certainly have never made anyone suffer... The word 'suffering' is completely inappropriate to use about the process of filming."

"To talk about the suffering of the actor is something I can only laugh at — in such a beautiful profession, where you’re creating through your emotions, your body — to me, there is nothing of suffering. The job of an actor... it’s one of a spoiled child. You wake up, you’re made up, you do a few takes, you’re beautifully lit. Not to get into my social origins, but I’ve seen hard labor, and it is not comparable."

Said Abdellatif Kechiche, the director of "Blue Is the Warmest Color," which stars 2 young actresses who claim to have suffered in the filming.

Nice interview with Charles Krauthammer on "The Daily Show."

Video here. Krauthammer was good at connecting with the liberal Jon Stewart, in part because — as he says in the interview — he was once a liberal himself and in part because he had some ready and charming parries in the form of — this quote is from memory — "That's an excellent argument. Unfortunately, it's wrong...."

He was pushing his new book, "Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics," which comes out on October 30th.

"Without private evidence, I will take a pass on the frail case of Jon Lester and the Twittered glob of something-or-other in his glove."

"Cheating was more blatant and more fun in the old days, when the Giants’ Gaylord Perry would smilingly stand with upraised arms while an ump frisked him for K-Y Jelly or other skulking lubricants. When a Phillies pitcher, Kevin Gross, allowed sandpaper to fall out of his glove, he indignantly denied that he’d been doctoring the ball. No way! A great dad, he’d been employing idle dugout moments to fashion a little birdhouse for his daughter."

The great old Roger Angell is blogging the World Series, with better words and better memories than anybody else.

He's 93!

In case you don't want to take a pass on the Twittered glob of something-or-other, here's "'Giant booger' or rosin? Jon Lester says he doesn't have a cold."

"The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel."

"The Atlantic recently assembled a panel of 12 scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, historians of technology, and others to assess the innovations that have done the most to shape the nature of modern life."

I was interested to see nitrogen fixation at #11, because it's something I've got to tell you I had never thought much about that at all until last week when I was reading this excellent New Yorker article by Elizabeth Kolbert, "Head Count, Fertilizer, fertility, and the clashes over population growth," which begins with this topic:

Early in the history of agriculture, people realized — without, obviously, understanding the chemistry behind this insight—that when usable nitrogen ran low fields turned barren. Eight thousand years ago, farmers in the Middle East were already planting legumes, whose roots harbor nitrogen-fixing bacteria, in rotation with cereal crops, such as wheat. Later, Cato the Elder recommended that Romans “save carefully goat, sheep, cattle, and all other dung.” Bird shit is an excellent source of nitrogen, and in the early nineteenth century, when Europeans learned that there were mountains of the stuff on remote islands off Peru, the discovery inspired a guano rush; by the eighteen-fifties, Britain was importing four hundred million pounds of bird poop a year, and the United States a hundred and seventy million pounds....

By [Fritz] Haber’s day, the appetite for crop-friendly nitrogen was so huge that scientists had turned their attention skyward. Nitrogen is the most common element in the earth’s atmosphere.... but almost all of it is floating around in the intractable form of N2. When... Haber showed how to bust up N2 to produce ammonia — NH3 — he basically solved the problem. No more guano would be needed. Haber had, it was said, figured out how to turn air into bread.

"Now let us get this straight... We elected you to get the country out of economic and foreign policy troubles, and instead you made them worse?"

Meade writes a new caption for what he tells me is his favorite "Far Side" cartoon:

"ObamaCare 2016: Happy Yet?/The website problems were finally solved. But the doctor shortage is a nightmare."

An interesting WSJ column by Bradley Allen, a pediatric heart surgeon, painting a nightmare scenario that's very heavy on predictions of doctors serving their own self-interest:

With the best and most successful doctors disappearing into concierge medicine or refusing new Medicare and Medicaid patients, replacing these experienced physicians with bright young doctors to work with the "general public" has become difficult. Why? Because such doctors are hard to find — going into medicine doesn't have the professional allure it once did.

This is the perspective of a doctor, who believes his profession is highly elite and deserves to be treated that way, but I think he's a little blind about the continuing ability of doctors to opt out of the system. Won't they be compelled to participate? I don't think they can be compelled to work if they choose to retire from the practice of medicine, but why wouldn't the government's system evolve into something that subsumes all medical practice? If there are shortages that frighten and distress the people, the doctors' options will, I predict, shrink.

Must the "professional allure" be preserved? Apparently, it's already gone. Who will want to be a doctor now? As the nightmare unfolds, we will find out. Old doctors are always checking out and the system is always producing new doctors (and other medical professionals). Who will they be and what will happen? Maybe in the future we will dispense with pediatric heart surgeons. We got by without pediatric heart surgery before 1956. I'm picturing lots of nurses and lots of palliative care.

Cowgirls emailing cowgirls.

Neo-Neocon — a propos of my post showing me in cowgirl dress at age 4 — emails to show me her picture of herself at approximately age 4, dressed as a cowgirl:



She was inspired by Jane Russell (in "Son of Paleface"). I was inspired by... can you tell?... one of my readers could...



... Sally Starr.

What not to do when telling women what not to do.

A memo to women lawyers is a good negative example:

Last night, we started receiving reports of a memo entitled “Presentation Tips for Women” that was distributed by a member of the Women’s Committee to all women associates across the U.S. offices of Clifford Chance.

I haven't worked in a law firm since the 80s, so you tell me: Why is there a "Women’s Committee" in the first place?

Our tipster was correct in that the vast majority of these words of wisdom aren’t tips for “women,” but rather, tips for “human beings.”

Yeah, but there's a "Women’s Committee." These are women helping women. Either you like that or you don't. Pick one.

We’ve listed some of the most ridiculous “tips for women” here, along with our commentary...

My link goes to an Above the Law post by Staci Zaretsky, which has the text of "the full memo," but I don't see the title "tips for women." Is that the title, or is the "for women" simply a characterization that arises from the fact that there is a "Women’s Committee" and it communicates with the women? In any event, the demeaning that the recipients experienced came, it seems, from the special effort at mentoring the women.

Anyone might benefit from most of these tips, but some address problems only women have, such as whether a little cleavage is ever okay or even good, whether to leave off the high heels if you're not expert at walking in them, and whether you need to make a point of wearing something with lapels if you're going to have a clip-on microphone, and whether you're doing something that might be termed "the urinal position" (which I'm guessing — Google didn't help — is a hands-around-genitals position that men are more likely to realize looks unprofessional).

How would you like to be an older woman at the firm trying to help the younger women present themselves in a way that won't have clients talking behind their back about their uptalking and creaky voice and so forth? It's not easy! We could reverse-engineer that badly received memo to come up with some Tips for Senior Women Advising Junior Women.

1. Don't affect "girltalk." You have power and authority. Acting like you don't fails to create the sense of warmth and intimacy you want and, ironically, sets a bad example of how to sound professional.

2. Make it gender-neutral. Everyone involved already knows you're women mentoring women. Continually pointing it out creates anxiety about whether it really is a special problem to be female.

3. Don't attempt humor, even when — especially when — you're talking about seemingly lightweight things like vocal quirks, hand gestures, hairstyles, and fashion. Even if you were a gifted comic writer — and you're not — it's best to be utterly dull when conveying advice that will be received as personal criticism. Remember the old punchline: That's not funny.

"The big embarrassment here isn’t the spying..."

"... but rather the fact that it has become public due to the incompetence of those charged with keeping it secret — and, of course, the inept response once the news has come out."

"All the states are competitive on this stuff, but I think Amazon realized that Wisconsin is not only open for business, Wisconsin is good for business."

Said Phil Jennings, president of Next/Partners, Inc. (and Wisconsin Law grad), explaining Amazon's selection of Kenosha for a $250-million distribution facility that brings "1,100 new jobs, including hundreds of high-paying technical and management jobs."

Jennings says he’s never met [Gov. Scott] Walker and didn’t contribute to his campaign, but he says the Republican deserves credit for trying to improve the state business climate. He contrasts that approach with former Gov. Jim Doyle and current Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, both Democrats.

“Unlike Doyle and Quinn, Gov. Walker has worked hard to create the platform where Wisconsin can be attractive to Fortune 50 companies like Amazon,” he says....

Amazon has been criticized for running sweatshop-like operations, but Jennings says the Kenosha development will be a state-of-the art, air-conditioned facility that will include sophisticated package handling equipment.

The quote in the post title refers to the Scott Walker slogan: "Wisconsin is open for business."

ADDED: Meanwhile, in Milwaukee: "Special Prosecutor Named In Investigation Of Possible Criminal Activity Surrounding Scott Walker Recall Election." More jobs... for lawyers.

Wisconsin boy has been wearing his Aaron Rodgers jersey every day for 3 years.

His father set off this effort at record-breaking by mentioning some boy who'd worn a Brett Favre jersey for 4 years. 

We're told the shirt is hand-washed every other day.

As long as we're talking about things that happened in 1983 — note the previous 2 posts — let me add that Aaron Rodgers was born in 1983. Amazing what some people in their 20s are able to achieve. He'll be 30 on December 2nd.

"To me the Beirut bombing started it all. The person they said was responsible was (Osama) Bin Laden's mentor, from what I've been told."

Said Kim Carlson, the sister of Jesse J. Ellison of Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, who died at the age of 19 in the bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. The 30th anniversary of the bombing was Wednesday.

"I kind of held a lot of resentment against President (Ronald) Reagan at the time because he didn't take any action. It makes you wonder had they taken action would that have made (terrorists) think twice before coming after us with all the other bombings. But maybe it would have made it worse."...

Reagan sent Marines to Lebanon in 1982 on a peacekeeping mission during the Lebanese Civil War. Six months before the barracks bombing, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut was hit by a suicide bomber, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans. The Islamic Jihadist Organization claimed credit for the bombings as well as kidnappings and other terrorist activities and demanded that Americans leave Lebanon.....

The Marine barracks bombing helped solidify what would later become informally known as the Powell-Weinberger doctrine: American troops would not go anywhere unless there was a clearly defined objective, a willingness to send a massive force and the American people were solidly behind the action, [said UW-Madison history professor John Hall].

Today is the 30th anniversary of the invasion of Grenada — "the first major operation conducted by the U.S. military since the Vietnam War."

Do you remember the reason for Operation Urgent Fury? We had to save some medical students?

Operation Urgent Fury, was a 1983 United States-led invasion of Grenada, a Caribbean island nation with a population of about 91,000 located 100 miles (160 km) north of Venezuela, that resulted in a U.S. victory within a matter of weeks....

Grenada gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1974. The leftist New Jewel Movement seized power in a coup in 1979, suspending the constitution. After a 1983 internal power struggle ended with the deposition and murder of revolutionary Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, the invasion began early on 25 October 1983, just two days and several hours after the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut (early 23 October Beirut time).

So 2 days ago was the 30th anniversary of the bombing in Beirut.

The date of the invasion is now a national holiday in Grenada, called Thanksgiving Day....

A congressional study group concluded that the invasion had been justified, as most members felt that U.S. students at the university near a contested runway could have been taken hostage as U.S. diplomats in Iran had been four years previously. The group's report caused House Speaker Tip O'Neill to change his position on the issue from opposition to support.

However, some members of the study group dissented from its findings. Congressman Louis Stokes, D-Ohio, stated: "Not a single American child nor single American national was in any way placed in danger or placed in a hostage situation prior to the invasion." The Congressional Black Caucus denounced the invasion and seven Democratic congressmen, led by Ted Weiss, introduced an unsuccessful resolution to impeach Ronald Reagan.

Impeach Ronald Reagan. That's what it was like in 1983. Do you remember?

"An extremely drunken man who lost track of time called 911 to ask what day it was."

News from Flathead, Montana.

Protest kissing in Iraq — on the charred plinth of a vandalized sculpture of a man and woman kissing.

Kamaran Najm posted a photo on Facebook and...

"The first three hours it was mainly media outlets calling me. I had no idea that this was the first public kiss in Azadi park," he said.

Although the couple were protesting at the vandalism, which included an attack on the grave of famed Kurdish romantic poet Sherko Bekas, not everyone got the picture. Kurdistan's two major Islamic groups spoke out in condemnation, believing they had set out to offend Islamic sensibilities. "Everyone should be against the kiss. It's an effort to disorient Kurdish Muslim youths," Muhammad Hakim, of the Kurdistan Islamic Group, was quoted as saying by Kurdish online news site Bas News.

Everyone should be against the kiss.

The authorities seem to agree, with local media reporting that the regional prosecutor was pursuing a lawsuit against Najm for "behaving or performing an act out of the accepted social and cultural norms".

The news that Najm could be charged has led to copycat pictures on Facebook, but he says he has not had time to pay much attention to them. "I've been told couples in and outside Kurdistan have been taking pictures of themselves kissing and putting it on Facebook. I am told it is about 10 or 11 couples now," Najm said.

10 or 11... keep it up. You can build a new social and cultural norm. I suppose, legally, it's the "accepted social and cultural norm" at the time of the behavior that's allegedly "out of the accepted social and cultural norms."

"The Cities Creating The Most Middle-Class Jobs."

The top 4 are in Texas.

"Germany and France demand talks with US over NSA spying revelations."

"The revelations are threatening to create a major rift between the US and its European allies," says the Guardian.

Despite US efforts to placate Angela Merkel – including a phonecall made by the US president, Barack Obama, on Wednesday – she has refused to conceal her anger over the issue. "We need trust among allies and partners," Merkel told reporters in Brussels on Thursday. "Such trust now has to be built anew... It's become clear that for the future, something must change – and significantly."...

The latest confidential memo provided by [Edward] Snowden reveals... that one unnamed US official handed over 200 numbers, including those of the 35 world leaders, none of whom is named. These were immediately "tasked" for monitoring by the NSA.

After Merkel's allegations became public, the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, issued a statement that said the US "is not monitoring and will not monitor" the German chancellor's communications. But that failed to quell the row, as officials in Berlin quickly pointed out that the US did not deny monitoring her phone in the past.

"University of Colorado Boulder tells students to avoid costumes including cowboys, indians, white trash or anything potentially deemed offensive."

Reports the U.K. Telegraph. It's the U.K., so maybe something's lost in the translation. I see they don't capitalize "indians." (I'm offended!)

But what's offensive about cowboys?

A university spokesman called cowboy costumes a "crude stereotype."

Okay, I'll just go as a university spokesman.

ADDED: Here's a picture of me, back in the 1950s, before I learned about the horrors of crude stereotypes:

It snowed here yesterday.

I was in class, and I'm not sure if it wasn't just rain in town, but further out in the country where Meade was, it looked like this:

"The Wisconsin Supreme Court raised the prospect Wednesday of striking down part — but not all — of a law that gives same-sex couples some of the rights of those who are married."

At yesterday's oral argument.

... Austin Nimocks, an attorney for the plaintiffs, argued domestic partnerships mirror marriages and thus aren't allowed under a 2006 amendment to the state constitution that bans gay marriage and any "legal status identical or substantially similar to marriage."....

Justice Patience Roggensack noted it is rare for the court to strike down a statute in its entirety, rather than just the parts that violate the constitution. That prompted a discussion about whether the court could take out the elements of the registry law that require people to be of the same sex and not closely related.

If the court were to go that route, gays could remain in domestic partnerships, but heterosexual couples would now get the chance to form them. Family members could also enter into them, such as a woman who took care of her sick grandmother.

I haven't seen the transcript of the argument, and I can't tell if this was merely a device to open up the analysis or a real option under consideration, but it strikes me as profoundly anti-democratic for judges to rewrite a statute like that. It would be an interesting legislative innovation to allow domestic partnerships for any 2 co-habiting individuals who would like access to government benefits as a legally recognized couple. But that ought to be something the people have had some chance to contemplate and about which to have some representation in the legislature.

I support same-sex marriage and I opposed that 2006 amendment to the state constitution, but the amendment is what it is, and it seems as though the court is confronted with a statute that probably violates that constitutional amendment. I understand the urge to resist that unpleasant conclusion, but statutory and constitutional texts need to be taken seriously.

The people who oppose same-sex marriage are cynical enough already about whether texts are interpreted fairly and whether majoritarian preferences count against elite opinion anymore.

"What Is Mitt Romney Hiding in His New House's Hidden Room?"

"You can see the room in the blueprint at right. It's a little over 50 square feet, twice as long as it is wide. The document marks where the 'hidden door' will be built in to shelving in the adjacent study. It's next to the 'powder room' and the 'coat room," which many people would call a 'bathroom' and 'closet.'..."

Hey.

Hey, you. You got something to say?