... in Arches National Park, March 11th.
Talk about whatever you'd like in the comments.
(And consider shopping through the Althouse Amazon Portal.)
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The Landscape Arch...
... in Arches National Park, March 11th.
Talk about whatever you'd like in the comments.
(And consider shopping through the Althouse Amazon Portal.)
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How pathetic were the Dems today with Gorsuch?
And Schumer wants to delay the vote because .... Russia.
Did you know that Landscape Arch is really Delicate Arch and vice versa, but the names got mixed up on a map at some point and the park service figured it was too much trouble to switch the names back?
The installation of the floor tile starts tomorrow. Anybody in Tucson got a spare room ?
Ugh !
Regarding James Comey's session with the House the other day, it amazed me when Adam Schiff (D-Cal) asked if Comey believed Putin was in favor of Brexit and Comey thought for a second and then tersely answered, "Yes."
This was absolutely wrong on so many levels. It is not for the FBI to have an opinion on foreign affairs to start with - it is a domestic police organization - and here, besides stepping onto both State Dept. and CIA turf, Schiff and Comey also "meddled" in the internal affairs of both the U.K. and Russia - an odd thing to do in a hearing protesting foreign "meddling" in our internal affairs.
And how would Comey know Putin's thinking unless he has an agent next to Putin?
If he does, I think the CIA and State Dept. both would come unhinged if this came to light.
David Begley said "How pathetic were the Dems today with Gorsuch?"
Extremely!
I think Neil Gorsuch is just a little too "Hollywood" for me. Let us hope for the best, but it is a real pity that Senate confirmation hearings have sunk to the level they are at now. I think many, if not most, qualified candidates - and not only for the Supreme Court - just refuse to submit themselves to such humiliation not to mention have their families watch them go through it.
I think someone else already commented on Comey stating that the Trump campaign has been under investigation since July of last year, but there has not been any surveillance!
After reading the #Cosmopolitan article on Gorsuch and the 2nd Amendment, I wonder if Cosmo is as wrong about the 19th Amendment as well.
Maybe we should push through a SCOTUS ruling that a woman's vote is worth 3/5 of a man's for electoral purposes. Heck, the Democrats like that rule the last time it was pushed through.
On my long drive to work, I listen to audio books. I've just started into Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism by Camille Paglia. She's reading her own words, which is not typical for an author to do. And it's wonderful. It's like what I imagine sitting in on her lecture would be like, as she reads and comments with an authentic passion that adds an extra dimension to the experience. If you have an Amazon Audible credit, this is definitely worth a download. Check it out.
Hagar, I didn't attend to the hearings today, but do you think they are still clinging to this "wiretap" (ye olde alligator clips on copper wires) distinction, or did anyone attempt to clarify by asking whether any other forms of surveillance or espionage were used, such as hidden microphones, glasses held against doors, parabolic microphones (including the use of lasers to capture sonic vibrations from window panes), lip reading or whatever other tricks I don't know the names of? And if the question was asked was it forthrightly answered?
I want to talk about the Gorsuch hearing today. I emailed Althouse about it, and offered her a link.
Last February, Judge Gorsuch was in the process of making the rounds with Senators after having been announced by Trump. At the same time, Trump's first-version travel ban was being shot down in a Washington U.S. District Court. Prompting our ol' Twitter friend President Donald Trump to Tweet that the order, by the "so-called judge" would be overturned. The order hasn't been overturned, and the Trump White House took an Executive Order Mulligan.
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/827867311054974976?lang=en
As Judge Gorsuch met privately with Senator Richard Blumenthal soon after the "so-called judge" Tweet, Blumenthal asked Gorsuch about it, and about the hit to judicial independence. Gorsuch apparently called the situation "disheartening and demoralizing." Blumenthal repeated those remarks, to the press. Other witnesses in the room corroborated it.
With that, the ball was back in President Trump's court. And to thoroughly mix our country club sports metaphors, Trump immediately hit it out of bounds. Trump's responsive Tweet said, "Sen.Richard Blumenthal, who never fought in Vietnam when he said for years he had (major lie),now misrepresents what Judge Gorsuch told him?"
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/829660612452036608?lang=en
I noted the controversy in an Althouse comments page; the two points I wanted to make were: 1)That the matter would again come up, sooner rather than later, in Gorsuch's confirmation hearing. Because Blumenthal is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and it would be the first thing he asks Gorsuch. It was the VERY first thing Blumenthal asked this afternoon. And point 2) was that it was such a filthy cheap shot by the draft dodger Donald Trump, who never served in the Vietnam-era military at all, to whine about Senator Blumenthal's military service. (The back-story being that Blumenthal once commented publicly about his service "in" the Vietnam war, instead of "during" the Vietnam war. Long, long ago Blumenthal had apologized for the remark and corrected any misunderstanding.)
The Althouse comments page is here:
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2017/02/at-althouse-cafe.html
It's so rich. The pity is that the comments sidetracked onto Blumenthal's military record which is an old and now-pointless story, apart from providing Trump some way to deflect. The better point worth more discussion was my flat prediction that this would come back in a way that showed that Blumenthal "misrepresented" nothing, and that Trump was simply lying about it.
If you watched today, you will know that Blumenthal only started to get out a question about judicial independence, and that Judge Gorsuch very carefully and deliberately repeated his exact words form February; "disheartening and demoralizing."
“When anyone criticizes the honesty or the integrity or the motives of a federal judge, I find that disheartening. I find that demoralizing — because I know the truth,” Gorsuch told Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).
“Anyone including the president of the United States?” Blumenthal asked, who had made the elephant-in-the-room comment.
“Anyone is anyone,” Gorsuch said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/supreme-court-nominee-gorsuch-starts-day-two-of-confirmation-hearings/2017/03/20/ccd81b02-0dbf-11e7-9d5a-a83e627dc120_story.html?utm_term=.6d6ea2b47412
So. I'm back! I'm here to spike the football. And gloat, after reviewing that February comments page full of some vintage insults and trashtalk.
Trump lied. Senator Blumenthal didn't "misrepresent" anything. Gorsuch told the truth today. As I predicted.
At this site, picture 122-22 (about a sixth of the way down the page) shows Landscape Arch from the air, and it looks even more improbable.
That arch looks like its about to be an ex-arch.
I dont suppose they let people walk any nearer than your path.
About the other substance of today's Gorsuch hearing:
1. Sheldon Whitehouse is the new Dick Durbin. The most evil, the most capable (and I mean that in the worst way possible) and the most slickly determined of the Judiciary Committee Dems.
2. Al Franken's questioning brought out some stuff about Gorsuch that I didn't actually know; lots of little bits of private correspondence and private matters that showed Gorsuch to have been a much more partisan and ideological Republican than I had ever previously imagined. Gorsuch will never be another Souter. And Al Franken convinced me. Thanks, Al!
3. Senator Mazie Hirono (D) of Hawaii. Wow, what a nasty piece of work she is! What a dimwitted, ignorant insulting waste of Congressional space. At one point, while she was so clearly insulting Judge Gorsuch, she actually said, "I don't mean to insult you, but..." Because, obviously, she and everyone in the room knew that hers was a thinly-veiled attempt to insult Judge Gorsuch.
4. Trump came up short again, on the subject of abortion. All of Trump's campaign bloviating about "appointing judges who are pro-life," Gorsuch testified that Trump never asked him about any of his own views on abortion, and that if Trump had asked him such a thing, Gorsuch would have walked out of the meeting. I knew all along that Trump's statements would eventually be questioned in any judicial confirmation fight, and that every nominee would be forced to admit that any such commitment was nonsense. As happened today.
http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/hiking/5071852-155/utah-hike-of-the-week-many
Michael K says: The installation of the floor tile starts tomorrow. Anybody in Tucson got a spare room ?
Ugh !
I just visited my friend who lives in Tucson and she has all-tile floors and her house stays nice and cool. Plus, it's beautiful.
Having endured numerous herds of workers in and around my house these past three months, I am thankful to have an RV plugged in on my extra lot here. My projects are done for the season and I'll be heading north next month but I'm already brewing new plans for fall projects. There is no end to it!
Who knew that Trump-bashing could evolve into a full-time career?
Looks like a collar bone to me.
...
"Repent, the end is near!"
That's what his sign said, but the man, dressed in tattered robes and worn sandals, seemingly from central casting, didn't inspire confidence. In fact, he looked like he belonged in Bellevue's psychiatric wing, not standing on 42nd Street urging humanity to repent. But he meant well, so for years he was a sidewalk-fixture just a few steps from Grand Central Station. And also not far from some of the world's biggest ad agencies on Madison Avenue. This is important because those agencies preached the importance of repetition, the importance of pounding your message home, over and over, until the public, and especially the sinners, bought it.
So, I too started to wonder. But we're talking fifty years ago, and I'm finally starting to relax.
I watched about a half hour of the Gorsuch hearings. He certainly looks and talks like a judge. He had a terrific haircut. Not one hair out of place, and yet he didn't look coiffed and blow dried like a newscaster. Plus his hair was silver gray. You couldn't ask for better hair on a judge.
f you have an Amazon Audible credit, this is definitely worth a download. Check it out.
I just finished a Great Courses course on the French Revolution. 25 hours.
Life is too short to listen to feminist books.
New York Times calls Chuck a lying sack-o-shit:
(The back-story being that Blumenthal once commented publicly about his service "in" the Vietnam war, instead of "during" the Vietnam war.)
"In an interview on Monday, the attorney general said that he had misspoken about his service during the Norwalk event and might have misspoken on other occasions. “My intention has always been to be completely clear and accurate and straightforward, out of respect to the veterans who served in Vietnam,” he said.
But an examination of his remarks at the ceremonies shows that he does not volunteer that his service never took him overseas. And he describes the hostile reaction directed at veterans coming back from Vietnam, intimating that he was among them.
In 2003, he addressed a rally in Bridgeport, where about 100 military families gathered to express support for American troops overseas. “When we returned, we saw nothing like this,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “Let us do better by this generation of men and women.”
At a 2008 ceremony in front of the Veterans War Memorial Building in Shelton, he praised the audience for paying tribute to troops fighting abroad, noting that America had not always done so.
“I served during the Vietnam era,” he said. “I remember the taunts, the insults, sometimes even physical abuse.”
Mr. Blumenthal, 64, is known as a brilliant lawyer who likes to argue cases in court and uses language with power and precision. He is also savvy about the news media and attentive to how he is portrayed in the press.
But the way he speaks about his military service has led to confusion and frequent mischaracterizations of his biography in his home state newspapers. In at least eight newspaper articles published in Connecticut from 2003 to 2009, he is described as having served in Vietnam.
The New Haven Register on July 20, 2006, described him as “a veteran of the Vietnam War,” and on April 6, 2007, said that the attorney general had “served in the Marines in Vietnam.” On May 26, 2009, The Connecticut Post, a Bridgeport newspaper that is the state’s third-largest daily, described Mr. Blumenthal as “a Vietnam veteran.” The Shelton Weekly reported on May 23, 2008, that Mr. Blumenthal “was met with applause when he spoke about his experience as a Marine sergeant in Vietnam.”
And the idea that he served in Vietnam has become such an accepted part of his public biography that when a national outlet, Slate magazine, produced a profile of Mr. Blumenthal in 2000, it said he had “enlisted in the Marines rather than duck the Vietnam draft.”
It does not appear that Mr. Blumenthal ever sought to correct those mistakes.
In the interview, he said he was not certain whether he had seen the stories or whether any steps had been taken to point out the inaccuracies.
“I don’t know if we tried to do so or not,” he said. He added that he “can’t possibly know what is reported in all” the articles that are written about him, given the large number of appearances he makes at military-style events.
He said he had tried to stick to a consistent way of describing his military experience: that he served as a member of the United State Marine Corps Reserve during the Vietnam era.
Asked about the Bridgeport rally, when he told the crowd, “When we returned, we saw nothing like this,” Mr. Blumenthal said he did not recall the event. "
> Did you know that Landscape Arch is really Delicate Arch and vice versa, but the names got mixed up on a map at some point and the park service figured it was too much trouble to switch the names back?
Heh, no. But I do know that there are at least seven peaks in Utah named Mollys (Mollies) Nipple. Apparently John Kitchen really appreciated his wife...
"When she opened the box and removed the MAGA hat, she dropped it on the floor in revulsion."
I sent my brother-in-law a green MAGA hat for St Patrick's day. I sent him the original last summer. He has been a big Trump supporter all along.
Other pointed geographic features: Sadies Nipple, Mollies Nipple, Ferns Nipple, Nellies Nipple, Desert Princess Nipple, The Nipple, VABM Nipple, Nipple Butte, Black Tit, Brassiere Hills, West Cup, East Cup. Must have been a lot of lonely men back in the day.
Paco---nice link; thanks for sharing!
Bad Lieutenant---I think that regular New York pizza may not be in our future after all. I think I've decided I'd rather live in San Diego....(maybe!). I however have made notes of your previous suggestions and will use them as a guide when we visit the city again. I like Westchester a great deal but the towns I like best (Brewster and Katonah are a-fricking-dorable, as is that area out toward Pound Ridge) are too far away from the city. Train ride is too long, even if it's just a couple days a week. Closer in burbs are too expensive (Rye, Armonk) or too charmless (White Plains). We even looked at Danbury which is much cheaper but again, too far away. There were some places in Brooklyn that are affordable for us, but that's a bit of a culture shock for five kids who have lived in a sprawling subdivision in Texas for years. Husband keeps trying to talk me into Stuyvesant Town but damn those apartments are tiny.
So the considerations continue.
buwaya said: That arch looks like its about to be an ex-arch.
I dont suppose they let people walk any nearer than your path.
When I was a teenager, a friend and I managed to climb up on the rock fins behind and above the arch (from the end of the side trail that goes around the back to another arch on the same fin as Landscape). we could look essentially straight down on Landscape, and probably could have found a way out onto the span if we had wanted to. We weren't that stupid.
I tried the same route a few years ago, but found that it required at least one leap over a gap that I no longer have the nerve to do.
Ha! Just noticed that the other arch ("Partition Arch", I think it's called?) is visible in Althouse's first photo. And the fin my friend and I managed to climb is visible at the extreme right of the 2nd photo. Ah, foolish youth!
Angry elephant with elastic trunk.
What other could it be?
Interesting note on the Iraqi Christians. They are saying it is all over now.
30 years ago there was 1.4 million Christians in Iraq. Today the number is unknowable, but less than 250,000, with more leaving every day.
The Vicar of Baghdad said he tried to initiate a dialog with ISIS leadership. He invited them to dinner.
“They told me they would come, but that they would chop my head off afterwards. I didn’t think it would be a nice way to end a dinner party.”
When President Bush, his Cabinet, and Congress voted to do a Pearl Harbor on Iraq, they signed the death penalty to 1.4 million Christians.
They blew up the world.
The fate of Iraq was sealed with Obama's premature evacuation that created a vacuum from which progressed the Islamic State and other terrorist groups. However, the trail of tears follows a long path from Libya to Syria to Ukraine with Obama's social justice adventurism in elective regime changes, catastrophic anthropogenic immigration reform, and global belligerence towards national Muslims, eastern Christians (who he banned from immigration), and Russians who had the audacity to stand their ground against left-wing incursions.
There are still Ukrainian refugees in Crimea, but the crisis there was was mitigated, as it was in Syria, through Russian support that halted the worst of the Western-backed coup in Kiev and CAIR from social justice adventurism that has a notoriously anti-native outlook.
Chuck: "The back-story being that Blumenthal once commented publicly about his service "in" the Vietnam war, instead of "during" the Vietnam war. Long, long ago Blumenthal had apologized for the remark and corrected any misunderstanding."
Uh, no, read the following NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/nyregion/18blumenthal.html?hp=&pagewanted=all. Not only did he never correct it, he was so deceptive about the whole thing that to this day many people in CT still believe he served in Vietnam as a marine sergeant and at least 8 CT newspapers have talked about his service in Vietnam without him correcting the record. Nor did he mention his 5 deferments or that he didn't enlist in the marine reserve until those ran out and he couldn't get another. He didnt just say he served "in" Vietnam, according the the CT Post "In 2003, he addressed a rally in Bridgeport, where about 100 military families gathered to express support for American troops overseas. 'When WE RETURNED, we saw nothing like this," Mr. Blumenthal said."
That doesn't mean I question whether Gorsuch characterized Trump's words as "disheartening and demoralizing," but like others I recognize that neither you nor Blumenthal have any history with the truth; so, I just need a more reliable source to be sure.
Chuck: The pity is that the comments sidetracked onto Blumenthal's military record which is an old and now-pointless story,
UNLIKE TRUMP'S!!!eleventy!!
(But like yours! After our little discussion I thought you would have the sense to let sleeping dogs lie.)
If you ARE a Republican, Chuck, who needs Democrats?
n.n.,
You're pretty devout about supporting Russia in Ukraine. May I ask why?
The silliest thing about Landscape Arch is that they won't let you walk under it anymore because some stone fell off. Once. 20 years ago. But they let you continue on the trail past the arch that runs along various cliffs:
http://c8.alamy.com/comp/DY6A9R/woman-hiking-trail-devils-garden-trail-arches-national-park-utah-DY6A9R.jpg
Rocks are actually elastic and viscous.
Now that is a delicate arch.
I am going to pick out jaydub's comment as the one to respond to.
jaydub says this:
That doesn't mean I question whether Gorsuch characterized Trump's words as "disheartening and demoralizing," but like others I recognize that neither you nor Blumenthal have any history with the truth; so, I just need a more reliable source to be sure.
I think that what jaydub meant in all fairness (but was somehow mis-worded, a sin that I am not always free from) was that jaydub agrees that Trump may have been wrong to Twitter-claim that Gorsuch's words were "mischaracterized" by Blumenthal. But jaydub doesn't like, and doesn't believe, either Senator Richard Blumenthal, or me. He thinks that "Chuck" and "Blumenthal" each have "no history with the truth," so there is no point in listening to either of us.
And that is precisely why I picked this fight in the way, and at the time, that I have.
Blumenthal, it is now assured, was right. I was right, right down to the time when the truth would become known, that Blumenthal would be vindicated on what Gorsuch said.
Gorsuch has now clearly and unequivocally confirmed on the record that his chosen words about Trump's escalation of his federal judge disputes was just what Blumenthal had said all along. "Disheartening and demoralizing."
Blumenthal, it is now clear, was right.
I was right.
Gorsuch has been consistent.
Trump was wrong.
And yes, the point here is that with all of the personal attacks on me and my credibility here, I have specifically come back to gloat about it. And grind on it. Trump was full of shit. Nobody "mischaracterized" anything about the first Blumenthal/Gorsuch conversation. I said at the time that Trump would get called out on this one, and he has.
I was right, I was right, I was right.
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