"All of you Hollywood 'A-list' golden boys are LIARS. We have just begun. #ROSEARMY."

All of you Hollywood “A-list” golden boys are LIARS. We have just begun. #ROSEARMY pic.twitter.com/r5yPL2A3bC

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) October 10, 2017

Rose McGowan was on fire on Twitter these last few days...

@benaffleck “GODDAMNIT! I TOLD HIM TO STOP DOING THAT” you said that to my face. The press conf I was made to go to after assault. You lie.

... but now: "Rose McGowan Suspended From Twitter After Ben Affleck Tweet" (NYT).

It was not clear which tweets had resulted in the suspension. However, on Tuesday, after Mr. Affleck tweeted that the allegations against Mr. Weinstein “made him sick,” Ms. McGowan called him a liar, saying he had long been aware of what Mr. Weinstein had done.

There's still Instagram:

rosemcgowan TWITTER HAS SUSPENDED ME. THERE ARE POWERFUL FORCES AT WORK. BE MY VOICE. #ROSEARMY

By suspending her, Twitter created evidence that confirms suspicions that there is a conspiracy of silence surrounding the people who enabled Harvey Weinstein. The evidence — suspending McGowan — can be interpreted in different ways. It might be that Twitter has neutral rules and would suspend anybody who attacks anybody as specifically and severely as Rose McGowan attacked Ben Affleck, but I think Twitter is foolish to take down Rose McGowan, when it lets President Trump take his shots.

Here's what Twitter PublicPolicy said about not censoring Trump's tweeted attacks on Kim Jong-Un:

We hold all accounts to the same Rules, and consider a number of factors when assessing whether Tweets violate our Rules

Among the considerations is "newsworthiness" and whether a Tweet is of public interest

This has long been internal policy and we'll soon update our public-facing rules to reflect it. We need to do better on this, and will 

Twitter is committed to transparency and keeping people informed about what's happening in the world

We’ll continue to be guided by these fundamental principles

So, the same rules for everybody includes a rule with an exception: newsworthiness.

The system of facilitating and protecting Harvey Weinstein is newsworthy, and Rose McGowan has personal experience and passionate energy giving something important to those of us who read and comment on Twitter.

If you don't apply your exceptions in a neutral fashion, they're not exceptions. They're loopholes.

ADDED: Right now, Rose McGowan's Twitter is working for me. And — for balance — here's Ben Affleck's Twitter feed. The top post is:

I acted inappropriately toward Ms. Burton and I sincerely apologize

The above-linked NYT story does not mention "Ms. Burton."

You can get more background on Burton — Hilarie Burton — in this Daily Mail piece: "'I would also love to get an apology from Ben Affleck': Makeup artist now claims Batman star and Weinstein protégé 'grabbed my a**' at a Golden Globes party' in 2014/Makeup artist, Annamarie Tendler, claims Ben Affleck 'grabbed her a**' in 2014/Tendler said she was attending a Golden Globes party when incident happened/She demanded Affleck apologize for 'pressing his finger in her crack' on Twitter/Affleck recently apologized for groping Hilarie Burton on TRL in 2003/Burton tweeted about the incident in light of Weinstein sex abuse scandal/She wrote 'I didn't forget' on Twitter & said she was forced to 'laugh' off incident/Affleck, who is currently in rehab for alcohol addiction, admitted his 'inappropriate' behavior and apologized to the actress on Twitter/It came hours after Affleck said he was 'saddened and angry' over 'sickening claims' of sexual assault made against his benefactor Weinstein/He was slammed by many, specifically Rose McGowan, who called him a liar."

"A great example of where ['Liz and Dick'] doesn't dare go as far as reality is the way the movie depicts the end of Taylor's marriage to Eddie Fisher."

"In real life, as in the film, Burton really did demand that Taylor pick between him and Fisher, and she chose Burton—right in front of Fisher."

In Liz and Dick, this scene marks the end of Taylor's marriage to Fisher. In real life, though, the cuckolded Fisher hung on for quite a while longer. According to Furious Love, Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger's incredible book on Burton and Taylor based on their diaries and letters, Fisher called Taylor's villa days after the confrontation and Burton answered. “What are you doing in my house?” Fisher asked. “What do you think I'm doing?” Burton responded. “I'm fucking your wife.”

ADDED: Here's "Furious Love," which is only #30 in the "Rich & Famous" subcategory of the "Leaders & Notable People" subcategory of the "Biographies and Memoirs" list at Amazon. Who's leading among the "rich & famous"? Bruce Springsteen, followed by Rod Stewart. Aging boomers prefer a rock 'n' roll milieu for their vicarious memories.

"I can’t describe the feeling it gives you. It reminded me of when other cultures say, 'Don’t take my picture because it is taking away your soul.'"

Said Tim Burton, quoted in "Tim Burton hits out at ‘disturbing’ AI, likens it to a robot ‘taking’ your soul" (CNN). 

He was referring to a Buzzfeed article that used AI to rework Disney movies — “Frozen,” “The Lion King,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “The Little Mermaid” — into Tim Burton movies.

"It takes something from your soul or psyche; that is very disturbing, especially if it has to do with you. It’s like a robot taking your humanity, your soul."

Presumably, if a human being worked up the same idea — in Mad Magazine, for example — it wouldn't be disturbing. It would be the grand old tradition of satire and parody. But it's just too easy for AI to run with ideas like this and produce a fully realized image.

Here's the Buzzfeed article. Actually, the images are not very good. They get boring very fast. Maybe it hurts Burton's feelings that his style is banal. Why does he feel AI is stealing his "soul"? If he's an artist, he should have way more soul than anything that's reflected in these pictures, which seems to be an idiotic attachment to big-eyed girls.

"What does an 'Art Deco Buddhist temple' look like? The phrase is nearly nonsensical; it’s hard to imagine... But this didn’t deter the Twitter account @images_ai, which promises 'images generated by A.I. machines.'..."

"The account has produced everything from a version of Salvador Dalí’s painting “The Persistence of Memory” in the neon-pastel style of Lisa Frank to a depiction of 'the edge of reality and time,' a frightening swirl of floating eyes, hourglasses, and windows onto nowhere.... [T]he account’s proprietor is... Sam Burton-King, a twenty-year-old student at Northwestern University.... They began as a math major, but, finding the coursework too difficult, moved into studying philosophy and music.... To create art for @images_ai, Burton-King feeds a selection of written prompts into what’s known as a generative adversarial network (G.A.N.), a machine-learning system in which two artificial neural networks—computer models that mimic the information processing of a human brain—compete with each other to come up with a result that best matches the inquiry..... 'People ask for Shrek all the time, or Big Chungus, or Donald Trump in various situations,' they said. One successful prompt was 'Elon Musk experiencing pain'....  Burton-King feels that the looming impact of A.I. is out of their hands, though; the machines are getting more skillful all the time..... 'I don’t mind contributing to the artificial-intelligence apocalypse,' they said, 'as long as they have a cool civilization after ours.'"

From "Appreciating the Poetic Misunderstandings of A.I. Art/The Twitter account @images_ai has gained a following for its feed of surreal, glitchy, sometimes beautiful images created through machine learning" by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker).

"art deco buddhist temple" https://t.co/E6wFW5fZpt pic.twitter.com/BW4rYL5lFR

— Images Generated By AI Machines (@images_ai) August 6, 2021

"This guy might be the perfect pick because he’s already got everyone responding ‘Who is Mike Richards?'"

A tweet quoted in "Who is Mike Richards? Meet Alex Trebek’s reported ‘Jeopardy!’ host successor" (NY Post). 

Richards has been the executive producer of the show for the last year, and he has lots of experience with game shows and, specifically, with Trebek. When he subbed as host, he displayed a "command of the fast-paced game and easy on-air manner." The choice seems to be to have someone who blends into the show. 

Some people wanted Ken Jennings and some wanted LeVar Burton. There are, unfortunately, some people crying racism over the failure to pick Burton. The NY Post quotes this tweet: "YALL COULD HAVE A WHOLE ICONIC LEVAR BURTON BUT YOU PICKING CHAD MCWHITERSON FOR… WHAT???"

I think a problem with Jennings is that he's indulged in some partisan politics on Twitter and displayed contempt for people. I can see how that goes with his persona as a smart guy but it can't be good for a big TV quiz show where I think the idea is to radiate generic love for everyone who watches.

"It’s tempting to see our attention economy as purely dystopian. It is nightmarish, after all, to compete with one another via avatars..."

"... for work, for sex, for companionship, for cash to pay our medical bills. But the rise of the attention economy also reveals a truth that the dandies of the café terrace did not realize: of course our selfhood is defined by the attention, and with it the love, of others. Even in the disembodied terrain of the Internet, we are utterly contingent creatures: not just self-makers or, God forbid, influencers, but beings dependent on the attention of others, an attention that, at its core, is not so unlike love. (As Simone Weil famously put it: 'Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.')"

From "Eat Me, Drink Me, Like Me /Is love in the attention economy unreal?" by Tara Isabella Burton (in The New Atlantis, Winter 2020).

This is a very interesting article. Highly recommended. But I got totally sidetracked wanting to understand that Simone Weil quote — "Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love."

It doesn't really fit the idea Burton is talking about, which is the urge and effort to grab attention. The article title "Eat me, drink me, love me" comes from this Christina Rossetti poem, "Goblin Market." Excerpt:

“Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeez’d from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.”

But the Simone Weil quote seems as though it must mean not clamoring for attention but paying attention.  Read the Weil quote in context here, then — if you're with me this far — apply it to what we are doing or failing to do when we experience what Burton calls "purely dystopian... in the disembodied terrain of the Internet."

As for "the dandies of the café terrace":

"Among Cosby’s most high-profile supporters on Wednesday was actress Phylicia Rashad, his former co-star and incoming dean of Howard University’s College of Fine Arts."

"Rashad applauded the overturned conviction, tweeting that 'a miscarriage of justice is corrected' alongside an image of Cosby. After a flurry of criticism over her tweet, Rashad later added, 'I fully support survivors of sexual assault coming forward. My post was in no way intended to be insensitive to their truth.' Nylah Burton, a writer and former student of Howard University, called Rashad’s initial comments 'obscene.' Burton said she was raped while attending the university. Last year, she set up a GoFundMe to help support current and former Howard University students who have experienced sexual violence on the HBCU campus. The 26-year-old said she’s still processing the news about Cosby, which was 'triggering,' but it was Rashad’s comment that she found immediately chilling. 'To see random people celebrating Bill Cosby is always hurtful, of course, but to see people with so much institutional and cultural power … so firmly against you, it makes you feel hopeless,' Burton said."

From "Sexual assault survivors are devastated by Bill Cosby’s release: ‘It makes you feel hopeless’/Cosby was released from prison Wednesday after his sexual-assault conviction was overturned" (The Lily (at WaPo).

Why is Phylicia Rashad a dean at Howard? I see at her Wikipedia page that her highest degree is a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Here's Howard's official announcement, dated May 12, 2021. Excerpt:

“I can think of no individual better suited to take on this role than Ms. Phylicia Rashad,” said Howard University President Wayne A. I. Frederick, M.D., MBA. “As we reintroduce our campus community and the world at large to Howard’s College of Fine Arts, the dean will play an instrumental role in ensuring an auspicious beginning for this reestablished institution. Given Ms. Rashad’s reputation as well as her capabilities and impressive list of accomplishments, she will undoubtedly empower the college to transcend even our incredibly high expectations.”

What did they think they were getting? Image? Now, they need to distance themselves from her and they say — sensitively! — that she lacked "sensitivity." 

This would have been a good time for Howard to say that the rights of the criminally accused are just as important as enforcing the criminal law, but Howard's statement asserts "Survivors of sexual assault will always be our priority."

"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...."

"Only Eddie Fisher, as a boyhood friend of the frantic playgirl, seems like something dragged in from left field."

"He plays a music writer who lives in a dark room in Greenwich Village and acts as if he wishes they would all go away and leave him alone."

From the 1960 NYT review — by Bosley Crowther — of "Butterfield 8," the movie Elizabeth Taylor won an Oscar for playing "the slut of all times" in. Fast-forward to 2010 and Eddie's dead.

When Eddie Fisher's best friend, producer Mike Todd, was killed in a 1958 plane crash, Fisher comforted the widow, Elizabeth Taylor. Amid sensationalist headlines, Fisher divorced Reynolds and married Taylor in 1959.

The Fisher-Taylor marriage lasted only five years. She fell in love with co-star Richard Burton during the Rome filming of "Cleopatra," divorced Fisher and married Burton in one of the great entertainment world scandals of the 20th century.

Fisher's career never recovered from the notoriety.

Eddie, like Todd and Burton, is now dead. He made it to 82. What did he do after Liz? Did anyone pay attention to anything other than Liz? Even now, the old man finally gone, we hear of his death, and we think — don't we? — of the goddess Elizabeth Taylor.

"Just to be clear, the president is not backing off in any way from the comments he made last night. It is not his role as president to pass judgment on every local project."

Said Obama spokesman Bill Burton.

What's the worst thing about Burton's statement?
	It disrespects Ground Zero to characterize it as just another "local project."
	The President really did change his position, and it's a lie to deny that.
	The President dips into local matters when he wants to, such as Skip Gates and the Cambridge cop.
	It's legalistic hair-splitting again instead of saying something clear that people can understand.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: I almost feel sorry for Obama and the Democrats for their misfortune that this is the issue that has come to the fore at this time.

At least one Republican, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, seized on the confusion. “Mr. President, should they or should they not build a mosque steps away from where radical Islamists killed 3,000 people? Please tell us your position. We all know that they have the right to do it, but should they? And, no, this is not above your pay grade,” Palin wrote on Facebook....

Democratic aides say that, at the very least, the president has again knocked his party's candidates off local messages and forced them to talk about a national issue that doesn't appear likely to play well with important swing voters.

These officials planned to spend this weekend talking about Social Security’s 75th anniversary....

"The main reaction is 'Why? Why now?’" said one House Democratic leadership aide. "It's just another day off message. There have been a lot of days off message.

The chief of staff to one politically vulnerable House Democrat said it "probably alienates a lot of independent voters" and "it's not a good issue to be talking about right now."

He said he suspects "there are a lot of (Democrats) who are spooked in tough districts today" and "a lot of Republicans licking their chops right now."

Almost. The Democrats would love to do the same thing to the Republicans. They wouldn't hesitate to exploit something that captures the public's attention and provides leverage for the political arguments they like to make. Remember the Mark Foley incident in 2006.

"Modern American culture has a way of transforming nearly every philosophical and spiritual tradition... into an anodyne pop-culture analogue."

"But contemporary iterations of Stoicism... may win the prize for reducing complex ideas to shallow, if marketable, sound bites.... At its best, Stoicism challenges us to tame our selfish passions and trains us to accept injustice, failure and death. Contemporary pop-Stoicism, however, treats this idea of self-control as... a useful 'life hack': individualistic, capitalist-friendly self-help... For [writers such as Jordan Peterson], Stoicism can often be boiled down to therapeutic platitudes: work hard, push through pain, reframe toxic narratives. But pop-Stoicism doesn’t ask one of philosophy’s most important questions: What does it mean to live a good life?... [G]oodness, unlike productivity, is something we can’t 'hack' our way toward achieving."

Writes Tara Isabella Burton under the heading "Stoicism" in a collection of short essays, "Spring Cleaning 2022," at WaPo. She's the writer of novels and also the nonfiction works "Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World" and "Self-Made: Curating Our Image From da Vinci to the Kardashians."

The "Spring Cleaning" title refers to the prompt given to the various writers — "what all of us should toss."

I don't think Burton has established a reason to throw out Stoicism. Ironically, she wants people not to use this philosophy in a shallow way, but her rejection of today's efforts at Stoicism seems shallow too. She's certainly capsulized Jordan Peterson in an aggressively pat way.

"Weird Christianity is equal parts traditionalism and, well, punk: Christianity as transgressive alternative to contemporary secular capitalist culture."

"Like punk, Weird Christianity has its own, clearly defined aesthetic. Many Weird Christians across the denominational and political spectrum express fondness for older, more liturgically elaborate practices — like the Episcopal Rite I, a form of worship that draws on Elizabethan-era language, say, or the Latin Mass, or the wearing of veils to church.... One Weird Christian is Ben Crosby... a student at Yale Divinity School.... Raised Lutheran, he was unprepared for what he found as a first-year undergraduate at Yale in 2009 when he attended an Anglo-Catholic parish. 'I walked into a service and it’s a big, beautiful, 19th-century neo-Gothic nave, clouds of incense wafting up toward the ceiling, candles everywhere,' Mr. Crosby told me. 'It was like nothing I’d experienced before.' Likewise for Rod Dreher, a senior editor and blogger for The American Conservative magazine.... [W]hen he was 17, he told me, he visited Chartres Cathedral while on a group tour of France and he found himself moved by the majesty of the Gothic architecture. 'I think this is why a certain kind of person really is drawn to the older, ritualistic, aesthetic forms of Christian worship,' he said. 'It speaks to something deep inside us, and, I think, it is a kind of rebellion against the ugliness and barrenness of modernity.'... This sense of rebellion — of consciously being at variance with modernity — permeates Weird Christian politics no less than its aesthetics.... [F]or plenty of Weird Christians, their faith is a call to a far more progressive politics. Like their reactionary counterparts, they see Christianity as a bulwark against the worst of modernity, but they are more likely to associate modernity’s ills with the excesses of capitalism or with a transactional culture that reduces human beings to budget line items, or anonymous figures on a dating app.... Weird Christianity represents an alternative to 'both more liberal and conservative forms of American Christianity,' said Mr. Crosby.... In the age of lockdown, when so much of life exists in a nebulous digital space, a return to the Christianity of the Middle Ages — albeit one mediated through our screens — feels welcome.... Like the hipster obsession with 'authenticity' that marked the mid-2010s, the rise of Weird Christianity reflects America’s unfulfilled desire for, well, something real...."

From "Christianity Gets Weird/Modern life is ugly, brutal and barren. Maybe you should try a Latin Mass" by Tara Isabella Burton (NYT).

I'm not getting the use of the word "weird" here. Burton makes it sound like she's involved in coining (and promoting) the term: "Many of us call ourselves 'Weird Christians,' albeit partly in jest." But she seems to be calling Episcopalians weird. Maybe I'm a little too close to the experience, but to me, Episcopalian is the least weird religion. Yes, the aesthetics are good, and high-quality aesthetics are appealing. But what's weird? You could find all religion weird, but I don't think "the older, ritualistic, aesthetic forms of Christian worship" are particularly weird. In fact, the purported "weirdness" of the aesthetically appealing form of worship is a shield from the real weirdness in religion: true belief.

It's funny. I'm reading (rereading) a novel that has a character whose problems are initially revealed in terms of an inability to say that anything is "bad." She "would only say that this was very 'weird.'"

... Patty was incapable of going past “weird”... the worst she would say aloud... was that [something] was very weird....

The reliance on "weird" is a tell.

Here's the place in the post where I look up the key word in the Oxford English Dictionary. It's the older, ritualistic, aesthetic side of me. "Weird" originally meant:

Having the power to control the fate or destiny of human beings, etc.; later, claiming the supernatural power of dealing with fate or destiny.

Later, in the 1800s, there was:

Partaking of or suggestive of the supernatural; of a mysterious or unearthly character; unaccountably or uncomfortably strange; uncanny.

It seems that religion is inherently weird. It's weird to think you're saying something special by calling your little corner of religiosity weird. What is the motivation to call your religion "weird"... and then back off and say that's "partly in jest"? People who call themselves weird... what's up with them? Especially, when all they're doing is Episcopal Rite I. Are they doing it partly in jest? Is it "weird" because they fear it's only cushioning from "the ugliness and barrenness of modernity"? Or is it weird because they find they truly believe?

"I'm scared. I'm scared by him, by his possibility. And I do empathize with him. I can’t imagine what his 3 a.m. is like."

"There’s a gathering storm—everyone feels it, he feels it. His children are in jeopardy, and I feel that. I think, 'What if my children were in jeopardy?' I would do anything — anything — to get them out of trouble. So we should be afraid. That’s what I think."

Said Meryl Streep, quoted in "Meryl Streep on Why People 'Should Be Afraid' of Trump" (Hollywood Reporter).

"The Gathering Storm" is the title of the first volume of Winston Churchill's history of World War II. There are 2 films about Churchill with that title, one from 1974 starring Richard Burton and one from 2004 starring Albert Finney. Last year's movie about Winston Churchill, with Gary Oldman, was called "Darkest Hour." "Darkest Hour" is not the title of any of the WWII volumes. It's just "a phrase coined by British prime minister Winston Churchill to describe the period of World War II between the Fall of France in June 1940 and the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 (totaling 363 days, or 11 months and 28 days), when the British Empire and Commonwealth stood alone (or almost alone after the Italian invasion of Greece) against the Axis Powers in Europe."

At least Meryl Streep didn't feel that it's our darkest hour. It could be worse.

Meryl Streep is one of the all-time great movie actors. So was Richard Burton. Here he is agonizing over the gathering storm in "The Gathering Storm." He's in his jammies, so it's easy to view this as a visualization of Trump at 3 a.m. (in case you, like Meryl, are trying to do that and face an impoverishment of imagination):



IN THE COMMENTS: Ken B said: "What starlet was in danger from Harvey Weinstein, when Streep knew about him, and kept his secret? What about her 3 a.m.?"

Fraud in Texas? "It looks like there was data entry error. You ended up being coded as BOTH a Hillary Clinton and a Barack Obama delegate."

Yesterday, I blogged about how the Obama campaign sent my son a postcard urging him to vote for Obama at the Texas county convention. He's a delegate representing the people who caucused for Clinton at one of the district caucuses in Austin, Texas. Today, someone whose email address indicates his name is Matthew Berg sent this email to me and my son Chris:

Hello Chris (and Ann),

I am a volunteer for the Obama campaign in Texas. I saw this post (via Marc Ambinder), and was surprised, because I thought we were only contacting Obama delegates. That's what we've been in my part of TX, anyway.

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2008/03/in-texas-obama-campaign-tries-to-win.html

So I checked the voter file (screenshot attached), and it looks like there was data entry error. You ended up being coded as BOTH a Hillary Clinton and a Barack Obama delegate. Apparently both the Texas Democratic Party and the Travis County Party added your data, and it looks like one of them made a mistake. I think the postcards are being sent to anyone coded as an Obama delegate, which (mistakenly) includes you. I deleted the Obama delegate code, so you shouldn't get mistakenly bothered again.

Anyway, have fun at your convention.

Thanks,

Matt

Yeah, have fun, kids. Play at your little democracy thing. Meanwhile — you, you pesky little blogger-connected county delegate — you won't be seeing any of our mailings anymore. We've stricken your name from our list. And if anyone else shows up and complains about Obama mailings to Clinton delegates, we can fix their double-coding too. Now, go off and don't worry anymore.

Do you trust the caucus process?

UPDATE: Chris emails:

I just asked some of the other delegates if they've gotten material from the Obama campaign. The only one to respond was a Clinton delegate, who said he's also received fliers from Obama, and is just surprised that he's gotten material from Obama but not from Clinton. Now I don't think it was a mistake. I think they just tried to make it look like one after the fact.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I have email from an Obama county convention delegate saying he's gotten email from the Clinton campaign. (I recognize the email as something Chris got — an invitation to a conference call tonight with Bill Clinton.)

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Andrew Romano at Newsweek wrote about this post:

Apparently, Obama has mailed these postcards to all Texas county delegates, not just his own. This is precisely what the Clintonites did in Iowa. If you'll remember, Clinton spokesman Phil Singer told me at the time that the Iowa Democratic Party had provided the campaign with an incomplete list of delegate affiliations, meaning that "the point of the call is to identify our delegates." But a quick check with the IDP revealed that "80 percent" of the county delegates were, in fact, linked to their chosen candidates on the lists sent to the campaigns--including at least one Obama supporter, Lance Jenkins, who specifically reported receiving the Clinton robocall.

That means that both Obama and Clinton are, in effect, asking their rival's delegates for support.

Now, don't get me wrong. Both the Clinton call (which included a "press 1 if you support Hillary" option) and the Obama postcard are serving another purpose--roll call and reminder, respectively. What's more, wooing delegates at the county level--or, for that matter, the national level--is part of the game (although both campaigns have forsworn the practice, at least nationally); campaigns are supposed to make sure that the maximum number of supporters show up at each level (county, district, state). And there's almost no chance that such subtle seduction would work to any significant degree. I mean, anyone swayed by a robocall or a postcard--especially the hardcore supporters chosen to serve as delegates--doesn't deserve to vote in the first place.

But these under-the-radar "outreach efforts"--which essentially say, "By the way, vote for me"--are worth remembering. Because if neither Obama nor Clinton clinches the nomination by the end of primary season in June, they'll be forced to spend the summer jockeying for any possible advantage--and this is exactly the sort of passive, grey-area poaching that you can expect to see.

That got a response from the Obama campaign:

According to Obama spokesman Bill Burton, the post card in question was mistakenly sent to a Clinton delegate--not, as I previously believed, to the entire list of Texas county delegates, regardless of affiliation. "The Texas Democratic Party gave us a list of delegates that indicated him as an Obama delegate--which is why he got the errant post card," he says. "The suggestion that we have a passive strategy of trying to flip Clinton's pledged delegates by sending one postcard to one guy is pretty ludicrous on its face." If that's what happened, I absolutely agree. I'm double-checking with the Texas Democratic Party to confirm that the delegate in question was listed as a Clinton supporter and find out whether others also received the mailing. I'll post another update when I hear back.

And here's how Christopher responded to all that:

Andrew Romano,

I wanted to respond to your post about the the post card I was sent by the Obama campaign. Bill Burton's explanation is, I think, inaccurate. Here is the list published by the Travis County Democrats online, which clearly indicates that I am a Clinton delegate:

http://www.westaustindemocrats.org/Delegates.aspx?P=235

I am the Hillary Convention Captain in my precinct, so I was actually sent that list a while ago, I believe as soon as it was released to the campaigns, so that I could check my precinct's list for accuracy. There were some spelling errors on that list originally, but my entry was always correct, and I was always listed as a Clinton delegate there.

A volunteer wrote to me and was quoted in the post you linked to, and his explanation was that I was double-coded as both an Obama and a Clinton supporter in the list they used. The Travis County Democrats list had me only as a Clinton supporter, so if I really was double-coded, it seems like it was the Obama campaign that added the extra code, intentional or not.

I actually thought it could have been a mistake, so I e-mailed a couple of the Clinton delegates in my precinct, and asked if they had received materials from Obama. One of those two Clinton delegates said, "I have received mailings form the Obama campaign...Suprised I haven't received anything from the Clinton campaign." The other delegate I wrote to hasn't responded, but she doesn't e-mail as much. In any event, I don't think this was sent to just "one guy."

Thanks for writing about this.

-Christopher Cohen

Chris later adds that the other Clinton delegate he wrote to emailed him:

[She] said that she, too, had received post cards and e-mails. Were all three of us accidentally double-coded or written in as Obama delegates? I personally doubt it.

Me too.

ADDED: Romano does some investigating, and I respond to him here.

"I have never quite got over the fact that I thought, and I'm afraid I still do think, that 'acting' for a man — a really proper man — is sissified and faintly ridiculous."

"The French have a word for what I am and it's called 'manqué,' meaning a failure of desire.… I am everything 'manqué.' An actor manqué, a philosopher manqué, a writer manqué, and consequently an intolerable bore. (Not manqué, I'm afraid.)... The place I like to be best in the whole world is back in my village in Wales, down at the pub, standing with the miners drinking pints and telling stories. One drinks because life is big and it blinds you. Poetry and drink are the greatest things on earth. Besides women. There's something to death and something to truth, and we're after them all our beautiful lives on earth. Liquor helps."

Said/wrote Richard Burton.

"Instantly Improve Your Day With This Magical Baby Tapir."

I instantly knew this Buzzfeed piece could only have been written by Summer Anne Burton.

Just remember that tapirs are real, actual creatures that live on the same earth as me and you.

They look like... miracularious little sepia watermelons.

"Charles Manson called off his wedding to his much younger fiancée after he learned she only wanted him for his body..."

"... once he was dead, that is."

ADDED: "Afton Elaine Burton... and a pal, Craig Hammond, planned to lay out Manson’s remains in a glass cryp... The pair figured their bizarre California version of Lenin’s Tomb would draw huge crowds and make big money."

"What’s more wholesome than reading? Yet books wield a dangerous power: the best erode self, infecting readers with ideas."

Here's an essay titled "Dark Books" by Tara Isabella Burton.

Throughout the 19th century, novels were regarded with the same suspicion with which we treat, say, Eli Roth’s ‘torture-porn’ Saw movies today. They were dangerous not simply because of the stories they might contain – the romantic expressions of wish-fulfillment, for example, that led Emma Bovary down the garden path of adultery – but also because reading itself was seen as a kind of possession: an encroachment of the ‘other’ upon the self.

In his condemnatory tract Popular Amusements (1869), the American clergyman Jonathan Townley Crane cautioned his flock against reading novels: ‘novel-readers spend many a precious hour in dreaming out clumsy little romances of their own, in which they themselves are the beautiful ladies and the gallant gentlemen who achieve impossibilities…’ only to find themselves ‘merged in the hero of the story’, losing the sense of who they really are.....

"Cash for clunkers had two objectives: help the environment by increasing fuel efficiency, and boost car sales to help Detroit and the economy. It achieved neither."

Says the WSJ:

According to Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer, at best "the reduction in gasoline consumption will cut our oil consumption by 0.2 percent per year, or less than a single day's gasoline use." Burton Abrams and George Parsons of the University of Delaware added up the total benefits from reduced gas consumption, environmental improvements and the benefit to car buyers and companies, minus the overall cost of cash for clunkers, and found a net cost of roughly $2,000 per vehicle. Rather than stimulating the economy, the program made the nation as a whole $1.4 billion poorer.

The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, "Economics in One Lesson," you can't raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.

You can't? It worked for Chaplin:

Headpiece.

What kind of word is that? I'll withhold my reason for asking about it for now. Don't want to spoil any current puzzles, but I thought that was too obscure. 

A little googling lets me see that its current usage mostly has to do with bridal costumery. Maybe something between a headband and a headdress that somehow doesn't seem like a tiara? 

But it made me think of "headcase" and "thinkpiece."

One of the definitions of "headpiece" in the OED — and there are 8 — is "The head or brain considered as the seat of mental activity; intellect, brains, sense. colloquial in later use." 

It's in the 1740 novel "Pamela": "You have an excellent Head-piece for your Years." And I like this dialog from "Jazz" (2003 J. Murray): "She has brains, I swear, nearly as big as my own"/"Some headpiece that must be. I wonder what you two great minds choose to talk about?"

Ha ha. I like it. I'm going to try to remember to use "headpiece" like that. You can also use "headpiece" to mean "A clever or intellectual person." Example:  "Of all the head-pieces that were there, he was thought to give the strongest reasons" (1657 T. Burton Diary).

By the way, "headcase" is in the OED. Defintion: "A person whose behaviour is violent and unpredictable, or markedly eccentric; (often hyperbolically) such a person characterized as mentally ill or unstable." The first observed us is in the 1965 movie "Flight of Phoenix": "They ain't gonna let no head-case run a drilling operation." I love the trailer: