"Clause" not "laws." Transcripts of Thursday's debate get a word wrong in a key spot that seems to be making some ...

Reactionary animals. From "The Life of Pi," from a passage defending zoos : If a man, boldest and most intelligent of creatures, w...

Son of a post office worker. John Edwards never tires of saying that he is the son of a mill worker. Why not vary the theme occasionally a...

Kerry's wrong about DNA and the death penalty. Asked in the California debate about his position on the death penalty, John Kerry serv...

Would Shakespeare really blow the new SAT? Some Princeton Review people talk about what it takes to ace the new essay section of the SAT....

The truly principled.

Nice going, Cliff. UPDATE: Play suspended due to inclement weather--in Tucson ! I wonder what that's like. Anyway, Cliff is 7 under par ...

Women's Army Corps Song Book. I've written about this book before and said I wanted to scan the pictures, but here's a website...

"Vile and vicious and hateful." Rosie O'Donnell gives this reason for going to San Francisco to marry her female partner: ...

Hair on water, indivisibility, and Amy as the winner. Prof. Yin has a nice post on last night's The Apprentice. He doesn't like th...

The height of informercialism. The Apprentice reached a new summit in loathsome informercialism last night as the entire show served to int...

The King of the Offbeat Interruption. Larry King brought his distinctive style to the debate last night. I found this one-two interruption ...

Sleep, lifeboat, buzzwords. Limping through the last days of my (horrors!) cold, I felt overwhelmed by fatigue at 7:30 pm last night. Knowin...

Vogue word: robust. Today, while sitting through a paper presentation, complete with comments from the audience, I noticed how often lawprof...

Oh, here it is nearly 2 pm and I haven't blogged yet. What, am I supposed to have something to say to the entire world every day now? W...

Strictly Madison. I walked up State Street in the late afternoon today and saw two notable things: 1. An aging folksinger guy strumming an ...

Only one slope is slippery. Justice Breyer was concerned at oral argument, in Locke v. Davey , about the implications of deciding in favor ...

What motivated the Court in Locke v. Davey? I said two posts ago that the Court's opinion today did not reveal the real pressure that I...

Relax, Rejoice. Inspired by Nina's meditations on Ralph Nader's "Relax, rejoice" advice-- "I urge the liberal estab...

Principle and flexibility. The room left for state experimentation , which the Chief Justice called the “play in the joints” between the two...

Separation of church and state prevails over the Free Exercise Clause in today's Supreme Court case, Locke v. Davey . And really, feder...

"Don't burlesque me." That's a quote from Ralph Nader, speaking to Chris Matthews on Hardball Monday night. When is the l...

Making the same point, less enigmatically. Someone asked me to restate that first post today and make it clearer, so I'm going to try ...

Is fighting off the amendment an added burden for gay rights proponents? You may respond to my previous post by saying that the fight again...

The arrival of a new set of arguments about gay marriage . President Bush is asking Congress to go forward with a constitutional amendment ...

Very creative, Ralph. I'm at home this afternoon, nursing my cold, trying to stave off laryngitis, and I'm reading things on the in...

The SAG Awards, Get to Know Your Rabbit. The SAG Awards were awfully dull. One big surprise--Johnny Depp won the best male actor award--but...

Another Sunday. It started out sunny and warmish, but now it's all gray and there's a light snow falling. I'm finally about to ...

Nader and the gay marriage issue. I had thought that both Kerry and Bush had plenty of motivation to try to keep the gay marriage issue from...

Traditionalists, check your references. Reverend Banuchi's sandstone analogy was still nagging at me, and I realized it was because it...

That sandstone again, and "very sophisticated soot." I wrote : "If somehow people did want to buy sandstone at the price of ...

I resent that. So I sent an email to someone who had recently emailed to say he was using a new email address from now on. I realized my mi...

More on the gold and sandstone analogy . My son John writes: You wrote: "Gold is, obviously, not like marriage, because people have an...

What, no grinning Nader image on Drudge yet? I was expecting the revolving siren light. You can't sleep in just because it's Sunda...

What do you call ...? I like this dialect survey (recommended by Andrew Sullivan). "What do you call the area of grass between the si...

Words needed . Here are two things that it would be nice to have a word for: 1. The inaccurate sense of bodily dimension caused by wearing a...

What do you want, a medal? Let me offer Banuchi a more apt analogy than his gold and sandstone , so it will make more sense to be concerned ...

For the annals of bad analogies. After the NYT wrote an editorial favoring gay marriage, the Executive Director of the New York Christian ...

Gay marriage in .... Cambodia! King Norodom Sihanouk has an opinion, according to BBC news : After watching television images of gay marria...

How Madison Voted in the Primary. Once again I've seen something in The Isthmus (our local free tabloid) but can't link it to their...

Watching for the cobra. Prof. Yin has a nice analysis of last night's The Apprentice. There are lots of reasons for watching this show...

Advertising America in Arabic. The U.S. broadcasts television in Arabic in the Middle East. The NYT reports : Between programs, Al Hurra pr...

It's wrong to laugh at memorials, isn't it? But some of these are woefully absurd. Click on the slideshow for pictures of losing p...

Prospects for a one-on-one debate. I wonder if Kerry will take up Edwards' challenge to have a two-man debate. I'd like to see the...

It's a vast right-wing con... ... I mean ... "it's a political, you know, witch hunt...." It's Roll-Out-the-First-Lad...

Forget Whole Foods, what about Pure Foods? Speaking of Atkins-ing, there's this new development : In Southern California, two entrepren...

"A Pleasure Palace Without the Guilt." That encounter with the evil scale caused me to go to Whole Foods and buy a lot of meat an...

Feeling groggy not bloggy today. Sorry for not posting yet today, but I seem to be getting a cold, and I haven't had a cold in over ten...

The effect of pictures from San Francisco on the American psyche. The cable news channels are covering the San Francisco gay marriage event...

Why not scream? I watched Dean's speech today. As he got toward the end, he started using that growly voice that he used in Iowa just be...

I don't even want to talk about last night's American Idol . I don't want to have to think about it. Each singer was worse than...

Backward! If there is one way to give a boring speech in Wisconsin, it is to start out with the observation that the state's motto is ...

The pundits are just loving the Edwards surge. I'm watching Hardball and the energy is bursting off the screen tonight: they had gotte...

Voting in a church. So what's it like voting at the First Congregational Church, my polling place, in Madison, Wisconsin? The booths ar...

It's scary. So last night I was tying up the phone line for a long time with my computer modem. (Yes, I am too lazy to go through the t...

Primary day at last. My polling place is a church. I find that rather strange! Anyway, the skies are clear and the temperature is on the way...

Re-creating the brand of San Francisco? As travelers flood into San Francisco to take advantage of its (perhaps temporary) gay marriage pol...

Is Mayor Newsom like Judge Roy Moore? Rod Dreher at The Corner poses a question with an easy answer --and not the easy answer he implies is...

Which Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Are You? I got this from Prof. Yin . He was Rule 11. I too am Rule 11. Ah, I bet everyone comes out ...

Speaking of good taste , the NYT ran an article yesterday about rudeness and driving, which began: The comedian George Carlin has observed ...

The return of low-tech spelling. Gawker has the Dow Jones memo outlawing the use of computer spell checking devices. We have had too many ...

Some idiosyncratic arrangements . It's a nice cold morning in Wisconsin. The phone rang at 11:30 last night, after I was asleep, so I en...

Undertaker: No Poo. The guru--she prefers "do-roo"--of curly hair has lots of tips , including don't use shampoo--which she p...

"The gay studies department, whatever that is." Robert Rauschenberg answers some questions from Deborah Solomon in today's N...

John Edwards and the Coatless Girl. Edwards' use of the image of a "coatless girl" to represent the 35 million Americans who ...