"... Trump doesn’t own Trump Tower.... Trump Tower is owned by the people who own the apartment units...."

"What he actually owns at Trump Tower is 'the parking garage, the valet booth, room-service kitchens, lobby bathrooms, a restaurant space, and one unit.' That’s his apartment.... His basic model is that he goes to a city, lines up money to build the building... essentially licenses his name to operation, builds it and then gets what amounts to an ongoing residual in the form of some kind of servicing contract tied to the structure. You sell the units to a mix of people who are wowed by the Trump name and others from Russia and Saudi who want to park their money through a blind LLC..... [W]hat he does own is by design deeply intertwined with the real stuff that other people own.... The stuff he actually owns owns is the stuff [Letitia] James is going after — golf courses, big houses...."

Writes Josh Marshall, in "We Have Met the Enemy and He Owns the Valet Booth at Trump Tower" (TPM).

At Business Insider, there's this: "Here are 13 Trump properties that NY AG Letitia James can go after if he doesn't pay up."

And at New York Magazine: "What Real Estate Does Trump Own in NYC Anyway?"

Twitter's problem with real-time location doxxing.

People had been posting an address they thought I was at, photos of houses, and death threats.

If something tracked my real time location then they'd know where I actually was at.

— Tim Pool (@Timcast) December 16, 2022

SEE ALSO:

"There are various theories purporting to explain Musk’s hard right turn: a childhood in apartheid South Africa, his connection with Peter Thiel, disappointments in his personal life."

"Whatever the truth of the matter, whatever right-leaning tendencies he may have had before a couple years ago appear to have been latent or unformed. Now the transformation is almost complete. He’s done with general 'free speech' grievance and springing for alternative viewpoints. He’s routinely pushing all the far right storylines from woke groomers to great replacement. One particularly notable hint about the future came in a fractious interaction on Wednesday when Musk rolled out his own antic Dolchstoßlegende manque. In exchange about advertiser departures and alleged media bias, Musk claimed that he had cut a with [sic] civil rights groups to create a 'moderation council' but that they had broken the deal. Perhaps needless to say, this did not happen. The reference is to a chaotic meeting Musk held with a group of leaders of prominent civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the ADL, on November 2nd. Musk actually announced the 'moderation council' days earlier. We’re hardly four weeks into the Elon era on Twitter and he’s already cueing up a storyline in which he tried to placate the Blacks and the Jews and the gays but they betrayed him and set out to 'kill Twitter.' Not pretty...."

Writes Josh Marshall in "Elon Musk and the Narcissism/Radicalization Maelstrom" (TPM).

I'm not vouching for any of that, and it doesn't reflect my opinion of what Musk is doing with Twitter. I just think it's an important viewpoint that ought to be out in the sunlight.

By the way, who first said "Sunlight is the best disinfectant"? Was it Justice Brandeis?

Here's Quote Investigator:

"Democrats Can Win This Fall if They Make One Key Promise... Give us the House and two more senators, and we will make Roe law in January 2023."

Writes Josh Marshall (in the NYT).

Democrats hope to make November’s midterm elections a referendum on Roe v. Wade.... But you can’t make an election into a referendum on an issue if you can’t point to anything winning the election would accomplish. To make the 2022 elections a referendum on Roe, Democrats have to put protecting Roe and abortion rights on the table. 

Here’s one way to do that: get clear public commitments from every Senate Democrat (and candidate for Senate) not only to vote for the Roe bill in January 2023 but also to change the filibuster rules to ensure that a majority vote would actually pass the bill and send it to the White House for the president’s signature.... 

If... there are 48 Senate Democrats ready to make that pledge... That is, all current Democratic Senators except Manchin and Sinema. they need two additional Democratic senators in the next Congress.

There needs to be a specific commitment to an explicit statutory text and to changing the filibuster rule.

No ambiguity, no haggling, no living in Senator Manchin’s head for a year. You give us this, and we’ll give you that. That tells voters exactly what will be delivered with a Democratic win. It also defines what constitutes a win: control of the House and two more Senate seats.

I don't know if that strong position would win them the majority they'd need to follow through. What if their commitment to ending the filibuster ends up inspiring Republicans — if Republicans, as predicted, take the majority — to end the filibuster and pass some things they like — including anti-abortion legislation?

Josh Marshall elevates the bad comedy of a man with 51 Twitter followers. Josh assumes it's not comedy so he can take an incredibly low-quality cheap shot.

"why didn't they just give the 3rd shot as the first one." the mix of low-trust, conspiratorial thinking and just bullshit is and will continue to hold this country back in a big way. https://t.co/6VB0Jx8jZX

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 15, 2021

AND: Yes, I believe it is possible to take a high-quality cheap shot. I have some respect for cheapness, done right. 

UPDATE: The man with 51 Twitter followers seems to have deleted his tweet.

"I didn't support animal skin guy..."

I didn't support animal skin guy, but he is our new leader and we should give him a chance to grow in office https://t.co/Ci4SDaXJBi

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) January 6, 2021

Less humorously...

You are a joke. You are a traitor. You are a disgrace. You demanded this. You created it. You are guilty and you should be held accountable.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 6, 2021

this you? pic.twitter.com/7iDRFk5knn

— Dmitry Pozdniakov (@Hambo_dev) January 6, 2021

Josh Marshall applies "a hermeneutic of suspicion" to the what seems to be a decision by the US Attorney's Office in Manhattan to close its investigation into the Trump Organization without filing charges.

He comes up with this:

US Attorney Geoffrey Berman had to recuse himself from the Trump-related investigations because of his ties to the President. Supervision was undertaken by the Deputy US Attorney Robert S. Khuzami. But he left the US Attorney’s office in late March of this year. A month earlier, Attorney General Bill Barr was sworn in. So Bill Barr was sworn in about exactly five months ago – which seems to be roughly the time of the last contact between the US Attorney’s office and executives of the Trump Organization....

To be clear, I am not aware of any reporting documenting any interference from US Attorney Berman, Attorney General Barr or anyone at Main Justice. But given the Barr DOJ’s demonstrated record of consistently unethical behavior and more or less open efforts to protect President Trump, this requires some scrutiny.

Obstructionopalooza.

Pelosi is right. Trump's and Barr's blanket refusal to honor subpoenas is itself obstruction of justice. pic.twitter.com/BXZoxS9Jey

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 2, 2019

Note to erstwhile liberals: Any attempt to assert your rights against demands from the government will be regarded as a crime in itself.

"But the appearance of the name of Felix Sater in this new article in the Times is one of the biggest shoes I've seen drop on the Trump story in some time."

Okay, you can go over here if you want to know what Josh Marshall is so exercised about. And here for the underlying NYT article, "A Back-Channel Plan for Ukraine and Russia, Courtesy of Trump Associates."

I just want to talk about the mangled cliché "one of the biggest shoes I've seen drop" — because we had so much fun 3 days ago talking about "he is a bull looking for a china shop" (a NY Post description of Donald Trump). I'd said if you'd just avoid clichés, you'd escape the danger of screwing them up. The phrase is "a bull in a china shop," not "bull looking for a china shop" and:

Bulls aren't hot to relocate to china shops! They're not on a mission to break china. They just would break a lot of china if they ever were in a china shop, which never happens.

I enjoyed the conversation in the comments, especially the pointer to the episode of "Mythbusters" where they showed that a bull in a china shop would not break a lot of china but would actually move about with agility and avoid hitting anything:



And here's a follow-up I found on my own:



So, I love stuff like that. It's overriding my Russia paranoia right now. I want to talk about Josh Marshall's phrase "one of the biggest shoes I've seen drop." Shoes of different sizes don't randomly drop. The shoe cliché is about 2 shoes of the same size — a pair of shoes — where one has already dropped so you are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The idea isn't that shoes are important news and here comes another shoe and wow this one is really big. It's just predictability. Where one shoe has dropped, you know there is a second shoe:

A common experience of tenement living in apartment-style housing in New York City, and other large cities, during the manufacturing boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Apartments were built, similar in design, with the bedrooms located directly above and underneath one another. Thus, it was normal to hear a neighbor removing their shoes in the apartment above. As one shoe made a sound hitting the floor, the expectation for the other shoe to make a similar disturbance was created.

You never see these shoes. You only hear them. That's why waiting for the other shoe to drop involves distinct anticipation: You're not seeing the person unlace the shoe and reach the point where he will drop the shoe. You know he will, but you don't know exactly when, not until you hear the shoe hit the floor. And that goes to show just how badly Josh Marshall mangled the cliché when he wrote "one of the biggest shoes I've seen drop."*

You shouldn't be using clichés anyway, so why expose yourself to the lampooning you're going to get here at Althouse if you get them wrong?

____________________________

* And I don't even want to talk about Marshall's image of shoe dropping on the Trump story. The shoe-dropping cliché is about the need to endure the sound of the shoe hitting the floor. The floor isn't hurt or changed in any significant way by the shoe.

"'In a series of swing-state appearances this week, Mr. Clinton unleashed an impassioned self-defense, by turns sarcastic and almost pleading.'"

"Sarcasm and pleading: The twin keys to electoral success!"

ADDED: The quote in the headline is from the NYT, and the line below that is Instapundit. And now, let's think about sarcasm — who uses it and who gets credit for it and from whom. Let's remember that just a few weeks ago Donald Trump not only used sarcasm, he got treated as if he'd just said something incorrect, and then when he was criticized for that, he came out and explained it, saying it was "sarcasm," and even after that his critics couldn't accept it. So it's very funny to see Bill Clinton's speech puffed and promoted by the NYT calling it sarcasm.

To refresh your recollection: Trump had called Hillary and Obama the "founders" of ISIS. When some people purported to think he was just wrong, he tweeted: "Ratings challenged @CNN reports so seriously that I call President Obama (and Clinton) 'the founder' of ISIS, & MVP. THEY DON'T GET SARCASM?" And his critics acted like they couldn't understand the explanation. For example, Josh Marshall said: "This is not the first time Trump backers have tried to write off one of the candidate's inflammatory comments as a joke."

Why did Josh Marshall title his column "The Trumpian Song of Sexual Violence"?

This is a very verbose thing that Josh put up at Talking Points Memo yesterday. I slogged through it, even read some sentences aloud to Meade to test the intelligibility of the multiple negatives and piled up phrases:

The simple fact is that there's no evidence or logic to the idea that anyone who doesn't already hate Hillary Clinton with a passion will believe that she is culpable in some way for her husband's acts of infidelity against her.

But what's up with the title to his column? There's no music to Marshall's prose. There is a musical metaphor at the very end: 

As I've written in similar contexts, when we look at the messaging of a national political campaign we should be listening to the score, not the libretto, which is, like in opera, often no more than a superficial gloss on the real story, mere wave action on the surface of a deep sea. You're missing the point in trying to make out the logic of Trump's attacks on Clinton. The attacks are the logic. He is trying to beat her by dominating her in the public sphere, brutalizing her, demonstrating that he can hurt her with impunity.

Oh, I get it. He shouldn't attack her. That should be seen as sexual violence. If you listen to the music. Not the words. Hmm. Not any logic. Just how it feels. I know how I felt reading this piece, on the wave action of the deep sea that is Josh Marshall. Kinda seasick.

But to answer my question up there in the title. I think he meant to evoke the great song from "The Threepenny Opera," "Ballad of Sexual Dependency." Here's Marianne Faithfull's version:



Here are the lyrics. Read along and contemplate. Count how many times you think sounds like Trump and how many times you think sounds like Clinton and how many times you think Idiots, all of them....

"This killer’s father is now lecturing us on the need for gun control and he says he has no idea how or where his son got the guns."

"Of course he doesn’t know. You know why he doesn’t know? Because he is not, and has never been in his son’s life. He’s a complete failure as a father, he should be embarrassed to even show his face in public. He’s the problem here."

Wrote Bobby Jindal in a post titled "We fill Our Culture With Garbage, And We Reap The Result," which I read because Talking Points Memo was trashing it. Josh Marshall said: "Bobby Jindal appears to be a seriously disturbed, morally degenerate individual."

"The simplest boat can be not much more than a rectangular box, open on the top, with just a little bit of curve to it to help it move on the water."

"How hard could it be?"

Not that I believed for a moment that it would be easy, especially for someone who hadn’t built anything out of wood in twenty-five years and even then only a barely passable book shelf. But possible. Possible. It must be possible if you studied up on how it was done, chose a simple and manageable plan and set about doing it. It must be doable if I set my mind to it. And from that moment, walking along the beach with my older son, the idea took hold of me....

Josh Marshall wants to know WTF is Diane Rehm's problem.

"If you're interviewing President Obama and you ask him whether Osama bin Laden is his brother or whether he's conspiring with Iran to destroy America, that's not just a question. Why not ask an African-American congressman if he's held up any 7-Elevens recently? People are going to say, rightly, WTF is your problem? It's not a question, at least not phrased anything like that. You're dignifying, laundering hate speech. And when you get a flat denial you're not helping put the rumor to rest. That's CYA after the fact."

He's addressing the controversy we're already talking about in the first post of the morning "Did NPR host Diane Rehm just make an honest mistake when she said to Bernie Sanders 'Senator, you have dual citizenship with Israel...'?"

"Despite what you've heard, tenure is unchanged."

Explains Christian Schneider in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. This piece begins with some funny — funny now — material:

A century ago, the American Association of University Professors issued its famous "declaration of principles" in response to several high-profile faculty firings. These principles, such as insisting that only faculty members may judge one another, were meant to protect academic freedom within university systems.

What immediately followed could be considered the Golden Era of Terrible Research. In 1916, University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor Michael Vincent O'Shea developed a child development theory that said children shouldn't be scolded for having dirty hands and bad table manners, and that 16- and 17-year-old boys shouldn't be allowed to show interest in girls. University progressives were busy working their eugenics theories, which they believed would create a master race if the feebleminded were sterilized.

That same year, UW-Madison medical school professor H.C. Bradley gave a speech in which he extolled the nutritional virtues of cannibalism. Bradley said the "ideal food would be man flesh" and other meats are indigestible when compared with "human steak."

Schneider's key substantive point — which I've blogged already — is that "tenure will be alive and well, it just will be the responsibility of the regents, not state law." This protection at the state level (which goes back only to 1973) is unique in the nation.

Meanwhile, at Talking Points Memo, "Josh Marshall Says Goodbye To One Of America’s Great Public Universities" is the front-page teaser, going to a piece titled "Goodbye, Madison," which NOWHERE mentions that the change is only moving tenure from the state statutory level to the regent level, putting Wisconsin in the same position as everywhere else. This deceptive article is illustrated with a photograph of Governor Scott Walker looking like an idiot who doesn't give a damn.

You know, it was just a year ago that liberals were getting upset about Michigan taking a decision away from the state university's regents and putting it into the state law. If the level at which university decisions are made matters, which way does it matter?

"Welp, So Much for Young People," says Josh Marshall...

... observing that these kids today may be "more pro-gay rights, more racially inclusive and generally have more progressive political views on a host of issues," but he abandons his erstwhile hope for the new generation because "a lot of these youngs seem to be complete a complete disaster [sic] on vaccination."

As you can see [from this poll], for older Americans, support for mandatory immunizations is overwhelming. And it just got lower and lower and lower the younger you go - with what looks like a steep turning points somewhere in the mid-30s....

I think the reality is that society seems to has lost the historical memory of various horrific endemic childhood diseases.

Welp, my first question was how old is Josh Marshall. The internet says:



Welp, I'm a whole generation older than that, and the measles vaccination only goes back to 1963, 6 years before Josh was born and a dozen years after I was born. I don't know what Josh Marshall means by the "historical memory" of the "horrific endemic childhood disease" that is measles, but I remember when everyone got measles. It was part of childhood. We all got measles, and then we were all immune. I don't remember it being horrific. Marshall's memory is of getting a vaccination to prevent it, and that was completely the norm in his time, but in my time, we accepted measles, got sick, with spots, and then got better. It wasn't that big of a deal. I think people should get their kids vaccinated, and I got my sons vaccinated, but the question is whether parents who seriously believe they're saving their kids from something else that they think is horrific need to be forced by the government, rather than convinced by good science and benevolent persuasion, and Josh Marshall's hysteria isn't modeling rationality and sound persuasion. And his giving up on young people — because their idea of the good skews away from government force — isn't very pretty.

"[A] small community of detractors is subjecting Serial to a scathing critique framed in the language of social justice."

"Its narrator and producer stands accused of exemplifying white privilege, stereotyping Asian Americans and Muslims, racism against blacks, and making 'people of color' cringe," writes Conor Friedorsdorf (about the popular podcast).

In Serial, the victim, Hae, is a Korean-American daughter of immigrants, while the man convicted of killing her, Adnan, is the son of Muslim immigrants from Pakistan. "Sarah Koenig, the journalist telling their story, is white," [writes Jay Caspian Kang's article in The Awl, "'Serial' and White Reporter Privilege."] "This, on its face, is not a problem. If Serial were a newspaper story or even a traditional magazine feature, the identities of all three could exist alone as facts; the reader could decide how much weight to place upon them. But Serial is an experiment in two old forms: the weekly radio crime show, and the confessional true-crime narrative, wherein the journalist plays the role of the protagonist. The pretense of objectivity is stripped away: [Sarah] Koenig emerges as the subject as the show’s drama revolves not so much around the crime, but rather, her obsessions with it."

That's all rather interesting, but let me introduce a second topic. Reread those last 2 sentences of the indented paragraph. I'm thinking that Koenig's podcast belongs in that trend I was talking about earlier today: under-edited stream-of-consciousness written by anguishing liberals. It's particularly similar to Josh Marshall's "thinking-out-loud/welcome-to-my-mind type stuff" that — as I put it this morning — "goes on and on," dragging us through "the raw experience of his thoughts, subjecting us in real time to a performance of his mental processes."

There's nothing necessarily wrong with that intensely personal approach to presenting a story. It can go wrong, however, and Koenig may be influencing others who lack her style and skill... such as, perhaps, Marshall.

"The best I can say in defense of this comical 'correction' is that it would be challenging to amend the piece in light of the categorical collapse of the article's central assertion."

"I mean, how do you correct it? I guess you just don't? Which is pretty much what they did here."

Josh Marshall slathers on the mockery that Breitbart richly deserves.

Breitbart the website, not Breitbart the man, who sadly died, leaving his name on a website that he can no longer monitor and control.

"Violence against women is never okay… Even if that violence occurs against conservative women."

"Imagine for a second the outrage that would happen if Chelsea Clinton had gotten pushed by some guy. Had she tried to defend herself, the liberal media would’ve held her up as some feminist hero."

Writes Bristol Palin in "The Truth about the 'Palin Brawl' – The Media Reveals Its Bias Against Conservative Women Once Again."

CNN's Carol Costello has now apologized for inviting viewers to "sit back and enjoy" the recording of Bristol describing what was a violent attack on her. And Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski also apologized for presenting the story in a “humorous tone.”

“The more we learned about what happened its clearer that it’s not that funny,” Brzezinski said. “We played into stereotypes from maybe our own outlook, quite frankly. So it’s definitely more of a story than that.”

Scarborough said everyone is guilty for presuming the Palins are to be used as a “punch line.” “There is the very real possibility that something terrible happened to them,” Scarborough said. “… I think we all shot first and asked questions later and a lot of people are guilty of that.”

And by "everyone" he means everyone he knows. 

ADDED: Josh Marshall stands his ground:

So now, liberals, the media, Democrats, apparently anyone who thinks Palin is a buffoon of almost world historic proportions (which gets you to something like 80% of the country) are all abominable hypocrites for 'laughing' at what is now fairly preposterously portrayed as a violent assault against a woman. If you listen to the police interviews, which occurred just as the brawl had barely ended, all the witnesses beside Bristol said she attacked the homeowner. Indeed, even Bristol's younger sister Willow backed up the these other witnesses' account. She just said Bristol missed with her punches.

I think it kind of goes without saying that if news emerged that Bristol had been assaulted by a boyfriend or spouse or really anyone else, no one would be laughing. Indeed, I'm not sure anyone now is laughing so much as standing back agape and marveling. But advocates who are trying to alter public perceptions about and stiffen penalties against violence against women are, I do not think, saying that female bodies are inviolable in every case if you barge into someone's party and start swinging punches at them.

"This dramatic announcement marks a sad and grim turn to the [Toronto Mayor Rob] Ford story, which always mixed tragic elements with heavy doses of the comic and the surreal."

"These are the sort of dark reversals of fortune which probably haunt all of us, either about our loved ones or ourselves. I would feel remiss not saying that this latest development somehow continues the surreal nature of this man's public story, larger than life, almost operatic in its improbability and drama, almost difficult to even believe."

Josh Marshall, having had his fun with Ford, seems to feel a need to perform in the Theater of Purple Prose. Me, I've always ignored Ford. I didn't care to amuse myself with him when he was supposedly so amusing. Now, we learn he is one of the millions of human beings with cancer alive in the world today, and there's nothing I would "feel remiss not saying." If there was, I guarantee I wouldn't use that phrase.

ADDED: Getting cancer is not "operatic in its improbability." It may be improbable in the sense that it's more likely than not that you don't have cancer, but the likelihood is enough that there's nothing "operatic" about your number coming up. Maybe Josh Marshall is thinking of opera because of the stereotype that opera singers are fat and Rob Ford is both fat and afflicted with cancer of the fat.