१३ मे, २०२३
"There are those who demonize and pit people against one another. And there are those who will do anything and everything, no matter how desperate or immoral..."
Said Joe Biden, quoted in "Biden Warns of 'Sinister Forces' Trying to Reverse Racial Progress/The president’s commencement address at Howard University, a historically Black institution, came as Democratic strategists have expressed concerns about muted enthusiasm for Mr. Biden among Black voters" (NYT).
That quote is creepily generic. Who's he talking about? The article presents this as the context:"Democrats have a much broader spectrum to cover, from those that are in what I would call the immigration advocacy community, to those who I would consider the pragmatic moderates and everything in between."
"[Jordan Neely] was on a list informally known as the Top 50, a roster of people in a city of eight million who stand out for the severity of their troubles..."
"Does the mere fact of his large following in an increasingly radicalized and extremist Republican Party require that news organizations broadcast his views to millions?"
"'Are you Brian Wilson?' he asked. 'Yeah,' I said. 'Hi,' he said. 'I’m Bob Dylan.'"
१२ मे, २०२३
The miscalculated sunrise run.
"The man you were so disturbed to hear from last night, that man is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president."
Said Anderson Cooper last night (transcript and video at RCP).
"‘Mommunes’: Mothers Are Living Single Together/Women are joining forces under one roof, using the age-old power of sisterhood to split the household bills and raise their children."
All over the world, women are joining forces under one roof, sharing the load of child care and household bills through the age-old power of sisterhood....
"It’s not unreasonable to think Carlson’s Twitter move could work awfully well. It could also further tweak the meaning of 'show.'"
The most TikTok critique of TikTok.
The most TikTok critique of TikTok #TikTok https://t.co/TW7KX3xMG6
— Ann Althouse (@annalthouse) May 12, 2023
"Don’t whinge, don’t poke, don’t pick the scab of Time. / How long we’ve got, the loving gods won’t say."
[O]de-writing is a two-way street. The universe will disclose itself to you, it will give you occasions for odes, it will blaze with interest and appreciability, but you’ve got to be ode-ready.... Respond to the essence with your essence... [I]t gets results. Squirrels have treated me differently since I wrote an ode to squirrels: They give me the nod, those little fiends. And I see odes everywhere now. I see them boiling up from the ground where my dog squats to do his business. I see them poking down through the clouds in fingers of divine light. Your odes, too—can you see them?
From the above-linked ode to squirrels:
"[S]he interrogates her love of the flowered Czech dishes she inherited and then realized bear some resemblance to ones that belonged to Hitler’s companion, Eva Braun."
"I found the mom rage compelling, and gave into it freely, screaming in my car with the windows up and going on 'rage walks'...."
Writes Sarah Wheeler in "Moms Gone Wild/Motherhood can obliterate you — or it can set you free" (The Cut).
I feel like averting my eyes, but maybe you choose to worship all that is Dolly.
"The sun would appear green if your eye could handle looking at it."
Said W. Dean Pesnell, project scientist of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, quoted in "Is the sun white or yellow? It’s a hot debate, and everyone’s wrong. Plot twist: It’s green" (WaPo).
According to the article, some people on social media are discussing whether the sun used to be yellow and now it's gone white.
It seems to me you need a foundation of expectation before you can declare something a "disappointment."
At a time when CNN has been struggling to turn around viewership decline, the telecast proved to be a ratings disappointment, with Nielsen reporting just 3.1 million viewers overall. That was a big boost over CNN’s typical 8 p.m. telecast, but a smaller audience than CNN’s town hall with President Biden last summer (3.7 million) and six previous Trump town halls carried by Fox News — calling into question both CNN and Trump’s drawing power.
"What is she thinking? That’s not a promotion, not even a lateral move. Then you still have Musk owning Twitter..."
११ मे, २०२३
"But just as [Heather] Armstrong created possibility for women on the internet, she collided early with its dark side."
Writes Lisa Belkin in "Heather Armstrong Was the Original Influencer/With her blog, Dooce, she ushered in an age of confessional writing online by women, inspiring millions of readers and creators to come" (NYT).
Since Donald Trump talked about E. Jean Carroll again, she might sue him for defamation again.
The comments were made at the CNN town hall last night. Here's the transcript. Here's the section that might contain material that could become the basis of another defamation suit:She was asleep and did not learn of his comments calling her claim of a decades-old sexual assault “fake” and a “made-up story” until Thursday morning, when her lawyer sent her a transcript, she said.
"Daniel Penny, the 24-year-old Marine veteran who choked and killed a homeless man on the subway last week, will face a charge of second-degree manslaughter..."
If you're conversant with negative Commerce Clause doctrine — AKA the "dormant" Commerce Clause — then you know why the Supreme Court split the way it did.
The case that came out this morning is National Pork Producers Council v. Ross.
Gorsuch announces the judgment. Much of what he says is joined by the conservatives Thomas and Barrett and by the liberals Sotomayor and Kagan, and some of what he says is joined only by Thomas and Barrett. The Chief Justice concurred in part and dissented in part, and he was joined in that dissent by the conservatives Alito and Kavanaugh and also by the liberal Jackson. There are some additional opinions by Sotomayor, Barrett, and Kavanaugh.
The Commerce Clause — which empowers Congress — has been interpreted to bar the states from discriminating against interstate commerce and, more controversially, from putting too much of a burden on interstate commerce. The California law in question in the case forbids the sale, in California, of meat from pigs that have been raised, anywhere, in a manner California deems cruel.
The split among the conservatives seems to be between those who favor judicial restraint and federalism and those who want more freedom from regulation.
"Thanks Althouse. You read the liberal/left crap, so I don't have to...."
Commented rcocean, after I posted a massive block of links to articles about the Trump/CNN town hall.
Maybe rcocean was referring to things I do elsewhere — I blog mainstream news every day — but I didn't read any of that analysis of the town hall. I watched the town hall myself, and I stayed tuned for some of the CNN panel discussion afterwards, but I was getting nothing out of it — it seemed like pro forma outrage — and turned in for the night, slept until time for the sunrise run, and, finally approaching the blog at 6:30 a.m., wrote that post to distance myself from the yammer about the town hall
I don't subject myself to an ordeal of reviewing liberal media. I follow my own interests, which, you can see, had to do with a song I'd heard on my run/walk and some feathers strewn on the trail before I posted that block of links, which I called "an image of outrage," about the town hall. It was a snapshot of something seen only from a distance.
What's striking to me now, writing this post, is what's not in those headlines: There was no one terrible thing Trump said that everyone's talking about.
There's just generic stuff about how Trump is awful. It's hard even to think of an answer to the question: What would you use if you had to choose one thing from the town hall to attack Trump?
"Who has clear plastic and fish tubing laying around the house?"
So long #MTV News, it was a great ride 📺🎸 https://t.co/t4ygMnP4LQ
— Martha Quinn Ⓥ (@MarthaQuinn) May 10, 2023
Did CNN cut the Trump town hall short — by 20 minutes?
Questions have been raised as to why CNN appeared to cut a town hall broadcast with Donald Trump on Wednesday evening short by as much as 20 minutes....
A CNN spokesperson told Newsweek it had gone on record "days ago" that the town hall would last "roughly an hour" with "a little room to bleed over."
I believe that, because, seen live, the ending didn't look abrupt, Trump didn't act surprised or outraged, and the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, didn't seem to be acting ungracious or punitive. She had been prodding him about his lies/"lies" throughout, and to give up before the planned end time would seem as though her pushback had been inadequate, which is not something CNN would want to concede. Of course, Trump bulled ever onward. That was predicted and prepared for. Nothing went wrong, and it would have been wrong to pull the plug early.
You can see an image of outrage....
I did watch the Trump/CNN town hall last night.
१० मे, २०२३
"Heather Armstrong, the breakout star behind the website Dooce, who was hailed as the queen of the so-called mommy bloggers..."
"Biden is using his executive authority to offer hundreds of thousands more migrants per year an opportunity to come to the United States legally..."
"Santos is in custody in the federal courthouse. He was charged with seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering..."
Trump is doing a live "town hall" show on CNN tonight.
Let's see how the major news media are handling this story the morning of:
The New York Times: Media correspondent Michael M. Grynbaum asks, "Should a leading presidential contender be given the opportunity to speak to voters on live television?" Wow. That suggests it could be considered unethical to give air to the horrible man.
Joy Reid, an anchor on rival MSNBC, derided the event as “a pretty open attempt by CNN to push itself to the right and make itself attractive and show its belly to MAGA.” Her colleague Chris Hayes called the town hall “very hard to defend.” Critics asked why CNN would provide a live platform to someone who defended rioters at the United States Capitol and still insists the 2020 election was rigged. Those objections intensified on Tuesday after Mr. Trump was found liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of the writer E. Jean Carroll. “Is @CNN still going to do a town hall with the sexual predator twice impeached insurrectionist?” Alexander S. Vindman, the Army colonel who was a witness in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial, wrote on Twitter....
Politico: The headline is "Trump world booked CNN hoping for a big audience. Now, they’re in the thick of it/The former president will fundraise off the E. Jean Carroll verdict. But he also has to get through a televised town hall where it will come up."
"Tucker Carlson, two weeks after being ousted by Fox News, accused the network Tuesday of fraud and breach of contract..."
९ मे, २०२३
Tucker Carlson says he's back.
We’re back. pic.twitter.com/sG5t9gr60O
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) May 9, 2023
The Washington Post Editorial Board closes in on Biden: "Biden no longer does press conferences. That’s not acceptable."
"A Manhattan jury on Tuesday found former President Donald J. Trump liable for the sexual abuse of the magazine writer E. Jean Carroll..."
The jury has found that Carroll did not prove Trump raped her, but they did determine that he had sexually abused her. The jurors also found that Trump had defamed Carroll when he called her accusations false. They awarded her $5 million damages....
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said that for the jury to establish that Trump raped Carroll, she had to prove that Trump engaged in sexual intercourse with her, and that he did it without her consent. The judge said that sexual intercourse includes “any penetration of the penis into the vaginal opening.”...
This means that the jury did not believe part of her testimony. They somehow found her story credible enough to believe partially but not totally. Was this a compromise verdict?
"We could go further and read the dominance of crunchy and creamy in American diners’ preferences as metaphor: a sly enactment of the dynamic of conquest and submission..."
When the manners expert is unaccountably snooty... and wrong.
When you're dying of thirst and the only beverage is wine, should you drink it?
"The journalist’s need to humanize everything in sight can be useful, even revelatory, but it can also obscure."
Writes Jay Caspian Kang, in "Tony Hsieh and the Emptiness of the Tech-Mogul Myth/A new biography of the Zappos executive depicts him as a narcissist and an addict who tossed around half-baked ideas and rarely saw them through" (The New Yorker).
So... they're doing this in the New Yorker crossword.
८ मे, २०२३
"Why non-White people might advocate white supremacy."
Philip Bump feels called to explain (at WaPo) after a man named Mauricio Garcia killed 8 people in a shopping mall in Texas. There's reason to think that Garcia held white supremacist/neo-Nazi beliefs because he wore a patch with the letters "RWDS," which, we are told, stands for "Right Wing Death Squad."
Maybe the letters don't really mean that or maybe Garcia didn't know the meaning, and maybe Garcia was white, but the point of Bump's column is to assume, based on the name, that Garcia was non-white and that he wore the patch because he was a white supremacist and then to try to explain why.
"There are no witnesses to call to prove a negative."
Trump's lawyer said in his opening statement, quoted in "Jury in Carroll's civil case against Trump to hear closing statements" (WaPo). Closing statements are expected to begin today.
On Thursday, even after his attorney had said Trump would not testify, he made comments to reporters in Ireland suggesting he might make a surprise appearance at the trial after all.
"Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition."
Wrote Octavio Paz in "The Labyrinth of Solitude."
"It’s all for education. Both my dad and mom were deprived of education, so he worked hard in the mountains."
"It does not appear that any riders intervened to help Mr. Neely; at least two other riders appeared to help pin him down...."
The article says "There is no indication that he was violent or that he made any direct threats," but the most highly rated comments over there object to that way of putting it:
"An author might know nothing about writing, which is why he hired a ghost. But he may also have the literary self-confidence of Saul Bellow..."
From "Notes from Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter Collaborating on his memoir, 'Spare,' meant spending hours together on Zoom, meeting his inner circle, and gaining a new perspective on the tabloids" by J. R. Moehringer (The New Yorker).
"The Inflation Reduction Act... will help accelerate the growing private ownership of U.S. infrastructure...."
Writes Brett Christophers, in "The Unfortunate, Unintended Consequence of the Inflation Reduction Act" (NYT).
Peanut butter is a liquid.
७ मे, २०२३
"US First Lady Jill Biden was caught on camera inspecting her cheese and pickle sandwich at Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's coronation lunch today."
The old fool asked, "Do we not know that art is art?"
Richard Dreyfuss has a point: it's terribly unfair that given today's common-sense notions of casting even the very most brilliant Black actor would not likely be cast to play Richard Dreyfuss. https://t.co/xiYa3ma8mD
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) May 7, 2023
The enigmatic, paradoxical rhetoric of Ramaswamy.
"Title 42, the policy that has allowed the swift expulsion of many migrants at the southern border, will lift on Thursday."
When the pandemic-inspired restrictions end, border officials will resume an immigration system that has largely failed for decades, but with the added pressure of three years of pent-up demand. About 35,000 migrants are amassed in Ciudad Juárez, another 15,000 in Tijuana and thousands more elsewhere on the Mexican side of the 2,000-mile-long border....The federal government is expecting as many as 13,000 migrants each day immediately after the measure expires, up from about 6,000 on a typical day.
Meanwhile, Republicans are poised: