A dialogue about Trump and Biden.

Composed by my son John (at Facebook):

“Biden is too old to be president.” 

“But Trump is also old.” 

“But Biden is older.” 

“But since they’re both very old, it’s unfair to focus so much on how old one of them is. Besides, Trump lies.” 

"This young woman is exposed to the world as if she's a racist, but maybe look into your own heart..."

"... If there were some line you could say to the cop who stopped your car that would cause him to let you go with just a warning, wouldn't you say it? Also, what if this woman were a little smarter and more experienced and knew to just give a smile and a look that communicated 'I'm a clean, white girl' but never said the words? She'd be the more white-privileged woman, and she wouldn't be getting her life ruined by social media."

I wrote, over on Facebook, where my son John posted the news article "A Woman Arrested For Drunk Driving Told Police They Shouldn't Arrest Her Because She's A 'White, Clean Girl.'"

"The new '... nevertheless, she persisted'?"

Writes my son John about the statement "She got exactly what she wanted, which wasn't to speak.... She wanted to cause a scene...."

The statement appears in an L.A. Times article, "A state senator is removed from the chamber for her comments about Tom Hayden and Vietnam":

After trying to make a statement about the late Tom Hayden and his opposition to the Vietnam War, Sen. Janet Nguyen (R-Garden Grove) was removed from the floor of the state Senate on Thursday, a tense scene that ended in a slew of angry accusations from both Republicans and Democrats.

Nguyen, who was brought to the United States as a Vietnamese refugee when she was a child, said she wanted to offer "a different historical perspective" on what Hayden and his opposition to the war had meant to her and other refugees....

In the statement which she later posted on her official Senate website, Nguyen criticized Hayden for siding "with a communist government that enslaved and/or killed millions of Vietnamese, including members of my own family."

A procedural rule was cited as the basis for wanting shut Nguyen up. She was ruled "out of order" for using a "point of personal privilege." Nguyen had refrained from airing her opinion during a remembrance of Hayden that had occurred earlier in the week.

"February 10, 2017 Protest in Washington Square Park."

Photographs by my son John Althouse Cohen.

I love the variety of messages on the signs, from the things the mildest apolitico may embrace...

To the things the protesters antagonists could seize upon in an effort to undercut everybody at the protests.

"She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted."

I agree with John. It's a great meme.

The quote is from Mitch McConnell, explaining his senatorial effort at squelching Elizabeth Warren, and the forces of the internet have turned it into wonderful things like this:

"One problem with hyperbolically calling it a 'Muslim ban': you end up with headlines like 'Most Americans support Muslim ban.'"

Says John Althouse Cohen, commenting on a new Slate article: "First Muslim Ban Poll Finds Americans Support Trump Order by 7-Point Margin."

The poll referred to in that headline (by Reuters/Ipsos) asked the question in a way that tipped people more negatively than another poll. In that other poll, by Rasmussen, likely U.S. voters favored Trump's policy by a 23-point margin.

"Ignorance allied w/ power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."

A James Baldwin quote* on an excellent painted placard at yesterday's Women's March in Manhattan, caught in an excellent photograph by my son John Althouse Cohen.

2 more photographs by John here, one of police interacting respectfully with the crowd and one of a little boy with a sign that reads "Too young to vote/But not too young to care."
______________________

* That's an abbreviated version of the quote. Here's the extended version, from "No Name in the Street" (1972), is:

Well, if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected — those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! — and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person — ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

"Tori Amos released her first solo album, Little Earthquakes, on January 6, 1992 — 25 years ago today."

My son John Althouse Cohen writes:

Although she's an American, the album was released only in the UK at first; the US version was delayed until late February. Apparently the thinking was that she might not be as appealing to Americans. The concern was unnecessary.

It's hard to express what a brilliant artist Tori Amos is. She does three things and is stellar at each one: songwriting (alternating between frankly confessional and slyly cryptic), singing (at its most mellifluous on this album but capable of being much more raw) and piano playing (classically trained but with pop and jazz sensibilities).

More — with videos — at the link.

"Assignment: Someone, please make an 'it gets better' video for liberals who are depressed about Trump."

Writes John over at Facebook.

He gets a lot of negative reactions.

I react to that:

Does the reaction to John's idea reveal that the original "It gets better" videos were shallow and propagandistic? If people are very unhappy right now about their current circumstances, should those who don't even know them swoop in and sincerely assure them that "It gets better"? John's idea could be seen as a proposal for a comic riff that not only annoys Trump haters but that also portrays the original project as banal and insulting.

"He was dignified, hilarious and modest. He told me that I’d sometimes been unfair to him, sometimes mean, sometimes really, really mean..."

"... but that when I was he usually deserved it, always appreciated it, and keep it up. He spoke of other things; he characterized for me my career. I’d heard of his charm offensive, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say how charming, funny and frank he was—and, as I say, how modest. How actually humble. It moved me. And it hurt to a degree a few weeks later when I wrote in this space that 'Sane Donald Trump' would win in a landslide but that the one we had long seen, the crazed, shallow one, wouldn’t, and didn’t deserve to. Is it possible there are deeper reserves of humility, modesty and good intent lurking around in there than we know? And maybe a toolbox, too, that can screw those things together and produce something good?"

Said Peggy Noonan after that time — 6 weeks ago — Donald Trump got on the phone with her.

Kind of vulnerable to flattery, isn't she?

Anyway, yeah, let's hope Donald Trump can screw us together... in a good way.

Low-tech Twitter: Carrying a document with the print showing as if you don't know and allowing a photograph you know the press will zoom in on.

I'm seeing "Maybe Next Time Use the Folder/What we can read is bad enough. What stuff is Kris Kobach obscuring?" Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, is standing next to Trump, who, we're told, is considering Kobach for the Secretary of Homeland Security post.

That's via my son John at Facebook, who says:

I have a feeling Democrats and Republicans are about to switch positions on how bad it is to be extremely careless with national-security information....

My response was:

Maybe I didn't read every word of that Esquire article, but I don't think there's any basis for thinking this is a classified document and you have to consider the possibility that they expected and wanted people to zoom in on the document. It's an interesting way to get people excited about whatever text you're trying to purvey. It's viral. Beyond tweeting.

If you're interested in the substance of the accidentally/accidentally-on-purpose revealed document, that's my point. We're not naturally hot to read documents. But here's what the little secret/not-secret theater dramatized:

•"Update and reintroduce the NSEERS screening and tracking system (National Security Entry-Exit Registration System) that was in place from 2002-2005. All aliens from high-risk areas are tracked."

•"Add extreme vetting questions for high-risk aliens: question them regarding support for Sharia law, jihad, equality of men and women, the United States Constitution."

•"Reduce the intake of Syrian refugees to zero."

"Upworthy showed everyone that you get more pageviews with two-sentence headlines. What happened next will blow your mind."

From a Facebook discussion of the Slate article titled "Republicans Stole the Supreme Court/Democrats, don’t let them get away with it."

If Facebook knows what it's doing with serving up ads, then I need a $4,215 gunsmithing lathe... and a hot dress.

Here's what I'm seeing on Facebook right now:



If you want to buy that gunsmithing lathe, please use this Althouse Amazon link.

It seems pretty cool, doesn't it?



I may want new work, now that I'm about to hang up my law-professor spurs.

I can just see myself, gunsmithing at the Shop Fox, then going out carousing in my hot dress.

There's a little arrow in the upper right corner of the ad, so I click that and get...



I am so tempted to click "I already own this." Then what ads would I get? Or would the government start spying on me? And spare me the comment "Start?! Althouse you are so naive."

Here's the link to John's post about spellchecking "commenter." Don't hesitate to make a comment, er....

If my post made you wonder why I wrote "Parents are so terrible!" — feel free to speculate in the comments, but you will never guess.

If my post made you wonder about the origin of the phrase "hang up your spurs," read this, at Grammarphobia.

Today, to “hang up one’s spurs” (or the tools of one’s trade) means to retire from the field, to give up, or to turn one’s attentions elsewhere. This... is a tradition dating back to classical times. The Roman poet Horace, who lived in the first century BC, refers to this tradition... [w]ith the lines nunc arma defunctumque bello / barbiton hic paries habebit, the narrator decides to retire metaphorically from the field of battle and hang up his weapon—the lyre with which he does his wooing.

ADDED: Meade says "'the lyre with which he does his wooing' should be a picture of me from the New York Times on the front porch with my laptop." He means the picture of him here.

"We should subject him to merciless scrutiny and criticism, just as we should with any other president."

"In fact, that will be possible only if we accept that he is legitimately the 45th President of the United States, and the time for protesting Trump's holding this office has passed. If you drown out any discussion of the specifics of his presidency with the familiar refrains that he's abnormal, racist, sexist, etc., you'll remove yourself from the realm of productive debates about the president."

Writes my son, John Althouse Cohen, urging us to get past the shock of Trump's election and start taking him seriously. Trump wasn't taken sufficiently seriously as he ran for President, but he achieved everything he said he would. We should assume he's going to do the specific things he's got in his first-100-days plan and focus on what we'd like and not like to see happen. As John puts it, none of Trump's proposals "involve turning America into a fascist dictatorship, forcibly removing citizens from the country, systematically violating due process, instituting apartheid, or squelching free speech." And some of the proposals are or might be good ideas that even Trump opponents might want to nudge him to focus on.

I remember a couple days before the election, when Newt Gingrich said: "[I]f Trump is elected, it will just be like Madison, Wisconsin with Scott Walker.... a Madison, Wisconsin kind of struggle if Trump wins." But the Wisconsin protests did not happen at the point of Scott Walker's election in 2010. They began in February 2011, after Scott Walker had taken office and the GOP legislature had presented a bill — Act 10 — with specific proposals people objected to. The anger and outrage was directed at legislation, not at the outcome of the election.

So the not-my-President protests against Trump are not like what happened in Wisconsin. Protesting an election — and election that is not contested or unclear — doesn't make much sense unless you're opposed to preserving our constitutional system of government. Perhaps some protesters fall into that category. Some may be a bit confused and think the electoral college ought to be changed, but that's not to say there's something illegitimate about the result of the election. Trump won clearly under the rules of the game everyone was playing. The protesters seem mostly to be afraid of what Trump will do, so they ought to address their protests to the specific proposals.

That's not only how the Wisconsin protests worked, that's how the Tea Party originated. It was not at the point of the election or the inauguration, but the following month, in February, when something particular was proposed. It happened to be — did you remember? — Obama's mortgage relief plan.

The Tea Party has had a lasting effect on American politics, and I don't think we'd have seen the same thing at all if it had begun as a freakout on seeing Barack Obama elected.

"How should Democrats respond to Gary Johnson and Jill Stein supporters?"

My son John, a Johnson voter, opines.

Think about this: a candidate as bumbling as Johnson, who was ignored by the mainstream media except when there was a story that allowed the media to ridicule him for supposedly not knowing about the world, did far better than any other Libertarian candidate in history. That should send a message....

"Trump didn't build that."

"Democrats have been arguing for years that President Obama should have the power to get a lot done on his own, without going through Congress: executive orders, going to war, etc. If President Trump exercises similarly broad powers, remember: Trump didn't build that!"

Quips my son John.

"My goal with these photos was simply to document the various ways I saw people in New York City expressing themselves with respect to the 2016 presidential race."

"I don't intend these photos to express any of my own views about the candidates depicted or referenced in these images," writes my son John Althouse Cohen, posting a set of 17 photographs, here. I'm showing you 3 of them, and my choices have nothing to do with what I might think of the candidates.

"Admit It: You People Want To See How Far This Goes, Don’t You?"

An Onion piece from July 2015.

I can tell you’re practically salivating right now. And I’m going to keep riding this fascination, this little fixation you have with me as far as you’ll take me. You know I will....

You know what you have to do to make me go away. Just quit paying attention. Stop reading this right now.

That’s right, I didn’t think so. I have the power to make the next 16 months one of the most incredible times in our nation’s history, and not a single one of you can say you’re not at least a little bit curious to see how this wild ride shakes out...

Oh, yeah, we are curious. 

(Via John Althouse Cohen, posting on Facebook this morning.)

"So his reasoning is that there's no evidence of the destruction of evidence, and surely nothing unethical happened because lawyers were involved?"

"Is this a joke? Donald Trump is also well-lawyered — should we hold back from ever accusing him of illegality in his business affairs or lawsuits because surely his lawyers would have prevented it?"

Writes my son John Althouse Cohen, responding to Matthew Yglesias's "The real Clinton email scandal is that a bullshit story has dominated the campaign."

Yglesias wrote a sentence that makes me laugh, cry, and cringe all at once: "Generally speaking, in life we assume it would be moderately difficult to hire a well-known law firm to destroy evidence for you without someone deciding to do the right thing and squeal."

"I’d always thought of him as a brother. Every time I’d see his name somewhere, it was like he was in the room." Wrote Bob Dylan about Bobby Vee.

Bobby Vee died yesterday, from Alzheimer's disease, at the age of 73. Here's the NYT obituary, which I first saw linked at my son John's Facebook page. John wrote:

I post a lot of obituaries, but this was the rare one where seeing it made me instinctively exclaim out loud: "Oh no!" I've loved his most famous song, "Take Good Care of My Baby," since I was a young child. It's quintessential early '60s, pre-Beatles pop. Bob Dylan fans in particular should read this to the end...

There's a good chance that I was the one the played him "Take Good Care of My Baby," when John was not much more than a baby. I got the idea early on that rock 'n' roll oldies were sort of children's songs. (I know the exact song that caused this idea: "Ya Ya" by Lee Dorsey.) I bought many rock 'n' roll oldies cassettes and we played them in the car all the time, and I guess "Take Good Care of My Baby" was in there somewhere. I wonder if we talked about the lyrics (which were written by Carole King).

Take good care of my baby
Be just as kind as you can be
And if you should discover
That you don't really love her
Just send my baby back home to me

I can imagine myself saying something like Why does Bobby Vee think that the other man has the power to send the woman where he chooses to send her? Wouldn't the woman just go where she wants to go? And why would she want to go back to Bobby Vee when he admits he cheated on her?

As for the Bob Dylan connection, for us big Bob Dylan fans, the first thing we think of when we hear "Bobby Vee" is "Bob Dylan." Here's what Bob Dylan wrote about Bobby Vee in his great book "Chronicles: Volume One":