"Busy day at the CFPB. Digging into the details."

Busy day at the @CFPB. Digging into the details. pic.twitter.com/yfs0gmh28F

— Mick Mulvaney (@CFPBDirector) November 28, 2017

I'm glad Mick Mulvaney — who won a big lawsuit yesterday — has such an unprepossessing office.

That's the first time I've used the word "unprepossessing" in the entire 50,000+ posts on this blog. I did quote it once, in "A 'balding, blunt, unprepossessing, listed-at-5-foot-7 policy wonk would be a strong contender to take on President Barack Obama...." That was in 2010, and the unprepossessing guy — "the un-Obama" — was Mitch Daniels, whom I'd hope to see get the GOP nomination in 2012. I was interested in moving away from adulation of an icon and toward humility and modesty and workmanlike ordinariness. That didn't happen in 2012 and it sure didn't happen in 2016. I don't know why our politics has gotten so over-inflated and dramatic. I can't answer that. I'm just saying I like Mick Mulvaney's office. And by "office," I mean the physical place, not the abstraction of power.

I loved today's NYT crossword — thought it was especially enjoyable... full of challenging, interesting words...

... but my favorite NYT crossword blogger, Rex Parker, hated it:

Before I was half done, I had exclaimed "what?" or else audibly groaned something like half a dozen times. This thing was stale the second I bit into it (i.e. at TIETACK), and though parts of it are decent, the overall taste was unpleasant, for sure. Fitting that it has ARCHAISM in it, because it felt old and ... old. In a bad way. In the way where ... like in the olden days, when you just had to know random biological trivia or you were ****ed. BRISTLECONE PINE? SHAGBARK? News to me and *real* news to me, respectively. Take your botanical fetish back to the Maleskan era, thank you kindly....

Wait! My favorite thing was bristlecone pine. The clue was: "Tree that's among the oldest known life forms on earth (4,800+ years)." How can that be a mere "fetish"? There's a kind of tree on earth that was alive in 2700 B.C. — the end of the Early Dynastic Period in Egypt, the time of the mythical Yellow Emperor in China and the construction of the Caral metropolis in Peru...

No trace of warfare has been found at Caral: no battlements, no weapons, no mutilated bodies. Shady's findings suggest it was a gentle society, built on commerce and pleasure. In one of the temples, they uncovered 32 flutes made of condor and pelican bones and 37 cornetts of deer and llama bones. One find revealed the remains of a baby, wrapped and buried with a necklace made of stone beads....

I knew bristlecone pine because I had just read the January 20th New Yorker article "The Past and the Future of the Earth’s Oldest Trees/Bristlecone pines have survived various catastrophes over the millennia, and they may survive humanity" by Alex Ross. A great read!

A "balding, blunt, unprepossessing, listed-at-5-foot-7 policy wonk would be a strong contender to take on President Barack Obama....."

"[H]e’s the un-Obama. If the country has soured on a charismatic orator who brought glamour but little executive experience to the presidency, the thinking goes, then [Mitch] Daniels could provide the antidote.... He’s a Princeton-educated former Senate chief of staff-turned political operative-turned think tank chief-turned Fortune 500 executive-turned White House budget director-turned two-term governor."

The Hoosier is willing.