Rachel Maddow is at a loss for words.

 When she sees her employer on the donor list for the Trump ballroom.

"It was cool, though, I mean, pshhwww, it's terrible...."

 Said George Clooney, making some funny faces, about the Louvre heist.

"What if all of sports is ruined by this gambling thing?"

I said, revealing my level of engagement in sports, gambling, and the attendant legal issues. 

Who are the greatest figures in world history who never got to watch TV? List them along with their (anachronistic) favorite show.

Grok:

1. Socrates - "The Twilight Zone"
2. Cleopatra - "I Love Lucy"
3. Leonardo da Vinci - "Cosmos"
4. Joan of Arc - "M*A*S*H"
5. Genghis Khan - "Vikings"
6. William Shakespeare - "The West Wing"
7. Queen Elizabeth I - "The Crown"
8. Isaac Newton - "Breaking Bad"
9. Mozart - "Glee"
10. Abraham Lincoln - "The Andy Griffith Show"

ChatGPT:

1. Socrates — The Good Place
2. Cleopatra — Succession
3. Leonardo da Vinci — Black Mirror
4. Joan of Arc — Buffy the Vampire Slayer
5. Genghis Khan — Game of Thrones
6. William Shakespeare — The Simpsons
7. Marie Antoinette — RuPaul’s Drag Race
8. Ludwig van Beethoven — Mozart in the Jungle
9. Abraham Lincoln — The West Wing

"Putting up a tent does nothing but make people upset that they’ve come to a state dinner but they never get inside the White House. The only bathroom facilities..."

"... for a tent are porta-potties. Setting up a kitchen out there is hugely expensive. When the tent is up, the helicopter [Marine One] can’t land. And the grass dies."

Said Gahl Hodges Burt, quoted in "A Pile of Rubble: After 123 Years, the East Wing Is Gone/Critics are outraged over President Trump’s demolition of the East Wing to make way for his $300 million ballroom. Others say it was time for change" (NYT).

Gahl Hodges Burt, who was social secretary for three years under President Ronald Reagan, said that tearing down the East Wing to make space for the ballroom was an unfortunate necessity, and that change was overdue. Since the State Dining Room holds only 140 seated guests and the East Room has space for 200 at most, recent administrations have taken to erecting enormous tents on the South Lawn for ever larger state dinners. Ms. Burt, a board member of the White House Historical Association, added that larger spaces for East Wing offices are “very much needed.” The White House has said that office space is included in Mr. Trump’s plans for the ballroom.

Sunrise — 6:58, 7:48.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

Here's that crazy ad that Cuomo accidentally/"accidentally" released.

This is the wildest attack ad I’ve ever seen in politics. Andrew Cuomo pulling out all the stops. pic.twitter.com/rPQ77Z3bE7

— Stephen Taylor (@stephen_taylor) October 23, 2025

Background from The Guardian, "Cuomo condemned over racist AI ad depicting ‘criminals for Zohran Mamdani’/Official X accounts posts and then deletes AI-generated attack ad that prompts widespread denunciation."

From Fox News, "Andrew Cuomo campaign walks back controversial attack ad targeting Mamdani voters/Campaign quickly removes AI-generated video after Mamdani calls it 'just disgusting.'"

"Now in their fury and impotence, Democrats hit the streets—projecting onto their hated nemesis, Donald Trump, their own past preferences for kingly methods."

Concludes Victor Davis Hanson, laying out the evidence, in "Who Are the Real Kings? Democrats cry 'No Kings' while wielding royal power—raiding rivals, silencing dissent, and crowning heirs without a single vote" (American Greatness).

"I particularly like the line where you said Trumpism is seeking 'to amputate the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, science...'"

"'... and the pursuit of justice, and supplant those virtues with greed, retribution, ego and appetite.' There’s some very good stuff here. But I’ll tell you where I take issue with you. You talked about a miasma of passivity that seems to have swept over the anti-Trump ranks. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think that you’ve seen this ['No Kings'] movement grow. I think that what is making things difficult is, in our history, I think it’s fair to say that we have never confronted a government that was willing to break the law as freely — not just break norms, which they haven’t cared about for a long time, but break the law as freely."

Said E.J. Dionne to David Brooks in "Trump Has a Religion. What Do Democrats Have? Mamdani might be working in Democrats’ favor. But what about 'No Kings'?" (NYT)(video of the whole conversation here, on YouTube) .

"If Democrats don’t reverse course, they may soon find themselves unable to win presidential elections."

"Increasingly, the party is made up of urban professionals who graduated from four-year universities and command relatively high salaries. Having more of these supporters has been a boon to the party’s finances, but electorally, the shift has been a disaster. The electoral power of high-income voters is limited: Not only are they a smaller demographic, but they are also concentrated in a handful of coastal states that do not decide presidential elections. By contrast, the lower-income voters lost by Democrats are dispersed across the battleground states that increasingly determine the Electoral College outcome. Under this system, no candidate can win the presidency today without galvanizing the working class...."

Writes Brody Mullins, in "How Democrats Became the Party of the Well-to-Do" (NYT)(free-access link, because there are some good graphs that show how the class politics flipped).

"Mayor Eric Adams... lashed out at Mr. Cuomo for pressuring him to leave the race, calling him 'a snake and a liar.'"

It says here in "Eric Adams Will Endorse Andrew Cuomo for Mayor/Mayor Eric Adams will endorse former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo for mayor and plans to campaign with him, in hopes of slowing the momentum of Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee" (NYT).

"This is my nightmare."

Said David Sedaris, last night at the Overture Center, here in Madison.

Were you there? We were.

I had to worry about him a few times. Was it comic stage business when he made repetitive fussy little noises and then switched to humming to himself in a way that felt like desperate self-soothing as he searched for his place in his readings? He also spent a lot of time urging us to by another author's book — "Long Island Compromise" by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. He called her the female Philip Roth. Really? Maybe, but I got tired of hearing about her, and the bit that he read from her book wasn't as good as what he was reading us from his next book — "The Land and Its People."

Have these adults lost their sense of childlike wonder?

I'm reading "Residents’ fury at paying £2,000 for a playground … that’s just a log/Families paying for the maintenance of a near-empty patch of grass say they are being ‘ripped off’ as the play area they expected fails to materialise" (London Times).

To you, it's just a log...

... but to a child it is a galloping dragon transporting them into the world of imagination you've lost the power to see!

It's log!

It's big, it's heavy, it's wood!

"Apparently our three-year-old, who does not understand the concept of time, had told someone that she hadn’t bathed for five days..."

"... (she had, several times). There were also concerns over the holes in her tights and her 'unseasonal dressing.' The holes were minor and the outfits, granted, were eccentric but the only way to get out the house in the morning was to allow my daughter to dress herself. I clarified that I always included other options in her bag for when she dressed for Christmas in July but it was clear that they had already decided I was inept or neglectful, or both. Following this, after every drop-off I would send an email novella about my daughter’s clothing choices... until one day my paranoia felt too much and I stopped. I still included additional outfit options but I didn’t provide the lengthy explanations — something that returned to haunt me when I didn’t communicate a new obsession my daughter developed with some too-small shoes.... We had been told about four or five 5p-sized bruises on my daughter’s shin that we couldn’t explain.... And, of course, the strange outfits, holey tights and small shoes...."

From "My daughter’s nursery reported us to social services/When bruises were found on our child’s shin it was just the start of a humiliating, harrowing experience" (London Times).

Sunrise and afternoon in the woods.

7:17 a.m.

At 2:49 p.m., it looks a lot brighter, but it was still quite overcast and beginning to rain:

October is the most beautiful month in Madison, but some of its days are like this, and the gently filtered light feels quite nice to me.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"The White House is demolishing the entirety of the East Wing..."

"... to make way for President Trump’s $200 million ballroom, a construction project that is far more extensive than he initially let on, a senior administration official said on Wednesday.... When Mr. Trump first announced his plans for the ballroom, he pledged that the East Wing wouldn’t be touched by the construction.... 'It won’t interfere with the current building. It’ll be near it but not touching it,' the president said. 'And pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.' But, upon further evaluation, the White House determined it was cheaper and more structurally sound to demolish the East Wing to construct the ballroom, rather than build an addition, the official said...."

The NYT reports.

What exactly did Trump say that supports the language "he pledged that the East Wing wouldn’t be touched by the construction." I can see that he asserted that the new construction wouldn't even touch the "existing building" and that he's changed his mind, but where's the "pledge"? You can be in the middle of a construction project and decide to do more demolition than originally planned. Trump — like other Presidents who've worked on the White House — apparently has the power to build a ballroom next to the East Wing or to demolish the East Wing and put the ballroom in its place. You may ask why the switch or whether this was the plan all along and why the deceit, but I don't see a broken pledge. 

ADDED: Here's the Washington Post's visualization of the project. It helpfully shows that the new construction is set apart from the familiar part of the White House and that the next building over is the far larger Treasury Department building:

The National Trust for Historic Preservation warned that President Trump’s planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom would “overwhelm the White House itself,” which spans just 55,000 square feet. https://t.co/iRY6cgoK7c pic.twitter.com/zTfL9CsLqO

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 22, 2025