"Bro, do I have to sue CNN? They're making shit up. They are saying I'm taking horse dewormer. I literally got it [Ivermectin] from a doctor."

"And CNN is saying I'm taking horse dewormer. They must know that is a lie.... If the internet says it, who cares? But CNN is saying it. Jim Acosta! CNN was saying I am a distributor of misinformation.... I don't know what's going on, man... One of the speculations involves the Emergency Use Authorization for the vaccines. That, in order for there to be an emergency use authorization, there has to be no treatment for a disease. So, because there is this treatment in Ivermectin... there's a lot of pushback against potential treatments, pretending they don't really work or they are conspiracy theories. The grand conspiracy is that the pharmaceutical companies are in cahoots to try and make anybody who takes this stuff look crazy.... But what's crazy is look how better I got! I got better pretty quick, bitch. Because I wasn't scared during the entire pandemic, what they would like is that when I did get sick that I was really sick and became really scared and learned my lesson. Instead, it is the worst-case scenario for them. I bounce back about as quick as I can. They're haters. But that's their life. Imagine spending any time whatsoever wishing that a person felt bad... It doesn't make people feel worse."

Said Joe Rogan, on his podcast, transcribed at Real Clear Politics. This is the same podcast episode I blogged last night, here, but I think this additional transcription is well worth reading and discussing.

He's outraged if something sloppy is said about him, but he lobs a conspiracy theory against  the pharmaceutical companies. But I doubt that he will sue CNN. "Bro, do I have to sue CNN?" is rhetoric, and it works as speech. He doesn't need to get litigious. But maybe he should... 

Should Joe Rogan sue CNN for defamation?

Yes.

No.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"The social media bans bit hard into Trump’s visibility. But instead of reconstituting his following with the sort of show business flash and sparkle he brought to his White House years..."

"... and the 2016 campaign—rallies, press conferences, televised appearances—the former president spent most of his exile in the minimum security prison that is Mar-a-Lago, where he keeps a vigil over the banquet table, gives half-hearted speeches to tens of supporters about the 'stolen election,' exposes his kissable ring to the lips of supporters and golfs... Trump’s half-hearted attempts at gearing up his movement suggest he doesn’t really care as much about returning to Facebook as he lusts, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, to be a member of a club that doesn’t want him as a member. This half-heartedness informs almost every Trump move since the Biden victory was certified by Congress and the new administration took over. As Gabby Orr and Meridith McGraw reported for POLITICO in mid-March, Trump has been adrift during his exile, indecisive, meandering and dawdling. Former CNN White House reporter Jim Acosta put it best by describing the Trump post-presidency as a 'sad old Elvis act,' adding, 'It’s like he’s an animatronic character, spewing out this stuff all over again like he has a string you pull behind him and replace the batteries when they’re low inside.' Trump’s sad old Elvis act has been performed with a limp and a hobble.... Although Trump’s Facebook account was popular... he never extolled it the way he did Twitter. ... Twitter was always Trump’s favorite child... his social media venue of choice. He will welcome Facebook reinstatement, of course, but will consider the honor a runner-up trophy. Twitter made him...."

From "Facebook Can’t Cure Trump’s Chronic Low Energy/It was Twitter that always gave him a reason to get up in the morning" by Jack Shafer (at Politico). 

Facebook's Oversight Board will announce its decision tomorrow morning. Trump could win, but — we're assured — that won't rouse him out of his pathetic malaise. He needs Twitter. He was Twitter. Without Twitter, he's a sad puppet...

An animatronic character, spewing out this stuff... like he has a string you pull behind him.... That's what they're saying he is now, and what he will be... unless he could get Twitter back. But the Twitter decision to oust him — unlike Facebook's decision — is permanent and unreviewable. So pathetic little man running out of batteries he is... unless he isn't.

FROM THE EMAIL: Alexander writes:

Um...

I found some steel slats down on the border. But I don’t see anything resembling a national emergency situation.. at least not in the McAllen TX area of the border where Trump will be today. pic.twitter.com/KRoLdszLUu

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) January 10, 2019

How Trump won the Acosta lawsuit.

You don't alway win by winning. That's too easy. The genius move is to win by losing.

AP reports on Trump's reaction to the temporary restraining order that Acosta won against him:

[The judge] ordered Acosta’s pass returned for now in part because he said CNN was likely to prevail on its Fifth Amendment claim — that Acosta hadn’t received sufficient notice or explanation before his credentials were revoked or been given sufficient opportunity to respond before they were....

“In response to the court, we will temporarily reinstate the reporter’s hard pass,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. “We will also further develop rules and processes to ensure fair and orderly press conferences in the future.”

Speaking to reporters after the decision, Trump said, “If they don’t listen to the rules and regulations, we will end up back in court and we will win.” He later added: “We want total freedom of the press. It’s very important to me, more important to me than anybody would believe. But you have to act with respect when you’re in the White House, and when I see the way some of my people get treated at press conferences, it’s terrible. So we’re setting up a certain standard, which is what the court is requesting.”

The judge framed it as a matter of process, which justifies Trump issuing a set of rules of decorum. I assume the rules will include a requirement that a reporter who has received a response (whether it's to his liking or not) must relinquish the microphone, that there can be no physical interference with a staff member who reaches out to take the microphone, and that one must stop talking once the President (or press secretary) has moved on to the next questioner.

Any complaints about these rules and the prescribed consequences of violating them can be met with pieties about adhering to the judge's ruling. Things must be done in an orderly way — in the press room and in a system of due process. Any complaints premised on freedom of the press will be met with statements like "We want total freedom of the press" and we want perfect due process. So here you are, here's notice of our rules of decorum. And that should be the end of the kind of questioning Acosta has become famous for. Trump wins.

Newly released footage of the Acosta accosting.

ADDED: This is an important cultural moment. There is now a comic meme about being physically violent to a woman. Notice how it's upping the violence that makes it funnier and funnier. It ends with a "Road Runner" type image where a bag of "intern feed" is handed to the woman and then a giant weight falls on her. Have we ever seen mainstream comedy like that before? We're laughing at a woman getting crushed to death. And am I the only one who sees the words "intern feed" and thinks of Bill Clinton's semen?

"O'Reilly: Where Pinhead Jim Acosta Went Wrong."

I just stumbled into that as I was poking around on YouTube. I'd entirely forgotten about Bill O'Reilly, and even now, reminded of him, I can't remember why he got kicked off Fox News. Just to show you how random my encounter was, the YouTube video I had on was something with 908 views, "semolina pilchard." I'd googled "semolina pilchard," because I'd seen the word "pilchard" in the context of looking up the word "mennard" in the OED. "Mennard" is an English variation on "minnow." Minnow was probably originally spelled "minnot," with the "-ot" ending like "turbot" added to a root that means small. The alternate ending "-ard" makes sense as another way to say "small fish," because the ending "-ard" is used in other fish names like "pollard" and "pilchard." I got interested in "mennard" in the first place, because it appeared on an interesting list of suggestions when I was looking for Fennario?



Have you ever gone looking for Fennario? Why were you looking? Did you find it? Or did you stumble on out of your reveries and land in one of the microsquabbles of the Trump era, like where Pinhead Jim Acosta Went Wrong?

Anyway. O'Reilly presents himself as the world's biggest expert on interviewing U.S. Presidents. He lists all the interviews he's done with them, and he talks about getting criticized for interrupting the President. "But I was never disrespectful. And I always couched my questions around facts.... I had a respect for the office. And once he [the President] answered it, I moved on to another question. Jim Acosta has no respect for the office. He hates President Trump...." Acosta didn't ask a question, but "immediately starts a debate." "He wants to debate and demean Donald Trump.... His intent isn't to seek information. If it was, he would ask 'Why do you consider it an invasion?'... but, no, he says, 'The caravan is not an invasion.'"

ADDED: Via Genius:

Semolina is a kind of wheat paste. A pilchard is small fish.

It has been speculated that “Semolina Pilchard” was Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher, head of the Scotland Yard Drugs Unit. He led the arrests of several 60s rock stars, including Lennon, on drugs charges, before being investigated himself for blackmail and bribery in the ‘70s.

Jim Acosta is "a rude, terrible person" who, when he reports "fake news" is "an enemy of the people"...

... said Trump at yesterday's news conference, where Jim Acosta, right in front of Trump was very rude and hit a woman:



I watched the press conference yesterday, but not from that angle, where the hitting of the woman is on camera. I got that video from "How CNN’s Jim Acosta became the reporter Trump loves to hate" (WaPo), where the headline suggests something I found myself thinking, that Trump and Acosta are both in control and choosing to do this theater of mutual hate.

And yet the White House has withdrawn Acosta's press credentials.

What do you think of the physical move? It made me think of the time Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was charged with battery for grabbing Michelle Fields (a reporter):



At the time, WaPo ran an article, "Corey Lewandowski lied about Michelle Fields. That should matter to Donald Trump. It won’t."

Quoted at that link, Donald Trump: "Wow, Corey Lewandowski, my campaign manager and a very decent man, was just charged with assaulting a reporter. Look at tapes-nothing there!"

Either both instances of battery matter or neither does. Pick one.

About the Kavanaugh accusation, Trump says "I don't want to play into their hands."

I think the Democrats believed the Kavanaugh accusation would play out differently, that Republicans would resist and obstruct, but Trump saw how they were playing and chose not "to play into their hands."

Here's the quote in context:



"I feel so badly for him that he's going through this, to be honest with you. I feel so badly for him. This is not a man that deserves this... this should have been brought up long ago and that's what you have hearings for, you don't wait until the hearing is over and then all of a sudden bring it up. When Senator Feinstein sat with Judge Kavanaugh for a long period of time a long, long meeting. She had this letter, why didn't she bring it up? Why didn't she bring it up then? Why didn't the Democrats bring it up then? Because they obstruct and because they resist. That's the name of their campaign against me. Resist. And they just obstruct. And, frankly, I think they're lousy on policy and in many ways they're lousy politicians, but they're very good on obstruction. And it's a shame. Because this is a great gentleman. With all of that, I feel that the Republicans, and I can speak for myself, we should go through a process, because there shouldn't even be a little doubt. There shouldn't be a doubt. Again, they knew what they were doing. They should have done this a long time ago, three months ago, not now. But they did it now. So I don't want to play into their hands."

You can think about how the hand would have played out if the Republicans had been the ones to "obstruct and... resist." I think that's what the Democrats pictured, when they waited until after the hearings: "They did it now." Trump sees that as a deliberate play, and he's not going to let it work the way they planned. After what they did... "we should go through a process." That's surprising. Now, what are they to do?

I think they are scrambling. Today, we see that the accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, might not appear at the scheduled hearing — "Kavanaugh’s Accuser Has Yet to Confirm Appearance at Monday Hearings" (NYT):

The mysterious silence from Dr. Blasey and her lawyers was another turn in a drama that has gripped the Capitol since Thursday....

Dr. Blasey, thrust suddenly into a spotlight that she never sought, has been inundated with vulgar email and social media messages, and even death threats.... Dr. Blasey, who has two teenagers, has moved out of her house, is arranging for private security for herself and her family, and is effectively in hiding, [an unnamed person close to her told the NYT]....

Democrats and Republicans, meanwhile, are clashing over the scope and shape of the hearings. Mr. Grassley said Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Blasey would be the only witnesses, prompting pushback from top Democrats, who are demanding an F.B.I. investigation to search for additional witnesses or evidence, and to avoid the specter of a “he said, she said” debate that will not get at the truth.

One possible witness is a friend of Judge Kavanaugh’s, Mark Judge, who Dr. Blasey said was in the room with Judge Kavanaugh when the assault occurred. Mr. Judge had told the Judiciary Committee that he does not remember the episode and has nothing more to say, seemingly foreclosing the possibility of an additional witness interview, at least for now.

He could be asked about his problems with alcohol-induced amnesia, his observation of Kavanaugh's drinking, and any alcohol-induced amnesia he saw in Kavanaugh, and he could be pressured to admit that he's unreliable as a witness to the nonoccurrence of any event from his heavy-drinking years.

“We have two diametrically opposed stories,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said on the Senate floor. “My view: Professor Ford is telling the truth. But if you don’t want the hearing to be just a ‘he said, she said’ affair, an independent investigation, a background check by the F.B.I., is essential.... We must not repeat the mistakes of the Anita Hill hearings,” he said. “They were rushed, and they were a debacle.”

That is, once the hearing was scheduled, Democrats switched to saying they didn't want it. And Blasey (Ford) seems to have become unavailable. Going public with the accusation now looks a bit like a bluff. But — not wanting to play into their hands — the bluff was called. And now they want a new deal: an independent investigation. Trump rejected that (in the clip above).

Anita Hill has been brought in, with an op-ed in the NYT, saying the Clarence Thomas hearings were not done right and the Senate needs to handle the woman's allegations about sexual misconduct properly this time. She says "The job of the Senate Judiciary Committee is to serve as fact-finders, to better serve the American public, and the weight of the government should not be used to destroy the lives of witnesses who are called to testify." But her idea of fact-finding is not for the Senators to question Blasey directly, according to Hill, who says:

Select a neutral investigative body with experience in sexual misconduct cases that will investigate the incident in question and present its findings to the committee. Outcomes in such investigations are more reliable and less likely to be perceived as tainted by partisanship. Senators must then rely on the investigators’ conclusions, along with advice from experts, to frame the questions they ask Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Blasey. Again, the senators’ fact-finding roles must guide their behavior. The investigators’ report should frame the hearing, not politics or myths about sexual assault.

So the new hand has been dealt. How do you not play into that? I'm using Trump's idiom. If it seems wrong, let's talk about that.

ADDED: This post caused me to do a fair amount of research into the phrase "play into their hands." I'm not sure what the original metaphor is, but you can see from the post that I assumed it was poker. Anyway, the phrase means to do something that unwittingly advantages your opponent.

In my search, I ran across the phrase in the famous and tragically hilarious NYT article "The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru/How Ben Rhodes rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age" (May 2016):

With three hours to go until the president’s address to Congress, Rhodes grabs a big Gatorade and starts combing through the text of the State of the Union address. I peek over his shoulder, to get a sense of the meta-narrative that will shape dozens of thumb-suckers in the days and weeks to follow. One sentence reads: "But as we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands." He retypes a word, then changes it back, before continuing with his edit. "Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks, twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages — they pose an enormous danger to civilians; they have to be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence."

AND: Something new from Dianne Feinstein, about Blasey: "I can’t say everything’s truthful. I don’t know."

Later, she said, “Look I believe she is credible... But based on what I know at this stage she is credible,” which doesn't explicitly walk back the idea that maybe not everything Blasey said is true.

But then Feinstein came back with a sledgehammer: "During every step of this process, I’ve found every single piece of information from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford eminently credible, sincere and believable. She knew this would have a huge effect on her life and she was incredibly brave to come forward."

PLUS: Just last August, Dana Milbank (at WaPo) had a column titled "Journalists are playing into Trump’s hand":

Trump is making us the story by making us the in-house villain of his rallies.... My colleagues’ instinct has been to fight back. During a live stand-up from Trump’s Tampa rally this week, CNN’s Jim Acosta was taunted by the crowd, which had been chanting “fake news,” “go home” and “CNN sucks.” Said Acosta: “We’re staying right here. We’re going to do our job and report on this rally to all of our viewers here tonight.”

A noble sentiment, but better to “go home” — so Trump can’t use the scenes to his benefit. Eric Trump retweeted video of Trump supporters chanting “CNN sucks” at Acosta during his stand-up, adding the hashtag #Truth. The president retweeted his son....

Stop letting him make us the story.

UPDATE: I just heard on the Tucker Carlson show that Blasey has announced that she will not testify until after an independent investigation is done.

The perfection of press vanity.

Getting ready to bring some #realnews to ⁦@colbertlateshow⁩ with ⁦@StephenAtHome⁩ #nottheenemy pic.twitter.com/a63TcxU92e

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 8, 2018

"I would say, having been called fake news myself, that the President of the United States is the king of fake news. He is the king of fake news."

"He said Barack Obama was not born in this country. He said Mexican are rapists and criminals. He has said many things. He has said he lost the election because undocumented people voted by the millions. He said that he had the largest inauguration crowd of all time. The list goes on and on."

Said Jim Acosta at a free-press forum at the Newseum on Wednesday night, which turned out also to be the night President Trump announced his "Fake News Awards" on the RNC website.

Now, I see (looking at my email this morning) that Trump is taking a vote (at his campaign website) asking people to vote for "KING OF FAKE NEWS of 2017." Is this in direct response to Acosta — a kind of I'm not the king, you're the king?

The options on the ballot are ABC, NYT, Washington Post, etc. — whole news organizations, not human individuals, so I don't think the term "king" can be flipped back at the media very well. And a king is the head of a government. The press is a counterbalance to government. The press only works by saying things that the people consume and react to. The safeguards are built-in. A king has power by way of a hereditary position and by his own will operates levers of power. No one is King of the News or the Fake News... unless you just mean "king" in the weak sense, as in Elvis is the King of Rock 'n' Roll.

Here's the point in the post where I'm triggered to look up "king" in the OED. The 4th meaning of the word is "A male person or being whose authority or pre-eminence is comparable to that of a king." Thus, God has long been called the "King of Heaven" or the "King of Glory" (which seems like a step down for God).

Then you get things like: "He is kynge of dronkardes and of dronkenes" (1509), "He's the king o' gude fellows, and wale of auld men" (1793 R. Burns), and "A never before assembled album of original RCA recordings of the King of Rock 'n' Roll—Elvis Presley" (1981 Weekly World News advertisement.)

There's the industrial/commercial use. In the 19th century, various magnates were called "cotton king," "fur king," "railway king," and these days, we're most likely to say "drug king." That makes me think of "drug czar," an informal term for an American government official in charge of drug control. A "czar" is the same thing as a "king," but it sounds foreign and funny. We don't call anyone in American government "king" unless, like Jim Acosta, we mean to insult him. We have a history with that term...

"Why do I find Stephen Miller completely compelling and want to write a novel about him? Why do I not want to write a novel about Jim Acosta?"

Tweets "American Psycho" author Bret Easton Ellis.

Should you want to be the guy Bret Easton Ellis wants to write a novel about?

If you don't know what he's talking about, here's the hilarious/painful interchange between Miller (the Trump adviser) and Acosta (of CNN):



Selected quotes:

Acosta: “What the president is proposing here does not sound like it’s in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration. The Statue of Liberty says, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’”

Miller: “I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty and lighting the world. It’s a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring to, that was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty.”

Aside from his suitability as a character in a novel, Miller is certainly right that Acosta is conflating the Emma Lazarus poem with the Statue and that the original historical meaning of the statue precedes and is not the same as those famous lines in the poem. WaPo points that out:

“New Colossus” was not part of the original statue built by the French and given to the American people as a gift to celebrate the country’s centennial. Poet Emma Lazarus was asked to compose the poem in 1883 as part of a fundraising effort to build the statue’s base.... In 1903, 16 years after Lazarus’ death, the poem was inscribed on the statue’s base, just as millions of immigrants were streaming into New York harbor....

Earlier this year Rush Limbaugh blamed Lazarus for the false connection. “The Statue of Liberty had absolutely nothing to do with immigration,” Limbaugh said on a January 31 broadcast. “So why do people think that it does? Well, there was a socialist poet.”...

From the Rush Limbaugh link:

It was originally intended to be delivered to celebrate the centennial of the Declaration, the American Revolution.... The statue was not intended to recognize immigration. It was intended to recognize liberty and freedom. If you think they’re intertwined, don’t be misled.

Rush proceeds to mock Madeleine Albright for saying that Trump's immigration policy is making the Statue of Liberty cry:

The statue doesn’t cry. The statue is a statue. It’s made out of bronze. It doesn’t cry. There aren’t any tears coming from the eyes of the Statue of Liberty ’cause there aren’t any eyes, and the Statue of Liberty is not welcoming immigrants. What it represents is the beacon of liberty and freedom!

Yeah, well, maybe, but it's not made out of bronze. It's pure copper. We're just all misreading everything. But there's a continuum from misreading to interpretation. I can say for a fact that the statue is made out of copper, but the meaning of the statue is cultural, and it means what it has come to mean in the hearts of Americans. What the French had specifically in mind when they sent it to us is relevant if that's what's in our hearts.

You know, it wasn't even green when it arrived. Being copper, it was copper-colored. Do original meaning fans deny that it's green?

IN THE COMMENTS: Fernandinande wrote:

"American Psycho"/I tried reading that a few months ago, and speaking of run-on sentences and that silly "grade" metric, I stopped reading after a two-page sentence which painfully detailed all the products and actions the guy used in his morning routine.

And yet, it you gave me 2 pages right now of Bret Easton Ellis's description of what he imagines Stephen Miller does and uses in his morning routine, I'd eagerly, happily read every word of it. I assume it would be... completely compelling.

Do "Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote"?

I just finished reading "The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote," by Sharyl Attkisson. About half way through I was saying "This book would make a lot more sense if Hillary Clinton had won the election," because the  "shady" operatives Attkisson scrutinizes (notably David Brock) were working to elect Hillary, and Trump was on his own, making it up as he went along.

I imagine that Attkisson had already done the majority of the work that went into this book before she had to account for the fact that Trump won. The activities she describes are important to understand, but they don't "Control What You See, What You Think, [or] How You Vote," because Trump got elected.

We weren't limited to mainstream media, which are (as Attkisson describes in detail) passing along propaganda generated by political operatives. We could go to Trump rallies or watch them on YouTube. We could read Trump's tweets and retweet them. We could read and write on Twitter and Facebook and blogs (often ripping into the MSM propaganda). The "shady political operatives and fake news" were not controlling what we saw and certainly not what we think or how we vote. That's what they wanted to do, and they threw (and are still throwing) a fit that we didn't restrict ourselves to the propaganda they wanted to feed us, but in 2016, more and more people decided what MSM were serving is toxic.

It's still very useful to read Attkisson's account of how those people operated. It worked to some extent, it might have worked if the GOP candidate had been anyone other than Trump, and it's important to figure out how it failed, because there will be efforts to re-rig the corrupt system to get it to work again somehow.

In the second half of the book, Attkisson does address how Trump beat the system that had seemed so formidable. Here's a sampling of how she incorporated the Trump phenomenon into the thesis of her book (and I think she did this much better than the book's subtitle suggests):

"I see tone. You know the word 'tone'? The tone is such hatred."

Let's read the transcript of Trump's epic press conference. This went on for over an hour, with Trump picking up energy as he went, almost as if he absorbs energy from his antagonists in the room. I'll show you a few things that jumped out at me, including the places where he expresses his delight in bouncing off whatever they dish up for him.

The press has become so dishonest that if we don’t talk about [it], we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people. Tremendous disservice. We have to talk to find out what’s going on, because the press honestly is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out of control....  I’m here... to take my message straight to the people...

The failing New York Times wrote a big, long front-page story yesterday. And it was very much discredited, as you know. It was — it’s a joke.... Wall Street Journal did a story today that was almost as disgraceful as the failing New York Time’s story.... And I’ll tell you something, I’ll be honest, because I sort of enjoy this back and forth that I guess I have all my life but I’ve never seen more dishonest media than frankly, the political media....

I don’t mind bad stories. I can handle a bad story better than anybody as long as it’s true and, you know, over a course of time, I’ll make mistakes and you’ll write badly and I’m OK with that. But I’m not OK when it is fake. I mean, I watch CNN, it’s so much anger and hatred and just the hatred....

Is it just a bad logo or a logo that makes you think bad thoughts?

Trump and Pence intertwined in this new logo appearing in fundraising email pic.twitter.com/O2imSka40v

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) July 15, 2016

"I am going to squeeze every last little bit of opportunity to help make this world a better place over these last two years."

Said Barack Obama, responding to one part of a 2-part question from CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jim Acosta at a press conference yesterday. The part of the question he answered was: "Are you running out of time? How much time do you have left? And what do you make of the notion that you’re now a lame duck?" And he really didn't even answer that question. He turned it into the question: What are you going to do with the rest of your time?

The other part of the question, the first part, was: "your party rejected you in these midterms...  they did not want you out on the campaign trail in these key battleground states. How do you account for that?" Obama blabbed so long on the reframed second part of the question that, I guess, he hoped we wouldn't notice that he never got around to that. But what would he have said? Those loser Democrats have their loss to themselves, so don't smear their loserhood onto me. I am the one the American people embraced heartily twice. They love me.

We can only imagine what he might have said and what he really thinks. I pulled out the quote I put in the post title, because I found it appealing. I read it out loud to Meade, and he latched onto the word "squeeze": "I do not like him squeezing and getting into my life. He can try to get onto the track of making my life better, but that's not his job, to make my life better."

I always get Meade's approval before blogging a quote of his, and this time the quote-check triggered another quote that I couldn't get verbatim. I've got to paraphrase: Obama's policies were rejected in the election, what was rejected was the Democratic Party's excessive intervention into the lives of the people, so Obama needs to get back to the proper role of the President, Commander in Chief and executing the laws of the United States.

It's April 1st, but this CNN Breaking News email seems intended to be taken absolutely seriously.

This arrived in my inbox at April 1, 2014 6:22:22 AM CDT:

A senior administration official said today that after a surge in sign-ups on enrollment deadline day, Obamacare is on track to hit the White House's original target of 7 million people signing up, CNN's Jim Acosta reports.

More than 4.8 million visits were made to HealthCare.gov and 2 million calls were made to the call center Monday, raising optimism that the goal would be met, the official said.

The administration is awaiting final numbers from the federal and state exchanges, the official said.

So... an unnamed spokesperson says there was "a surge" and that sign-ups are "on track," and that there was a large number of visits to the website and calls to the center. CNN takes dictation and conveys a message that's intended to be read — if readers don't look too hard — as a claim that the original 7 million target was hit. But there are no "final numbers" yet.

No final numbers?! There are no numbers on the sign-ups, only numbers on the traffic to the website and the call center. Do we even have a rough guess of the relationship between the number of visits and calls to the number of sign-ups? Is it 99%? 50%? 10%? We're given no idea! And the target of 7 million... 7 million what? Wasn't it coverage for 7 million of the previously uninsured, who were the point of all this health-insurance upheaval? Many people lost insurance they had, and if these previously insured folk had to go to the website/call center to replace their insurance, they shouldn't count toward meeting the 7 million.

I'm trying to find out exactly what the original 7 million goal was, so I don't have to rely on my memory, but when I try to Google, I'm hit with a barrage of articles like "Obamacare Set To Reach 7 Million Sign-Ups On Deadline Day: Sources" (HuffPo) and — for faux balance — "ObamaCare sign-ups reportedly on track to hit 7 million – but will they pay?" (Fox).

Everyone can remember "7 million," but 7 million what? No one remembers, and all the news sites report the White House PR that goes as far as it can to create the impression that the target is hit.

If you do a Google image search on "7 Million," this is the first image that shows up, and it's about as useful as the unnamed-official-source-quoting news outlets:



(Image explained here.) Just one lady, running for shelter... the nearest shelter... it's a bowling alley, but it's shelter... get inside...



Oh, no!!! He's everywhere! He's trying to make it look good, but it's not working out very well.