YOU CAN’T TWEET YOUR WAY TO FREEDOM: You also need battlefield dominance.

UPDATE: When you Twitter a king, you must kill him.

FROM MILES O’BRIEN: Rocket Racing League video.

GEORGE WILL: In Praise Of Cheerful Men.

HEH: Geithner: “I Never Had A Real Job.”

UPDATE: A reader emails: “He still doesn’t.”

FRANK CAGLE IS dreading the Civil War sesquicentennial. I can see why, but by his own terms we’ve come a long way since the centennial, when the South was full of segregationist Democratic politicians who were standing in the schoolhouse door. Now we’ve got Republicans promising to stand up for constitutional rights!

MAYBE HE PICKED IT UP FROM HILLARY: Obama Develops Mysterious Southern Accent.

BUDGET PROJECTION: Spending as much on interest as general spending by 2040?

WELL, THIS STORY DOESN’T INSPIRE CONFIDENCE.

MICHAEL YON ON the Battle For Kandahar.

THE AUTO PROPHET: Lt. Steve Zilberman RIP.

BEST PREDICTION FROM 2008: “Four years of talking down to me and asking me to pay for it.” So far it looks spot-on.

STUDY: Average Woman Dates 24 Men Before Settling Down.

INFORMED CONSENT and the ethics of DNA research.

MARKDOWNS on sports and fitness GPS gear.

WORRY ABOUT CARBON FOOTPRINTS IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: BBC lectures us incessantly on climate change. So why did their bosses make 68,000 domestic flights in two years? I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.

(Via NewsAlert).

SMART DIPLOMACY: The Scud Saga Continues.

MAD MEN’S THIRD SEASON IS NOW OUT ON DVD, and Ed Driscoll has some thoughts.

CATHY YOUNG: Tea Partiers Racist? Not So Fast. “The lead investigator, political science professor Christopher Parker, graciously provided me with the fuller data — which strongly contradict the notion of the Tea Parties as a unique hotbed of racism.” Given that Joan Walsh was stumped by a veiled Keith Olbermann reference I wouldn’t expect her to tease out much useful information here, so I’m hardly surprised to find that her take is wrong.

BOB OWENS: Agents of Incompetence: ATF Dodges FOIA, Still Has Seized BB Guns. “PJM asked for documents related to the bureau’s seizure of $20,000 worth of BB guns, but was given documents that had nothing to do with the case.”

RECIPE for a happy marriage.

A REVIEW of the Singularity Is Near movie, based, of course, on Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity Is Near. Short take: “It’s awesome.”

Here, FYI, is my review of the book for the Wall Street Journal.

MARKDOWNS on magazine subscriptions.

EVEN IF THEY HAVE CANDY: Stephen Hawking: Don’t Talk To Aliens. “The aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.”

I also recommend this piece by Gregg Easterbrook, if you’re interested in the subject.

UPDATE: Fausta Wertz brings the inevitable allusion.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John McCray writes:

From Charles Pelligrino’s The Killing Star,

“Three Laws of Alien Behavior: 1) Their survival will be more important than our survival. 2) Wimps don’t become top dogs. 3) They will assume that the first two laws apply to us.”

Sounds plausible to me.

MATT WELCH: President follows Europe into places Europeans no longer want to go. “What’s worse for us is that we’ve pretty much given up trying to address the root problem, which is the decade long spending binge initiated by George W. Bush and then tripled down on by Barack Obama. The VAT isn’t a way to streamline a complicated tax code; it’s a new spigot to flood money into the pockets of teachers who can’t be fired, and securities regulators who can’t get enough porn. The grand irony here is that the very continent we’re scrambling to emulate has been moving aggressively in the opposite direction on taxes and economic policy. While the US keeps corporate taxes frozen near 40%, EU countries have slashed them down to an average of around 25%. Top marginal income tax rates, which in the US are 35%, are under 25% all across the former East Bloc.”

THE FOUR CONGRESSMEN of the cotton subsidy apocalypse.

SAY IT AIN’T SO: Soy biodiesel worse for global warming. “Maybe politicos should do more research before imposing half-baked energy mandates.”

MICHAEL KINSLEY: Who Owns The First Amendment? Journalists Think They Do — And They’re Wrong. “An interview is a commercial transaction in which the reporter and the source each hope to gain something. Such exchanges rarely amount to anything illicit, but most FOIA requests, on all subjects, are dry holes. And many FOIA requests offend people’s sense of privacy or give succor to their enemies, rivals, or competitors. . . . For people whose job it is to describe the world, journalists often seem to have remarkable difficulty imagining life in other people’s shoes.”

QUINCY NEWS: Quincy May Be Tea Party Central Again This Week.

STEPHEN GREEN: The Week In Blogs: Paid Companions, Unpaid Debt, And The Government’s Magic Touch. Nice to see my The country’s in the very best of hands line is still around.

PROGRESS: Israeli researchers develop small, lightweight hydrogen storage tech.

TOM MAGUIRE: Politics Suspends Critical Thinking At The Times.

IN THE MAIL: From Steven Stark and Harrison Stark, World Cup 2010: The Indispensable Guide to Soccer and Geopolitics.

TIM CAVANAUGH: “Republicans are standing up for Goldman because they support laissez faire capitalism and unfettered free markets. Inconveniently for that thesis, Goldman has given more than twice as much money to Democrats as to Republicans in this election cycle.”

APRIL 25, 1980: Remembering the Desert One debacle.

I HAVEN’T TRIED THE Kodak Playsport pocket video camera, but it looks to be something like a waterproof version of the Zi8, which I own and which is pretty cool. I don’t see any sign of an external microphone input, though, and I’d guess that’s been dropped for easier waterproofing. Still for $149, including a free memory card, not bad. (The free HDMI cable, which my Zi8 came with, too, is a nice touch.) There are lots of good pocket video cameras out now in this price range. I want these things to be even more ubiquitous by the next round of Tea Party rallies and Congressional campaign events . . . .

RACISM AT BOSTON’S 98.5 FM? Somewhere, Don Imus is smiling.

SORRY, WE’RE STILL SCREWED: Reihan Salam says we’re heading into a decade-long economic buzz saw. “We are propping up the most rotten sectors of the economy and diverting talent that would otherwise shift into the new interrelated systems that are slowly emerging—and this emergence will prove very slow indeed once the inevitable tax burden required to prop up aging yet politically powerful sectors hits.” Let’s hope this is wrong, but it’s basically an explanation of why a powerful federal government, unconstrained by traditional limits, is a bad idea. Oh, well, at least I’ve got Vox Day’s book to cheer me up . . . .

SNICKERDOODLES, past and present.

FRANK ROSS: Re South Park, The Silence Of The Media Lambs Continues. “That’s right: an American-born Muslim convert with ties to a small extremist group operating openly in the United States of America can affect the programming policy of a cable comedy network whose headliners — Stone and Parker, and Jon Stewart — pride themselves on their fearless irreverence.”

Funny how all those talking-heads who solemnly warned us about the danger of violenct speech don’t have anything to say about, you know, actual threats. Maybe if we tell them he’s really a Tea Party mole . . . .

BILL DYER: Share your ideas for breaking the LA Times’ stonewall on the Obama/Khalidi Tape.

ANTHRAX UPDATE: I missed this the other day: Colleague Disputes Case Against Anthrax Suspect.

A former Army microbiologist who worked for years with Bruce E. Ivins, whom the F.B.I. has blamed for the anthrax letter attacks that killed five people in 2001, told a National Academy of Sciences panel on Thursday that he believed it was impossible that the deadly spores had been produced undetected in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory, as the F.B.I. asserts.

Asked by reporters after his testimony whether he believed that there was any chance that Dr. Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, had carried out the attacks, the microbiologist, Henry S. Heine, replied, “Absolutely not.” At the Army’s biodefense laboratory in Maryland, where Dr. Ivins and Dr. Heine worked, he said, “among the senior scientists, no one believes it.”

Dr. Heine told the 16-member panel, which is reviewing the F.B.I.’s scientific work on the investigation, that producing the quantity of spores in the letters would have taken at least a year of intensive work using the equipment at the army lab. Such an effort would not have escaped colleagues’ notice, he added later, and lab technicians who worked closely with Dr. Ivins have told him they saw no such work.

I definitely get the impression that the feds have been more interested in pinning this on someone so they could close the case, than in actually getting to the bottom of things.

HMM: Roots of Islamic fundamentalism lie in Nazi propaganda for Arab world, book claims. “The roots of Islamic fanaticism can be traced to Adolf Hitler’s radio messages broadcast around the Arab world during the Second World War, according to a new book.”

JAMES TARANTO: A Real Peace Movement: “Antiwar” rallies are more violent than tea-party ones.

PRIZE-WINNING cookbooks.

PROF. JACOBSON: “The loss of relevance must be a frustrating thing. It can drive some people mad.”

UPDATE: More thoughts from Ed Driscoll.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Paranoid Style of American Liberalism. “Liberals, to put it mildly, are not dealing well with their declining political fortunes. For some reason, liberals seem surprised that Americans have not warmed to the Obama administration’s policies, like government takeover of health care; bailouts and government ownership in multiple industries; wasteful and ineffective ‘stimulus’ spending; unheard of deficits; massive tax increases slated for next year; and a foreign policy that perversely alienates our allies and caters to our enemies. There has never been a time in our history when most Americans would have approved of such policies, yet liberals are somehow convinced that today’s manifestation of longstanding voter attitudes represents a unique and sinister animus against Barack Obama and his administration.”

HEH: That Was Quick… Forget the Dialogue & Civility- Angry Coffee Party Mob Wants Blood! Switch ‘em to decaf.

THE QUOTE THAT ISN’T A QUOTE: This piece in The Isthmus, a Wisconsin alt-weekly, quotes me as follows:

I actually emailed Glenn Reynolds, another law prof blogger from Instapundit, about this issue, and he told me that he thought Althouse’s blog could qualify as “relevant” academic work.

This was the email I received:

On your site you write that you consider Instapundit to be within the realm of the “public service and education” component of being a law professor. Do you believe that Althouse’s site would similarly qualify?

I answered:

As for the second question — sure. Not all of her posts are about law, of course, but then that’s hardly a requirement.

I never actually used the word “relevant,” which is presented in quotes. This isn’t a big deal — and it’s certainly not the first time I’ve been misquoted — but it’s a bit odd, though it doesn’t misrepresent my meaning, really. Maybe there’s another email I’m not finding via Gmail search? Anyway, I do think blogging is part of “public service and education.” My Dean has said that blogging counts as scholarship, even encouraged me to use research assistants for the blog, but I’ve never done that — for whatever reason, I’ve always tended to keep the blog its own thing, largely distinct from my day job. (Not all blogging lawprofs do that, though; some even host their blogs on university servers.) But I think blogging is more like writing opeds or book reviews than scholarly publication, at least most of the time. Occasionally one of my blog posts will morph into a law review article — like Is Dick Cheney Unconstitutional? or Libel In The Blogosphere — but even when they do, it’s the scholarship that’s really the scholarly output, with the blog just serving as an idea-generator. But there’s not much question that blogging and scholarship overlap a lot more than people once thought.

As Orin Kerr notes, “I think we’re seeing a shift in how law professors and legal journal editors view blogs. The old lines have blurred. Blogs have become a significant part of the scholarly conversation.”

Meanwhile, some thoughts on scholarship and mixed blogging from Stephen Bainbridge.

UPDATE: Reader James Graber writes: “As a non-academic, my reaction is that those are scare quotes or emphasis quotes, not quote quotes, and you are making too big a deal of it. Just my two cents worth.” Hmm. Normally in journalism, things that are quoted are quotes. But possibly. And maybe The Isthmus doesn’t follow journalistic protocols that closely.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The author emails: “Thanks for the link Glenn! Sorry about the quote issue –– I could have sworn that was the word I had used. I would have been more vigilant in an actual article –– that was just a quick blog post response to Althouse’s response to my article.”

IS “RADICAL MUSLIM” THE NEW GOTH? “This is a much greater mockery of Islam than a drawing of Muhammad! Nice work, Chesser, you loser.”

JERRY POURNELLE: What do they teach them in school nowadays?

ROGER SIMON: Censorship of Islamic Terminology: A Call for a Congressional Inquiry.

PRESIDENT OBAMA ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE.

Plus, a flashback: Senator Obama on Armenian Genocide.

JOHN FUND: Wisconsin and the Voter Fraud Agenda.

WELL, IT IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Japanese Government and Industry Aim for Mind-Controlled Robots and Electronics in 10 Years.

THE ATLANTIC: Goldman’s ‘Victim’ in SEC Case Was a Yield Chaser. “The German bank on the losing end of the Goldman Sachs derivatives deals that have attracted the ire of the Securities and Exchange Commission was so absorbed in the pursuit of high-yield returns from financial instruments linked to the U.S. housing market that it preferred to lose one of its top executives rather than change course. This single-minded pursuit of yield provides an important context for the SEC’s case against Goldman. In hindsight, it can appear that Goldman must have been committing some kind of fraud in order to sell subprime CDOs that performed so badly. But at the time, the buyers of these instruments were actively seeking exposure to subprime risk.”

AN EXTREME MAKEOVER, for King Tut.

BELDAR WARNS THAT STAMPING “TAX CHEAT” OVER TIM GEITHNER’S SIGNATURE might get you prosecuted. And, yes, it might. I think such a prosecution would be unjust, but the world is full of unjust prosecutions. However, it occurs to me that, so far, I don’t think I’ve seen a single bill with Tim Geithner’s signature. And while I haven’t checked every bill that has passed through my hands, I’ve stopped to look on a number of occasions. Are any of those out yet? And, if not, is it possible that this stamp, and the publicity it’s gotten, accounts, at least in part, for the delay?

UPDATE: Reader Juan Paxety writes: “I’ve checked every bill that has passed through my hands since March, 2009 – not a single Geithner. My stamp sits unused.” But another reader emails that his business just started getting bundles of Geithner-signed bills, so stay tuned.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Mark Wilson writes:

Are you familiar with “Where’s George”? People stamp a tracking number on a dollar bill and register it on a website. As the bill circulates, other people record when and where they received the bill. It’s kind of interesting to watch the movement of the bill. This has been going on for at least a decade. How is that different from stamping “tax cheat” on a bill?

One makes fun of the Secretary of the Treasury, and the other does not. And prosecutors have a lot of discretion. As I say, I’d regard a prosecution here as unjust — unjust enough to warrant calling out the prosecutors by name — but that’s no guarantee they wouldn’t do it, though it’s true that there’d be considerable blowback.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes: “Funny. You see enough unjust prosecutions, you don’t fear them any more. They can’t prosecute three hundred million people.”

AUGMENTED REALITY: I feel, therefore I am.

READING BRAIN WAVES to predict suicide risk.

CAR LUST: 1970s Super Coupes. My friend Doug Weinstein had the first-gen Scirocco, which was a great car. Another friend had the Opal Manta, which he liked but which I always found underwhelming.

FREE SPEECH HERO: Jon Stewart on South Park Death Threats.

More praise for Stewart here.

MAXED OUT: HOW MUCH CAN A HUMAN LIFT:

In the heaviest dead lift recorded, British weightlifter Andy Bolton lifted 457.5 kilograms from the floor to his thigh.

Strongmen like Bolton are perhaps five or six times stronger than the average man, who will often struggle to lift 45 kilograms over his head, says Dan Wathen, an athletics trainer at Youngstown State University, Ohio. The record for an overhead lift is 263.5 kilograms.

So what is the maximum weight a human could ever lift? Todd Schroeder at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles thinks we are already close to the maximum. “If you look over time at the records for maximal lifts, they have crept up but are starting to plateau,” he says. “Today’s weightlifters, including those that use steroids, are near the limit of human potential.”

Nanotechnology will fix that . . . .

A TAX REVOLT grows in New Jersey. “Median tax bills in six Garden State counties are among the 10 highest in all of America. As a share of income, levies in Passaic and Essex lead the nation — with Bergen, Union, Hunterdon and Hudson not far behind. School boards — and teachers unions that refused concessions — must have been dreaming if they thought voters would rubber-stamp tax hikes yet again. No, this time taxpayers were paying . . . attention.”

ED MORRISSEY: “The importation of toys with lead paint from China two years ago prompted Congress to pass the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), requiring extensive independent testing of all products sold — or resold — for children. The new regulations threatened to put small manufacturers and thrift shops out of business, thanks to the onerous burden of test costs. But what about the big manufacturer that actually put 2 million contaminated products on shelves? Mattel gets a waiver from testing requirements — again.”

Safety rules, like taxes, are for the little people.

THE ENTHUSIASM IS . . . ELECTRIC! Leaf pre-orders in Japan already exceed half of Nissan’s annual sales target.

IN OAK RIDGE, gearing up to dismantle some big bombs.

IN THE MAIL: The Return of the Great Depression.

SEC INSPECTOR GENERAL will probe Goldman suit timing.

BRIAN DOHERTY on the latest militia scare. “What the likes of Clinton, Klein, and Maddow realize, to their great chagrin, is that that power is faltering in the age of the Internet, with the cable news networks aiming for smaller targeted ideological audiences. This makes them so angry they feel it necessary to conflate or link their ideological enemies with mass murderers. . . . An America where, as Churchill writes, ‘the libertarian memory of the American revolution was transformed from a mainstream creed to a badge of extremism’ and in which ‘unquestioning loyalty and obedience to the nation state’ has become standard may be more conducive to domestic peace and order—at least in a tautological sense. But that transformation also enables a destructive set of policies, both overseas and domestically, that are more damaging to the property and liberty of Americans than any militia member or Tea Partier, however angry or irrational, will ever be.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “Yesterday I think I understood why California is in deep trouble. Let me walk you through another day out here.” Plus, a Mickey Kaus endorsement!

IN A REBUKE TO STANFORD’S EDUCATION SCHOOL, Stanford charter elementary to close.

Much more here.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: The Pernicious Corporate Governance Provisions Of The Dodd Bill.

VIDEO: “Remember November.”

ANN ALTHOUSE ON ARIZONA’S NEW IMMIGRATION BILL: “What is irresponsible and unfair about what Arizona did?”

Some thoughts on the legality here.

UPDATE: Ann Althouse disagrees with me on the Guaranty Clause issue, saying that it would probably be considered a “political question.” That’s certainly the standard take on Guaranty Clause issues, but here I’m not so sure. First, the primary case authority for the notion that Guaranty Clause issues are political questions is Luther v. Borden, which has been expanded considerably beyond its actual holding. (There’s dicta in New York v. U.S. suggesting that it’s been over-read in that regard). In addition, the “protect from invasion” language in Article IV Sec. 4 relates to language in Article I Sec. 10, which provides:

No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

Arizona is not — yet, anyway — engaging in war, but it’s clear from this language that it’s constitutionally empowered to do so when invaded, even if the federal government does nothing (and perhaps even in the face of federal objection). Arizona’s legislation is passed in response to armed people coming across the border and killing Arizonans, which sounds rather like an invasion. If that’s the case, then lesser responses to invasion are, arguably, permissible as well in the face of federal inaction. What the courts will do with this is, of course, uncertain (and likely not tied very closely to the actual text of the Constitution!) but it’s certainly not a frivolous argument. (Bumped).

SHE SHOT SOME FOLKS IN PLOVER, just to hear them say “ouch!”

FROM THE CRITERION COLLECTION, a bunch of new DVD releases.

PJTV: Meet MSNBC’s Very Own Lord Voldemort: Just Don’t Let Him Invade Your Brain. More Rita Skeeter than Voldemort, really.

MAY 20TH IS “Everybody Draw Mohammed” day. “If each threat produces more blasphemers than it silences, then threats suddenly become counterproductive.”

TWEET FIGHTING MAN: PJTV producer Owen Brennan gets in a twitter-fight with Keith Olbermann. Brennan emails:

I got in a very odd twitter fight with @KeithOlbermann today … went a few rounds too.

The tweet that started it all: “@KeithOlbermann Congrats on getting nearly 50,000 viewers! Er, I mean “followers,” but what’s the difference these days?”

And it just so happened to be a perfect promotional moment.

We’d just put up Kruiser’s latest … which has one of the most uncomfortable moments I’ve ever seen on cable news with four people on the Morning Joe team hoping the moment passes without anybody saying the dreaded words, “Keith Olbermann.”

I don’t have a scar on my head from tweeting Keith, but I’ve got an amusing twitter stream now. While Jon Stewart is picking a fight with Fox News, Keith Olbermann is fighting with PJTV.

Anybody who knows anything about media fights know that you only fight above your weight, which is why Olbermann is left to fight us.

Heh.

SHIKHA DALMIA: It’s Still Government Motors. “Uncle Sam gave GM $49.5 billion last summer in aid to finance its bankruptcy. (If it hadn’t, the company, which couldn’t raise this kind of money from private lenders, would have been forced into liquidation, its assets sold for scrap.) So when Mr. Whitacre publishes a column with the headline, ‘The GM Bailout: Paid Back in Full,’ most ordinary mortals unfamiliar with bailout minutia would assume that he is alluding to the entire $49.5 billion. That, however, is far from the case.”

NPR: Could Obama face a primary challenge?

GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE: VA Claims Office Takes SNAFU to a New Level. “Last month, a decorated Gulf War hero received a letter from the Veterans Affairs Administration that said: We are working on your claim for menstrual disorder. He was surprised — but not as much as one might think.”

JOHN HINDERAKER: “Whenever President Bush talked about immigration, his approval ratings went down. It was like clockwork: liberals never understood that the fatal decline in Bush’s popularity during his second term had at least as much to do with his advocacy of ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ as with war-weariness. Now President Obama has entered the lists, urging Congress to take up immigration. One can only wonder what Congressional Democrats make of this. Maybe they figure their own approval ratings can’t possibly get any lower. But Obama’s can, and they will if he keeps talking about immigration.”

THIS WEEK in the future.

BONNEVILLE: World’s fastest compressed-air car.

CLIMATE CHANGE: The vital importance of whale poop.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale.

THE PRICE OF ADMISSION: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges.

BUILD YOUR OWN cellular network.

BECOMING ARGENTINA: At least at an aesthetic level. I’d rather we matched their beef and their Malbecs . . . .

SEATTLE HACKER catches cops who hid arrest tapes.

JOHN KASS: Blagojevich sends not-so-subtle message to Obama. “Obama’s former patron and real estate fairy, the convicted influence peddler Tony Rezko, is a key player in the government’s case. Blagojevich’s aim is to undercut what Rezko has told investigators. And now Blago wants the president to do the undercutting from the witness stand, with the nation riveted to his every recollection of his days in Chicago politics, hanging with Tony and the guys, with the midterm November elections approaching.” Or, you know, to make the case go away.

AN INTERVIEW with graphic novelist James Sturm.

PJTV: Hoosier Daddy: Bill Whittle’s Tea Party speech from Indianapolis.

WILL COLLIER: Is A Bailout Backlash Building?

MATT WELCH: There He Goes Again. “Now that the world is belatedly waking up to the fact that President Obama lied his face off about the fiscal impacts of health care reform, maybe it’s an appropriate time to point out that he’s lying his face off about financial reform as well.”

Related: Now They Tell Us — Sebelius: We Don’t Know What ObamaCare Costs Will Be.

PETER INGEMI: It’s All About Respect.

JAMES LILEKS: ‘Question Authority’? Dude, That’s sooo 2008. “Then: dissent=patriotic. Now: sedition. Then: opposition to Bush=principled and civilized. Now: opposition to Obama=opposition to the very nature of civilization itself.”

MICKEY KAUS: “Revving up the base isn’t the solution for the Dems. The base (unions, the Latino amnesty lobby) is the problem.”

IMPORTANT DATING ADVICE: Don’t Date A Male Stripper.

POWER LINE: Shut Up, The Senior American Official Explained.