Comanche Grasslands sunset.

The lawsuit against the University of Iowa College of Law for rejecting a conservative applicant for a lawprof job.

The applicant, Teresa R. Wagner, was active in the Right to Life cause, and the associate law school dean is caught in writing saying "Frankly, one thing that worries me is that some people may be opposed to Teresa serving in any role in part at least because they so despise her politics (and especially her activism about it)."

In the NYT, Adam Liptak calls attention to the dissonance conservatives ought to feel about litigation:

“I have serious misgivings about asking the courts to fix this through lawsuits,” [Walter Olson, a fellow at the Cato Institute, said]. “It threatens to intrude on collegiality, empower some with sharp elbows to sue their way into faculty jobs, invite judges into making subjective calls of their own which may reflect their assumptions and biases, all while costing a lot of money and grief.”

“At the same time,” he added, “there’s a karma factor here. Law faculties at Iowa and elsewhere have been enthusiastic advocates of wider liability for other employers that get sued. They’re not really going to ask for an exemption for themselves, are they?”

"Kantor nails her story... and casts it all in the stock lexicon of D.C. confrontations: Gibbs 'shook with rage' and soon 'stormed out.'"

Writes David Remnick:

The rest of the group “sat stunned.” The conflict, the profanity, the yelling: it’s the sort of vivid, if ultimately meaningless, detail that provides books like “Renegade,” “Game Change,” and, now, “The Obamas” with their lurid and irresistible zing. Such books regard more earnest matters like history, context, and ideas the way a child looks at a plate of Brussels sprouts. They aim to serve up big bowls of ice cream. And, no matter what Michelle Obama counsels, we political gluttons will lick the spoon clean.

Indeed, Remnick can't resist copying out a dialogue between Robert Gibbs and Valerie Jarrett that contains 4 "fucks," including "fuck her too!" — "her," being the First Lady. Mmmm. Ice cream! But I've had too much. I'm not interested in dessert.

Santorum's South Carolina stock...

... is falling.

Men and women are really different.

Really. More than previously thought... by experts... who discovered this.

Fighting off the Ice Age...

... with Global Warming.

Madisonians — including Police Chief Noble Wray — fret about the new concealed carry law in action.

Our local liberal rag, the Cap Times, displays and magnifies the worrying for its skittish readers.

What really trips Wray's trigger is the lack of a meaningful training requirement. Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen prepared rules requiring four hours of training courses, but fellow Republicans thought even that low bar overly onerous and GOP Gov. Scott Walker agreed. Says Wray, "I thought four hours was a bare minimum," adding that almost all state law enforcement officials agree.

What exactly do you do for 4 hours? It seems as though the point of making it 4 hours was to deter people from exercising their rights. That is, it wasn't really to serve the state's legitimate interest in safety, but for the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of the citizen who chooses to carry a gun. (Do you recognize the italicized words? Google them if you don't, especially if you enjoy irony, the exposure of hypocrisy, and fun stuff like that.)

Madison's concealed gun crowd has to be minuscule, I'd guess. After all, it's hard for me to imagine the biomolecular chemistry professor or the pediatric oncologist yearning to tote a concealed sidearm. So how many are seeking permits in Madison?

I love the smug elitism. Madison people are all professors and doctors. Not even just run-of-the-mill professors and doctors. We're a steaming mass of biomolecular chemistry professors and pediatric oncologists. It's those lowlifes from beyond the gleaming city's limits who want guns. Ugh! These benighted folk want to cling to some guns along with their religion. They don't belong here, just like that fiend Scott Walker and all the Republicans in the legislature don't belong here. They are bringing their what's-the-matter-with-Wisconsin values to our beautiful city!

The author of the Cap Times piece — Paul Fanlund — tries to find out how many Madisonians there are among the the 67,000 who have applied for permits and is surprised to learn that it's illegal to disclose that information. Law-abiding gun owners actually have privacy interests the state wants to protect. What a surprise! But it would be so interesting to know what loathsome, Republican-voting communities they came from. Surely not the teeming-with-physicists-and-oncologists Madison!

Fanlund quotes Chief Wray:

"What I can't understand is how come we have not evolved beyond the point that the best way to protect ourselves is a gun? How come we cannot come up with something that is less destructive and less permanent."

I don't know, Chief. I'm pretty evolved myself, being a Madisonian professor, but I don't know. I do have a question for you though: Why haven't the police — the police you lead — eliminated crime in our neighborhoods? Why are there still rapes and robberies? Why are there still gangs? Why haven't your police evolved to the point where you have solved these problems for us? Because, I know that I, personally, would love to depend on government for all my personal protection. How come you cannot come up with something?

Fabric that works like a touch screen.

The new smart fabric.

Touch it... swipe it.... and... what? What do you want to have happen as a result of touching fabric? I mean stuff that a computer would do for you. The article suggests controlling your car radio by touching the fabric of the car seat or dimming your lights by rubbing your armchair. Who wants that? What are the applications for this? All I could think about is... some kind of sex machine....

Because you can clean it, the material will be practical for everyday use.

Phew!

"As flames of desire sensuously circle around the tub and weightless bubbles become candy clouds..."

"... I step my bare body into a delicious dream."

(Check out the whole slide show. I don't know if this is funny or sad. I'm definitely nauseated, and I had to check to see if I had a tag for "horrifying." I didn't, and I'm not going to make one for this. I have a threshold of restraint when it comes to creating new tags. But if I'd already had a tag for "horrifying," I'd have added it here. Oddly, I did already have a tag for "bubbles.")

"Record-High 40% of Americans Identify as Independents..."

"... based on more than 20,000 interviews conducted in 20 separate Gallup polls in 2011."

Should the "digital project" replace dissertations in PhD programs?

Inside Higher Education examines the emerging trend:

Graduate students need to learn "what it means to write for the web, with the web," which is not the same thing, [said Rutgers English prof Richard E. Miller], "as making PDFs of your [print] articles."

Whether departments want it to happen or not, the form of scholarship is going to change, he said. Rather than avoiding that, scholars should consider the ramifications, he said, by redesigning dissertations. "Once you lose the monograph, what’s the future of the long argument?"

There's not much of a future for your English PhDs, monograph or no monograph, and you know it.  ← short argument.

"Santorum... is more of a Catholic than a conservative..."

"... which means he's good on 60 percent of the issues, but bad on others, such as big government social programs. He'd be Ted Kennedy if he didn't believe in God."

Quips Ann Coulter, via  WaPo's "On Faith... Conversation about Religion and Politics."

State Capitols, seen on 2 consecutive days.

Nebraska:



Colorado:

Tebow!

Broncos defeat the Steelers.

(We're watching — on TV — in Denver.)

ADDED: And Thomas!

AND: Here's the extremely cool sudden-death touchdown.

"Unbeknownst to reporters, the State Dining Room had... been transformed into a secretive White House Wonderland."

According to the new book by Jodi Kantor.

Tim Burton decorated it “in his signature creepy-comic style. His film version was about to be released, and he had turned the room into the Mad Hatter’s tea party...

“Burton’s own Mad Hatter, the actor Johnny Depp, presided over the scene in full costume, standing up on a table to welcome everyone in character.”

ADDED: And:

The president's aides decided the party would send the wrong message at a time when the Tea Party was on the rise with its message against Washington's excesses and unemployment had risen sharply to ten per cent.

"White House officials were so nervous about how a splashy, Hollywood-esque party would look to jobless Americans or their representatives in Congress, who would soon vote on health care that the event was not discussed publicly and Burton's and Depp's contributions went unacknowledged...."