December 2, 2017

At the December Walk Café...

DSC05205

... you can talk about whatever you want. It's a café post, so you can get to whatever topics I may have missed. I know I missed that tax bill. Important, but nothing for me to add today. Maybe you've got something interesting to say. In any event, maybe you've got some interesting shopping to do, in which case, I point you toward the Althouse portal to Amazon: here.

32 comments:

mockturtle said...

What else but the Ohio State/Wisconsin match-up tonight? Go Badgers!

tcrosse said...

Is the Blair witch nearby ?

Jupiter said...

Let's talk about Matt Lauer. In particular, this from Hotair's John Sexton;
" Given reports about his yearly salary over the past decade, he has likely already been paid well in excess of $100 million during his time at NBC. ... That’s a huge amount of money obviously but Lauer may now be facing a significant number of lawsuits that could whittle that amount down much quicker than he earned it."

Have we really reached a point where people suing for sexual harassment can expect to receive *damages* that will "whittle down" $100 million dollars?

Bay Area Guy said...

Oklahoma is explosive on offense. My picks for playoffs:

1. Oklahoma
2. Clemson
3. Ohio State
4. Alabama

MayBee said...

Is it Jesse SIngal you like so much, Althouse? If so, he was just hounded off Twitter.

Bad Lieutenant said...

Speaking of Matt Lauer. The one where he bends somebody over a chair, is that represented as sexual assault, sexual harassment, or just sleazy behavior? Hard to keep track.

Unknown said...

There is a street kid on the block who I have seen, off and on, for at least four or five years. A few others remain from that period, but the churn rate is usually faster than that. And maybe there are others that have never really registered in my memory: dirty hair, dirty clothes, haphazard tattoos, piercings, dead eyes -- the individual can be hard to distinguish. I am a little more familiar with the ones who constantly ask for a cigarette.

This kid, though: he has his look. When he started he was a slender boy, maybe sixteen. Long blonde hair, usually dyed blue and fading to seasick green, occasionally with a cheap barrette, often in pigtails. Short cut-off jeans, regardless of the weather. Girls' flirty sandals. Blue eye shadow. Sometimes a t-shirt, sometimes a discarded blouse. For a sixteen-year-old boy he made for a pretty sixteen-year-old girl.

He would be on the street for a few weeks, then disappear. Maybe to a different neighborhood: Capitol Hill would be a likely place to ply his trade. Maybe he picked up an older benefactor where he then stayed, until kicked out for behavior, or theft, or just because the benefactor was tired of him and wanted a new boy.

The benefactors probably almost believed they were doing a Good Thing. Sure, they were using him for sex, but he was off the streets, warm, fed. Perhaps drugs shared occasionally. They probably preferred calling it an arrangement, I imagine. As the bumper sticker from the Seventies said: Ass, Gas or Grass: No One Rides For Free. Pretty sure which of the three he is.

Then: back to the Ave. Like I said, I have seen him now run through this cycle for at least four or five years. He pretty much looks the same, but he doesn't smile as much. Eyes a little harder, etc etc. He still makes for a fairly pretty sixteen-year-old girl, or at least enough for some men. He can probably do this for a couple more years.

- james james

Danno said...

I saw a headline on my yahoo page saying the NYT was only allowing 5 free articles per month now.

tcrosse said...

Speaking of Matt Lauer. The one where he bends somebody over a chair, is that represented as sexual assault, sexual harassment, or just sleazy behavior? Hard to keep track.

That depends whether she bends over backwards.

tcrosse said...

I suspect that Hillary's server guys are now working at blogger.com

Jupiter said...

Bad Lieutenant said...
"Hard to keep track."

Or the video with the Vieira woman, where she bends over the table where he is working, and because her clothes are intentionally designed to offer occasional glimpses of her cleavage, he can see her tits. And he comments on it. "Nice view", I think he said. Now, suppose he had been wearing short-shorts with no underwear, carefully adjusted so his left nut occasionally emerges into view, and maybe something else alongside it. What would Meredith Vieira be guilty of, if she commented on his display? How much should she have to pay him in damages?

MayBee said...

crosse- right? It's been impossible the past few days!

tcrosse said...

Now John Hockenberry gets his turn in the barrel.

donald said...

Go Dawgs. Quit being stupid.

jimbino said...

I just heard the PBS Saturday Morning Edition interview of Chris Matthews. Speaking of his new book on RF Kennedy, he mentioned something along the lines of "He (RFK) never thought that (his close friend) McCarthy would have drank himself to death."

I have heard "drank" used as the past participle of the proper "drunk" more often than not on the radio. Is the solecism the result of euphemism?

Lucien said...

Bay Area Guy:

In your scenario 'Bama is in and Auburn and Georgia are out. Not happening. The either/or, given Oklahoma's win, is 'Bama vs. Ohio State. If Wisconsin wins, there is no drama.

wwww said...


So, are people happy about the tax bill?

The rest of what happened today will not be significant 10 years from now, but the tax bill is likely to affect one's grandchildren and, perhaps, their children.


MayBee said...

The rest of what happened today will not be significant 10 years from now, but the tax bill is likely to affect one's grandchildren and, perhaps, their children.

Why do you say this? Because every president in my adult lifetime has changed the tax rate/come up with new taxes/benefits.

wwww said...

Why do you say this? Because every president in my adult lifetime has changed the tax rate/come up with new taxes/benefits.


Three reasons, I guess. It's a pretty big change from earlier tax bills. & It's hard to make major changes once they are in place. The legislature is increasingly log-jammed when making deals or even selecting leaders.

And it's getting more unusual to have bipartisan legislation. It's not like it was under Reagan or even W. Bush. I think for any major piece of legislation one party will have to control the House, Senate, and Presidency. It's hard for that to happen, as designed by the founders.

The changes to the removal of the state deductions might be something that both parties find advantageous to keep in place.

Bay Area Guy said...

So, the Senate passes Trump's tax cut, and the ABC news reporter, Brian Ross, gets suspended for misreporting the Michael Flynn story. .

So much winning.

William said...

Marketing idea: Some feminine hygiene products company should package perv cards along with their products. The perv cards could be tradable and collectible. They should be small cardboard cards with a color picture of the perv in front and, on the back, a list of his offenses and the notable celebrities he has molested. Think of Topps baseball cards.......In my estimation, Harvey Weinstein is the Babe Ruth of sex offenders. It's not just the number of women he's molested, but many of those women were A-list movie stars. A Harvey card should easily be worth five Matt Lauer's or ten Garrison Keillors. The douche company should take care not to issue too many Harvey cards. You want women coming back to complete their collection. Perhaps they should issue a new set of perv cards each year. I think this is an idea whose time has come.

Hagar said...

It's not like it was under Reagan or even W. Bush.

But certainly like it was under Obama - though not quite as bad.

Bad Lieutenant said...

and the ABC news reporter, Brian Ross, gets suspended for misreporting the Michael Flynn story. .

So much winning.


Noooo! Oh, that's rich. Christmas every day!

Guess somebody called Iger. You can lie to the American people all you want, but don't be messing with my money!

MayBee said...

Three reasons, I guess. It's a pretty big change from earlier tax bills. & It's hard to make major changes once they are in place. The legislature is increasingly log-jammed when making deals or even selecting leaders

I'm actually pretty happy about the log-jammed part.

I have no idea whether this tax bill will help me or hurt me. I suspect a little of both, like every piece of legislation. I am gobsmacked at how dire the left is pretending this is, though. My friends who consider themselves resistance and are always going on on Facebook about not giving up free birth control, are just outraged suddenly about political donors getting what they want in legislation. And people who want national healthcare are just outraged that this will contribute to the debt.

I have to live with Obamacare, and I suspect I'll live with this tax code revamp, too.

Narayanan said...

@Jupiter ... If not the victims the lawyers will?!
Can the network claw back for damages they'll be paying?

mockturtle said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Michael K said...

The rest of what happened today will not be significant 10 years from now, but the tax bill is likely to affect one's grandchildren and, perhaps, their children.

What will affect them is the collapse of the economic entity of the United States after a half century of raids on the federal treasury by the political left and its parasites.

It was begun by Lyndon Johnson who put his awesome political skills in the service of his psychopathic concept of politics in 1965. He skillfully used the death of Kennedy, who was mildly conservative if ineffectual, to engineer a fatal upending of the national consensus of economy.

According to Caro's biography, Life Magazine had a whole issue on Johnson's corruption ready to publish the week after the assassination of Kennedy. It was shelved, of course, and history took its course.

de Toqueville warned that , if th citizenry learned it could vote benefits to itself from the Treasury, Democracy would fail.

We made it 200 years but the results will be coming along soon. The student loan debt might be the final straw on the camel.

Rosa Marie Yoder said...

There's not enough music in many people's life. Would Somebody Sing!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6bMDSKtc-8

Phil 314 said...

The capital of Wisconsin football remains in Green Bay.

jaydub said...

If people need music in their lives, here's another option, Amira Willighagen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb17BSnnXdY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_WyjEj5DW8&list=RDQb17BSnnXdY&index=2

Jupiter said...

www said...

"The rest of what happened today will not be significant 10 years from now, but the tax bill is likely to affect one's grandchildren and, perhaps, their children."

I will form a judgment on the tax bill when the members of the joint committee of the House and Senate have finished deciding what to put in it, now that it has passed.

Of course, we won't really know until the IRS and SCOTUS have had a couple decades to chew on it.

MadTownGuy said...

Is it my imagination or has Donna Brazile been disappeared from the news outlets? Perhaps just relegated to Page C6 or some such?