Ten Words from Today's Times - March 21, 2012

He was poised to collect about three times as many delegates as Mr. Santorum, which aides hoped would increase his lead enough to tamp down talk of a contested convention and build an unassailable advantage in the race for the nomination.

He belittled Mr. Obama’s experience as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago and as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, saying the president was ill suited to lead the nation to economic prosperity.

The arcane and often confusing delegate system is forcing the campaigns to navigate a patchwork of state party bylaws that has built up since the era of Abraham Lincoln, who, as it happened, won the Republican nomination in 1860 after swaying delegates to support him in a third round of voting.

In Florida, if people feel they are in imminent danger from being killed or badly injured, they do not have to retreat, even if it would seem reasonable to do so.

It will run parallel with one announced on Tuesday by the state attorney in Seminole County, who said a grand jury would be convened.

Church as community leaders and residents gave testimonials of police harassment and listened to N.A.A.C.P. officials criticize the law.

Kent Alterman, Comedy Central’s head of original programming and production, said that the number of stand-up specials it shows was “in service to our audience and our business,” and that only “a very rarefied community of comedians” commanded followings large enough to make Internet-only programs viable.

“Musicians can have personas,” said Erin McPherson, who is Yahoo’s head of video programming and originals, “but comics are themselves, and their fans relate to them almost as friends.

Mark Greenberg, a former Showtime and HBO executive who is now the president and chief executive of Epix, a cable and online network that focuses on movies and live events, said that programmers’ interest in stand-up was partly demographic: comedians bring more male viewers and especially desirable younger viewers, whom programmers can’t afford to ignore “unless your attitude is that you’re going to be retired in 10 years and you don’t care,” he said.

While this straight-to-the-Internet strategy is far from ubiquitous in stand-up, it is already having a profound impact on the comedy landscape, enabling online content providers and individual artists to take more turf from television networks and empowering comedians to be as candid (and as explicit) as they want in their material.