Ben Masel — the great Madison activist — has died.

Very sad.

Ben Masel, prominent marijuana activist and professional rabble rouser, died Saturday from complications due to lung cancer. He was 56....

Masel was born in the Bronx and grew up in New Jersey. He moved to Madison in 1971 and quickly became a fixture of the counter-culture, known specifically for acts of civil disobedience in the cause of legalizing pot...

"He wasn't just some pothead," said Sal Serio, a longtime friend. "He respected the constitution. He respected the system. And he fought to make sure others did too."

In fact, Masel made his living fighting those who tried to limit personal freedoms and rights. He was, for lack of a better term, a professional activist....

Meade and I had coffee with Ben less than a month ago. He looked and sounded like someone who was going to beat the terrible odds. It was possible to survive. You have to get into the "long tail." He was vibrant and completely engaged in the recent political events of Madison and took great pleasure in telling us about the many free speech battles he'd fought over the years. He talked about moving to another apartment and wanted to find a place that would accommodate his tall bookcases and all his books. With death staring him in the face, he was fully alive.

Jeff Scott Olson, Masel's attorney for the past 20 years, said his client focused mainly on challenging limitations to free speech and right to assemble. Whenever police departments or cities tried to stop him from collecting signatures or protesting, he would sue. And according to Olson, he almost always won.

Said Amy Gros-Louis, a friend of 25 years, "Ben knew the laws better than the police did."

And better than a lot of law professors! He was quite a brilliant guy.

Here's video Meade shot on March 24 at the Wisconsin Capitol, with Ben reading the free speech guarantees in the Wisconsin Constitution:



ADDED: Here's Ben's Facebook page for the event he called "Take back Wisconsin Constitution."

Yesterday the police issued the first citations for holding signs on the first floor ring of the Capitol building, in contravention of the court order which directed the department of Administration to return speech options to January. individuals have been free to hold political signs in this area for at least 25 years.

It's particularly ironic thatbthe Departmet of Adminisration's sign announcing the ban on protest ias immediately adjacent to an originalcopy of our State's Constitution, open to the very section which guarantees our right to protest there.

"One family. One room. Four screens. Four realities, basically."

"While it may look like some domestic version of 'The Matrix' — families sharing a common space, but plugged into entirely separate planes of existence through technology — a scene like this has become an increasingly familiar evening ritual. As a result, the American living room in 2011 can often seem less like an oasis for shared activity, even if that just means watching television together, than an entangled intersection of data traffic — everyone huddled in a cyber-cocoon."

It's a NYT culture article.

Is there a problem here? If a family of 4 were sitting around together reading books, it would seem better than if they were all watching the same show on TV. And yet, with books, you wouldn't be able to IM stuff to each other.

With either books or computers, if you're with other people, you can easily read something out loud to the people in the room and start a conversation. My grandfather used to do that with the newspaper, and I've come to think of it as a kind of proto-blogging.

These days, if I'm reading something and finding it interesting, I might blog it to the whole world and try to start a conversation on line, but we still interact in real space. Meade might read something out loud to me, and that might lead to a long conversation, or it might get one of my all-too-typical responses: 1. "IM me the link," 2. "I already blogged that." 3. "I'm blogging that right now."

One of Qaddafi's sons was killed in a NATO airstrike that targeted Qaddafi's house.

Qaddafi and his wife were in the house at the time.

ADDED: The NYT reports:

“Tonight and only a short time ago, the Western crusader aggression against the Libyan nation continued and proved again that it has no moral foundation, no legal foundation and no political foundation,” said Moussa Ibrahim, the government spokesman. “The attack resulted in the martyrdom of brother Seif al-Arab Muammar el-Qaddafi, 29 years old, and three of the leader’s grandchildren.”...

Footage broadcast on the satellite channel Al Jazeera showed the wreckage of the house, including a wall with an enormous hole and shattered concrete. There was no immediate reaction from NATO or independent confirmation of the attack....

The airstrike against the Qaddafis marked the most significant escalation so far in the Western air campaign intended to help push him from power. In recent days, NATO leaders have described their growing frustration at the resilience of Colonel Qaddafi’s military forces, which have begun to disguise themselves, hide equipment and otherwise evade NATO airstrikes....

"If the bunny from Donnie Darko turned into a snap dragon and opened up to reveal Mickey Rourke’s face..."

It's "Immortals," the new Tarsem Singh movie, about Theseus.

I'm very resistant to seeing movies these days, but the director's previous movie, "The Fall" was my favorite movie of 2008, a year in which I saw 17 movies. (Here's my last-night-of-2008 post that contains my official ranking.)

I truly appreciate Singh's avoidance of CGI (in movies that would seem to require CGI). I hate CGI. Viscerally.

Monkeytail beards.

Hilarious and repellent. Via ALOTT5MA, which also made look at these pictures of Adam Lambert. Try to resist.

A Drudge photo juxtaposition, presented for your intepretation.

You've got Obama, turning to his right, gleefully chomping a chocolate-dipped strawberry, with the heading "Obama Ready to Eat the Press." (The linked article is about the White House Correspondents' Dinner tonight.) The photo underneath Obama is his father, turning in the opposite direction, a pipe clenched in his teeth. (The heading beneath that pic is "Obama's father forced out at Harvard...," linking to an article referring to Harvard's "difficulty... figur[ing] out how many wives he had.") The third picture freezes Mitch Daniels in a gesture that gives the impression — to my eye — of being quite rude.



Come on, Matt. What's this supposed to mean? A wider view may flesh out the meaning:

At the Most Difficult Café...

... you can challenge yourself or annoy everybody else.

Oh, give Romney a break. He didn't say "We're gonna lynch him."

He said "We're gonna hang him."

Uh, so to speak... metaphorically...

Bad science and why we get fat.

A diavlog with Gary Taubes.

And here's his book: "Why We Get Fat."

And here's his NYT article: "Is Sugar Toxic?"

Mid-recount, Prosser's lead has gone from 7,316 to 13,735.

525 of 3,602 precincts have finished their work. Maybe the slower-counting precincts will trend toward Kloppenburg, but it looks pretty hopeless.

ADDED: Actually, if Prosser picked up 6,419 in the first 525 precincts, there are perhaps 26,000 votes that could be netted by one candidate or the other in the remaining precincts. If there are more Kloppenburg-leaning counties that haven't finished yet, why couldn't she win? Prosser supporters should not get complacent. Pay attention! [ADDED: Most likely, the increased margin after counting only about 1/7 of the votes is purely a result of Prosser-leaning precincts having finished counting at this point. The precincts that are reporting on the recount may be coming up with exactly the same totals they had the first time.]

IN THE COMMENTS: Larry J says:

Of course the precincts that trend towards Kloppenburg will be slow to report. They want to see how many votes they have to manufacture. It's a very old tactic that has been proven quite effective (e.g. Kennedy, Franken).

And traditionalguy said:

Or the recount is revealing the vote packing fraud practiced by the Kloppenburgers that aimed to win by just enough against a known count for Prosser. But the "mistake" of leaving out a city's report from the totals skewed the target that the Kloppenberger vote packers had to aim for. Damn those cheating Republicans.

That made me realize that I was assuming Prosser's net gain was the result of finding previously uncounted votes. But it could just as well be the result of Kloppenburg losing votes. The linked article is minimal, but it does say the recounters haven't found any "major anomalies."

MORE: Commenter Dual Freq gives us the cite to get to the running totals, so we can see how the new counts in each precinct. When you do that, you can see that nothing dramatic has happened. Even though the margin at this point is 6,419 more than the original margin for the whole state, the comparison of the previous totals in the recounted precincts reveals that Prosser has only netted 33 votes so far in the recount. That is, the original count was pretty accurate.

MORE IN THE COMMENTS: Dual Freq says:

Looking closer at the totals from the GAB's spreadsheet, the differences are mostly 0, 1, 2 or 3 votes in each ward. Except two wards. Prosser lost 4 and Kloppenburg gained for for a net loss of 8 votes in Bailey's Harbor Ward 1&2 in Door county. Prosser also netted 15 in Eau Pleine Ward 1 in Portage County when Prosser gained 7 and Kloppenburg lost 8 from the original totals. That's a huge error there because there were only 339 votes in that ward.

T J Sawyer saYS:

The title of the post reads like a report from the MSM. It's a good thing we have DualFreq on the job!

Yes! Many thanks to Dual Freq!

"In a pants-on-fire moment, the White House press office today denied anyone there had issued threats..."

"... to remove Carla Marinucci and possibly other Hearst reporters from the press pool covering the President in the Bay Area. Chronicle editor Ward Bushee called the press office on its fib..."

"It is not a truthful response. It follows a day of off-the-record exchanges with key people in the White House communications office who told us they would remove our reporter, then threatened retaliation to Chronicle and Hearst reporters if we reported on the ban, and then recanted to say our reporter might not be removed after all."

Marinucci was in the "print pool" at an Obama event, and she used her cell phone to make a video of protesters singing "We paid our dues/Where's our change?"



The White House seems to have objected to a reporter taking advantage of her "print pool" access to do something other than writing. Obviously, they've also got to be annoyed by the negative coverage. And now, the Chronicle, revealing confidential communications, is continuing to make the White House look bad.

Meanwhile, Marinucci isn't just some print reporter who spontaneously grabbed her cell phone to capture an unplanned event:

In fact, Carla and her reporting colleague, Joe Garofoli, founded something called "Shaky Hand Productions" - the semi-pro, sometimes vertiginous use of a Flip or phone camera by Hearst reporters to catch more impromptu or urgent moments during last year's California gubernatorial race that might otherwise be missed by TV.

The name has become its own brand; often politicians even ask if anyone from Shaky Hand will show at their event. For Carla, Joe and reporters at other Hearst newsrooms where Shaky Hand has taken hold, this was an appropriate dive into use of other media by traditional journalists catering to audiences who expect their news delivered in all modes and manners.

Well, this is great publicity for Marinucci's "semi-pro" enterprise, isn't it? But if she has this enterprise, should she be able to exploit "print pool" access? The Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein says that all journalists have their little video cams now and that, even though many journalists are denied access altogether, the ones who do get in should be able to use their ordinary tools.

And then there's the threat argument that the Obama administration will wreck its "hip, transparent and social media-loving" image if it doesn't back off on this issue.

8-year-old boy in a tornado: "He said it was like he was floating in the air and then just floated back down."

The grateful dad:

"I was reaching up for him, but my hands never made it. The walls crumpled like paper, and he just went with them...

"Like someone had him on a string and snatched him away real quick...

"It was like a nightmare. I wasn't sure exactly what was happening...I just held on to what I had and asked God for protection...

"I looked up and saw a silhouette, his little shadowy figure walking back over the debris... It was wonderful..."

Here comes the story of Elmer McGuirt...

Seems like a poem should be written about Elmer McGuirt.

"People are free to discriminate based on sex, religion, race, and so on in their wills..."

... but what if, instead of specifying how much specific individuals get, the will says to divide things up according to religious law? Is the court supposed to figure out what the religious law requires? Eugene Volokh has a very interesting post about a case in which the court decided that the sons should get twice as much as the daughters because the will said to follow "Islamic Laws and Sharia." Looking at a Supreme Court case from 1968, Volokh thinks the Establishment Clause requires the court to refuse to make such a religious decision. Volokh also thinks "this rule is right..."

...  even though it does make things difficult for religious people who want the religious terms of their wills and contracts enforced. The alternative, after all, is for courts to take sides in deciding which rival religious view — say, which understanding of Islamic law — is right and which is wrong...

Fortunately, religious observers who want their disputes settled according to religious law generally have a simple solution: They can provide for arbitration by some religious tribunal that they choose, and courts will generally then enforce the result of that arbitration. Civil courts will no longer be called to decide what Islamic/Jewish/etc. law “really” requires, yet religious believers can have their disputes adjudicated under religious principles.

ADDED: Here's a hypothetical with religion taken out of it. A man has 2 children by 2 different women, who are of 2 different races. The will says that his estate shall go to the child who is racially superior.

Obama views...

... tornado destruction.

And gets criticized for failing to respond to wildfire destruction.

"The truck was just cruising down the highway when he rolled up to it and pointed."

"I wasn't sure what he was gonna do until he was under it. It couldn't have been for more than a minute."

Aftermath: "To be honest, it was completely stupid and reckless. God was definitely looking out for me and I've promised myself no more bullshit. I have an awesome life and a lot to live for and I have taken my life for granted. I'm not anymore."

Cake...

... detail.

Think Progress says: "Storms Kill Over 250 Americans In States Represented By Climate Pollution Deniers."

What a terrible thing even to think of saying!

Of Mice and Men... and dogs.

"I'm looking for a broken dog..."




Get your tickets for this play and other American Players Theater productions this summer.

“These Brats Bust Unions!”

The anti-Scott Walker sticker campaign.

“You don’t have to be in Madison or NYC to participate!!... You can be anywhere where there are stores. Here’s the deal: the struggle in Wisconsin is not over. It has just changed course. One of the current tactics is a boycott of the companies that donated to the Scott Walker campaign last year. No matter where we live, we can support Wisconsinites, spread the word about the boycott, and let these companies know that we are taking action against them.”

So... vandalism is the tactic. Another "peaceful" protest. If you don't like this political attack on grocery stores, buy the products the protesters have targeted. Johnsonville Brats. You know you need toilet paper: Get Angel Soft toilet paper for your angel-soft ass.  Sargento Cheese and Coors beer — the menu suggests itself.

Meanwhile, there's this "Post-It Campaign" that Instapundit is pushing, which I never thought was cute. (Meade can verify that when I heard about it, I called it "littering" and expressed contempt for it.) "Ten Rules for Liberty Guerrillas." Ugh.

How about some respect for the work of people who run small businesses? Hang your scrappy signs on your own damned property.

Man, I have seen too many signs this year!


(Date of photo: February 25, 2011.)

"This beatification is different because this pope is different."

"He’s a man with a role in history, not just in church history... The seal of sainthood doesn’t close the debate on history... In a certain sense, for many Catholics he’s already a saint, even without beatification and, let’s be honest, even without a miracle."

ADDED: Longer video here.

Birtherism and racism.

John McWhorter and Glenn Loury talk it out. The diavlog begins with McWhorter asserting that birtherism is not about race:

"Leading from behind is not leading. It is abdicating. It is also an oxymoron."

"Yet a sympathetic journalist, channeling an Obama adviser, elevates it to a doctrine. The president is no doubt flattered. The rest of us are merely stunned."

Donald Trump, redefining presidential, sublimely entertaining, or...

... fucking stupid?

During a 30-minute stump speech focused mostly on foreign affairs, Trump blasted Obama's handling of Libya, Iraq, China and Afghanistan, and in one of his many curse-bombs, he lamented the nation's focus on building schools in war-torn Iraq, while neglecting education in the United States.

"In the meantime we can't get a f---ing school in Brooklyn," he said.

He also cursed the spike in gas prices: "We have nobody in Washington that sits back and said, you're not going to raise that f---ing price."

Trump even dropped what's considered the most offensive f-bomb when he promised to use swear words while negotiating with China.

"Listen you mother f---ers, we're going to tax you 25 percent," he said.

Trump also sprinkled in a number of insults directed toward the nation's leaders.

"Our leaders are stupid, they are stupid people," he said. "It's just very, very sad."

He knows what he's doing, but do we?

ADDED: It looks and sounds like this:



The audience loved it.

"Why portray the king as a cross-dressing homosexual who shoots Protestants dressed as birds in his royal park for fun?"

"Because that's exactly as I saw him," answers Ken Russell, looking back 40 years at his truly outrageous film "The Devils."

Russell's film was adapted from Aldous Huxley's 1952 non-fiction novel The Devils of Loudon, as well as John Whiting's follow-up 1960 play The Devils. They were all inspired by the notorious case of supposed demonic possession in 17th-century France, in which a charismatic Catholic priest, Urbain Grandier, was accused of bewitching nuns. The accusation was trumped up by Richelieu as an excuse to destroy a Protestant stronghold....

Russell mentions he was inspired by one particular line in Huxley's book. "The exorcism of sister Jeanne," wrote Huxley, "was equivalent to rape in a public lavatory." Hence the film's vision of Loudon as a pristine, white-stone city and the convent as clad in white tiles.... Russell recalls the film's final shot: "The girl goes up the hill of broken bricks." The girl (Grandier's recently widowed wife) walks over Loudun's ruins into a landscape in which the only objects are posts topped by carriage wheels, on which Protestant corpses turn in the wind. "Polanski is said to have been inspired by that shot for the last scene of The Pianist," [says Russell's wife  Lisi Tribble].

Russell then suggests The Devils is a religious film that takes inspiration from his own Catholic faith. "It's about the degradation of religious principles," he says. "And about a sinner who becomes a saint."

I had a list of my 5 favorite films that remained the same 5 films for quite a few years, and "The Devils" on the list. What was the rest of the list? Can I remember? "Aguirre the Wrath of God," "My Dinner With Andre," "Mahler," and "It's a Gift." I have had the same 11 films on my Blogger profile list for a long time, maybe going all the way back to 2004. 3 of my old 5 favorites are still on the list. The 2 that are not are Ken Russell films. Ken Russell was really important back in the 1970s and 80s, and I've forgotten about him in the last 20 years. I wonder what sort of impression "The Devils" would make on me now. Or "Mahler." Or all those other fabulous Ken Russell movies we submerged ourselves in, in the isolation chamber of the movie theater.

"I pronounce that they be man and wife together, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

The wedding is accomplished.

The bride wore a dress that had been designed by a designer.

Mr. Bean was there.

“Do you want to wait this market out in your current house or do you want to wait it out in your next house?”

Are you irrationally loss averse?

[M]ost of us wildly overestimate the benefits of waiting. We convince ourselves that avoiding a potential future loss is the same as saving money. We underestimate the risks that we’ll face by waiting another year. And we totally ignore the real, measurable costs of staying in a home that’s too big or too small or poorly located....

Lots of detail at the link. Here's an analogy:

Overall, it’s helpful to think of house prices as a river that flows forward and, on very rare occasions, backward. It’s natural for us to prefer to jump from one raft to the next when the river is moving forward—that is, when prices are rising, not falling. But even when the river is flowing backward, jumping rafts midstream can make sense. When the river is flowing backward, we tend to fixate on the speed of the next raft relative to the stationary riverbank (e.g., “My next home is going to fall 5% in value after I buy it”). We should focus instead on the speed of the two rafts relative to each other (e.g., “Both homes are going to fall 5% in value”).

Thus, "only first-time buyers face a substantial risk when buying in a declining market."

"[T]he courts have no obligation to entertain pure speculation and conjecture."

Said the Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit, threatening sanctions against the plaintiffs' lawyer:

[T]he appeals court said, the plaintiff advanced inconsistent theories, including that the defendants may have ordered explosives to be planted in the Pentagon, may have hired Muslims extremists to carry out the attacks, may have used Muslims as dupes or patsies, or may have fired a missile into the Pentagon. Nor did the plaintiff cite any facts to support a conspiracy among the defendants, according to the opinion....

The lawyer, William Veale, said the judges were "dishonest" and "didn’t mention half of what we presented to them in the complaint. They simply disregarded mountains of evidence.”

Here's the opinion (PDF):

While, as a general matter, Gallop or any other plaintiff certainly may allege that the most senior members of the United States government conspired to commit acts of terrorism against the Untied States, the courts have no obligation to entertain pure speculation and conjecture.

The Untied States? Perhaps that's another clue for your imaginary mountain range, Mr. Veale.

Indeed, in attempting to marshal a series of unsubstantiated and inconsistent allegations in order to explain why American Airlines Flight 77 did not crash into the Pentagon, the complaint utterly fails to set forth a consistent, much less plausible, theory for what actually happened that morning in Arlington, Virginia. See, e.g., Complaint & 3 (alleging that defendants may have caused “high explosive charges to be detonated inside the Pentagon”); & 21 (alleging that defendants “may have employed Muslim extremists to carry out suicide attacks; or . . . may have used Muslim extremists as dupes or patsies”); id. (alleging that “four planes” were in fact hijacked on the morning of September 11); & 33 (alleging that “[i]f Flight 77, or a substitute, did swoop low over the [Pentagon], to create the false impression of a suicide attack, it was then flown away by its pilot, or remote control, and apparently crashed somewhere else”); & 40(d)(3) (alleging that apart from Flight 77 “a different, additional, flying object . . . hit the Pentagon”); & 43 (alleging that there “may have been a missile strike, perhaps penetrating through to the back wall, which helped collapse the section that fell in, possibly augmented by explosives placed inside”).

"Test Flags Babies With Autism, But Also Feeds False Alarms."

It's a 5-minute questionnaire, to be answered by the parents of 1-year-olds. The point would be to begin treatments earlier, when they might be more effective. I'm not sure what the treatments are... but perhaps there are exercises that could beneficially be done with all babies, so that it would not be crucial to know early on if a child is autistic.

"What really struck me was how merciless they were. They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them to more violence."

The NYT interviews, Lara Logan, the CBS reporter who was sexually assaulted in Egypt on February 11th:

She was ripped away from her producer and bodyguard by a group of men who tore at her clothes and groped and beat her body. “For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands”.... She estimated that the attack lasted for about 40 minutes and involved 200 to 300 men....

As the cameraman, Richard Butler, was swapping out a battery, Egyptian colleagues who were accompanying the camera crew heard men nearby talking about wanting to take Ms. Logan’s pants off. She said: “Our local people with us said, ‘We’ve gotta get out of here.’ That was literally the moment the mob set on me.”

And from Jeff Fager, the chairman of CBS News:

Mr. Butler, Ms. Logan’s producer, Max McClellan, and two locally hired drivers were “helpless... because the mob was just so powerful.” A bodyguard who had been hired to accompany the team was able to stay with Ms. Logan for a brief period of time.

... Ms. Logan “described how her hand was sore for days after — and then she realized it was from holding on so tight” to the bodyguard’s hand.

From the CBS interview with Logan:

"There was no doubt in my mind that I was in the process of dying... I thought not only am I going to die, but it's going to be just a torturous death that's going to go on forever..."

She says that to try to survive, she thought about her children, and when she saw them again: "I felt like I had been given a second chance that I didn't deserve...because I did that to them. I came so close to leaving them, to abandoning them."

"I don't know how anyone survived."

"We're used to tornadoes here in Tuscaloosa. It's part of growing up. But when you look at the path of destruction that's likely 5 to 7 miles long in an area half a mile to a mile wide ... it's an amazing scene. There's parts of the city I don't recognize, and that's someone that's lived here his entire life."

Effort to recall Wisconsin State Senator Mark Miller ends... in a somewhat strange way.

There's a local effort to collect signatures, which came up little short. Those signatures could have been merged with signatures collected by a Utah-based group, but the leader of the local effort is suspicious of the leader of the Utah group based on "troubling news articles and blog posts" that raise questions about "his integrity and values": "We’ve gone out of our way to run our campaign above board and with integrity. I don’t want to sully our reputation.”

That sounds like a good decision.  Meanwhile, the signatures have been filed for 8 recall campaigns — against 5 Republicans and 3 Democrats.

Justice Stevens: "that was the day I decided to resign... I learned giving that talk that I had a speech problem."

"That talk" = the announcement of his dissenting opinion in Citizens United, which you can listen to here.

From an interview published today in The Atlantic.

Stevens said he retired because, while he still loved the job of judging, he had no desire to linger beyond his physical prime. He had witnessed the final years on the bench of [William O.] Douglas, Thurgood Marshall and others who should have retired earlier for health reasons. A few years ago, he secretly asked Associate Justice David Souter to tell him when it was time for him to go. But Souter left first, in 2009.

"When he retired, I knew I didn't have any safety valve anymore."

The suggestion, as I read it, is that Stevens had to judge himself strictly because he didn't have Souter to reassure him that the time to go had not yet arrived. (How can you tell if you've lost your mental powers?)

Why Souter was a unique confidante, the interviewer did not ask.

Rush Limbaugh talks about Critical Legal Studies... and Obama's legal education at Harvard.

From yesterday's show:

[Obama] attended Harvard Law School at the height of something that it was promoting, education technique or a theory.  It was called critical legal studies.  Critical legal studies was in its ascendancy at Harvard Law when Obama was there.  You can look it up.  Just Google critical legal studies.  It is out and out Marxism. 

In a nutshell, critical legal studies claims that law is just politics by other means.  It is a way for the rich to keep the poor working man down and deny him opportunities for prosperity.  That is what Obama was taught at Harvard and based on what he believes and is doing it looks to me like he probably did get good grades.  Look it up if you want.  Critical legal studies.  Law is just politics by other means.  You can even turn it around.  Politics is just law by other means.

"And yeah, I hear that she wants to now engage in more multidimensional storytelling."

"Versus, I guess, just the straight-on reading-into-that-teleprompter-screen storytelling. So more power to her. I wish her well with her multidimensional storytelling."

Sarah Palin mocks her nemesis Katie Couric.

Multidimensional storytelling is an expression that lends itself to comic riffing. Palin's jab isn't particularly clever. It's mainly just the sarcastic repeating of Couric's own term. How did the term "storytelling" catch on over the last quarter century as a positive way to talk about narration of real-world events? If I remember correctly, before about 1980, the term "storytelling" mainly referred to fiction or lying.

There was a real fad in the legal academy for writing and pontificating about "telling stories" about this or that aspect of law, and it was meant in a positive way. I hate to pick on an individual lawprof, but here's an example of what I'm talking about from a recent law review article:

Narratives matter, place matters, and care's embrace of storytelling situates law in a more robust dialogue on the allocation of rights to controlling our surroundings.

Like most law review article sentences, it has a footnote:

Ecofeminist literature often portrays the ethic of care through the use of narrative, telling stories of human and nature interactions, in which nature is approached not as a challenge or commodity, but as a partner or collaborator. Ecofeminist stories describe nature from the perspective of a loving eye instead of from arrogant perception - not as something to dominate and conquer, but as a participant in an experience. Karen Warren illustrates why ecofeminism relies on the power of narrative to undermine the patriarchal biases in rights rhetoric. Warren’s story invites the reader to the tension between the climber and a large rock edifice. Through her story, Warren is able to evaluate the process by which she reconsiders the goals of rock climbing, from which she arrives at an understanding of her relationship to this rock feature in which the two are engaged in one another as “silent conversational partners in a longstanding friendship.” [Karen J. Warren, The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism, 12 ENV. ETHICS 125, 134 (1990).] Narrative enables the expression of interests and behaviors that may be misunderstood, undermined or excluded in dominant rhetoric. By rejecting the restraints of dominant vocabularies, narrative offers “a way of conceiving of ethics and ethical meaning as emerging out of particular situations moral agents find themselves in, rather than as being imposed on those situations (e.g. as a derivation or instantiation of some predetermined abstract principle or rule.” Id., at 136.

Whether Couric was ever steeped in this kind of scholarship, I don't know.

"Dozens of tornadoes spawned by a powerful storm system wiped out neighborhoods across a wide swath of the South..."

"... killing at least 201 people in the deadliest outbreak in nearly 40 years... Alabama's state emergency management agency said it had confirmed 131 deaths, while there were 32 in Mississippi, 16 in Tennessee, 13 in Georgia, eight in Virginia and one in Kentucky."

Were you in the path of the storms?

Will no one shed a tear for Jerome Corsi?

Corsi wrote the much promoted book: "Where's the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President."

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #36 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#1 in Books > Nonfiction > Law > One-L
#1 in Books > Nonfiction > Government
#1 in Books > Nonfiction > Law > Constitutional Law

#1 in Constitutional Law? Does that hurt, o fellow conlawprofs? Check out the rest of the list? How far down do you have to go before you see a book on constitutional law that you respect? But anyway... who can pity Corsi? He got his #1 book. But no, the book won't be released until May 17, so everyone who's put in an order for the book, everyone who made that book #1, should go right into their Amazon account and delete the book. Or will the publisher find a way to withdraw it and redo it so that it becomes super-timely? Some new chapter espousing some trumped up conspiracy theory about the birth certificate and its release.

James Taranto got me thinking about Corsi:

Jerome Corsi's "Where's the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to Be President" has an official release date of May 17. Corsi must be wishing he'd pushed the date up to yesterday...

Presumably Obama could have made this request [Hawaii's Department of Health] at any time, so why now?...

It's an amusing thought if an idle one that perhaps Obama did this just to stick it to Corsi, whose book reportedly hit No. 1 on Amazon after Drudge promoted it. John Kerry, the haughty, French-looking former junior senator from Massachusetts who by the way served in Vietnam, is probably smiling. After all, Corsi was co-author, with John O'Neill, of "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry."

But Kerry really was unfit for command, whereas contrary to Corsi's new book, Obama, fit or not, is legally qualified to be president. "We don't have time for such silliness," Obama said at his briefing today. Then, as John Podhoretz notes, the president "flew off to Chicago to be on The Oprah Winfrey Show."

The NYT calls the "birther" issue "a baseless attack with heavy racial undertones."

The editors want to make sure you see the issue as racial:

[T]he birther question was never really about citizenship; it was simply a proxy for those who never accepted the president’s legitimacy, for a toxic mix of reasons involving ideology, deep political anger and, most insidious of all, race....

It is inconceivable that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama as the insidious “other” would have been conducted against a white president.

Inconceivable? Really?

There was a price to the party for keeping the issue alive; inevitably, it was picked up by a cartoon candidate, Donald Trump, who rode birtherism directly to the prime-time promontories of cable TV. The Republican establishment began to wince as it became increasingly tied to Mr. Trump’s flirtations with racial provocation, and Karl Rove told him to knock it off.

Oh! The evil Karl Rove is back... seemingly as a measure of how much more evil the birthers are.