Joe Blow wins the thread!

Do you like it when a commenter says that so-and-so "wins the thread"? Yes, it's snappy and adorable. If you disagree, disagre...

But Christopher Hitchens was talking about the document leakage, and Assange has turned himself in over the... semen leakage.

Yesterday, Christopher Hitchens posted "Turn Yourself In, Julian Assange," and today, Assange has turned himself in . ADDED: He w...

"[I]t’s important to counter the 'haha sex by surprise those crazy Swedes' media narrative..."

"... with the fact that actually, non-consensual sex is assault and should be recognized as such by law. Consenting to one kind of sexu...

"People my age don’t want to put hats and scarves on in their homes..."

Old people in Britain are cold. Ironically, I read that while wearing mittens. I've been trying to warm up my hands for the last hour. I...

So... Gingrich?

He's saying signs point to him , but check out this picture . I'm scared!

The collar flip.

It's real.

Don't forget!

You can show your love for the Althouse blog by starting your shopping searches here: Amazon.com Widgets You'll pay no more for your pu...

Elizabeth Edwards is dying.

And she says a few words via Facebook: She did not mention Mr. Edwards in her message on Monday. “There are certainly times when we aren’t a...

The oral argument in the 9th Circuit in the Prop 8 case is about to begin.

The case is Perry v. Schwarzenegger . You can watch live on C-SPAN . I'll update with comments soon. UPDATE: You can read some details a...

The Supreme Court takes a global warming case....

... with Justice Sonia Sotomayor recusing herself. American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut involves the use of a common law theory of ...

The Supreme Court will decide if Wal-Mart can be sued by a class of 500,000 female employees claiming discrimination.

SCOTUSblog reports on Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes : The first question will be whether, under Federal court Rule 23, a lawsuit may seek a money...

"A majority of Muslims around the world welcome a significant role for Islam in their countries' political life..."

A new Pew poll: According to the survey, majorities in Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Nigeria would favor changing current laws to allow stonin...

Christmas trains.

At Olbrich Gardens, here in Madison.

Jeff Probst accuses 2 contestants of breaching the implied "Survivor" contract.

Okay... but, of course, there is a written contract. What's in it? The idea of an implied contract is nothing but a figure of speech fo...

At the Clarity Café...

... you can sharpen your perceptions... ... or melt into bliss. ADDED: Enlargements: #1 and #2 .

The Wikileaks Doomsday Machine.

"Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has circulated across the internet an encrypted 'poison pill' cache of uncensored docum...

The high-speed rail boondoggle at its worst — in California.

Via Instapundit , Reason has the nauseating details : The California High Speed Rail Authority is committed to breaking ground on a leg of t...

"The Stones carry no Woodstockesque, antibusiness baggage."

Why the Rolling Stones are able to make so much money. Not everyone, of course, is enchanted by Jagger’s business smarts. There are those wh...

"She’s like the ominous blob in the horror films: the more you shoot at it, the bigger and stronger it becomes."

If a conservative columnist had come up with that image to describe a liberal politician, liberals would gasp and scold about the violence s...

Did CNN turn off Sarah's music?

Because that wouldn't be cool if they did that. "These Iowa people, got my back."

We walked out in the snow.

Picnic Point, today.

Meadhouse breakfast.

Obama pardons a man who was convicted of mutilating coins in 1963.

Why? Why does that win the attention of the President of the United States? The pardoned man, Ronald Lee Foster of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvan...

Our Madison weekly — Isthmus — does an article on Auric Gold, a Madison gun rights advocate.

And he shows up in the first comment: It would have been more accurate to label me as a "gun rights advocate" than "gun advoc...

"FBI issues warning over Barbie 'Video Girl' which could be used by paedophiles to make child pornography."

The doll has a camera built into it.

The movie we watched last night.

"Rebecca." I'd seen it before, but others here hadn't. I'd forgotten some of the details, but I remembered the key sur...

At the First Snow Café...

... I'd say that counts.

Hillary says: "I think I will serve as secretary of state as my last public position."

Oh? You "think." You don't know. And that's "think," in the present tense. So it's your current vision of ...

Steve Martin is in trouble.

For luring people to pay $50 to hear him interviewed and then having the interview be all about the art world and his book about the art wor...

"I haven't been out to check on him for five hours but I went outside for a fag and he's gone."

A woman in the UK calls the police to report the theft of her snowman. And she's a smoker.

"It's troubling that he had a cellphone since he's a person who got other people to murder on his behalf."

Charles Manson had a cell phone.

Bristol Palin gets sarcastic on Facebook about Keith Olbermann.

After he called her "the worst person in the world."

Linda Greenhouse purports to be impressed by the post-retirement activities of Justices Stevens and O'Connor.

But there's also this: Not so long ago, it was typical for justices to remain on the court until they died (the exit strategy of 49 of t...

Paul Krugman adds a new layer of shellac to Barack Obama.

"... a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale,...

"It’s the most sane and moral weapon ever devised."

"It’s the only nuclear weapon in history that makes sense in waging war. When the war is over, the world is still intact." The neu...

"I like that I got an ugly girl's personality."

"In other words, a homely girl always has to develop that muscle. And I did. But the good news is that I never considered myself beauti...

"I know in my heart I am not going to be judged by this Congress. I’ll be judged by my life in its entirety."

Said Charles Rangel... after the House voted 333-79 to censure him.

Thanks, once again...

... for showing your appreciation for my diligent bloggerly scribblings by starting your shopping here: <A HREF="http://ws.amaz...

2 Harvard law students sue Janet Napolitano and the TSA administrator over the airport scanning and groping.

They say it violates the 4th Amendment. IN THE COMMENTS: lyssalovelyredhead said: On a related note, I heard from a lawyer today... that his...

"Women follow rules better than men do, so the women do better in school."

"But, there is no correlation between doing well in school and doing well in adult life. And there might be a reverse correlation, beca...

"All I knew was that I had to cross the line."

A 16-year-old runner collapses, then crawls to the finish line. "It took over 20 seconds for her to crawl two yards." I was touche...

"It’s like if you or I morphed into fully functioning cyborgs after being thrown into a room of electronic scrap with nothing to eat."

The newly discovered arsenic-eating bacteria. But it's not really that weird: Arsenic sits right beneath phosphorus in the periodic tab...

"The government has never brought an Espionage Act prosecution that would look remotely like this one."

"I suspect that has a lot to do with why nothing has happened yet," says lawprof Stephen I. Vladeck, puzzling over why the U.S. Ju...

"A Month After Elections, 200,000 Votes Found."

In New York. That's 17% more votes than originally reported.

"Norman Rockwell would get the boot... if I believed in pulling everything that I'm offended by: I can't stand the view of America that he presents..."

"... which I feel insults a huge number of us non-mainstream folks. But I didn't call for the Smithsonian American Art Museum to pu...

Should the Constitution be amended to empower the states, by a 2/3 vote, to repeal provisions of federal law?

Dana Milbank notes "the unfortunate echo of nullification," but nullification was the idea that individual states could disregard...

"Twinkling Stars May Reveal Human-Size Wormholes."

May!

"Funny, only a few months ago [Obama] said his opponents talk about him like a dog."

"Now he is talking about himself, like a dog, but of the blue variety."

"It's like Charles Darwin and his theory is a saint. You can't touch it."

Some Louisiana citizens think the Louisiana textbook advisory panel isn't doing a good enough job of implementing the Louisiana Science ...

"If members have homosexual thoughts or feelings or engage in homosexual behavior..."

"... Church leaders should help them have a clear understanding of faith in Jesus Christ, the process of repentance, and the purpose of...

"Why are liberals more intelligent than conservatives? Because liberalism is 'evolutionarily novel.'"

Says the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa: [Kanazawa's study] showed that young adults who identified themselves as "very...

As the male ousts the female from the Speaker's chair....

... he chivalrously provides all the ladies of the House with  very important seats. Toilets. But I'm sure Nancy Pelosi has her own priv...

"If Charles Darwin were alive today, I think he would find something very attractive about punk rock."

Writes Greg Graffin in "Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science and Bad Religion in a World Without God." Graffin was (is?) the lead si...

Righty bloggers pick their Conservative Of The Year: Chris Christie.

Second Place: Sarah Palin. Third: Mark Rubio.

Mickey Kaus hates the Dream Act.

"For only the second time in Wisconsin state history, no one was killed during gun deer season..."

"... except for deer."

"Now I am scared I am going to wake up with a decapitated moose head in my bed..."

Says Margaret Cho, possible evincing the guilt she really ought to feel.

"The Select Committee on Global Warming – which was created to provide a political forum to promote Washington Democrats' job-killing national energy tax..."

"... it will not continue in the 112th Congress."

No, that's not the first snow.

That doesn't count. We have a standard for what counts as the first snow, so you have not won your bet. Not yet. Meade said the first sn...

Sissy on "sissy."

Yesterday, I had a problem with Rush Limbaugh using the word "sissy" over and over again to express his feelings about Julian Ass...

A shopping reminder.

Remember, you can painlessly show some love for the Althouse blog if you do your shopping beginning here: Amazon.com Widgets I really do ap...

Violence against women...

... amuses liberals sometimes.

Allowing gays to serve openly in the miliary "would not be the wrenching, traumatic change that many have feared and predicted," said Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates.

At a news conference today, after the release of a 9-month Pentagon study.  He said it was a “matter of urgency” that the lame-duck Senate v...

What Sarah Palin is doing to her children.

The ratings are up for "Sarah Palin's Alaska." Oh, that's so sad for the people who exulted last week when the ratings we...

"If they’ve got money to squander like this – of a crucifix being eaten by ants, of Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts, men in chains, naked brothers kissing..."

"... then I think we should look at their budget," said Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston, a member of the House Appropriations Committee...

Why aren't there any black Senators?

James Taranto reacts to the inflammatory assertion that "Mark Kirk Re-Segregates the Senate." It's true that "of the fou...

Here I am listening — for the first time — to Rush Limbaugh talking about me.

I've got the podcast of today's show, where he's reading from this blog post of mine : And let me invite Rush to go on Bloggingh...

Depriving people who crave attention from getting attention?

DSM-5 eliminates narcissism as an official personality disorder. The conflict is nowhere near as amusingly ironic as my post title or the he...

Rush Limbaugh just mentioned me.

I'm told (via email). I don't listen until the podcast comes out. Anyone know what he said? UPDATE: I listen to the podcast here .

"With biking, you feel in control until you have an accident."

"Then all of a sudden you realize you are not in control. That can have a dramatic effect — you can shift abruptly from excessive darin...

"WikiLeaks Fallout: Should Hillary Clinton Resign?"

Asks David Corn. Clinton... signed orders instructing U.S. foreign service officers to spy on the diplomats of other nations.... Diplomats a...

Julian Assange — "He's a sissy; he's a waif, purely and simply an Internet creation."

That's how Rush Limbaugh talked about Julian Assange on his show yesterday. What I'm interested in here is not Assange per se or wh...

"It's my theory that this chap Meade is the arch-criminal and he's behind the whole thing."

"Meade" is in 210 phrases in 30 movies (with a lot of repetitions in "Gone With the Wind"), but "Althouse" is...

Go ahead!

Jump! Via Metafilter , where I also found out (via email from Jaltcoh) about this amazing website where you can search for phrases in movie...

Did Oklahoma single out Muslims for disapproval?

A federal judge bars the state's Save Our State Amendment pending further proceedings. “While defendants contend that the amendment is m...

The director of the best "Star Wars" movie has died.

Do you even remember his name? Irvin Kershner was 87.

"Would you ever in your wildest dreams imagine Chris Matthews flatteringly comparing Sarah Palin to former President Bill Clinton?"

Noel Sheppard asks before speculating: Are Obama-loving press members trying to orchestrate an outcome by giving an abundance of attention ...

Things we talked about here over the weekend.

If a retired Supreme Court Justice is going to publish an essay in a classy literary tabloid , he should do better than this. If an erudite ...

"... Sinatra was a singularly fluorescent vocal phenomenon."

No, of course that's not what the NYT review of that new book about Frank Sinatra says. It says "Sinatra was a singularly incande...

"All right. I've read the entire Wikileaks dump. And there's nothing in it."

Overheard at Meadhouse.

"I just want to tell you both good luck. We're all counting on you."

Goodbye to Leslie Nielsen. Goodbye and good luck.

Althouse in 1970.

Yes, it's me, age 19, sitting under a Norman-Mailer-for-Mayor poster: ( Enlarge .) Just something I ran across as I work on restoring th...

Spooning with the robot pillow.

Funktionide Part II from eltopo on Vimeo . Is it sad? I mean... I'm not asking if the blob itself is sad. But is it sad that there is...

Standardized testing has embarrassed teachers into facing the fact that they've been grading kids for compliance and pleasing.

That's what I extract from this pretty garbled NYT op-ed . And by garbled I mean stuff like this: “Over time, we began to realize that m...

Madison needs to deal with its vermin - the geese.

At the Isthmus, Bill Lueders — remember him from last week ? — seems disturbed by the proposal to kill the geese that are ruining our beauti...

Justice John Paul Stevens writes about the death penalty in the New York Review of Books.

The book under review is David Garland's "Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition." The review i...

"The FBI successfully thwarts its own Terrorist plot."

Was Mohamed Osman Mohamud entrapped?

Incandescent light bulbs.

Stock up! UPDATE: Shining the harsh light of journalism on Arianna Huffington: The light bulbs are the first incongruity I spot waiting for ...

"Normally when we think of happiness, we think of money and status, but Denmark teaches us the opposite lesson."

"There, you have a place where you are taxed to the mean. A cultural norm reminds everybody that they are no better than everybody else...

I thought we'd finally hit the year when efforts to use "tryptophan" in Thanksgiving jokes had ended.

But hoary old NPR is still purveying them. Christmas is coming up, so I'm steeling myself for jokes about how no one actually likes fru...

"I had a piece of Carefree Sugarless gum and I was still worried."

"It never kicked in, I took it back to the store and said 'Bullshit!'"

Pay $1 million or Lady Gaga (and other celebs) won't do Twitter and Facebook anymore.

It's Digital Life Sacrifice. "It's really important and super-cool to use mediums that we naturally are on."

Presidential biographer Edmund Morris to Bob Schieffer on "Face the Nation": "That's a fucked up question." [UPDATED: "That’s a bullshit question!"]

Schieffer's question was: "What would Teddy Roosevelt think of today’s politics?" “You keep asking these presentist questions,...

New Wikileakage — "a secret chronicle of the United States’ relations with the world in an age of war and terrorism."

The NYT passes along the "brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats." ¶ Gam...

Hey, thanks to the person who bought the Shun Ken Onion Serrated 5-Inch Utility Knife and used my Amazon search box.

That knife costs $139.95. I don't have a knife like this myself, but I assume the reader knew what he or she wanted. And my point — my ...

"I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement."

Cheating and enraging customers so they denounce you on the web... as a business model , thanks to Google. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes,...

The Christianist in the White House — he's President of Jesusland.

Instapundit turns the tables on the Democrats and, in the process links to a post I wrote 6 years ago — not because I was doing 6-years-ago...

Photo blues.

Oh dear... You know what that is? It's the first digital photograph I ever took. I'm uploading it to Flickr tonight along with 2,00...

"That Fat Lip Might Give Obama Some Street Cred."

An NPR headline for a Scott Simon piece: I wonder if having a larger scar wouldn't actually fortify President Obama's profile, as he...

The last football Saturday of the year.

If you've got something to say about it, say it here. ADDED: And now, it's on to the Rose Bowl. But first... pick up that trash: (Th...