"In a stunning political reversal, prominent supporters of Rep. Eric Swalwell’s campaign for California governor withdrew their support Friday..."

"... after the congressmember denied allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman twice, including when she worked for him. Swalwell was among the leading Democrats in the race to replace outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom. But in just hours, he saw his most prominent supporters - including U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff and powerful labor unions - drop their endorsements and call for his exit from the race.... This turmoil in the race came after the San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday that a woman said Swalwell sexually assaulted her in 2019 and 2024.... Uncorroborated and nonspecific rumors that Swalwell behaved inappropriately with female staffers have circulated on social media for weeks, but the Chronicle’s story is the first reported account of someone making a direct accusation...."

I'm reading "Allies yank support for Swalwell’s California governor run after sexual assault allegations" (AP).

"But as the show gassed on, it also started to feel like zealotry porn: There were only so many fingers you could watch chopped off, only so many gouged-out eyes."

"After a while, the red robes started to look more like cringe cosplay than a pointed protest symbol. When the series finale aired last year, I didn’t bother watching, especially after reading that the titular handmaid, June, never reunites with the daughter she’s spent the entire series trying to rescue.And now we learn why: Because without that loose end, there could be no 'Testaments.' Our new protagonist is June’s teenage daughter, Agnes, who is being raised by a wealthy Gilead family and trained to become a perfect upper-class Gilead wife. Daily, she and the other 'plums' get on a big purple bus and go to the weirdest finishing school in suburban Maryland. Mostly they spend their days learning needlepoint and flower arranging, but sometimes they break up the monotony by ecstatically cheering while watching a petty criminal lose his hand to a buzz saw...."

From "A 'Handmaid’s Tale' sequel answers questions the original forgot to ask/'The Testaments' extends the authoritarian thought experiment that began with Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel by turning focus to the enforcers" (WaPo).

Yikes. Zealotry porn. Are there really so many people who feel drawn to observe bloody amputations? And then they think the show is criticizing other people, not them. Are they titillated... by the amputations and by seeing how terrible those other people are?

Anyway... Daily, she and the other 'plums' get on a big purple bus... sounds like something in a song by Prince. I racked my brain, but all I could think of was "The bus came by and I got on, that's when it all began..."

And, yeah, it's "racked my brain," not "wracked my brain." The rack is a torture device.

"Iran has been unable to open the Strait of Hormuz to more shipping traffic because it cannot locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway and lacks the capability to remove them..."

"... according to U.S. officials. The development is one reason Iran has not been able to quickly comply with the Trump administration’s admonitions to let more traffic pass through the strait. It is also potentially a complicating factor as Iranian negotiators and a U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance meet in Pakistan this weekend for peace talks...."

The NYT reports.

"Bartz recently put some of her own writing into Ace, an A.I. checker, and was startled when the program labeled her work as 82 percent A.I.-generated."

"The program then offered her a solution: 'Would you like to humanize your text?' When Bartz wrote about her experience on Substack, dozens of writers chimed in. 'I guess that’s what happens when your books were stolen to program A.I.,' the novelist Rene Denfeld commented, noting that an A.I. detection program had also falsely determined some of her writing to be A.I.-generated.... [W]ith the many ways A.I. is seeping into book creation, from research to editing to composing sentences, there is confusion over which forms of A.I. use cross a line — and a heightened fear that A.I. writing can, and will, steal past professional editors...."

Writes Alexandra Alter, in "Where Does Publishing’s A.I. Problem Leave Authors and Readers? Major publishing houses risk unwittingly putting out books generated with A.I. tools. Authors and readers are frustrated, nervous and grasping for solutions" (NYT).

Which U.S. First Ladies have received the cruelest treatment in the press (and in public conversation)? Especially which ones were disrespected as, essentially, whores?

I asked Grok. Answer after the jump. The easiest guess as to who came in first is the correct answer, so see if you know who came in second:

Bedeviled.

 

This is found art — wordplay that appears by chance.

I was doing a word search in the OED, looking up "bedevil," because it had come up in an article I just blogged. The NYT writer crafted this sentence: "Was [Trump] upset that [Melania] had single-handedly thrust this story that had so bedeviled him back onto front pages around the globe?" (Don't get me started on "thrust" and "globe.")

That blog post ends with a quote from Lord Byron, and I see the OED entry for "bedevil" also has a quote from Lord Byron — worrying about critics of "my poor, gentle, unresisting Muse, whom they have already so be-deviled with their ungodly ribaldry."

I like the word bedevil. It's vivid, perhaps too vivid. Are we to picture devils? Does anyone think of Jeffrey Epstein as literally The Devil? I know JD Vance seems to think the UFOs are devils — "I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion."

Have I been casually summoning up The Devil over the years by using this word that I like? Checking the 22-year blog archive, I see I've quoted it a few times and I've used it twice. Both times came in 2014. Once, in July, on the topic of ObamaCare:

"[Eric] Stewart came up with the idea for the song after his wife, to whom he had been married for eight years at that point, asked him why he did not say 'I love you' more often to her."

"Stewart said, 'I had this crazy idea in my mind that repeating those words would somehow degrade the meaning, so I told her, "Well, if I say every day 'I love you, darling, I love you, blah, blah, blah,' it's not gonna mean anything eventually." That statement led me to try to figure out another way of saying it, and the result was that I chose to say "I'm not in love with you," while subtly giving all the reasons throughout the song why I could never let go of this relationship.'"

From the Wikipedia article, "I'm Not in Love."

Researched this morning because the song Meade chose for his sunrise video got me thinking about lyrics that say the opposite of the meaning the singer conveys:

"Mr. Trump projected sang-froid about it all on Friday. 'I don’t mind anything having to do with Epstein,'"

"But he was talking about it again because of something his wife chose to do. Was he upset that she had single-handedly thrust this story that had so bedeviled him back onto front pages around the globe? 'No,' he said. 'I never get upset.' He said that after he watched Mrs. Trump’s statement, he thought to himself: 'She had a right to talk about it, because the fake news covers her so inaccurately. Would I have done it that way?' the president mused. 'Perhaps not, perhaps, I don’t know.'"

Writes Shawn McCreesh, in "Trump Says First Lady ‘Had a Right’ to Talk About Epstein/President Trump said in an interview that he had known his wife wanted to address rumors about the late sex offender at some point, but that he had not known exactly what she would say" (NYT).

My search of the NYT archive included a term that wasn't in the article: Ungaro. I was looking, as I usually do, for elite media coverage of a story I am seeing in lowlier media, which I generally eschew. In this case, that would be things like "Amanda Ungaro Arrived in the U.S. on Jeffrey Epstein's Plane at 17 — Now She's Going After Melania Trump From Brazil" (Yahoo!news). I guess you can say I'm just seeing one of those things the NYT deems not "fit to print."

Anyway... I enjoy Shawn McCreesh's writing at the NYT. I love the coverage of Trump's enigmatic responses. "I never get upset" — what a perfect answer to the question whether you are upset. It can't be true, but one appreciates the sang-froid.

Great word, sang-froid. Lord Byron used it in Don Juan:

In the mean time, cross-legg'd, with great sang-froid,

     Among the scorching ruins he sat smoking
Tobacco on a little carpet....

It was a chilly, cloud-covered sunrise this morning.

That's my photograph. Later, it got warm and sunny and you can see the blue sky as the background for an eagle in flight, video'd by Meade:

Write about whatever you want in the comments... except the return to Earth of the Artemis astronauts. Go one post down for that.

Artemis splashdown, live.

"Kristi Noem's husband, Bryon, had an on-off secret online relationship with a left-wing dominatrix for more than nine years..."

"Bryon fantasized about 'leaving' Kristi for the woman he worshipped as his 'goddess' and discussed his desire to transition his gender through surgery and hormone therapy. Sotomayor – a 5ft sex worker known as Raelynn Riley with extra-large 2500cc breast implants – has shared dozens of phone recordings and online messages with the Daily Mail.... 'He needed to just talk and talk, and it felt more personal than I was comfortable with,' said the 30-year-old from Colorado Springs who says she made tens of thousands of dollars off the relationship.... 'F*** your family,' Sotomayor texted Bryon in November, later calling the whole Noem clan 'gross.' 'Love that,' he responded. 'Besides the fact of who your wife is, no one is prettier than me. No one is as powerful,' she continued. 'F***ing true. Do you want me to be a woman?' he wrote.... 'I need to be your trans bimbo slut,' he wrote Sotomayor...."

That's what it says in The Daily Mail.

Kamala knows how to be President, because she "spent countless hours in my West Wing office, footsteps away from the Oval Office."

Here's Kamala Harris at the National Action Network conference, when Al Sharpton asked her if she's going to run for President again.

"Listen, I might [run again]. I'm thinking about it. Let me also say this. I served for four years being a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States. I spent countless hours in my West Wing office, footsteps away from the Oval Office. I spent countless hours in the Oval Office, in the Situation Room. I know what the job is. And I know what it requires...."

So she spent untold hours in a room near his room. But what was he even doing in his room? Weren't there other people in other rooms doing everything for him? So yeah, she knows what it takes, and she feels up to it, and, if that's the job, we're all up to it.

"I want you to imagine a guy today, if R. Crumb never existed, but he emerged as R. Crumb today and put that work out. He would 100% be labeled in the Andrew Tate camp, right?"

 

Duncan Trussell had sent Joe Rogan an R. Crumb drawing, and it sets Joe off:

A look at Trump's Triumphal Arch... with the Lincoln Memorial in the background, at a distance.

From "Trump officials unveil designs for president’s controversial 250-foot arch/The arch is intended to commemorate the United States’ 250th anniversary. Military veterans have sued to halt the project, saying it would alter key views of Arlington National Cemetery" (WaPo)(gift link). Excerpt:

"It is his nature to be very deliberate. We don’t have time to be very deliberate in the year 2026."

Said one UW regent, Timothy F. Nixon, quoted in "Top Regent Defends Firing of Wisconsin University Leader/In testimony before state lawmakers, regents suggested that Jay O. Rothman had been well aware of the board’s concerns about his leadership" (NYT).

There's also: "Mr. Nixon, paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, also cast doubt on Mr. Rothman’s contention that he had not known about the board’s misgivings, saying his claim had 'all of the substance of the shadow of a starving pigeon.'"

The oft-repurposed Lincoln hyperbole is: "as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death."

"Everyone seemed to agree that the patients were self-aware — that they could feel, that they had a grounding sense of being a someone who feels."

"But nobody knew exactly how much they retained of themselves: whether they knew themselves as a particular someone, or the someone they once were. It was impossible to know. In the view of these researchers, covertly conscious patients occupied a phenomenological gray space that was inaccessible to scientific probing and even to the human imagination. But some researchers believed that at least some of the patients were largely intellectually intact.... Tabitha learned that once a patient was diagnosed as 'vegetative' and then admitted into a nursing home, it was almost impossible for family members to get a second opinion and a new diagnosis and then, maybe, though only maybe, a new insurance-company authorization and entry into a rehabilitation program. Instead, when a family member, sitting at the bedside, reported the early flickerings of consciousness in a loved one, she was usually dismissed as seeing what she wished to see...."

From "Vegetative Patients May Be More Aware Than We Knew/New research is upending what we thought about the consciousness of patients, leaving families with agonizing choices" (NYT)(gift link, because there's a lot more material at the link, very well presented, including much about the Terri Schiavo case, the recent research about covertly conscious patients, and the vigilance of one wife at her husband's bedside).