November 20, 2024
"Malpractice was committed by that campaign. They saw the ad, they knew it was being bought in heavy quantities. Where were they? What were they thinking?"
"She was only 15 when Warren Beatty lent her Natalie Wood’s bathing suit and took her for cigarettes and a swim."
From "Becoming Cher Didn’t Come Easy/The first volume of her frank autobiography is a testament to resilience, chronicling a grim childhood and the brazen path to stardom, with and without Sonny" (NYT).
"They’ve asked for these, and so I think it’s a good idea."
The Biden administration’s decision came despite widespread condemnation of mines by rights groups that cite their toll on civilians, which can stretch for years or decades after conflicts end as the locations of minefields are left unmarked or forgotten.... Russia has seeded mines throughout vast swaths of Ukraine since 2014 as front lines have swayed over forests, farm fields and villages. It has also set many so-called victim-activated booby traps, such as explosives rigged to detonate when a car door is opened, a category of weapon also prohibited in the mine ban treaty.
Why didn't the NYT publish this report before the election?
This would have been useful to voters. Too useful, I suspect. This issue seems to have been suppressed, papered over by Trump-is-a-racist rhetoric. "Hidden truth," indeed.
"America is not going to save Ukraine. Maybe we need Mr. Trump — brazen and unscrupulous — to finally say so out loud and act accordingly."
What methods has this 16-year-old girl used to measure the boys?
We girls woke up to a country that would rather elect a man found liable for sexual abuse than a woman. Where the kind of man my mother instructs me to cross the street to avoid will be addressed as Mr. President. Where the body I haven’t fully grown into may no longer be under my control. The boys, it seemed to me, just woke up on a Wednesday.
What made my skin burn most wasn’t that over 75 million people voted for Donald Trump. It was that this election didn’t seem to measurably change anything for the boys around me, whether their parents supported Mr. Trump or not. Many of them didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair. We don’t even share the same future....
The word "seem" doesn't cure all problems with assertions about what other people are thinking. The election didn't "seem to measurably change anything for the boys around me." Either you tried to measure them or you did not. If you had some sort of measuring device and applied it, you wouldn't need to use the word "seem."
If you're so worried about what the boys share with you — "didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair"/"don’t even share the same future" — why don't you share in the sense of speaking to each other? Why just look at them and decide they aren't enough like you to interact with?
Now that the election's over, MSM is free — and selfishly motivated — to present Trump in a favorable light.
The Mika/Morning Joe confabulation with Trump is just one manifestation of this phenomenon, which I'm seeing popping up wherever I look this morning. I need a tag to keep these things together so we can see the pattern. I was thinking of: Now we like him.
They don't like him that much. They're just taking a different tone and raising issues they'd have suppressed and they're not forcing the old template on everything.
"[Bike lanes] are often installed not to satisfy the barely measurable trickle of residents who pedal to work..."
From "The truth about bike lanes: They’re not about the bikes/D.C. is building miles of bike lanes, though fewer people are biking to work" (WaPo). That's an opinion column by Marc Fisher.
Trump isn't going to shut down the federal Department of Education.
While Mr. Trump has repeatedly called for an outright dissolution of the agency, any effort to shutter it would require congressional action and support from some Republican lawmakers whose districts depend on federal aid for public education....
So it's just something to talk about, not actually do. So what is McMahon really going to try to do? She's the chairwoman of the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action.
[T]he America First Policy Institute has set out a more immediate list of changes it says could be achieved through vastly changing the department’s priorities. Those include stopping schools from “promoting inaccurate and unpatriotic concepts” about American history surrounding institutionalized racism, and expanding voucher programs that direct more public funds to parents to spend on home-schooling, online classes or at private and religious schools.
"Ozempic users... aren’t just eating less. They’re eating differently. GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite..."
November 19, 2024
"Some folks might decry this practice as 'rent-free living.' However, if it maximizes Congress’s productivity..."
Writes Buddy Carter, a Republican representing Georgia’s 1st Congressional District, in "I sleep in my office. The rest of Congress should, too. The House would be more bipartisan if lawmakers made the Hill their home away from home" (WaPo)(free-access link so you can see the photographs).
"Ukraine’s military used American-made ballistic missiles on Tuesday to strike into Russia for the first time..."
From "Ukraine Fired U.S.-Made Missiles Into Russia for First Time, Officials Say/The attack came just days after President Biden gave Ukraine permission to use the weapons to strike targets inside Russia" (NYT).
"If some nonprofit needed a T-shirt design, Ed would always draw it. So we wrapped him up..."
From "A Visit to Planet Koren/A new exhibition celebrates the work of the late cartoonist Edward Koren" (The New Yorker).
"In the wake of Mr. Kavanaugh’s confirmation, the gender and sexuality scholar Asa Seresin picked up on a feeling in the air..."
Writes Marie Solis, in "Men? Maybe Not. The election made clear that America’s gender divide is stark. What’s a heterosexual woman to do?" (NYT).