"It shouldn’t be necessary to point out the obvious, but clearly it’s necessary to point out the obvious."

It shouldn’t be necessary to point out the obvious, but clearly it’s necessary to point out the obvious. pic.twitter.com/FQjLkBiaMy

— Franklin Leonard (@franklinleonard) December 22, 2017

Also:

i guess the redhead is the diversity offering?

hey, @LATimes, i can think of one way that we can "change the way many stories are told"...look up irony in the dictionary before you write your cover lines. pic.twitter.com/X2b7uTvzUn

"Hundreds of pro-Trump demonstrators and counter-protesters clashed Saturday at a 'Patriots Day' rally in Berkeley, the third time the two groups engaged in violent confrontations on city streets in recent months..."

The L.A. Times reports.

Fistfights broke out near Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park, where Trump supporters had scheduled a rally. Fireworks and smoke bombs were thrown into the crowd, and a few demonstrators were doused with pepper spray.

Both groups threw rocks and sticks at each other and used a large trash bin as a battering ram as the crowd moved around the perimeter of the park. One bank boarded up its ATM machines before the rally as a precaution....

Stewart Rhodes, founder of the citizen militia group known as the Oath Keepers, said he came from Montana with about 50 others to protect Trump supporters. They were joined by bikers and others who vowed to fight members of an anti-fascist group if they crossed police barricades.

“I don’t mind hitting” the counter-demonstrators, whom he called “neo-Nazis,” Rhodes said. “In fact, I would kind of enjoy it.”

I found that hard to read. Both sides are calling each other Nazis? Everybody's hitting everybody?

Or is the L.A. Times choosing to depict this as more confusing than it is?

"Fistfights broke out...," "Fireworks and smoke bombs were thrown..." — the subjects of these sentences are not human beings. 

"The 2015 baby Jesus catalog features a dozen glossy pages of options.... If you're in need of money, you might dress your infant in the aqua blue 'Prosperity Baby Jesus' outfit."

"If you're feeling ill, you could try the red and gold 'Health' gown. If there's drama in your life, your best bet is probably the 'Peace' frock, which comes in white and blue, with a miniature dove."

Dolls and doll clothes, for sale in L.A. — described in the L.A. Times. Described patronizingly, in my view.

"You won’t believe this (or maybe you will). The LA Times claims that Scooter Libby 'leaked' the name of Valerie Plame."

"As we all know the leak came from Richard Armitage. I wonder how a mistake like that got by all those editors and fact checkers. The reference was in [an] article about the White House blowing the identity of the CIA station chief in Afghanistan."

Will the Koch brothers own The L.A. Times?

They are "exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company’s eight regional newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant."

[T]he papers could serve as a broader platform for the Kochs’ laissez-faire ideas. The Los Angeles Times is the fourth-largest paper in the country, and The Tribune is No. 9, and others are in several battleground states, including two of the largest newspapers in Florida, The Orlando Sentinel and The Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. A deal could include Hoy, the second-largest Spanish-language daily newspaper, which speaks to the pivotal Hispanic demographic....

A Democratic political operative who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he admired how over decades the brothers have assembled a complex political infrastructure that supports their agenda. A media company seems like a logical next step.

This person said, “If they get some bad press that Darth Vader is buying Tribune, they don’t care.”

The Tribune Company is worth  $623 million, but Koch Industries takes in $115 billion a year. So the Kochs don't need this media business to make money. They would, apparently, be doing this to get their message out. Is this fair to L.A.?

“It’s a frightening scenario when a free press is actually a bought and paid-for press and it can happen on both sides,” said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

Let's talk about what freedom means in this context. The newspaper businesses are privately owned and the newspapers themselves are objects of commerce in a free market. Anyone is free to start a newspaper business. L.A. is a liberal place, with lots of people who've made lots of money in the entertainment business, which is also a form of expression accomplished through privately owned businesses. News media and entertainment media operate in the commercial marketplace and the marketplace of ideas.

What is the frightening scenario? That so much money is involved that some speakers are far more powerful than others? But isn't that gigantic power needed to counterbalance the most powerful speaker of all, the government? And unlike the government, news and entertainment media can't make us consume their product. Or am I just saying laissez-faire things because the devious Koch brothers have insinuated their ideas into my innocent, pliable little brain.

By the way, speaking of brothers and frightening scenarios, what percentage of Americans think the Koch brothers are worse than the Tsarnaev brothers? I can't answer that, having lived in Madison, Wisconsin too long. I'll just share this old video, shot by Meade on April 4, 2011, with street performers in top hats portraying the Koch brothers as puppeteers manipulating Governor Scott Walker:



"Come along, Scottie!"

ADDED: "You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year...."

"Butt cracks eventually appeared in Lamb's public persona..."

A typo for the ages.

If a judge's spouse is politically active, does it "test" his "impartiality"?

Surely, the answer can't be, only if the judge is conservative.

"I've never been in TIME Magazine. I don't need TIME Magazine."

An early rejection of mainstream media, from the movie "Don't Look Back" (which we watched again on New Year's Eve):



This is one of my favorite scenes in the great old documentary by D.A. Pennebaker. Bob Dylan is ranting — for the cameras? — and the TIME reporter looks like he walked into the room with his pencil in his hand, trying to understand but not knowing just what he will say when he gets home.

Does the film invite us to laugh at the reporter's cluelessness? I don't think it's that simple. Presumably, we're identifying with Dylan, the central character in the film we've chosen to watch, but gradually, and certainly by this point, we've been given cues to detach ourselves from our pop star hero. Do we think Dylan is being a jerk, mistreating the reporter? The reporter, whose bland doughiness makes a funny contrast to Dylan's intensity, might look as though he doesn't know what is happening here, but I got to thinking that the gears in that head were turning, and he was judging and gathering material. Who was that guy?

His name is Horace Freeland Judson, and he's no dummy. He worked for TIME for 7 years, but he is also — I'm relying on Wikipedia — a historian of molecular biology and a expert on the "deliberate manipulation of scientific data." He's been on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University, and he's won a MacArthur Fellowship. As for the film:

[H]e was subjected to what he believes to be a contrived tirade of abuse from Dylan. During Judson's interview, Dylan launched into a verbal attack on Time magazine, and Judson himself. The film's producer Pennebaker does not believe the tirade was planned, but notes that Dylan backed off, not wanting to come across as being too cruel. However, Judson believes the confrontation was contrived to make the sequence more entertaining. "That evening," says Judson, "I went to the concert. My opinion then and now was that the music was unpleasant, the lyrics inflated, and Dylan, a self-indulgent whining show off."

Here's a 2007 interview — in TIME Magazine, of all places — with Pennebaker:

Much of the film is devoted to Dylan tangling with the press. Why do you think he played so hard-to-get with reporters?

The poor souls, they were sent out to interview him and they didn't know much about him. He turned it into a circus. He was enjoying himself. But I never felt that he was being particularly mean in those interviews.

There's a scene, though, in which Dylan directs a lengthy recrimination of the media at TIME magazine correspondent Horace Judson. I have to be honest: I would have hated to be in Judson's shoes.

I have the story [Judson] wrote. He wrote a very good piece on Dylan. I thought Dylan was kind of nice in the end. He made jokes out of it. When I show the film, especially to kids, they want to see that as someone thrashing TIME. But it isn't that. He's thrashing a whole system of media that people had been thrashing for a long time. I never thought of it as mean-spirited.

A whole system of media that people had been thrashing for a long time... Ha ha. So much for my "early rejection of mainstream media"! People have been bitching about journalists forever, haven't they? And it's not as though Bob Dylan would have been kinder to bloggers if they'd been around and managed to infiltrate his entourage.

***

I'm following the TIME Magazine convention of writing "TIME" in all caps, which I haven't done in the past. I'm just for the first time noticing that's what TIME Magazine expects from me. Not that I need TIME Magazine, just that I'm noticing. And I'm wondering: Is in an acronym for something? "The [something with an "i"] Magazine Ever"?

UPDATE, May 10, 2011: The NYT obituary for Horace Freeland Judson.

Instead of shouting "You lie," try: "I’m incredulous at that utterly preposterous spewing of fiction."

That is: talk like Tim Gunn.

(Commenting, last night on "Project Runway," about Johnny's story about the spluttering iron ruining the newspaper dress.)

Yes, the task last night was to make something out of newspapers — the L.A. Times to be specific. And you thought the L.A. Times had become useless.

"Marijuana seems to be marching mainstream at a fairly rapid pace."

Observes the possibly drug-addled Los Angeles Times:

At least in urban areas such as Los Angeles, cannabis culture is coming out of the closet.

At fashion-insider parties, joints are passed nearly as freely as hors d'oeuvres. Traces of the acrid smoke waft from restaurant patios, car windows and passing pedestrians on the city streets -- in broad daylight. Even the art of name-dropping in casual conversation -- once limited to celebrity sightings and designer shoe purchases -- now includes the occasional boast of recently discovered weed strains such as "Strawberry Cough" and "Purple Kush."...

Marijuana's presence on TV and in the movies has moved from the harbinger of bad things including murderous rage ("Reefer Madness" in 1936) to full-scale hauntings ("Poltergeist" in 1982) and burger runs gone awry ("Harold & Kumar go to White Castle" in 2001) to being just another fixture in the pop-culture firmament. Cannabis crops up on shows such as "Entourage," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "True Blood" and "Desperate Housewives," and even on animated shows such as "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy."...

Well, then, legalization must be right around the corner. Remember thinking that around 1969? I do. In 20 or 30 years, people said, we'll be the ones in Congress, and — ha ha ha ha — there's no way we won't legalize marijuana! It's 40 years now, and what happened?

Back to the LA Times hallucination:

Richard Laermer, a media and pop culture trend watcher and author of several books, including "2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade," ... points to a ... subtle shift: aging baby boomers — a generation famous for tuning in, turning on and dropping out — who are keeping their party habits going into their golden years.

"It's hard to fathom that the fifty- and sixtysomethings would be against pot after all the pot they smoked," Laermer said, "Their kids would laugh them out of the room if they started telling them not to smoke pot."

Hello? The Boomers have been in power for decades, so I guess we are hard to fathom. Hey, we're deep and complex and... just as hypocritical as every other generation that ever flowered and went to seed. You can laugh at us all you want, but you actually can't laugh us out of the room... or out of Congress.

Quit laughing. Quit whining. Here. You can watch the entire movie "Reefer Madness" (originally titled "Tell Your Children"). It's so old it's in in the public domain...

... and yet marijuana is still illegal. ADDED: Jonah Lehrer:

I recently moved to Los Angeles and I'm still adjusting to all the medical marijuana stores - there are two within a mile of my apartment. And it's not just the dispensaries, with their parking lots full of fancy cars - it's the Amsterdamesque attitude. Light up a joint and people ask for a hit; light up a cigarette and they give you a dirty look.

Speaking of hypocrisy... "medical" marijuana....

"This country has already alienated allies and seen its moral standing crumble."

"Now, as we try to get to the bottom of what happened during those years, we have to acknowledge that doing so might put us in further danger."

The LA Times thinks we need to see more of those graphic photos.

"It is a very touchy subject. Some people see it like a drug; some people see it like coffee."

"You have to understand our background and understand the significance of it in our community."

So says Abdulaziz Kamus, president of the African Resource Center, about khat — a substance that is illegal in the United States legal and popular in East Africa and the Arabian peninsula.

Now, I don't much understand the background and the significance of khat in the community Kamus is talking about, but I understand a lot about the background and community of the United States and its media, so my observation is about the L.A. Times article at the link. I can see what they are up to. They are reframing a drug problem in terms of multiculturalism.

Look at how this article begins with a cozy colorful picture set in "Washington" (which I presume means Washington, D.C., since the 4th paragraph contains the phrase "in cities such as Washington and San Diego"):

In the heart of the Ethiopian community here, a group of friends gathered after work in an office to chew on dried khat leaves before going home to their wives and children. Sweet tea and sodas stood on a circular wooden table between green mounds of the plant, a mild narcotic grown in the Horn of Africa.

As the sky grew darker the conversation became increasingly heated, flipping from religion to jobs to local politics. Suddenly, one of the men paused and turned in his chair. "See, it is the green leaf," he said, explaining the unusually animated discussion as he pinched a few more leaves together and tossed them into his mouth.

For centuries the "flower of paradise" has been used legally in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as a stimulant and social tonic.

See? It's a charming culture. You're not supposed to notice that you could mobilize your writing skills and do PR for any recreational drug like this. You're not supposed to notice that the actual scene is nothing more than some men lolling about having a drug-fueled argument.

But in the United States khat is illegal, and an increased demand for the plant in cities such as Washington and San Diego is leading to stepped up law enforcement efforts and escalating clashes between narcotics officers and immigrants who defend their use of khat as a time-honored tradition....

Increased immigration from countries such as Ethiopia, Yemen and Somalia has fueled the demand in this country and led to a cultural conflict.

"We grew up this way, you can't just cut it off," said a 35-year-old Ethiopian medical technician between mouthfuls of khat as he sat with his friends in the office....

"In my mind, [the arrests are] wrong," said an Ethiopian-born cabdriver who was arrested in November in a Washington, D.C., khat bust and spoke on condition of anonymity. "They act like they know more about khat than I know."

I admit I don't know about your culture's drug, but I know my culture's drug, multiculturalism. The L.A. Times is dealing it here. It is not a stimulant. It is a depressant: It numbs judgment.

So let me pour another cup of coffee and say that I do not want my medical technicians doing drugs in the office and I don't want my cabbie high.

The New Year's Tick has arrrived, replacing Father Time, The New Year Baby, and The Ball.

I asked for your drawings and photoshoppings of the new New Year's mascot, the New Year's Tick. That lovable master of the animated gif, Chip Ahoy, has come forward, so let's do the countdown.

I'm still looking for drawing of the tick that make him lovable and memorable. I've thought of a name: Tock the Tick. See? He represents time.

***

I've done all my out-of-the-house New Year's celebrating yesterday and today, and now I'll be home blogging tonight, so please hang out here. I've got a couple things I want to post, and then I'll start a New Year's Eve live-blog post. We'll talk about the old and the new and what's on TV, we may reproduce some of what passes for conversation chez Althouse, and if we are lucky, as the clock ticks, there will be more New Year's ticks.

The L.A. Times goes after 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski again.

Click the "Kozinski" tag if you don't remember the previous controversy. Now, the same reporter, Scott Glover, has a story about an email list run by Kozinski -- joined by accepting his invitation -- that sent out various humor items:

On the gag list, Kozinski periodically distributed jokes to a group of friends and associates, including his law clerks, colleagues on the federal bench, prominent attorneys and journalists. The jokes he sent ranged from silly to politically oriented to raunchy....

Do Kozinski's actions indicate a lack of judgment or are they merely the harmless expression of a free-spirited man who happens to be a highly regarded judge?

Patterico is not amused: Who cares what humor someone sends around to a willing group of friends? "To some, jokes like this are funny. To others, they’re annoying and tasteless... [I]t’s just not something that merits coverage in a newspaper," he says.

But wait. If the email went around to a lot of judges and it is truly offensive, I care! What if most or all of the recipients were men and much of the humor was demeaning to women? That would matter. What if it was full of racial and religious stereotypes? That would matter. You know people by what they think is funny. If there is insight to be had into the minds of judges, I want it! These people are trusted with immense power, and the federal judges have life tenure. Don't coddle them.

Now, let's go back to Glover's article and see whether he's found the kind of humor that I say matters:

The Times was given 13 jokes by three sources that were circulated on the gag list between 2003 and 2008.

One joke sent last spring poked fun at the Taliban, stating, "You may be a Taliban if ..." any of the following 12 statements are true. Among the statements: "You own a $3,000 machine gun and $5,000 rocket launcher, but you can't afford shoes" and "You wipe your butt with your bare left hand, but consider bacon 'unclean.' "...

The most graphic joke was set up as a three-page letter ostensibly written by a man to his estranged wife. The man sarcastically tells his wife that he still loves and misses her while at the same time detailing his recent sexual escapades with a young student, a single mother and his wife's younger sister. The single mom, the man says, acts like "a real woman . . . [who is] not hung up about God and her career and whether the kids can hear us."

Does this rise to the level that I've said matters? No.

But does that mean that the L.A. Times was wrong to publish this article? I'd say no to that too. I don't think it's important to publish this article. If federal judges were circulating racist jokes, it would be wrong to suppress it to protect these elite and insulated individuals. But that doesn't mean that it's wrong to share this insight into judicial minds. There was no prying into their private lives, no stalking or trickery.

Patterico places great emphasis on the fact that list membership was voluntary. There are 2 reasons why this doesn't make it all okay. The first I've already stated. The minds of judges affect the public, so it's good to have evidence of what those minds are really like. Just as I want news reports of things politicians accidentally say into a live microphone when they think they are speaking privately, I want to know what judges find funny when they talk -- or email -- amongst themselves.

The second reason appears in Glover's article:

Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School and former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, was skeptical that those who found jokes on the list offensive would necessarily complain, given Kozinski's commanding stature in the legal community.

"If you're ambitious, he's the last person you want to offend," she said.

It's just too hard to say no and, having said yes, to say take me off your list.

***

And, by the way, didn't sending jokes around to all your friends become completely uncool more than a decade ago? Why didn't Kozinski realize he was spamming everybody?