At the Mudface Café...

... you can talk all night.

I had already decided on the title "At the Mudface Café" for my day-ending open thread post using that photo of the seeming face I saw in the mud on the trail today. 

And after that pedestrian pareidolia, as I kept walking the muddy path, I was struck to hear this passage in my audiobook:

"When those on the creative side of fashion could be using their platform to share progressive values, it seems like many are acquiescing rather than pushing back."

"It’s frustrating to see the industry take a step back."

Said Sara Ziff, who leads a "models’ rights" organization. She's quoted in "Why Ultrathin Is In/When it comes to fashion models, the body diversity revolution appears to be at an end" (NYT).

Extreme thinness among models is “not really new — this kind of thing is cyclical,” she said. But this time around, she added, “it seems to echo the current political climate.”

Political???

"We're not gonna make t-shirts in this country again."

That line stuck in my head. It's from yesterday's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast yesterday, "Why a Worrisome Economy Doesn’t Seem to Worry Trump." (That's a Podscribe link with transcript and audio.)

The speaker is NYT economics reporter Ben Casselman. Context:

There are a lot of economists who reject the very idea that we need to re-industrialize the country in some way, right? They argue that over the decades, free trade has left Americans better off on the whole. That even if it has hurt some people, that on average it has been beneficial. I think most economists would make that point. But there's certainly been a lot of rethinking among at least some economists over the past couple of decades about the way that free trade has played out. Again, complicated subject, but I think the thing that there's pretty broad based agreement about is we can't just turn the clock back. We're not gonna make t-shirts in this country again.

"One day I saw this camera room, and nobody was in there, and I took one and tested it, walked ou,t and they never noticed that a camera was missing."

Said Werner Herzog to Anderson Cooper, who injected flatly: "That's a stolen camera."

Herzog: "It was more expropriation than theft. You have to have a certain amount of, I say, good criminal energy to make a film. Sometimes, yes, you have to go outside of what the norm is."

And I like this, about Klaus Kinski: "I had a a mad man as a leading character. He had a temper as demented as it gets. You had to contain him, and I made his madness — his explosive destructiveness —productive for the screen.... Every gray hair on my head I call Kinsky."

"All Voters who believe in Common Sense should GET OUT TO VOTE EARLY for Brad Schimel. By turning out and VOTING EARLY, you will be helping to Uphold the Rule of Law..."

"... Protect our Incredible Police, Secure our Beloved Constitution, Safeguard our Inalienable Rights, and PRESERVE LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL."

That's how Trump put it on Truth Social, quoted in "Trump Jumps Into a Major Wisconsin Court Race With an Endorsement/The president threw his support to Brad Schimel, the conservative candidate in a race for control of the battleground state’s top court. Elon Musk has spent millions of dollars on the contest" (NYT).

Does it help a state supreme court candidate to be so closely aligned with Trump? Don't we — a lot of us — think judges should be politically neutral arbiters of the law? 

Well, as Trump portrays it, it's the other side that's political. His guy is there to uphold the law and protect our rights. Trump is a political figure, but he respects the traditional values of the judiciary and vouches for Brad Schimel as an upholder of those values. Of course, that's utter garbage to the other side. This is the conventional discourse of judicial elections in Wisconsin. It's possible that the appeal to traditional values motivates conservatives more than liberals, but is Trump's position on traditional values credible, or does his appearance fire up the Trump haters?

Most important here is that the judicial election is isolated from more political elections, so there tends to be a low turnout. There are a lot of people in Wisconsin who love Trump. Maybe these people wouldn't even notice the judicial election or wouldn't bother to vote, but if Trump says, come on, this matters, get out there, maybe they'll stampede to the polls. Yes, it's a cue to Trump haters to get out there and cancel those votes, but the anti-Trumpers are a step behind.

The relevant election day is April 1st. Trump says vote early. If you wait until election day, you might forget or you might have something else going on.

"The Bidens are still living in an alternative universe that revolves only around them. Their irresponsibility, family ego and selfishness..."

"... put the Democratic Party in this position in the first place.… The Biden family — and the disconnected reality that they and their ineffective little circle live in — is responsible for the Trump sequel and the wilderness the Democratic Party finds itself in today.... These people drank so much of their own Kool-Aid... that they believed — and still seemingly believe — that an 82-year-old man with a 38% approval rating on a good day, who can’t sit down for a simple traditional 10-minute pre-Super Bowl interview, was the answer for Democrats in 2024 and now this same group thinks the Bidens are the answer for Democrats now? The fact that they continue to surround themselves with the same cast of clowns who delivered them nothing but the most devastating humiliation in modern political history — a president’s own power taken away by his own party — is all you need to know about them. They’ve learned nothing and they are the absolutely last and worst remedy for what ails the party in 2025 and 2026."

Said "a onetime senior White House adviser, quoted in "Biden aides, more Democrats pile on ex-prez’s offer to boost party fundraising after 2024 disaster...." (NY Post).

Did the Bidens "put the Democratic Party in this position" or did the Democratic Party put the Bidens in the place where they found themselves? What happened "in the first place"? The Democratic Party has itself to blame for forcing Biden on the country in 2020 and for everything that happened down the line.

ADDED: Dana Carvey captured the essence (on last night's new episode of "Real Time"):

Sunrise — 6:42, 6:56, 7:00.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments. And support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

"The chairman of Paul Weiss sought to reassure employees at the giant law firm that the deal it had reached with President Trump was consistent with principles that the 150-year-old firm has long stood by."

From "Paul Weiss Chair Says Deal With Trump Adheres to Firm’s Principles/In an email message, the law firm’s chairman, Brad Karp, reassured employees that its deal with President Trump was in keeping with its principles" (NYT)(free-access link).

Here's Trump's post on the subject:

"A group funded by billionaire Elon Musk is offering Wisconsin voters $100 to sign a petition in opposition to 'activist judges,' a move that comes two weeks before the state’s Supreme Court election and after the political action committee made a similar proposal last year in battleground states."

AP reports.

Meade took a picture of me at daybreak.

7:01 a.m.

Let this be a midday café. That is, write about anything you want. 

"I learned... what people write. Cultural references, jokes, weather conditions, or the difficulty of an ascent. Sarcastic comments..."

"... about needing to quit smoking or arriving stoned. A lot of humorous begging for a helicopter ride down. Catalogs of wildlife spotted or lamentably not. A lot of misspellings (which I’ve retained). A lot of thanks to God."

From "Why Do We Leave Notes on Top of Mountains? It’s Personal/For centuries, people have left all sorts of notes in summit registers. I looked through 100 years of love letters and spontaneous exaltation, including my own family's, to find out why." (Outside).

You can see trends in handwriting styles (neat cursive, like the kind taught by nuns, giving way over time to chicken scratch), as well as music and literature (lots of Grateful Dead and Dharma Bums). Some writers refer to previous entries. Most seemed not to have thought about what they’d write until they arrived. Instead, the words left in registers are simply tactile evidence that someone was there at a certain point in time: alone, with friends, or with the people they love.

One register entry found by the author: "If you are a single woman and made it this far to read these scribblings: I love you!! Marry me!"

And — this isn't in the article, but — here's a quote from "The Dharma Bums": "Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind."

I always had a complicated relationship with the United States, which was far from perfect, but the U.S. was always the shining city on the hill."

"But now. we’ve lost not only the power that protected us, but also the guiding star in the sky."

Joschka Fischer, identified by the NYT as "a former foreign minister, radical leftist in his younger days and now a Green party stalwart."

He's quoted in "In Germany, ‘Orphaned’ by U.S., Shock Gives Way to Action/No country in Europe is as much a product of enlightened postwar American diplomacy. Now adrift, it has begun to reckon with a new world."

Who said "orphaned"? Who viewed Germany as America's child?

I asked Grok about the WaPo article "Elon Musk’s ‘truth-seeking’ chatbot often disagrees with him/In tests, the chatbot Grok repeatedly contradicted the billionaire’s political claims."

Here's a free-access link to the WaPo article.

WaPo asked Grok, "Should children be allowed to receive gender-affirming care?" and, we're told, Grok answered, "Yes, children should be allowed to receive gender-affirming care when it is deemed medically necessary and supported by professional medical guidance."

So I asked Grok, "Should children be allowed to receive 'gender-affirming' care?" Same words — though I did add quote marks. (Why did I do that? Because it's an expression, not a strictly truth-based term. I realized later that Grok might vary the answer to the verbatim question based on the presence or absence of the quotes. Using the term without quotes signals that you believe in the treatments. Using the quotes conveys skepticism.)

I did not get the answer reported in the WaPo article. 

Here's what Grok said to me:

Bill Burr goes on "The View" and insults nerds... sexistly.

NEW: Comedian Bill Burr says he is mad at Elon Musk, calls him a "nerd" who doesn't "know how to talk to hot women."

The comments come days after Burr directly compared Elon Musk to Adolf Hitler.

Behar: "Is there anybody getting your ire up more these days than usual?"

Burr:… pic.twitter.com/6aOOtacajl

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 20, 2025

I'm saying it's sexist because of the line: "All these tech nerds that want to build robots because they don’t know how to talk to hot women." This is the kind of sexism you used to hear all the time half a century ago. A negative personality trait — or even just an interest in science or a hobby — would be attributed to a failure to have sexual intercourse. People with very little comic talent would think they were witty to say things like "You need to get laid."

I heard Tim Dillon — who's kind of my favorite comedian — make a similar joke on his podcast that came out on March 13th: "Now I understand there's man children out there that wanna fly rockets to Mars because they can't fly their penis into a vagina."

Did Burr just steal Dillon's joke, sanitize it, and run over to talk about it with the "hot women" on "The View"?!

Gavinx.

THIS IS BRUTAL! Gavin Newsom claimed on his podcast that no one in his office ever used the word "Latinx" to describe Latinos, so CNN aired a compilation of Newsom himself saying it REPEATEDLY.

It's amazing to see leftists tearing themselves apart.

Newsom: "By the way, not one… pic.twitter.com/jM1YxiWxeC

— George (@BehizyTweets) March 21, 2025

The first day of Spring — 6:49 a.m.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments. And support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

ADDED: I left this in draft overnight. Sorry! It does say "Published on 3/20/25 6:41 PM" in the sidebar, but somehow it ended up in draft. The accuracy of the post title depends on the date being March 20th.

"Democrats did worse in the 2024 election than you think. They completely failed to win over less engaged voters..."

"... who are becoming much more Republican. The higher the turnout, the more these voters show up and the worse it is for Democrats.... Low turnout is now the Democrats’ BFF!... Shor’s analysis... suggests that Trump outright won voters under 30. ... He also finds that Gen Z voters under 25 regardless of race or gender are now more conservative than the corresponding Millennial voters. So much for the Democrats’ generational tsunami. The issue landscape in 2024 was worse than most Democrats thought. The only really important issue Democrats had an advantage on was health care and that advantage was tiny by historical standards. The Democrats did have a large advantage on climate change—but voters don’t really care about the issue.... The way out is not with a feel-good Democratic playbook that leaves Democratic shibboleths intact. That hasn’t worked and it won’t work."

Writes Ruy Teixeira, in "How Deep Is the Hole Democrats Are In? Pretty deep" (Substack).

Shor = David Shor, who explained his findings here:

"The Nazi salute sh*t was insane. Honey, we're going to call a fig a fig, and we're going to call a Nazi salute what it was."

"I mean, I'll see things about him in the news and think, That's f**king cringe, I should probably post about this and denounce it, which I have done a few times.... But other than that, I don't give a f**k about him. I really don't. It's annoying that people associate me with him. I just don't have any room to care anymore. When I initially did the whole thing, when he came for me, the Jordan Peterson interview, that was the most cathartic moment of my entire life by far. I had all this pent-up energy, I had wanted to speak out for so long after being [essentially] defamed in a book, after being doxxed. Everything that had gone on — especially in my childhood — when that finally happened, it was the most cathartic experience I have ever had. And then I was like, Okay, whatever...."

Said Vivian Jenna Wilson, quoted in "Vivian Jenna Wilson on Being Elon Musk’s Estranged Daughter, Protecting Trans Youth and Taking on the Right Online/In Teen Vogue’s special issue cover story, the estranged 20-year-old daughter of Elon Musk talks about the 'cartoonishly evil' Trump administration and being a young trans woman today" (Teen Vogue).

The "[essentially]" is Teen Vogue's. I guess they're afraid the accusation of defamation is itself defamation and want to avoid seeming to be adopting that defamation. The "book" in question is, I believe, Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk. What specific statement of fact has she called defamatory?

"The First Amendment protects speech many of us find wrongheaded or deeply offensive..."

"... including anti-Israel advocacy and even antisemitic advocacy. The government may not threaten funding cuts as a tool to pressure recipients into suppressing such viewpoints. This is especially so for universities, which should be committed to respecting free speech. At the same time, the First Amendment of course doesn’t protect antisemitic violence, true threats of violence, or certain kinds of speech that may properly be labeled 'harassment.' Title VI rightly requires universities to protect their students and other community members from such behavior. But the lines between legally unprotected harassment on the one hand and protected speech on the other are notoriously difficult to draw and are often fact-specific. In part because of that, any sanctions imposed on universities for Title VI violations must follow that statute’s well-established procedural rules, which help make clear what speech is sanctionable and what speech is constitutionally protected. Yet the administration’s March 7 cancellation of $400 million in federal funding to Columbia University did not adhere to such procedural safeguards...."

From "A Statement from Constitutional Law Scholars on Columbia/Eugene Volokh, Michael C. Dorf, David Cole, and 15 other scholars/The government may not threaten funding cuts as a tool to pressure recipients into suppressing First Amendment–protected speech" (NYRB).

"There is certainly enough anger in the Democratic Party to create its own Tea Party. Democrats loathe Republicans..."

"... just as much as Republicans loathe Democrats, but there are important cultural differences between the parties that make a Democratic Tea Party less practical. For one thing, the Democratic turn toward more-educated voters means that the Tea Party’s anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism would be a poor fit for millions of Democrats.... Do Democrats think embracing Tea Party rage is the path back to power? Do they believe they can control that intense anger, once it’s unleashed?....  The Tea Party became a slave to its own rage. No fury was too great — no contempt was too deep — for the Democratic foe. And now we endure a presidency motivated by vengeance and spite. Opposition is necessary. Anger is natural. Courage is indispensable. But under no circumstances will we be better off if another Tea Party takes the political field."

Writes David French, in "The Last Thing Democrats Need Is Their Own Tea Party" (NYT).

"Garner" of the Day.

I don't really find a "garner" for every day. I just think it's funny to say "of the day" when the word "garner" pops up in a way that amuses me, like this one, last year. The word "garner" has delighted me ever since Meade pointed out that Jeb Bush — remember him? — said it 3 times in a single episode of "Face the Nation."

Here's today's "garner," in a question from the NYT "Ethicist" column:

A few years ago, a close cisgender male friend in a heterosexual marriage began identifying as queer. All of his romantic experiences have been with women. Through therapy, however, he concluded that gender wouldn’t have mattered in choosing a partner when he was single. He’s happily married and is monogamous with his wife. Still, he’s altered his presentation — fashion, hair, piercings, slang — to align with queer culture, and he openly identifies as part of the queer community and attends queer events. It feels as if my friend is attempting to garner the benefits and cultural cachet of being queer while also living a heteronormative life. Is this permissible authentic expression, or is it cultural appropriation?

What benefits and cachet have you garnered recently?

Not only do I get to use my "garner (the word!)" tag — I have tags for "cultural appropriation" and "heteronormativity." That feels like some kind of tag jackpot. Unfortunately, I don't have a tag for "queer." And I'm not making one. Not today.

"Ever since the pandemic, parties are not what they used to be. Instead of flitting from table to table, some guests cower with their phones in the corners..."

"... if they show up at all. People seem more excited to stay home than go out; a viral TikTok meme celebrates the relief, and delight, of plans getting canceled at the last minute. In nightlife hot spots like New York and London, clubs are shutting down. Champagne sales are tanking, according to CNN (and those threatened 200 percent tariffs probably won’t make things better). In a rather on-the-nose development, Party City, once the go-to spot for party-phernalia like themed hats, paper napkins, goody bag stuffers and shimmery banners, is going out of business...."

From "Party City is closing and champagne sales are down. Are parties dying too? 'We’re so divided, we’re so tribalized,' says one nightlife habitué. But don’t pour one out for the social gathering yet" (WaPo).

Speaking of post-coronavirus culture, the new episode of "The Daily" podcast is "Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?" (Podscribe): "And I was so struck at the lack of skepticism over the course of the pandemic about these measures.... In the quarters, you know, that I travel in among academics or in mainstream media. That's where there seemed to be little questioning. It was almost seen as sort of wrong or immoral to raise questions about whether this was feasible for most of the population.... Business closures... economic loss... isolating human beings who are social creatures will have a whole series of knock-on effects...."

Sunrise — 6:55.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments. And support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

"You have a President who has sworn to get tough on the border and get tough on crime expelling from the United States — by his description — hundreds of criminal gang members."

"And so that's an easy narrative to understand. You know, who in the world wouldn't want a bunch of criminal gang members kicked out of the country? And what kind of crazy liberal judge would order those gang members back into America? And if you watch conservative media, that's the argument they're putting out. You know, this judge wants these gang members roaming around the streets, attacking your family and loved ones. You know, obviously this is terrain the Trump administration chose carefully to fight on, and they believe in the court of public opinion, most people will be on their side of this issue."

Says Luke Broadwater, in "Trump’s Showdown With the Courts," the new episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily."

The court of public opinion is part of the system of checks and balances. In the long run, the courts need public support. The law needs public support. The Chief Justice can assert that judges are neutral arbiters, just doing their job in a meticulously professional way, but if people don't believe that, it's not going to work. And if it isn't true, should you hope that people will nevertheless believe, because without the courts carrying out their traditional rituals with solemnity we're lost?

"The average American leaves 53 pounds, or $329 worth, of food on the plate at restaurants every year...."

"Changes to that number over time are hard to track.... But anecdotal evidence suggests such a change in diners’ perception of leftovers.... 'There are some people who have a thing against them.... 'People who just say, "I don’t eat leftovers," as a matter of principle.' But for others, she said, leftovers are a question of logistics. How much food is left? How many boxes are needed to take it home? How much time do I have to eat it? What am I doing after I leave?... Members of Generation Z grew up with the ability to order whatever they want, whenever they want, from their phones. Why bring home food from one restaurant when you can easily order something fresh the next day?... 'I think maybe it’s embarrassing, like you don’t want to be the equivalent of going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and putting rolls in your dinner jacket'...."

From "Is the Doggy Bag Dead? Restaurateurs in big cities have noticed a somewhat surprising shift in diner behavior" (NYT).

The article doesn't mention it, but the term "doggy bag" originates in the presumed embarrassment of taking home leftovers. It's for the dog, not for me.

The OED traces the "doggy" euphemism to a 1952 issue of American Restaurant: "It's a pleasure to hand this beautiful Doggie Pak to your patrons To Take Home Bones For Their Dog... Printed in three colors... It's class."

Then there's this line from "The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern" (1967): "'Doggie hungry. You take doggie bag,' said the caterer, and he pushed a foil-wrapped package into Qwilleran's hand." I was completely unfamiliar with the "Cat Who" series, but it looks like a big deal in the world of mysteries and prompts me to observe that nobody leaves a restaurant with a "cat bag." But then, nobody says "Who let the dog out of the bag?"

"It is more difficult than ever for a theoretical Van Gogh to become an actual Van Gogh, a familiar reality for collectors of star 20th-century artists."

"More than a decade ago, foundations for Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, and the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, got out of the authentication business altogether. Keeping fakes from circulating is an important task but led to lawsuits that threatened their broader work."

From "Van Gogh or Faux? Weeding Out Fakes Is Starting to Take a Toll. Attributing a work to the artist generally requires authentication by the Van Gogh Museum, but lawsuits and an influx of requests have made it reassess that role" (NYT).

I like the idea of a "theoretical Van Gogh." (It makes me want to craft a joke about a vincentretical Van Gogh.) You can imagine how many people have tried to paint like van Gogh — either to pull off a fraud or just because they love Van Gogh. And here's this guy suing over something he bought cheap that would be worth many millions if it were a real Van Gogh.

He says: "I am sure that my painting is a real Van Gogh. The entire painting radiates van Gogh. Everyone who sees it only thinks of Van Gogh." But that would be the mark of a fake Van Gogh! How would you fake Van Gogh? You'd try to make the entire painting radiate Van Gogh. The curly colorful strokes, the petals and tree trunks, the little man in the field. Everyone who sees it would only think of Van Gogh!

Sunrise — 7:03, 7:06, 7:07, 7:17.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments. And support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

Splashdown.

In the Gulf of America.

Astronauts unstranded. 

"Just hours after President Trump called for the impeachment of a judge who sought to pause the removal of more than 200 migrants to El Salvador, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. issued a rare public statement."

"'For more than two centuries,' the chief justice said, 'it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.' Mr. Trump had called the judge, James E. Boasberg, a 'Radical Left Lunatic' in a social media post and said he should be impeached."

Writes Adam Liptak, at the NYT.

Liptak was reminded of something the Chief said in 2018, "after Mr. Trump called a judge who had ruled against his administration’s asylum policy 'an Obama judge'": "We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.... What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for."

Of course, that doesn't stop the NYT from telling us the name of the President who appointed the federal judges whose names arise in the news.

"Democrats seem to have no ability to stop him... So that leaves the courts, but for the courts to hold Trump accountable, to stop Trump...

"... they need for people to bring lawsuits and matters before them. And the people best equipped to do that are the big law firms in Washington. But if those firms are afraid that if they enter that fight, they could lose all of their business, Trump is then essentially taking one of his biggest adversaries off the playing field.... There are other lawyers who can bring these matters and that are skilled, but the ones with the most horsepower are potentially being sidelined. I've been reporting on this for the past week and a half, and I've learned that the leaders of these law firms have gone back and forth with each other about what to do.... Privately, they will all tell me how horrific they think this is. But publicly, they're saying very little."

Said Mike Schmidt, on "How Trump Is Scaring Big Law Firms Into Submission," today's episode of the NYT podcast, "The Daily" (link goes to Podscribe, with full transcript and audio).

And here's Schmidt's article from a few days ago: "Trump’s Revenge on Law Firms Seen as Undermining Justice System/The president’s use of government power to punish firms is seen by some legal experts as undercutting a basic tenet: the right to a strong legal defense" ("With the stroke of a pen last week, Mr. Trump sought to cripple Perkins Coie, a firm that worked with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, by stripping its lawyers of security clearances needed to represent some clients and limiting the firm’s access to government buildings and officials. That action came after he revoked security clearances held by any lawyers at the firm Covington & Burling who were helping provide legal advice to Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two federal indictments against Mr. Trump.)

"How do I politely tell people I don’t like having anyone visit me in my home? My home is my safe haven."

"The energy of the outside world drains me, and I don’t want that feeling inside my home. This includes family members, friends, neighbors, church family and anyone else who might come knocking on my door. I have anxiety and some unresolved trauma I’m working through that contributes to this. I’m happy to meet in a public place or visit someone in their home if we are both comfortable with it. My family cannot understand why I’m like this. They think they have a right to my space simply because they are family. I don’t mind anyone thinking I’m weird, but how do I respond without feeling like I have to explain myself?"

An interesting point of view, articulated in the form of a letter to the entity known as "Dear Abby."

If you don't mind anyone thinking you're weird, just say what you feel. And if you don't want to feel that you have to explain yourself, why are you asking how to respond?

Where do people get the idea they can invite themselves into someone else's house? 

"There's a term in law: justiciable. This is not justiciable."

Stephen Miller instructs Kasie Hunt:

ADDED: From the comments over there: "The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available."

Is it possible for both sides to do the Gish gallop at each other?

"Just days after giving birth, she returned to work on the Trump campaign, saying she was motivated to forgo maternity leave following the July 13 assassination attempt..."

"I looked at my husband and said, 'Looks like I’m going back to work.... I felt compelled to be present in this historic moment,' she added. 'The president literally put his life on the line to win this election. The least I could do is get back to work quickly."

From "White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, 27, Addresses Her 'Atypical' 32-Year Age Gap with Husband/Leavitt tied the knot with husband Nicholas Riccio, 59, in January 2025 after welcoming son Niko in 2024" (People). Niko was born on July 10th. Baby (and wedding) pics at the link.

Here's Leavitt at yesterday's press conference. I've cued up the discussion of the auto-pen pardons:

Leavitt: "The president was begging the question that I think a lot of journalists in this room should be asking about whether or not not the former President of the United States — who I think we can all finally agree was cognitively impaired — I know it took people some time to finally admit that but, we all know that to be true, as evidenced by his disastrous debate performance against President Trump during the campaign — I digress on that — but the President was raising the point that: Did the President even know about these pardons? Was his legal signature used without his consent or knowledge?

Sunrise — 6:50, 6:56, 7:02, 7:08.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments. And support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

"The Trump administration on Monday repeatedly stonewalled a federal judge seeking answers about whether the government had violated his order barring the deportation..."

"...of more than 200 noncitizens without due process, escalating a conflict that threatened to become a constitutional crisis.... Judge James E. Boasberg... said, he wanted only to figure out the timeline of the flights to determine whether they were in violation of his ruling. But [Justice Department lawyer, Abhishek Kambli] repeatedly refused to say anything about the flights, citing 'national security.' He simply reiterated the government’s position that it had done nothing to violate Judge Boasberg’s order..."

The NYT reports.

Meanwhile, Tom Homan said "We’re not stopping.... I don’t care what the judges think — I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming."

"A new report is shedding more light on why UW-Madison’s director of Division of Diversity, Equity & Educational Achievement lost his job."

"The report, which was released Friday, details how former DDEEA chief LaVar Charleston spent millions of dollars, handed out bonuses and raises, and never fully communicated any of it to anyone else at the school.... But perhaps the most damning part of the report came from what Charleston spent on training, travel, and events. Which totals over $2.5 million last year alone.... The report does not detail where those trips or training took place, or who was allowed to go. UW-Madison removed Charleston from his job at the DDEEA in January, but did not fire him. He’s currently on leave from his $133,000 job as a professor. He made over $300,000 as DEI boss. The report also details how the university’s governance system allowed Charleston to spend so much money without anyone knowing until afterwards...."

The MacIver Report reports.

Here's the Fox News report: "University of Wisconsin-Madison's ex-diversity officer scrutinized over spending, judgment amid DEI crackdown/Lavar Charleston was removed from his role as chief diversity officer in January, but continues to serve as a faculty member." 

"Hunter Biden has had Secret Service protection for an extended period of time, all paid for by the United States Taxpayer."

"There are as many as 18 people on this Detail, which is ridiculous! He is currently vacationing in, of all places, South Africa, where the Human Rights of people has been strenuously questioned. Because of this, South Africa has been taken off our list of Countries receiving Economic and Financial Assistance. Please be advised that, effective immediately, Hunter Biden will no longer receive Secret Service protection. Likewise, Ashley Biden who has 13 agents will be taken off the list."

Writes Donald Trump, at Truth Social.

"It’s time to not just try to love one another, because we know the difference between trying and doing. It’s time to do."

Said Jesse Colin Young, in 2018.

Quoted in "Jesse Colin Young, Singer Who Urged Us to ‘Get Together,’ Dies at 83/As the leader of the Youngbloods, he sang one of the enduring anthems of the peace-and-love era. He went on to have a prolific career as a solo artist" (NYT).

ADDED: Here’s a Youngbloods single that I owned and played many times back in the 1960s: “Grizzly Bear.”

AND: 

"President Trump wrote on social media on Sunday night that he no longer considered valid the pardons his predecessor granted to members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol..."

"... and a range of other people whom Mr. Trump sees as his political enemies, because they were signed using an autopen device.... But Mr. Trump’s assertion, which embraced a baseless right-wing conspiracy theory about former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., was a new escalation of his antidemocratic rhetoric. Implicit in his post was Mr. Trump’s belief that the nation’s laws should be whatever he decrees them to be. And it was a jolting reminder that his appetite for revenge has not been sated."

The NYT reports.

The NYT writer — Shawn McCreesh — observes "There is no power in the Constitution or case law to undo a pardon, and there is no exception to pardons signed by autopen," but to say that is to look past the question whether there  was a pardon. Even if a pardon can't be undone, how do we know it was ever done? We have a piece of writing, signed by autopen, and maybe it can be shown to have originated within the White House. The power that is in the Constitution is given to "The President," so, interpreting that clause, one might question whether his hand must do the signing... and whether his mind comprehended what he was doing.

But I can't believe courts would entertain challenges like that. It's the ultimate can of worms. Consider the parallel problem in the exercise of power within the judicial branch. We assume that the judicial opinions that emerge from the usual channels are signed/"signed" by the judges whose names appear on them and that the judges minds made the decisions that appear in the words of the text. We may well suspect that law clerks wrote the some of the opinions and even that some of the judges don't understand "their" own opinions. But we accept that they are what they purport to be. Beyond that lies chaos.

ADDED: Here is Trump's post on Truth Social:

"It's the $19 strawberry from Erewhon!"

I'm reading "I tried the viral $20 strawberry. It tasted like the end of the American empire/A single strawberry flown in from Japan is selling for $20 in a hip LA grocery store. Does it symbolize the worst of American excess, or is it simply delicious?" in The Guardian.

It calls attention to this TikTok of a young woman — whose family owns the luxury grocery store Erewhon — emoting over the consumption of an overpackaged, overpriced single strawberry:

Sunrise — 7:11.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments. And support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

"Let’s take it as a given, in any case, that it is wrong to murder a person, and then move quickly on from that baseline moral assumption."

"What can be said about the powerful and in many ways surprising reaction to the cold-blooded killing of Thompson, and to the chief suspect in that crime, Luigi Mangione?... The crime itself, and the growing agglomeration of cultural evidence around it, is almost hysterically overdetermined. It’s about the barbarism of America’s health care system; it’s about the extent to which people have become desensitized to violence; it’s about how the Internet has melted everyone’s brains; it’s about how we can’t help judging attractive people... by different standards from those we apply to everyone else; it’s about a growing and quasi-revolutionary rage at the structural violence of capitalism; and it’s about (depending on which opinion columnist you want to go with) white privilege, the coarsening of American political discourse, and the problem of male loneliness.... If Mangione did commit the murder of which he stands accused, it may have been because he felt that more democratic and ethical ways of refashioning a system grotesquely misshapen in the interests of the rich were not viable, or at least less attractive."

Writes Mark O'Connell, in "Single-Player Politics/Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of a health care CEO was conceived—and received—as a move within a game of symbols" (NYRB).

I can't believe I read that. I'm getting a little hysterically overdetermined. 

"Many days pass in darkness, the sun and moon and stars blocked out by volcanic smoke and toxic ash, a pall sometimes red, orange or yellow. Water is rationed."

"People buy homemade toilet paper from peddlers on the street using the tabs from aluminum cans as currency. There’s no internet, no television or radio. Wandering immigrants seeking asylum sleep packed in the tail of a crashed jetliner.... The possession of books is illegal. In their indefatigable resourcefulness, people fabricate their own media to clandestinely convey text, like the 'halceamadon,' a complexly folded piece of parchment paper containing a microscript written backward. At the crux of it all is a cohort of intractable women who resist the prevailing regime and struggle to live authentic, exuberant lives in the face of tyrannical repression and widespread deprivation....."

Writes Mark Leyner, reviewing "Brother Brontë" in "I’ll Have the Psychedelic Dystopia With Everything on It/Fernando A. Flores’s new novel imagines a bleak world where books are illegal and deprivation is the norm. It’s a blast" (NYT).

At one point, Leyner asserts, "'Brother Brontë' is like that mythical sub sandwich with literally everything on it."

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "I'm reading about 'a mythical sub sandwich with literally everything on it.' What's that?" and "The NYT used the expression as if it might be from some comedian and I got the impression that 'everything' was portrayed as literal, beyond just food, and including every item in the world, in the universe. Reminds me of the old Woody Allen [?] joke about a Zen monk asking at a deli counter, 'Make me one with everything.'"

In its answer, Grok formulated a joke I actually liked: "I ordered a sub with everything—now it’s got salami, provolone, the Andromeda Galaxy, and my childhood trauma, and the guy’s still asking if I want it toasted!"

"A shutdown would shut down all government agencies, and it would solely be up to Trump and DOGE and Musk what to open again..."

"... because they could determine what was essential. So their goal of decimating the whole federal government, of cutting agency after agency after agency, would occur under a shutdown. Two days from now in a shutdown, they could say, well, food stamps for kids is not essential. It’s gone. All veterans offices in rural areas are gone. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. They’re not essential. We’re cutting them back. So it’d be horrible. The damage they can do under a shutdown is much worse than any other damage that they could do.... It can last forever. There is no off ramp. One of the Republican senators told us: We go to a shutdown, it’s going to be there for six months, nine months, a year. And by then, their goal of destroying the federal government would be gone. And finally, one final point here, and that is that right now under the C.R., you can go to court and contest an executive order to shut something down. Under a shutdown, the executive branch has sole power.... I felt so strongly as a leader that I couldn’t let this happen.... I had to do what I had to do...."

Said Chuck Schumer, quoted in "The Interview/Chuck Schumer on Democrats, Antisemitism and His Shutdown Retreat" (NYT).

By "their goal of destroying the federal government would be gone," he meant, I think, their goal of destroying the federal government would be achieved. I guess it's technically correct to say a goal is "gone" when a goal has been transformed into a reality. I think Schumer got distracted by the hyperbole of "destroying the federal government" and the opportunity to say "the federal government would be gone." The federal government would be "gone" if it were "destroyed." Colorful language is tricky!

But anyway... I think Schumer analyzed the situation correctly and made the right choice. He's getting viciously attacked by fellow Democrats, but I can't believe they don't understand why his analysis was correct. Those whose votes were not needed to prevent what he correctly envisioned — they can carry on in public and kick him around, but privately they must be grateful to him... unless they are fools.

"It’s not hard to imagine how the attempt to squelch legitimate debate may have started."

"Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren’t just earnestly making inquiries, they were acting in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention. For scientists and public health officials, circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy. That’s also why it might be tempting for those officials, or the organizations they represent, to avoid looking too closely at mistakes they made, at the ways that, while trying to do such a hard job, they may have withheld relevant information and even misled the public.... We may not know exactly how the Covid pandemic started, but if research activities were involved, that would mean two out of the last four or five pandemics were caused by our own scientific mishaps...."

Writes Zeynep Tufekci, in "We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives" (NYT).

"Bowser caving immediately to the faintest hint of pressure on the name of the plaza is somehow even more cynical than the move to name it Black Lives Matter Plaza in the first place."

Said Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, a Georgetown philosophy professor (who, we're told, is black).

He's quoted in "Black Lives Matter Plaza Is Gone. Its Erasure Feels Symbolic. The movement that prompted 'Black Lives Matter' to be painted in bold yellow near the White House is in retreat. Its leaders are asking what comes next for social justice" (NYT). From the article:

"I told them not to worry, nobody does self-deprecating better than I do."

Said Donald Trump at the Gridiron Dinner in 2018. Supposedly, there was worry that he might not be able to fit the tradition of Presidents being self-deprecating.

Last night was this year's Gridiron Dinner, and he wasn't there at all: "At Gridiron Dinner, Jokes About Trump, Musk and Russia Abound/But President Trump wasn’t around to hear any of the barbs thrown at the annual D.C. event" (NYT). I read that NYT article so you don't have to. Sounds like the NYT is also tired of it:

Even after all these years, jokes about Mr. Trump and Russia still play with the official Washington crowd. Those in the Hyatt basement, which was packed with reporters, editors, television anchors and ambassadors, laughed along.... The PBS journalist Judy Woodruff opened up the room with jokes about Mr. Musk’s fathering so many children and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s drinking....  One of the less successful acts centered on two men pretending to be the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and Mr. Schumer, the Senate minority leader, covered in leaves. “Lost in the woods” was the chorus. (“No one cares about your pronouns when you’re lost in the woods.”).... Another act had a mock Usha Vance singing about being a phony populist....

Alien.

‘Alien’ welcomes Space X Dragon capsule crew as they arrive on the International Space Station to rescue the stranded NASA astronauts.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague dressed up in the alien mask to give the crew an extraterrestrial welcome. 👽🛸 pic.twitter.com/TUpFnCo8sz

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) March 16, 2025

AND: Here's video from the outside, showing SpaceX Dragon docking with Space Station. And here's a view of hugs all around on the inside.