Dana Milbank లేబుల్‌తో ఉన్న పోస్ట్‌లను చూపుతోంది. అన్ని పోస్ట్‌లు చూపించు
Dana Milbank లేబుల్‌తో ఉన్న పోస్ట్‌లను చూపుతోంది. అన్ని పోస్ట్‌లు చూపించు

13 ఫిబ్రవరి, 2026

"A day into the silence, I felt like taking a nap, and the urge intensified into thorough exhaustion. I took a walk outside..."

"... and gobbled a few cookies in hopes of a sugar boost, to no avail. I fell asleep before dinner and, after rallying for the evening meditation session, was out for the night by 8:30 p.m. The instructor said she often sees this reaction. Some people experience an adrenaline crash as their stressed minds and bodies adjust to the calm. But it also turns out that suddenly shutting off external stimuli and turning attention inward can demand a startling amount of energy."

Writes Dana Milbank, in "I went into phone-free silence. Something disturbing happened. Suddenly shutting off external signals and focusing inward can demand a startling amount of energy" (WaPo)(free link).

I was surprised to see the cookies, especially the gobbling thereof. Even if cookies are available at a silent retreat, I would think slow, mindful nibbling would be seen as necessary. I mean, gobbling, it suggests obnoxious sounds coming from the mouth, and it is the word we use for the alarming awful sound made by turkeys. 

19 సెప్టెంబర్, 2025

"Ted Pellegatta... did odd jobs his whole life and lived in a studio apartment attached to a vacant barn."

"He often stood outside a local restaurant hawking copies of his self-published books of poetry and photos to supplement his $1,000-per-month Social Security check..... But Pellegatta died a happy man when he succumbed to metastatic cancer last month at the age of 85.... He was a MAGA guy who was beloved by liberals. He was an old Marine, waiter and farmhand who made friends with all classes, ages and colors.... His signature achievement was the coffee klatch he convened at the local coffee shop, Before & After, just about every morning for the past 10 years, and in other locations before that. Day after day, he’d sit in the front of the shop, wearing his cowboy hat... over his wild silver hair, and serve as the unofficial chairman.... Anybody who walked in was welcome in the discussion. The ground rules were simple: Show interest in one another... and refuse to fight.... If an argument got too hot, he’d shut it down with a 'meow.' If somebody was pontificating, he’d drop his head and snore. If the conversation annoyed him, he’d get up and leave — then start again the next day...."


The article — by Dana Milbank — mentions Charlie Kirk, but only like this: "Last week’s gruesome slaying of conservative leader Charlie Kirk was followed predictably by finger-pointing and cries for vengeance in many corners of the United States. But not at Before & After...." I wanted it to mention Charlie Kirk as a model for communication between people who disagree. Anybody who walked in was welcome in the discussion. 

4 జులై, 2024

"Yes, I think Donald Trump should step down as his party’s presidential nominee. He is manifestly unfit to serve, both dangerously incompetent and clearly out of his mind."

Said Dana Milbank, one of 5 Washington Post columnists participating in an exercise called "If not Biden, who? Five columnists rate the field of potential replacements for the Democratic presidential nominee" (WaPo).

That's a gift link, so you can click over there and see them dream up the Whitmer/Booker ticket. Perry Bacon Jr. says:
Why pair Whitmer with Booker? He, like Kamala D. Harris, tried to run in between the left (Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) and the center-left candidates (Biden) during his 2020 presidential run. That strategy didn’t work in such a crowded field. But a candidate who is not a clear leftie or moderate could be a unifying figure. Booker remains very well-liked in the party. Diversity matters, so it’s important to have a non-White candidate. Booker (who is 55) combined with Whitmer (52) are a ticket that could address some of Biden-Harris’s current shortfalls among younger and Black voters as well as appealing to the majority of voters who don’t want a president in his 80s.

Diversity matters, that's why we're kicking our diversity-matters VP Kamala Harris to the curb and replacing her with a new repository of diversity. We'll split the diversity of Kamala in two and run with a white female presidential candidate and a black male vice presidential candidate. The young folks will love it. And besides, we can do what we want because Donald Trump is clearly out of his mind.

But the "out of his mind" man knows it's got to be Kamala:

"I got [Biden] out of there, and that means we have Kamala. I think she's going to be better. She's so bad. She's so pathetic. She's so fucking bad."

***

There's much more at that WaPo link — so many crazy statements from people who smugly declare Donald Trump to be out of his mind. I could write 10 blog posts excerpting different quotes and riffing on them, but I need to spread the love around. Happy 4th of July!

26 జూన్, 2024

"Jamaal Bowman was a Democratic Trump. Now he’s gone. It’s an encouraging sign that there is a critical mass on the left who can say: Stop."

That's the headline at WaPo... for a column by Dana Milbank.

This is the story of two New York demagogues. Both men have a history of bigotry, bullying, law breaking, promoting bogus conspiracy theories, engaging in obscene public rants and playing the martyr.

One, embraced by the Republican Party, became president and may well become president again. The other, kept at arm’s length by the Democratic Party, was dumped by Democratic voters in a congressional primary Tuesday night.

Obscene? Milbank notes that Trump has been saying "bullshit," "shitty," "scum," and "son of a bitch," whereas Bowman just had a rally where he said "We are going to show fucking AIPAC the power of the motherfucking South Bronx! … We’re going to show them who the fuck we are!"

ADDED: I would think the biggest problem with "We are going to show fucking AIPAC the power of the motherfucking South Bronx" is that Bowman's district is the north Bronx (along with the southern half of Westchester County).

26 నవంబర్, 2022

WaPo columnist Dana Milbank "recently bought a property in the Virginia Piedmont, with the pandemic-inspired idea of finding peace in nature."

"On paper, the parcel is three-quarters wooded, one-quarter pasture. In practice, the place is about 95 percent brush... an entire civilization of invasive vines and weeds.... Asiatic bittersweet and porcelain berry, kudzu and Japanese honeysuckle, invasive wineberry and aggressive Canada goldenrod had devoured the place, turning forest and field alike into tangled masses of vines and thorns, and murdering defenseless native trees by strangulation and theft of sunlight... [A]ny attempt to remove the invaders by mechanical means alone (or by planting more native species — which will be the topic of a future column) is doomed; the interlopers would grow back faster than I could cut them out or replace them. The only chance of victory... is with a laborious, multiyear course of herbicides applied to each invasive plant.... Clearly, I won’t be defeating these invaders. At best, I’ll battle them... holding them at bay until I lose the will to fight them...."

From "I’m losing the battle against the brush. I’m not alone." 

He tells us the place is 95% brush but not how big it is. Why did he buy land that had problems he didn't understand at all and that make the place entirely unsuitable for its intended purpose (finding peace)? And more importantly, why does a person with this level of practical sense and good judgment have a column in The Washington Post expounding on politics? Can we take his inane real estate venture as a metaphor?

7 జులై, 2022

"Always love your photos, the rising and the setting. How about you take a stab at D Millbank(sic, maybe)’s defense of Biden in WaPo today."

"I trust your judgment enough to want to know what you thought…. Is this the denial stage then, or a shot off the bow to start it?"

Wrote Rhonda, in the first post of last night's open thread (which had a few sunrise photos).

I'm glad to hear from Rhonda. Why, only 5 days ago, I commented — in a post about pinkness — that the name Rhonda means "the noisy one." The name Rhoda means rose — pink. One letter makes so much difference.

But here's Rhonda making noise about me possibly blogging a Dana Milbank column that I'd already skimmed and deemed too dumb to blog: "Give Biden a break." Give me a break.

3 మే, 2022

"Democrats need — but so far lack — a consistent national message for the midterm elections.... Even the abortion rights movement has seemed distracted by semantics..."

"... moving, for example, to replace the phrase 'a woman’s right to choose' with 'a person’s right to choose.' That well-intended inclusion of transgender and nonbinary people unfortunately blurs the essential message that the coming abortion ban is a frontal assault on women’s rights. Instead of playing into the talons of the opposition, let’s make sure every voter knows what these toxic turkeys are up to as they shrug off sexual assault and push for a nationwide abortion ban: They are vitiating a half-century of progress for women."

From "The turkeys of toxic masculinity strut their stuff" by Dana Milbank (WaPo). 

1. The reference to turkeys has to do with an actual turkey that has been biting and scratching people on Anacostia Riverwalk Trail in Washington D.C. There's an analogy there. It's intended to be funny. An aggressive bird. Like the bird is a jerk. But surely the Republicans are jerks.

2. Milbank wrote "the coming abortion ban" just before the draft opinion leaked. I don't think he had any idea how soon it was coming.

3. There's a price to be paid for all the speech control that been undertaken to display superficial deference to transgender and nonbinary people. We've been suppressing awareness of the difference between male and female bodies, as if the vulnerability to pregnancy does not dramatically affect life for a woman. Life isn't just about how you feel inside about things you think of as gender. There's an outward reality that has to do with a very particular right that we fought so long to get acknowledged, struggled for 5 decades to keep, and lost just yesterday. And we're supposed to modify how we speak and not say "woman"!

6 ఏప్రిల్, 2022

"In four days of Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the phrase 'child porn' (or 'pornography' or 'pornographer') was mentioned 165 times."

"There were also, according to transcripts, 142 uses of 'sex' ('sexual abuse,' 'sexual assault,' 'sexual intercourse,' 'sex crimes'), 15 of 'pedophile,' 13 of 'predators,' 18 of 'prepubescent' and nine of general pornography.... The Republican fixation on pornography continued during Monday’s round of statements by senators before the committee advanced Jackson’s nomination to the Senate floor. A preliminary transcript showed 41 mentions of 'porn' or 'pornography' and 32 mentions of 'sex offenders,' 'sexual assault' and the like.... Republicans on the committee congratulated themselves for avoiding 'personal slanders' of the sort they said Democrats inflicted on Brett M. Kavanaugh after women accused the Donald Trump nominee of sexual misconduct. Yet, they opposed Jackson with the most grievous of personal slanders... Graham: 'Every judge who does what you’re doing is making it easier for the children to be exploited.' Cruz: 'I also see a record of … advocacy as it concerns sexual predators.' Blackburn: 'What’s your hidden agenda? Is it to let … child predators back to the streets?' And, of course, there was Hawley, who previewed the hearings by saying Jackson’s record 'endangers our children.'"

From "Senate Republicans’ unhealthy fixation on child porn, by the numbers" by Dana Milbank (WaPo).

What goes around, comes around. Oh, but it came back around in a different form! An unhealthy and fixated form....

It's different but is it worse?

15 ఫిబ్రవరి, 2022

"When (predominantly White) crowds protest for the right to ignore public health rules in mostly peaceful but occasionally violent and highly disruptive actions..."

"... Republican officials hail the glory of civil disobedience. When (heavily Black) crowds protested for racial justice in mostly peaceful but occasionally violent and highly disruptive actions, Trump called them 'rioters, looters and anarchists' not to mention 'terrorists,' 'arsonists' and 'violent mobs.' 'I’m old enough to remember when Black Lives Matter shut down highways and the right responded with laws making it easier to run protesters over — and get away with it!' conservative Matt Lewis wrote in the Daily Beast. It’s true: Last year, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a law granting civil immunity to people who drive through protesters blocking a street. Texas, Oklahoma and other states enacted similar laws. Now, Republican officials are lending rhetorical support and financial protection to the White men blocking the streets of Ottawa? This isn’t 'reclaiming the dream.' It’s a bad acid trip."

Writes Dana Milbank in "Opinion: Sixty years late, right-wingers join the counterculture" (WaPo).

26 సెప్టెంబర్, 2020

For the annals of "taking pains."

"For five years, my colleagues and I have taken pains to avoid Nazi comparisons," writes Dana Milbank in "This is not a drill. The Reichstag is burning" (WaPo).

1 ఆగస్టు, 2020

Kamala Harris allies do a conference call with Joe Biden campaign staff and we get to read about it...

... at Politico. So embarrassing! Can't he at least look like he's in command, seeing what's good and bad in the people he knows, making his own decision? Why am I able to see that there's a "vetting unit" that includes Christopher Dodd, who's said something about Harris having "no remorse" for her "little girl was me" remark at a debate last year? I'm seeing the names of all these people on the conference call who were pitching Kamala Harris to Biden's people:
The conference call included several of the state’s highest-ranking elected officials and labor and business leaders, including Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, Secretary of State Alex Padilla, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, state schools chief Tony Thurmond, state Treasurer Fiona Ma and Chad Griffin, a Democratic consultant and former head of Human Rights campaign, according to organizers. Representing the Biden campaign were the four main members of his vetting team: Dodd, Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti; and Biden's former White House and Senate counsel, Cynthia Hogan....
Somebody leaked all that. How messy!
A person on the call said Harris’ allies wanted the campaign to hear from people who know her best.... "This was about us sharing how much Kamala would be a stellar vice president," said one official who participated on the call, referencing Dodd’s earlier remarks. 'He spoke at length about her and said very nice things," the person said of Dodd’s comments about Harris on the conference call.... Dodd said “very supportive things” about Harris during the call, according to Kounalakis.... Critics suggested that Dodd was questioning a woman for being ambitious....
I don't think hearing about this call helps Harris! The call was intended to help Harris, and the leaker seems to want to help Harris, but now I'd be surprised if it's Harris.

Meanwhile, at the Washington Post, Dana Milbank is doing all he can to stomp on Susan Rice: "Why would Biden pick a human lightning rod as VP?"

1 జులై, 2020

"Sen. Rand Paul doesn’t much care what Anthony Fauci has to say. The Kentucky Republican gets his public health advice from Friedrich Hayek."

"Hayek, the Austrian-born economist and libertarian hero, died in 1992. But Paul, an ophthalmologist before he took up politics, still takes medical guidance from the 20th-century philosopher. 'Hayek had it right!' Paul proclaimed at Tuesday’s Senate health committee hearing on the coronavirus pandemic. 'Only decentralized power and decision-making based on millions of individualized situations can arrive at what risks and behaviors each individual should choose.' Paul focused his wrath on Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious-disease official. 'Virtually every day we seem to hear from you things we can’t do,' Paul complained. 'All I hear is, we can’t do this, we can’t do that, we can’t play baseball.' Fauci assured Paul that 'I never said we can’t play a certain sport.' Unsatisfied, Paul demanded: 'We just need more optimism.'"

From "Could America’s pandemic response be any more medieval?" by Dana Milbank (WaPo).

Medieval?! If you're like me, you're thinking, what is medieval about looking at the big picture that includes maintaining psychological well-being and willingness to keep going through hard times and to invest in the future?

Milbank says "it feels" — feels!! — "as though 21st-century America is 14th-century Europe, reacting with all manner of useless countermeasures to the plague: balancing ill 'humors' and dispelling evil 'vapors' caused by planetary misalignment, religious marches and public self-flagellation, cures involving live chickens and unicorns, and the wearing of amulets and reciting of 'abracadabra.'"

It's Milbank who is having an emotional reaction. He's telling us how "it feels" — reacting to Rand Paul's rational consideration of the psychological element of enduring the pandemic and maintaining our sanity and character. Milbank is simply freaking out and wildly insulting Paul.

Milbank proceeds to rant about anti-virus measures — requiring masks, etc. — but avoids Paul's main point, which is that top-down, centralized regulation isn't the answer: "Only decentralized power and decision-making based on millions of individualized situations can arrive at what risks and behaviors each individual should choose."

25 జూన్, 2020

"Last week, when Sue Schafer learned that the Washington Post planned to publish a story about one of the dumbest things she had ever done, she had the same question that many readers would have..."

"... about the resulting 3,000-word article, 'Blackface Incident at Post Cartoonist’s 2018 Halloween Party Resurfaces Amid Protests': Why is this newsworthy? Readers within the Post newsroom were asking the question, too. 'No one I’ve spoken with at the Post can figure out why we published this story,' said one prominent reporter at the paper. 'We blew up this woman’s life for no reason.' In 2018, Schafer attended a Halloween party at the home of Tom Toles, the Post’s Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial cartoonist. The basis for Schafer’s costume was topical. NBC had recently fired Megyn Kelly after she said, on the air, that she didn’t understand why it was necessarily considered racist for people to wear blackface as part of a Halloween costume. Schafer, who is white, decided to lampoon the anchor by dressing as Megyn Kelly–in–blackface.... The Post said Schafer’s transgression was news because it happened in front of Toles and somewhere possibly in the vicinity of columnist Dana Milbank.... The story first arrived at the Post via management consultant Lexie Gruber, who, along with her friend Lyric Prince, an artist, had confronted Schafer that night in 2018.... Nineteen months later, on June 9, Gruber contacted Toles, whom she didn’t know, to ask for help identifying the woman... Toles claimed, falsely, not to recognize her.... Schafer told New York that when she asked [the author of the WaPo article] why the story was news, he replied, 'We have to do it or they will go to another outlet.'... Gruber expressed surprise that the reporters directed so much attention to Schafer — and to herself and Prince — instead of the more notable people at the party. 'I can understand people being curious: Why did they write a piece so focused on a private citizen?' she said. 'But Tom [Toles] is a public citizen. To me, it’s about a larger problem, where people go to marches and then drink and dance with people in blackface.'... How can Toles’s failure to promptly order Schafer out of his house be simultaneously so important that it merits feature-length coverage in the paper and not important enough to merit workplace discipline?"

From "Why Did the Washington Post Get This Woman Fired?" (NY Magazine).

What a clusterfuck! I think it's rather obvious that the ball got rolling when everybody hated Megyn Kelly and imagined they were enjoying her downfall. I wonder if Megyn Kelly is getting some weird muffled last laugh out of all this.

12 ఫిబ్రవరి, 2020

"Even by Trumpian standards, the jowly Barr, in his large round glasses, pinstripe suit and Trump-red tie, was strikingly sycophantic."

"'In his State of the Union, President Trump delivered a message of genuine optimism filled with an unapologetic faith in God and in American greatness and in the common virtues of the American people: altruism, industriousness, self-reliance and generosity,' he read, deadpan. Trump, he went on, 'loves this country,' and 'he especially loves you.' The boot-licking performance continued, about Trump’s wise leadership, his unbroken promises and even the just-impeached president’s passionate belief in the 'rule of law.' Then Barr turned to the enemy. He attacked 'rogue DA’s' and 'so-called social-justice reformers,' who are responsible for 'historic levels of homicide and other violent crime' in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago and Baltimore. Politicians in sanctuary jurisdictions, he said, prefer 'to help criminal aliens evade the law.'"

From a Dana Milbank column in The Washington Post with the somewhat strange headline "Why Bill Barr’s DOJ replaced Catholic Charities with Hookers for Jesus." That headline focuses on something that appears at the top of the column, the news that a group called Hookers received a grant from the Justice Department for its work with victims of human trafficking. I know nothing about the group, but Milbank is simply expecting us to register instinctive contempt for prostitutes, but that's glaringly inconsistent with empathy for the victims of human trafficking.

The description of Milbank at the bottom of his column is: "He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics." So, in this case, it's Barr — jowly Barr, in his large round glasses — who I think bears a strong resemblance to Elton John at the Oscars — looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid...



It's pretty easy to mock someone for being fat and wearing glasses. It's the cheapest shot of all, perhaps even foolish, fallacious, and felonious.

And what about those Hookers for Jesus? Milbank links to this Reuters article, which says:
Hookers for Jesus, which received $530,190 over three years, is run by a born-again Christian trafficking survivor who has lobbied against decriminalizing prostitution.... Hookers for Jesus operates a safe house for female adult trafficking victims that, in 2010 and in 2018....

Hookers for Jesus founder Annie Lobert denied that her organization requires safe house residents to attend services at her church. “We are not going to discriminate toward anyone,” she said. “But,” she added, “we are Christian. And there is an understanding before they come in here that we are Christian.”...
Here's the Wikipedia page for Annie Lobert:
Annie Lobert (born September 26, 1967) is an American former call girl and sex industry worker, who founded the international Christian ministry Hookers for Jesus.... Lobert worked as a prostitute in Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and Hawaii for 16 years. She left the sex industry with the support of Al Nakata, one of her regular customers, who had fallen in love with her....

In 2008, Hookers for Jesus established a safe house program in the Las Vegas area with one of The Church at South Las Vegas intern homes. The program, titled "Destiny House", is a safe haven for victims of sex trafficking and primarily serves prostitutes and local sex trade workers. Annie left CSLV (Church of South Las Vegas) and currently has a new Destiny House Estate.
What's wrong with giving this group a federal grant?

ADDED: From the comments over at WaPo:
Dana, once again, you've shown this President and his jackboots to be naked partisans, willing to sacrifice the good of our Nation for Trump's own personal gain....
That raises 2 questions: 1. Are you really naked if you're still wearing shoes/boots? and 2. If you read about victimized prostitutes and then you feel moved to talk in terms of nakedness, is your heart in the right place?

1 ఫిబ్రవరి, 2020

I'm sorry. I have rig fatigue.

There are things I'm not reading this morning. And I mean this phrase "not reading" to denote an active process. I should write it as one word: notreading.

For the list of things I'm notreading this morning: "The Senate impeachment trial was rigged!" (by Dana Milbank in WaPo).

Yeah, it was rigged. Everything is rigged. The election was rigged. Trump isn't really President. The impeachment trial was rigged. The acquittal won't count as an acquittal. If Trump wins reelection, it will be because it was rigged. It's all rigged. The Constitution itself is rigged. What's with that 2/3 vote requirement? Rigged. Electoral college? Rigged! Life itself is rigged!...

I'm sorry. I have rig fatigue.

ADDED: 2 things:

1. The trouble with writing "notreading" as one word is it has the "Superbowl" problem. How do you know it's not "superb owl"? How do you know it's not "no treading" — as in "Don't tread on me"?

2. That tag "active non-reading" is not new. "Rig fatigue" is new. But "active-nonreading" has a past on this blog. It's just one post, though, from last February — Sometimes I feel I must make a note of articles I saw and didn't read:

13 డిసెంబర్, 2019

Shall we avert our eyes?

None of the "top stories" at Vox is about impeachment...



... and 2 are about trees.

Tucked away at the bottom of the front page is one new story about impeachment, "Gaetz’s effort to make the impeachment hearing about Hunter Biden’s problems backfired spectacularly." There seems to be something about getting Gaetz today (I guess because he went after Hunter Biden). At WaPo, the second "most read" article is "Where is Matt Gaetz’s humanity?"

From the WaPo piece (a column by Dana Milbank):

20 ఆగస్టు, 2019

An hour and 30 minutes have passed since the first post of the day.

It was that thing about the vasectomy cake, which might make you think I have a low standard, but in fact the vasectomy cake met a very high standard, and I have been looking ever since to find something else that meets my standard.

I really mean it when I say better than nothing is a high standard. The vasectomy cake was in fact the only thing in an hour and a half of reading that was better than nothing. I considered and rejected:

1. "The U.S. must take Greenland by force!" by Dana Milbank (WaPo). Who cares how Milbank hits a softball?

2. "Trump is melting down. Again" by Eugene Robinson (WaPo). First line: "Uh-oh. President Trump is in such a state of panic about his dimming reelection prospects that he’s getting his lies mixed up and occasionally blurting out the truth." I considered a post title like "Uh-oh, WaPo is in such a state of panic about the Democrats' dimming reelection prospects that..." and then I just felt disgusted with the me who would write like that. A computer could be programmed to write a blog that just flips the partisanship of every headline.

3. "Conservative Scholar: The Real Racists Are People Who Call Trump Racist" by Jonathan Chait (NY Magazine). So the conservative scholar flipped a liberal meme to make it anti-liberal and liberal Chait will flip it back. Am I supposed to expend my cruel neutrality on such low-effort stuff? Chait has to write a column. He's paid to do it. I don't and I'm not.

4. "A Party Room and a Prison Cell Inside the Friends writers’ room," a book excerpt by Saul Austerlitz (at NY Magazine). I'm interested in "Friends," and the article is long. I read it. But that doesn't mean it has to become a blog post. It's less interesting than the vasectomy cake. And a vasectomy cake would be a great plotline for a "Friends" episode.

5. "Neil Young’s Lonely Quest to Save Music/He says low-quality streaming is hurting our songs and our brains. Is he right?" I love Neil Young. Nice black-and-white photograph of Neil Young. The first sentence is "Neil Young is crankier than a hermit being stung by bees" and we were just talking about bees, but the article is about digital audio, a topic he's been perseverating about for a quarter century. I make a mental note to pull out "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" for the next time we get together to play records.

27 జులై, 2019

"Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset" is a disgusting click-bait headline...

... for a column by Dana Milbank that begins:
Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset. This doesn't mean he's a spy, but neither is it a flip accusation.
I'm not going to link to the article, because that kind of dreck should not be rewarded.

Here's a link to Memeorandum which links and collects links to the link.

29 నవంబర్, 2018

"There are, of course, other life forms that do their 'thinking' with parts other than brains, but these tend to be sponges, scallops and..."

"... the slime mold that re-created a map of the Tokyo subway system — not exactly a desirable cohort in which the president has placed himself. Or perhaps [Trump] is claiming to be an evolutionary throwback. Anthropologists’ 'expensive-tissue hypothesis' posits that as animals’ guts got smaller, their brains got bigger. If Trump’s gut remains so prominent, might his brain be smaller than his hands? But Trump isn’t wrong to say his belly has brains. Researchers have found that bacteria in the gut send signals to the mind about what to eat, for example. I undertook a gut check on Trump with Braden Kuo, a director of the Center for Neurointestinal Health at Massachusetts General Hospital, and he told me the large number of neurons and neurotransmitters in the gut make it a sort of 'second brain.' This is why people eat comfort food when sad or get butterflies when anxious. 'A lot of our emotions, how we feel things, comes from nerve endings in our gut,' he says.... Bandy X. Lee, the Yale University psychiatrist who has sounded the alarm about the president’s mental functioning, thinks Trump’s preference for his gut is a rare moment of self-awareness. When Trump talks about his gut, she says, he’s really referring to his 'primitive brain' — from which a rush of emotion is 'overcoming him so he’s not able to access his actual intellect.'"

Dana Milbank endeavors to digest Trump's many reference to his "gut," in "Does Trump’s great gut mean a tiny brain?" (WaPo). This isn't about the size of his belly, but about his rhetoric — stuff like "They’re making a mistake... because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me" and "I know it better than anybody knows it, and my gut has always been right."

17 అక్టోబర్, 2018

"I'm not enrolled in a tribe, and only tribes determine tribal citizenship. I understand and respect that distinction."

What distinction?

That's Elizabeth Warren in this 5-and-a-half minute video dealing with the white-hot issue of the DNA test that does or doesn't support her statements over the years about her purported Native American ancestry.


I can figure out what distinction she means, but I'm interested in what bad writing reveals: "I'm not enrolled in a tribe, and only tribes determine tribal citizenship. I understand and respect that distinction." No distinction has been articulated. She's just conceded that she's not "Native American" in the sense that matters to the Cherokee Nation, which spoke up about her DNA test yesterday. To them, to be Cherokee is to have political status because the tribe has governmental power and controls its membership. The distinction Warren fails to articulate is between citizenship and genetic ancestry. Why doesn't she make that explicit? Does she think that touting one's genetics sounds wrong (at least to some people)? Does she not want to be confrontational to the Cherokee tribe by saying, yes, I know that tribal citizenship is important to you, and I'm not enrolled and don't qualify to be enrolled by your standards, but I've still got something going for me that I think matters, even though it's not what you think matters?

Why does it matter?! It matters because she talked about it in the past, and whether we believe all the law professors who say in that video that they did not take her supposed minority status into account when they hired her, we do know that she identified herself as Native American to the American Association of Law Schools and that Harvard Law School represented itself as having a Native American professor in its faculty when all it had was her. So the tiny percentage of possibly Native American DNA that Warren has matters only because she's fighting a charge of dishonesty and unfairness. If she had not used a claim of Native American ancestry in the past, she would never point to a DNA test now and say, look, I'm possibly a little tiny minuscule bit Native American. If that was the normal discourse in America, we'd be so bored with it by now.

I got that video at The Washington Post, where it appears with a Dana Milbank column:
Like most in the American melting pot, I’m a mutt: a stew of English and German, western pioneers and sharecroppers, immigrants from the shtetl and a great-great-great-grandfather who died fighting for the Iowa 39th Infantry in the Civil War.

This is why Warren’s DNA stunt was such a blunder: She took Trump’s DNA-test dare and let him divide us — again — by race and ethnicity....
Milbank relies on the same argument Warren uses in her video: Trump is the one using race to divide us. The defense of Trump there is: Trump calls out the dishonest use of race. But Milbank says something I think progressive Democrats like Warren disapprove of, the notion that America is a "melting pot." I think that's regarded as a microaggression.

From the Wikipedia article "Melting Pot":
In the early 20th century... [t]he melting pot was equated with either the acculturation or the total assimilation of European immigrants, and the debate centered on the differences between these two ways of approaching immigration: "Was the idea to melt down the immigrants and then pour the resulting, formless liquid into the preexisting cultural and social molds modeled on Anglo-Protestants like Henry Ford and Woodrow Wilson, or was the idea instead that everyone, Mayflower descendants and Sicilians, Ashkenazi and Slovaks, would act chemically upon each other so that all would be changed, and a new compound would emerge?"
We were talking about the idea of the "melting pot" back in June 2016. I wrote:
[Scott] Adams tries to figure out what Trump could say to undo the "crazy racist" branding. He pictures Trump saying he loves everyone and believes in the "melting pot."

I think what Trump is going to try to do... is argue that the true meaning of "racist" is what Democrats do, which is to openly talk about everyone — and to frame political appeals — in racial terms. What Trump said yesterday — about Elizabeth Warren — was "She made up her heritage which I think is racist. I think she's a racist actually, because what she did was very racist." The idea is: It's racist to exploit race, and they do that all the time. Democrats can be relied on to cite race continually, and Trump will have a lot of "there you go again" opportunities: They're trying to divide us by race to get political power for themselves. I will never do that.

ALSO: Trump might be able to get people to identify with him. He could say: I've been called a racist so unfairly, and it's what they do to you too if you don't stay in line. They've got people so afraid of being called a racist — completely unfairly — that half of the members of my own party are afraid to support me, they're so afraid they might get called a racist. This fear — this race-based fear, because of their racist name-calling — is terrible for America.