AT THE “VISIBILITY RALLY” OUTSIDE OF THE CLINTON-OBAMA DEBATE last night in Austin, Texas. Here’s a nice set of pictures taken by my son Christopher Althouse Cohen (who’s for Hillary). My favorite:

ADDED: Then there’s this dog…

… and my other son says we should name him “Bark Obama.”

I KNOW JUSTICE STEVENS WAS LESS FIXATED on the Supremacy Clause in Danforth v. Minnesota than was Chief Justice Roberts (who dissented). And, as I’ve said before, I think Justice Stevens got it right, but calling it “the Supremacy Clause in Article V” makes me feel a little sorry for it.

WHAT WOULD I DO WITHOUT HOWARD BASHMAN to keep me informed about the state of the law with respect to having sex with a dead deer in Wisconsin? I wrote about the case long ago — in a post called ” Is a burrito a sandwich? Is a dead animal an animal?” — and I promptly dumped it from memory. But Howard is always there, monitoring all things appellate.

PUT DOWN THOSE STAGE PROP GUNS! Because you know if you want to avert campus shooting sprees, you want to start with the hard-working theater kids who rehearsed their hearts out to put on a big show. Yes, the show is about presidential assassins, but it’s Sondheim. It’s high class. The bright side of this is: Because it’s high-class musical theater that’s getting censored, even the usual prissy anti-gun types should get pissed off.

Via Nick Gillespie, who hates the musical “Assassins” (“godawful in its original conception and execution back in 1990 (and naturally, retardedly well-received in its 2004 Broadway revival)”). I’ve never seen the show, but I loved Sarah Vowell’s description of it in her cool book “Assassination Vacation”:

“It’s the Stephen Sondheim musical in which a bunch of presidential assassins and would-be assassins sing songs about how much better their lives would be if they could gun down a president.”

“Oh,” remarks Mr. Connecticut. “How was it?”

“Oh my god,” I gush. “Even though the actors were mostly college kids, I thought it was great! The orange-haired guy who played the man who wanted to fly a plane into Nixon was hilarious. And I found myself strangely smitten with John Wilkes Booth; every time he looked in my direction I could feel myself blush.” Apparently, talking about going to the Museum of Television and Radio is “too personal,” but I seem to have no problem revealing my crush on the man who murdered Lincoln.

I THINK YOU CAN BE SURE that question won’t be repeated. Wouldn’t be fair.

SNOW IN NEW YORK CITY. I just got back from Madison, Wisconsin, where this winter we’ve had the most snow ever recorded. But there’s been barely a dusting here in my alternate home… until today.

Though I’ve heard some car wheels spinning, it looks very pretty from my vantage point.

ADDED: At ground level:

MCCAIN WANTS OUT OF THE CAMPAIGN FINANCE SYSTEM he’s responsible for and finds it’s not so easy. Amusingly, McCain is arguing that he has a constitutional right to get out.

MORE: “‘We never claimed that the matching funds were collateral for the loan,’ says McCain lawyer Trevor Potter. ‘This was all a hypothetical future transaction.’ (We wish we could get bank loans like that.)” The WSJ is aptly smirky: “We suppose we can’t blame Mr. McCain for trying to make the finance rules work for him, but it’d be nice if he finally admitted their embarrassing folly.”

MORE “PLAGIARISM.” Wow, Hillary really set herself up for this. I think that if your candidacy is going to be about accusations of unoriginality, then you’d better be sure that you’ve always used your own words…

SPEAKING OF PLAGIARISM, there’s this too. Hillary rips off John Edwards. (Via Metafilter.)

I’M LIVE-BLOGGING THE CLINTON-OBAMA DEBATE, so come on over and hang out at my place, where we have an active comments section.

"IT IS IMPORTANT NOT TO SILENCE COMMUNICATION on the Internet, but it is just as important not to silence victims of defamation," writes lawprof Betsy Malloy in an article flagged by Stephen Bainbridge. When someone says free speech is "important" but something else is "just as important," I get edgy. One cancels out the other and then what have you got? Like Bainbridge, I want a high standard to be met before a court can force an ISP to disclose the real name of an anonymous or pseudonymous blogger or commenter. So much damage can be done by the mere unmasking. It is all too tempting to file a lawsuit to punish someone who’s pissed you off. And, of course, victims of defamation are not "silenced" if they can’t sue. What a disaster if we think of the courthouse as our primary speech forum! If someone’s speech on the internet offends you, you can always talk back on the internet. Silence may nevertheless be the best choice, even if you’re used to jabbering endlessly on line. I’m frequently defamed on the internet, but I do what I can to avoid amplifying the attacker’s speech by reacting to it. There are times when I put my revenge in writing in a blog post and get that cursor right up to the "publish" button and then stop and remember what my mother used to say: "You’ll only encourage him."

AND: Eugene Volokh has some great detail on the standard the Delaware Supreme Court articulated in Doe v. Cahill: “Prof. Malloy seems to read the opinion as taking the view that statements in blogs are categorically opinion: ‘[T]he court argued that a reasonable person would not construe a blog as stating facts.'” That would be an a funny thing to say about blogs, and Volokh says the court didn’t say it.

“CINDY MCCAIN, LIKE OTHERS, STANDS BY MAN.” Ridiculous AP headline.

PSST, MEGAN. Stuff like this has been around for ages.

TNR REPORTS ON THE NYT:

The publication of the article [on John McCain] capped three months of intense internal deliberations at the Times over whether to publish the negative piece and its most explosive charge about the affair. It pitted the reporters investigating the story, who believed they had nailed it, against executive editor Bill Keller, who believed they hadn’t. It likely cost the paper one investigative reporter, who decided to leave in frustration. And the Times ended up publishing a piece in which the institutional tensions about just what the story should be are palpable.

Lots of detail at the linked article.

MICHELLE OBAMA — RETROGRADE AMERICAN WIFE, old-style leftist, affirmative action neurotic, or something else that I’m not even going to mention? Bob Wright and Mickey Kaus debate. The moose is deployed, and Mickey worries that he’s trafficking in stereotypes.

A BIG CIGAR? THERE?! That seems so wrong.

APHASIA IN THE COMICS.

“IF REPUBLICANS ARE MAKING TOO MUCH of Michelle Obama’s gaffe that ‘for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country’ — and well they might, because it could win them the election — Democrats are making way too little of it.”

“I GUESS MAKING ONESELF VULNERABLE to two negative stories in forty years is the price of a lifetime of public service.”

LAWRENCE LESSIG’S RUN FOR CONGRESS. “The district, south of San Francisco, runs straight through the heart of Silicon Valley, where Mr. Lessig is considered a celebrity, though one who wears glasses and uses phrases like ‘net neutrality.'” If you’re “considered a celebrity,” doesn’t that make you a celebrity? Is there some deeper lever of genuine celebrity that I just don’t understand?

“IS JOHN MCCAIN BROKE?”

“JIM RUTENBERG, MARILYN W. THOMPSON, DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and STEPHEN LABATON all show the kind of journalistic chops that made Us such a must-read in doctor’s offices and lavatories around the world.” Says Captain Ed.

MAJORING IN MIRACLES. Did Obama get sick on the eve of the big debate? Does Huckabee think this is the miracle he’d been hoping for? Unlike Huck, I didn’t “major in miracles,” but like the Virgin Mary on the grilled cheese sandwich, these works are uninspiring.

WHO READS INSTAPUNDIT? Science nerds, apparently. I’m reading the email, and most of it is correcting Megan McArdle about the theory of evolution or getting on my case about how a lunar eclipse is a full moon. So I’ll try to serve up more science. Did you know some scientists in Italy figured out how to detect the G-spot using ultrasound? There, did I say that wrong?

THE NYT HITS MCCAIN with a big rumor about his relationship with a female lobbyist: “Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself…”