IN YOUR FACE. Really in your face, Eminem.

STEEL YOURSELVES, Instapundit readers. I’ve got to break it to you that we have arrived at a week when our favorite blogger, Glenn Reynolds, is off on one of those trips of his, and I — along with Megan McArdle and Michael Totten — are going to be doing our best to add up to something that will tide you over until he reemerges. I think he may be scuba-diving again, so that’s why I’m using the sea imagery — “tide,” “reemerges.” See? I am trying my best to keep you amused, but I’m still stinging from that time Rick Brookhiser said:

Instapundit – Glenn Reynolds = 0. 

Nothing is harder than simple.

WHERE’S GLENN? I think he’s coming back tonight….

Photo by Chris.

SHAME, SHAME, SHAME. The Clinton campaign stooped so low circulating a picture of Barack Obama in African dress. The Obama camp responded with shaming: “On the very day that Sen. Clinton is giving a speech about restoring respect for America in the world, her campaign has engaged in the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we’ve seen from either party in this election.” And then the Clinton side shamed them back: “If Barack Obama’s campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed.” This is the classic rhetorical device that is technically termed “I’m rubber, you’re glue.”

JOHN KERRY ON BARACK OBAMA: “I believe Barack Obama has this moment of history to be able to change these politics and take the negative off, to take the politics of destruction away. He isn’t seeking to perfect Swift-boating, he’s seeking to end it. This is a man who understands we’ve got to talk to each other.” And Kerry is a man who doesn’t understand that he was a terrible candidate.

“THANK YOU LIFE, THANK YOU LOVE, and it is true, there is some angels in this city.” Marion Cotillard was adorable accepting the Best Actress Oscar last night. But I had the impression it was a very lackluster show (maybe because we came in late and breezed through it on the TiVo). But the LA Times has a Best and Worst of the Oscars slideshow with comments that makes it seem pretty entertaining. Reminisce about Jon Stewart saying Gaydolf Titler, etc.

JOSH MARSHALL WINS A POLK AWARD and gets a nice write-up in the NYT. (Am I supposed to punish the NYT for the dreadful McCain story? I’ve got to make an exception and link to this.) “[H]e operates a long way from the clichéd pajama-wearing, coffee-sipping commentator on the news.” Dammit, where’s my coffee? And enough with the pajamas cliché — which is a cliché even when you’re calling it a cliché.

By the way, speaking of clichés: Have you noticed you never see MSM articles carping about bloggers anymore? Like this one from back in September 2006. Actually, I think that one was so dumb that no one ever wrote another one.

OBAMA IS “MAKING A PROMISE TO VOTERS that is as old as the country itself.” It’s an American thing to start over again.

ROGER L. SIMON GOES PSYCHOANALYTIC on Bill Keller: “[T]here was something weirdly self-destructive in the newspaper’s behavior on this matter….”

WHAT ANDREW SULLIVAN LEARNED ABOUT THE CLINTONS: “Clinton is a terrible manager of people. Coming into a campaign she had been planning for, what, two decades, she was so not ready on Day One, or even Day 300. Her White House, if we can glean anything from the campaign, would be a secretive nest of well-fed yes-people, an uncontrollable egomaniac spouse able and willing to bigfoot anyone if he wants to, a phalanx of flunkies who cannot tell the boss when things are wrong, and a drizzle of dreary hacks like Mark Penn.”

TIME FOR ME TO GO OUT window shopping in Brooklyn Heights…

… window shopping and fisheye-lensing. (To enlarge the photo: click.) (What’s the place with the blue pig? What do you think? It’s The Blue Pig.)

“CRIPPLED BY YEARS OF SEXY DANCING,” Prince — aged 49 — is getting hip replacement surgery. Dance, Music, Sex, Romance… Somebody call the doctor… Say ooh, yeah, yeah… Help me!…

Ralph!

HILLARY IS SHAMING OBAMA for telling people she’s going to force them to buy insurance whether they can afford it or not. It really is so unfair. She’s going to force them to buy insurance only if she thinks they can afford it. There will be tax credits and subsidies to get them to the level where they will be told they can afford it. Surely, no one will think they can’t afford it once they government has figured out that they can. How dare Obama hinge his argument on the notion that people will have ideas of their own about how to spend their money.

NORA EPHRON SEEMS TO BE THE ONLY PERSON who knows that Charles Dickens died of multiple sclerosis.

FOR YOUR PRE-OSCARS PLEASURE: a beautiful morphing of the faces of beautiful actresses. It’s interesting to see the how similar the faces of beautiful women are even as they are strikingly individual. Do you find yourself trying to decide who is the most beautiful? Wasn’t it Vivian Leigh?

CLARK HOYT, THE NYT PUBLIC EDITOR, EXAMINES the journalistic ethics of the McCain story published last Thursday:

“If the point of the story was to allege that McCain had an affair with a lobbyist, we’d have owed readers more compelling evidence than the conviction of senior staff members,” [NYT executive editor Bill Keller said.] “But that was not the point of the story. The point of the story was that he behaved in such a way that his close aides felt the relationship constituted reckless behavior and feared it would ruin his career.”

I think that ignores the scarlet elephant in the room. A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did. And if a newspaper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair, whether editors think that is the central point or not, it owes readers more proof than The Times was able to provide.

“Ignores” is putting it way too mildly. It’s a ludicrous argument. It would mean that editors could purvey all sorts of trash as long as it is embedded it in a larger story. And when we get outraged, they could look down their noses and insult us about our poor reading comprehension.

Here’s Jeff Jarvis on the subject:

[Keller] tries to tell us that we’re concentrating on the wrong thing here, that we don’t see what the real story is….

Do they have no news judgment? The lede in this story was obvious to everyone but the Times…

That the editors of the Times don’t see that is incredible — that is to say, not credible.

More at the link, but I’ve boiled it down to make it clear that Jarvis thinks Keller is dissembling.

(Cross-posted here, where you can comment.)

CONTACT LENSES WITH CIRCUITS AND LIGHTS. Is there something you’d like to see with your eyes other than what’s really in front of you?

DIGG AND WIKIPEDIA WORK because the vibrant democracy we see on the surface is checked and balanced by a less conspicuous and more reliable elite group — Chris Wilson explains.

“THE KIDS BUYING MUSIC DON’T WANT immaculately-performed songs that remind them of their grandmothers; they want music that will help them get laid, which is exactly what AI’s audition process doesn’t test for.”

ELMO AS KRUSTY. Didn’t this happen on the “Treehouse of Horrors III”?

NEW YORK CITY, right now, from my perch in Brooklyn Heights:

“INDOCTRINATE U” is now available to buy and download on line here. The film — which I watched the other day — uses that “Roger and Me” approach where the filmmaker confronts people who have not agreed to an interview, and you probably already know whether you love to laugh at people who are trapped into defending the bureaucracy they work for. I think the conflict between free speech on campus and dealing with racial and sexual harassment is quite a bit more subtle than Evan Coyne Maloney makes it out to be, but it’s an amusing presentation of his point of view.

AND: If you want to argue with me about this, go here.

CAN WE JUDGE THE CANDIDATES by the way they woo Bill Richardson?

‘IT OFTEN SEEMS AS IF, TO THEM, I WILL ALWAYS BE BLACK FIRST and a student second.” So reads Michelle Obama’s senior thesis, written when she was a student at Princeton. You can read the whole thing, which I’m not going to do, but I did read the first few pages, and nothing I read troubles me. I should add that I attended her speech at Madison — the one where she said “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change” — and that line didn’t jump out at me. But she’s the wife of a presidential candidate, so her words will necessarily be raw material for attacks, especially what she’s saying now. But what she wrote as a college student in 1985? She had much more reason to feel alienated than the average college student — and anyway, feeling alienated is a classic part of the young American experience. Amba has read much more of the thesis than I have, and she has some excellent observations:

What was being weighed here… was whether it was better to participate in the common life or to build up a separate community with its own resources and institutions, as “a necessary stage for the development of the Black community before this group integrates into the ‘open society’.” Before, not instead of. Ideas are always psychobiography, and you may feel here the young Michelle’s sense that she needed to gain confidence in a context of people who were familiar and supportive before venturing forth into a more ambiguous, less embracing world that was harder to read and harder to trust.

ADDED: If you want to argue with me, come over here and you can.

AND: Captain Ed has read the whole thesis:

It found — surprise! — that black students who socialized more with whites before and during Princeton were more comfortable with whites later, and those who didn’t, weren’t. Interestingly, they all more closely identified with the black community during the Princeton years, and that mostly declined when they went out into the world afterwards. There were more subtle variations on ideological trends, and attempts to drill down into “literateness” and other subjective analyses, which made the project rather ambitious if not completely convincing. At the conclusion, she acknowledges that her more hard-line attitudes and assumptions about blacks who did not meet her definition of “identification” were incorrect and naive.