Herman Cain said he be comfortable running as VP with any of the GOP candidates... except Rick Perry.

And it's not because he thinks that word — that painted-on-a-rock name — might somehow get aimed at him:

Cain said his concerns about Perry include "being soft on the border, issues relative to tuition for children of illegal aliens." As governor, Perry supported legislation offering in-state college tuition for the children of illegal immigrants, which has become a flash point in the campaign. "And I haven’t totally gone through all of his positions, but a lot of positions I have questions with," Cain said.

"Sarah Palin’s political voice had dwindled well before she announced her decision not to run."

"Now it will sink altogether into inaudibility. She will be no kind of force in future national discussions."

Sayeth David Frum.

Harry Reid triggers the "nuclear option."

The "shocking development," reports The Hill, blocks Republicans "from forcing votes on uncomfortable amendments after the chamber has voted to move to final passage of a bill":

The Democratic leader had become fed up with Republican demands for votes on motions to suspend the rules after the Senate had voted to limit debate earlier in the day.

[Republican Leader Mitch] McConnell had threatened such a motion to force a vote on the original version of President Obama’s jobs package, which many Democrats don’t like because it would limit tax deductions for families earning over $250,000. The jobs package would have been considered as an amendment.

McConnell wanted to embarrass the president by demonstrating how few Democrats are willing to support his jobs plan as first drafted.

"Rodriguez struck out swinging as the Tigers celebrate on the field."

Yankees out.

School choice — it's choice! — how can it be bad?

It might be good.

[T]he appeal of school choice cannot be reduced to simple power politics. In fact, the people most resistant to expanding choice are often suburban voters who vote Republican and (sometimes mistakenly) believe their schools are providing quality education. Inner-city minority parents are frequently the most vocal choice proponents because they experience sub-par education firsthand. Republicans who support school choice are actually taking political risks that run counter to raw political calculations.

A brief history of "Shame" signs on Madison's Capitol Square.

This year, we've seen lots of anti-Scott Walker protesters carrying signs that feature the word "Shame." (We've also heard the word "shame" chanted over and over again.) There's this guy, from last March, carrying a commercially printed "Shame" sign:


From "Shame, shame, shame. Where is the shame?"

But a discussion a couple posts ago — about the Westboro Church folk coming to Madison — had me looking back to an old post of mine from 2004, when some religious group showed up at a Gay Pride parade. I was struck by this "shame" sign...



... and I wonder what it says about the protesters of 2011 that they are channeling old-time religion.

Elizabeth Warren's put-down of Scott Brown elicits a return put-down from Scott Brown.

Are they even now? Or is this going to come back and bite Scott in his once-publicly-naked butt?

In Tuesday's debate — among Democratic candidates to challenge Senator Brown — Elizabeth Warren said "I didn’t take my clothes off" to pay for school. That was a reference to the fact that Brown posed for a photograph in Cosmo and made money to pay for college. Asked by a radio DJ for a response, Brown said "Thank God."

So... is he allowed a tit-for-tat insult or will this little lapse work wonders getting women voters to turn away from the ultra-handsome politico?

Notification of Donation Received: Total amount: $1.00 USD.

In the gmail today — a $1 Paypal contribution along with the following text, entered in the Paypal form:

Purpose:

Althouse needs to continue delivering news.

Message:

Do remember unbiased coverage of the news will consistently cause anger. If there is no anger the matter is likely to have been trivial.

Now, I really appreciate that. It's only $1, but I can see from the purpose and message that it's somebody who likes the blog, and it's a nice example of a micro-contribution. If everyone who values this blog would throw in a dollar now and then, it would add up quite well.

The PayPal button is always in the sidebar, and I see the donations in my gmail along with whatever the message is.

Enough talk of women and their slutty-one-thing-or-another Halloween costumes.

Let's look a the man problem for once. Here'sthe Amazon list of bestselling men's costumes —via Instapundit — and the #1 costume is some stretchy fabric that covers your entire body and makes you all one color. What is the attraction here?

Why are men choosing these costumes?
	They want to be somehow invisible, yet brightly colored.
	It's very much like being naked, but with no face and no genitalia.
	There's some movie/video game character this represents.
	The onesie suit is just the beginning. It's what you put on next that counts.
	It's not a Halloween costume. Wear your team's color to a sporting event.
	It's not a Halloween costume. It's for committing crimes.
	The onesie suit is just the beginning. Use scissors for individual, customized partial nakedness.
pollcode.com free polls

IN THE COMMENTS: I'm schooled by DannyNoonan, who seems to think I'm a bit of an idiot not to know about the "green man," and KLDavis, who points me to a video clip that makes me laugh a lot.

The 4 Mistakes of Ezra Klein... [ADDED: or Rich Yeselson].

1. He's written a blog post titled "The four habits of highly successful social movements," but he never talks about any habits.

2. He does have paragraph containing "four things," but the verbiage is mind-numbing and lacking in parallelism:

Whether [the Occupy Wall Street protests] will grow larger and sustain themselves beyond these initial street actions will depend upon four things: the work of skilled organizers; the success of those organizers in getting people, once these events end, to meet over and over and over again; whether or not the movement can promote public policy solutions that are organically linked to the quotidian lives of its supporters; and the ability of liberalism’s infrastructure of intellectuals, writers, artists and professionals to expend an enormous amount of their cultural capital in support of the movement.

3.  He evokes the best-seller title "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People"  which prompts us to think about his ineffectiveness.

4. He promised a list of a specific number of items and then he didn't put it in the form of a numbered list. People love numbered lists. The internet is full of them. They're highly clickable. What's wrong with us? Why do we keep falling for that? 

ADDED: The post is signed by Ezra Klein but has an italicized parenthetical at the top saying he asked Rich Yeselson, a research coordinator at Change to Win, for some "thoughts on Occupy Wall Street." The post I'm complaining about is introduced as "some notes" from Yeselson, which Klein says he thinks are "worth publishing in full." Obviously, I didn't think this was worth reading in full, but now I assume the published text is completely the work of Rich Yeselson. As Bill Harshaw alerts me in the comments, this is "The one mistake of Ann Althouse." This is the great danger of pointing out someone else's mistakes: You look especially bad if you make a mistake yourself — and chances are you'll make the mistake at that point. (It seems everything every time I decide it's worth mocking a typo, I make a typo.)

Kandour, the magnificent police horse.

This video was recorded on June 12th, during the Walkerville protest on the Capitol Square here in Madison. The reason for posting it today is revealed in this edited version, and you can read more here.

SPOILER ALERT: Watch the video before reading any comments.

"Restoring 2006 levels of policy uncertainty would yield an additional 2.5 million jobs over 18 months."

Impressive.

And yet the government is always scrambling to help us out with new policies. And only today, Obama said:

“If Congress does nothing, then it’s not a matter of me running against them. I think the American people will run them out of town, I would love nothing more than to see Congress act so aggressively that I can’t campaign against them as a do-nothing Congress.”

Reconsider the amazing value of nothing.

The ATF acting director would like people to "calm down" about Fast and Furious.

I'm sure he does.

Harnessing wind power on a tiny scale: through the nose.

Invented at the University of Wisconsin:

Materials science and engineering assistant professor Xudong Wang, post-doctoral researcher Chengliang Sun and graduate student Jian Shi created a tiny device that generates electricity when passed over by low-speed airflow, such as that created by respiration (breathing)....

Steve Jobs, the brilliant performer.

"We're introducing 3 revolutionary products..." This was so great. Has a new product ever been presented this well:



I love fashion choices too.

"We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else."

"We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build."

Beautiful. Thank you!

That and more Steve Jobs quotes here.

Who has had as much impact on business and our lives as Steve Jobs?

"You'd probably have to go back to Henry Ford..."

So Bob Dylan didn't win the Nobel Prize for Literature after all.

It was a false alarm.* Oh! The injustice! They gave it to Tomas Tranströmer, some Swedish guy. Never heard of him. Cool name though, for sure.
______________________

* Or should I say, with Dylanesque redundancy, a phony false alarm.

"Why Conservative White Males Are More Likely to Be Climate Skeptics."

Headline on a NYT article about a study by sociology professor Aaron McCright, titled "Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States."

To test for the trend amongst conservative white males, the researchers compared the demographic to "all other adults." Results showed, for instance, that 29.6 percent of conservative white males believe the effects of global warming will never happen, versus 7.4 percent of other adults. In holding for "confident" conservative white males, the study showed 48.4 percent believe global warming won't happen, versus 8.6 percent of other adults....

To understand why there is a trend amongst conservative white males, the Gallup data was cross-examined with research about the "white male effect" -- the idea that white males were either more accepting of risk or less risk averse than the rest of the public....

McCright says, up to 40 percent of all white males in the study sample believe in hierarchy, are more trusting of authority and are more conservative. Conservative white males' motivation to ignore a certain risk -- the risk of climate change in this case -- therefore, has to do with defending the status of their identity tied to the white male establishment.

A few things:

1. Apparently, the "white male effect" has been studied quite a bit. I'm not surprised that studies of white males yield results that researchers characterize in negative terms. I call that the "lefty sociologist effect."

2. Look at the global warming question from the opposite side: Why are liberals less skeptical? I'd say there is more "trusting of authority" among people who accept the assertions of scientists and think government can solve this problem. And believing in climate change fits nicely with the general liberal mindset that involves enthusiasm for top-down government solutions and puts a relatively low value on preserving traditional ways.

3. McCright highlights the risk that the skeptics are willing to tolerate when they avoid taking steps to deal with the predicted climate change, but there is also risk in imposing solutions to head off problems that might not occur. Since there are risks all around, we're not really talking about differences in risk aversion. These are differences in weighting and comparing various risks.

4. The article uses the words "skepticism" and "denial" almost interchangeably, but these are actually dramatically different words. Skepticism is part of rational, scientific thought. If you don't have it, you are gullible. Denial involves an irrational resistance to evidence. McCright's study title reveals a bias: These people are in denial; what's their problem? I'd rather see a neutral study, something that seriously and fairly asked: What psychological tendencies explain the disparity in acceptance of scientific reports on climate change?

Goodbye to Derrick Bell.

The eminent law professor has died.

He was a pioneer of critical race theory — a body of legal scholarship that explored how racism is embedded in laws and legal institutions, even those intended to lessen the effects of past injustice. Mr. Bell “set the agenda in many ways for scholarship on race in the academy, not just the legal academy,” said Lani Guinier, the first black woman hired to join the Harvard Law School’s tenured faculty, in an interview on Wednesday....

Mr. Bell’s core beliefs included what he called “the interest convergence dilemma” — the idea that whites would not support efforts to improve the position of blacks unless it was in their interest....

Much of Mr. Bell’s scholarship rejected dry legal analysis in favor of allegorical stories....

One his best-known parables is “The Space Traders,” which appeared in his 1992 book, “Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.” In the story, as Mr. Bell later described it, creatures from another planet offer the United States “enough gold to retire the national debt, a magic chemical that will cleanse America’s polluted skies and waters, and a limitless source of safe energy to replace our dwindling reserves” in exchange for one thing: its black population, which would be sent to outer space. The white population accepts the offer by an overwhelming margin....

Not everyone welcomed the move to narrative and allegory in legal scholarship. In 1997, Richard Posner, the conservative law professor and appeals court judge, wrote in The New Republic that “by repudiating reasoned argumentation,” storytellers like Mr. Bell “reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites."

Prof. Bell was 80.

"He told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life."

"He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics — even people who knew him well, including his wife — could never understand."

Steve Jobs has died, at the age of 56.

Terribly sad. A great man.

He put much stock in the notion of “taste,” a word he used frequently. It was a sensibility that shone in products that looked like works of art and delighted users. Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”

Regis McKenna, a longtime Silicon Valley marketing executive to whom Mr. Jobs turned in the late 1970s to help shape the Apple brand, said Mr. Jobs’s genius lay in his ability to simplify complex, highly engineered products, “to strip away the excess layers of business, design and innovation until only the simple, elegant reality remained.”

Mr. Jobs’s own research and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide. When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

"Bob Dylan is favored to win Nobel Prize in literature."

"The British betting house has Dylan as the top possibility, running at 5-to-1 odds, ahead of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, who is in second place, and Syrian poet Adonis in third."

Crazy! I love Bob Dylan, but I don't think the Nobel Prize makes sense. It's like when they gave the Peace Prize to Obama. It feels like they're just trying to get a celebrity to visit the European Northland.

"At the dinner table, Phil sits between his wife and his girlfriend, across from the kids."

"He's a bus driver with an effusive personality and a stubbly goatee."

Polyamory hits Madison, Wisconsin.

During the course of conversation, he'll reach over and sweep a strand of hair behind Grace's ear or nuzzle his wife Katie after a joke. Their 9- and 11-year old boys babble cheerily about school. Their 17-year-old daughter Vionna comes home from work partway through the meal and pulls up a chair. She darts up to her room at one point and brings down a present for Grace, a pretty glass vial of perfume. Between all parties, there's a natural and easy vibe.

Oh, good Lord.

Jay Carney sloughs off the call for a special prosecutor in the "Fast and Furious" investigation.

"I think it's the biannual call for a special counsel by this particular congressman... Once every six months, we hear something similar."

It's just like all that other stuff you didn't notice. Nothing to see here.

AND: "Is CBS News Silencing Fast and Furious Reporter?"