I started to play Semantle but found it way too revealing of the patterns of my own mind.

What a devious tool! Also, it would take insanely long to figure out how your own word associations related to what the computer has connected, and I don't really want to learn and internalize the computer's patterns. 

In short, what's mine is mine. I don't want that thing spying on me and collecting information, and I don't want to use my mind to collect information about it. 

Sorry, I'm raving... after following MadisonMan's link (in last night's café):

https://semantle.novalis.org/ 

A little harder than wordle. Explanation for how it works at the website.

By the way, we have a family word game — invented by my son John (I must have described before on this blog, but where?) — that's a bit like Semantle but more fun and less devious.

"There was almost a celebrity-like aura around him. It wasn’t a normal class. He would go on these long tangents about life and spirituality."

Said Amelia Brown, quoted in "Past Students Say Professor of Rock ’n’ Roll Sexually Harassed Them/Six former University of Michigan students have filed legal papers accusing a former lecturer of sexually harassing them and the school of not doing enough to protect them" (NYT). 

The class Brown took with the professor, Bruce Conforth, was “Beatniks, Hippies and Punks.”

[One former student] says, according to the court papers, that Mr. Conforth pressured her into a series of sexual encounters, some of them in his campus office, and later, after she had graduated, raped her in his Ann Arbor apartment. A second former student, Ms. Brown, said she was pressured into a sexual encounter with Mr. Conforth after he told her he had feelings for her and pursued her for several weeks. A third woman said he aggressively kissed her. The other plaintiffs say Mr. Conforth propositioned them to have sexual relationships, at times sending them sexually-charged messages or emails and persisting even after they said no. One woman said he gave her a raccoon penis, suggesting it was a talisman.... 

"What's the avocado tree's name? (I have forgotten). It's looking pretty large."

Said MadisonMan, in the comments to the post with video of Meade grinding hard red winter wheat. Meade answered "Arthur" with a link to "Recurring features in Mad (magazine)" (Wikipedia), and then, later, took this picture of the tree and me. 

 

I'm there, I suppose, for scale. 

The hat is not an affectation, but a needed shield for my eyes as I work in front of the big window, but it's funny to see it in the picture, because I just finished writing a post on the NYT obituary for the artist Barry Le Va, and the obit has the line, "Mr. Le Va became known for his ever-present Borsalino hat," and that's what my hat is, a man's Borsalino hat. 

Here's how Arthur looked in May 2019, after we drove home from Utah in one day to save him from a mid-Spring freeze. And here he is in October 2015, when he was 2.

"He had this little list of rules that he lived by. They're all really good ones like, Don't talk all the time, Listen to your mentors and friends and learn from them."

"I actually have them memorized, which is kind of weird. Nobody likes an overbearing big shot, which sounds so much like his words... Help a friend when they're hurting."

Said Jenna Bush — her eyes welling with tears (according to The Daily Mail).

IN THE COMMENTS: Wince said:

"Nobody likes an overbearing big shot."

And, try as you might, nobody likes a wimpy, ineffectual establishment Republican.

Well, not until you're out of office or dead, and then only to use you as the new standard-bearer to attack and cow your successor Republicans.

AND: MadisonMan said:

"Nobody likes an overbearing big shot."

The Press gets to decide who fits that description.

Meade responded:

It's almost as if the Press is, itself, an overbearing big shot.

It's time to play "Was that racist?"

I'm getting email from an outraged reader who's on my case for not censoring the following comment, which appeared on yesterday's post about a NYT article titled, "Protests Draw Shoulder-to-Shoulder Crowds After Months of Virus Isolation." Out of discretion, I will refrain from naming the commenter, who said:

I'm sayin right out now. Like the 60s, the bulk of the "protesters" are lookin for a hook up. Nothin like a meaningful virtue signal to fire up the hormones. Mostly lookin for that Hot Monkey Love the libs all crave.

Was that racist?

IN THE COMMENTS: Leslie Graves said:

Is it safe to assume that they thought this because of the reference to "hot monkey love"?

I looked it up on Urban Dictionary, where the meaning is given as "To engage in hot serious sex. To go at it with the prowless [sic] of a monkey. In that you actually make each other wanna make noises similar to that of a screaming monkey."

Urban Dictionary doesn't represent this as having racial overtones.

The person also might have thought that claiming that hormones and the desire to hook up are actually what is causing folks (some of whom are people of color) to flood into the streets, as opposed to a high-minded desire to protest the killing, and that saying that is insulting to those people of color in a racist way.

I will say that back in the 60s, whenever there was an anti-war protest in nearby Madison, it was very common for the old folks to offer commentary suggesting that the main reason for those students (virtually all of whom were white) to flood into the streets was to get some action. So, that's how I read the comment.

MadisonMan said:

Why run to the teacher, so to speak, over something like this? If you find something in the comments racist enough to email the host, why isn't racist enough to comment on directly?

Some people don't want to engage in open debate. They want censorship. The person who emailed me said: "I don’t subscribe to the Zuckerberg view" and wanted to attribute it to me for not "filtering" it out. I get something like 1,000 comments a day and, though I delay them in moderation to squelch known trolls, I can't possibly read them all and think about what they mean. In any case, I do subscribe to the Zuckerberg view.

ADDED: Is Gilda Radner racist?



Is Maureen Dowd?

"Althouse: If you say 'Harumph' you must Link!"

Says Madison Man, in the comments to a post where I said "Harrumph!" He links to this:



Fantastic! My post has an embedded clip from "Putney Swope," because it has a line — "How many syllables, Mario?" — that I have held in my memory for half a century. But there's no chance that I'd have dragged up "Harrumph," because — can you believe it? — I have never seen "Blazing Saddles."

Is it "harrumph" or "harumph"? Double letters are the peskiest spelling problem. The OED says the double-r is correct. It's defined as "A guttural sound made by clearing the throat. Also fig. So as v., to make this sound; to speak in a rasping or guttural voice; to make a comment implying disapproval." One example is from The New Yorker in 1961, a cartoon, I'm guessing: "My goodness, Henry, you're much too young to be going har-rumph, har-rumph all the time!"

I put "Blazing Saddles" on my list of movies that came out during the period of my life when I pretty much went out and saw everything that was supposed to be excellent but that I never did see — not at the time and not in later years, when it became easy to see whatever I wanted on videotape or DVD. Also on my list: "Apocalypse Now" and "The Last Picture Show." I think of those 2 because they are DVDs that I bought as soon as they came out because I assumed surely I'd watch them and that my previous failure to watch them was nothing but a chance omission. They've sat on my shelf for way more than a decade.

And I still don't feel like watching "Blazing Saddles." Harrumph!!

"If you need to watch a movie more than once to understand it, then you've lost me. That's the definition of a bad movie, in fact."

Writes MadisonMan in the comments to the post about the 20th anniversary of the movie "The Big Lebowski" and the critics who panned it. He agrees with the original reviews, but has only "watched it once, and I'm not rewatching. It's unwatchable to me...."

The subject of rewatching (and rereading) is a big one, I realized as I started to respond to MadisonMan in the thread. I got this far:

I always had to rewatch an episode of "The Sopranos" to understand it. There was too much going on to get it the first time and too much artful ellipsis.

But I'd also have to watch last night's episode of "Survivor" again to understand it, and I know that isn't worth doing.

And then I decided this needed to be on the front page. When do you say, I am not rewatching/rereading that — they had one chance to reach me and I'm not putting my time into unraveling what they failed to make clear? And when do you say, I'm going back in to open up the mysteries that passed me by the first time?

One reason I'm glad not to be a law professor anymore (and glad to be able to follow the precepts of a fine religion) is that I was forced and had to force others to read Supreme Court opinions, and we were required to understand them, and that meant a lot of rereading of aesthetically displeasing and intellectually unrewarding verbiage.

I was bound by the power of the Court to spend twice as much time (at least) trying to read something that they could have spent more time making readably clear. I suspected that the Court deliberately inflated its own power by imposing burdensome reading. Heh, that will keep them busy, and they'll never get to the point where they can criticize us in writing that anyone else will have the endurance to read to the point of understanding.

But I was the Court's taskmaster, insisting to students — over and over — that no matter how incomprehensible you think this is, you can understand if you reread. Read it a second time, and if you still don't understand, read it a third time and a fourth. Empower yourself by discovering the meaning that only rereading will reveal.

I don't do that anymore.

I want to read and watch things that are rereadable/rewatchable. I truly believe that the best movies and writing are better the second time (or third or fourth time). But you can't get to the second time without going through the first, and when do you say, after the first, there will be no second time? Maybe the secret is to walk out of movies and throw aside books when you realize you're just trying to get through this and would never want to see/read it again?

Maybe, with all your first times, if you're not thinking this is going to be better the second time around, you should bail out of the first time. Is this a one-night-stand? If yes, then don't "Cat Person" it, get out.

"I didn't follow the Super Bowl thread — because I went to bed early last night. What bliss!! Meteor last night, by the way."

Says MadisonMan, pointing here:



That's video from he east camera on the roof of the Atmospheric, Oceanic & Space Sciences Building here at UW.

Everyone was saying Melania got her inspiration for that blue outfit from Jackie Kennedy...

... but I'm seeing the tie to Laura Bush...



Here's how Melania showed up to appear with her predecessor:



Note the similarity in the sleeve length and the flapped over section at the top as well as the color. The colors are interestingly different, and — funnily enough — for all of Melania's matchy-matchiness* — Laura's color would have much more closely matched the Tiffany box...



... the box that led to so much awkwardness yesterday — laughed at by me here.

I ran across that picture of Laura because, in the comments at that last link, MadisonMan said:

The picture of the Obamas' arrival at the White House 8 years ago includes Michelle handing a package to Laura. Why should she have been surprised to receive something today?

I still haven't found a picture of Michelle arriving with a package for Laura. I have no idea whether bringing a gift is traditional and required or bizarre and rude or somewhere in between, but I do think there is a principle of etiquette that overrides all others which is that when someone else is trying to be nice but gets something technically wrong, you do what you can to smoothly erase the appearance that anything is awry. The classic trope is Drinking the Fingerbowl. Thus, if Melania committed a faux pas, Michelle committed a worse faux pas.
____________________

* "Matchy-matchy" has been a standard fashion insult for many years, but as Maureen Dowd said in her live-chatting of the inauguration:

Matchy-matchy used to be bad but Melania may make it a trend. Coats and dresses that match, like old Doris Day movies. Monochromatic outfits that make you look tall and slim, like Marlene Dietrich and Audrey Hepburn in the “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” scene where she’s all in fuschia.

ADDED: Here's the video showing that Michelle did in fact bring a gift and hand it to Laura. Watch how deftly Laura hangs onto it while keeping it out of the photo op:



Laura carries it as if she appreciates it and hands it off discreetly to an unseen person after she enters the house.

Kanye West is "at once a prop and, because Trump’s political calculations can’t be unsnarled from the narcissistic Trump Show playing in his mind, a bauble for the kingpin to gloat over."

Writes Katy Waldman in Slate in a piece with the drama-queen headline "Donald’s Beautiful Dark Fascist Fantasy/What do Trump and Kanye have in common? Totalitarian aesthetics and disconnection from reality."

How about all the times celebrities have appeared with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton? Did you call them all props and baubles for a narcissist to gloat over?

Waldman goes on to talk about the "fascist undertone" of West's art. (She doesn't use the word "dark," by the way. That racially questionable adjective only appears in the headline.)

Mussolini’s favorite thinkers exalted the heroic, and curiously amoral, promise of man hurtling toward perfection; West speaks in similarly bombastic terms when he declares that, as a musician, “I can do whatever I want to do. … If I’m gonna take a stage and like, open up a motherfucking mountain I can do that.”... West and Trump’s dynamic—the artist and the strongman—evokes a traditional symbiosis between aestheticism and fascism. In the visually ravishing films of Leni Riefenstahl, the crisp goose-stepping of smartly uniformed troops, the propulsive fervor of futurism, we’ve seen politics married to the pursuit of the beautiful before.

Ironically, it's Waldman who is marrying ideas and images. If she's aware of how propaganda like Riefenstahl's films work, is she circumspect about what she herself is doing? It's not too aesthetically appealing, so there's little chance that it will sway large crowds, but it is, in its own tawdry way, propaganda.

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said:

So it's come to this. Slate writers assuming that Black entertainers are useful stooges to The Man.

Nothing racist at all about that assumption. 

It's the Clarence Thomas treatment. A black person is given less room to have opinions of his own.

Don't you see that the new war in Somalia is the same old war Congress authorized 15 years ago?

In 2001, Congress authorized the President "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

Although a separate authorization was acquired in 2002 to go to war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, it is the 2001 authorization that President Obama has relied on whenever he's felt a need to say that Congress has authorized the war with ISIS, and Congress hasn't pushed back.

Now, we learn that President Obama is interpreting the 2001 authorization to support a war against he Shabab in Somalia! The NYT reports:

The executive branch’s stretching of the 2001 war authorization against the original Al Qaeda to cover other Islamist groups in countries far from Afghanistan — even ones, like the Shabab, that did not exist at the time — has prompted recurring objections from some legal and foreign policy experts....

“It’s crazy that a piece of legislation that was grounded specifically in the experience of 9/11 is now being repurposed for close air support for regional security forces in Somalia,” said Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations....

In Somalia, the United States had long taken the position that a handful of Shabab leaders, as individuals, had sufficient ties to Al Qaeda to make them wartime targets. But it has debated internally for years whether the Shabab as a whole, including their thousands of foot soldiers, can or should be declared part of the enemy....

But as American partners have been going after the Shabab in general more often without any particular focus on individuals linked to Al Qaeda, it has been harder to point to any congressional authorization for such airstrikes that would satisfy the War Powers Resolution.

As the election neared, the administration decided it would be irresponsible to hand off Somali counterterrorism operations to Mr. Obama’s successor with that growing tension unresolved. Now, as Mr. Zenko pointed out, “this administration leaves the Trump administration with tremendously expanded capabilities and authorities.”

If the GOP Congress didn't stand up to Obama and balance his exercise of war power, it's hard to see how it will interfere with President Trump. Any Democrats (and other nonTrumpists) who cry out about an overpowerful President acting without express support from Congress will have to answer for why they did not make this argument when Obama was building the power of the presidency.

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan takes issue with my last sentence: "Answer to whom? The non-questioning press who will only harp on Trump?"

"Harvard announced on Thursday that it was canceling the rest of the season for its men’s soccer team..."

"... after university officials uncovered what they described as a widespread practice of the team’s players rating the school’s female players in sexually explicit terms," the NYT reports.

Lawyers for the university began investigating the men’s team after the college newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, reported last week that a player created a nine-page document in 2012 with numeric ratings, photos and lengthy evaluations of the freshman recruits of the Harvard women’s team based on their physical appearance. Men on the team referred to the document as a “scouting report.”

Here's the Harvard Crimson article. Excerpt:

The author... assigned each woman a nickname, calling one woman “Gumbi” because “her gum to tooth ratio is about 1 to 1.”

“For that reason I am forced to rate her a 6,” the author added.

“She seems to be very strong, tall and manly so, I gave her a 3 because I felt bad. Not much needs to be said on this one folks,” the author wrote about another woman.

Concluding his assessment of one woman, the author wrote, “Yeah… She wants cock.”

According to the NYT, the team had "a 4-0-1 conference record, 10-3-2 over all." There were 2 games left in the season, and the Ivy League championship was at stake.

Here's the response from the women's team, published in the Crimson. Excerpt:

“Locker room talk” is not an excuse because this is not limited to athletic teams. The whole world is the locker room.... We are hopeful that the release of this report will lead to productive conversation and action on Harvard’s campus, within collegiate athletic teams across the country, and into the locker room that is our world....

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said:

I roll my eyes at the title of the Women's Team's response.

"Every branch of the government could stand an 11% shrinking."

Said MadisonMan, commenting on my post expressing skepticism about the notion that the Supreme Court is "short-handed" when it has only 8 Justices instead of 9.

If the problem is that an odd number is so much better than an even number, why not 7?

I like this comment too, from Humperdink:

"Shorthanded" is a classic hockey term. One team is down a player, which results in the opposing team having a man (or woman) advantage, appropriately named a "power play". When the shorthanded time frame ends, both teams are at "even strength".

With the Supreme Court, I would prefer the even strength situation, as opposed to a power play. Maybe we would get less highly partisan rulings. Let the lower courts have their fun.

Once you visualize the Supreme Court as 2 teams playing against each other competitively, then it's the odd number that is the problem. The liberals have been playing short-handed for — what? — a quarter century? I'm counting from the year Clarence Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall.

By the way:

The new Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture treats conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas like a mere footnote while heralding the woman who accused him of sexual harassment, Anita Hill....

Ah, yes. 1991, the year America got its consciousness raised on the subject of sexual harassment awareness. 7 years later, we got our consciousness lowered.

ADDED: The special ice hockey meaning of "short-handed" goes back only to 1939, according to the unlinkable Oxford English Dictionary. The oldest meaning of the word is "Niggardly, mean; inefficient, ineffective," as in "My Hostesse was not short, either handed, or witted" (1622). Second-oldest is how I think of the word: "Lacking a full complement of ‘hands’, undermanned, understaffed."

And I want to say that I think it would be terrible for the Court to have a locked-in 5-Justice liberal or conservative majority. What we have had for the last 2 or 3 decades has been 2 minority factions with 1 or 2 swing voters. Now, these swing voters — O'Connor and Kennedy — could be characterized as conservative. They were, of course, appointed by a conservative President, Ronald Reagan. But conservative Presidents don't necessarily produce conservative Justices. Justice Souter showed that very well.

It has been tiresome dealing with 5-4 decisions determined by a swing voter, what with the absurd attention to how Justice Kennedy thinks about things. Much as I would like to move beyond this era of Supreme Court decision-making, I don't like the idea of a predictable 5-person majority on either the conservative or the liberal side.

I would not mind staying with an 8-person Court, where majorities require the 2 sides to find ways to come together and produce some legal thinking that would feel more like law and less like politics.

"Libtard" is a portmanteau word, but of what? Liberal + ???

This topic arose in the comments to my post last night that took The New Yorker to task for publishing the sentence: "In India, Hindu supremacists have adopted Rush Limbaugh’s favorite epithet 'libtard' to channel righteous fury against liberal and secular élites." In fact, Rush Limbaugh never says "libtard."

I added: "'Libtard' is an offensive word, unnecessarily dragging in disrespect for the mentally challenged." I have always heard the word as a combination of "liberal" and "retard." But in the comments, MadisonMan asked: "Does the 'tard' come from retard, or bastard?" I think it's obvious: 1. "Retard" is often shortened to just "'tard" and no one ever says "'tard" to mean "bastard," and 2. The contempt expressed in the use of the word seems to be about stupidity and not orneriness.

Urban Dictionary confirms my understanding, in the top-voted definition and in all the competing definitions.

But here's an op-ed in the NYT (from 2014), "Testing the Ideas of India." See? It's India again.

The [the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party's] dominance during this election campaign has had unexpected benefits, including reviving the belief that secularism is a value — even if it’s a value that needs reviving, and redefining. In rambunctious Twitter arguments, “sickular” is often used as a pejorative term, along with “libtard,” a composite for “liberal bastard.” This language, however extreme, is a sign that between the small but noisy groups of Hindu supremacists and the small but equally vociferous groups of committed left-liberals lies a vast middle ground.

I don't know if that columnist got it right, and who knows how the word "libtard" came into being in India? It didn't come from Rush Limbaugh, but did it come from other Americans? If so, was the "tard" misunderstood as connected to "bastard" or was the NYT op-ed writer — Nilanjana S. Roy — just innocent of the American word "tard" and making her own assumption? Roy is a novelist born, educated, and living in India. She's not a good source of the origin of the American epithet "libtard," which seems to have a life of its own in India.

I'm razzed for defending Prince's intellectual property and then embedding a Lonnie Mack video imprinted with the words "For Preview Only."

Madison Man says:

I'm appreciating that this post — complete with pirated video 'For Preview Only' — sits atop one complaining about appropriating Prince's name/symbol for any cause.

I react:

I assume that Lonnie Mack wanted the media getting his reputation out there (and so did the estate of Stevie Ray Vaughn). They could get it taken down. It's up, so I think the spread of the music is wanted, and if I heard otherwise I'd take it down. I assume I'm doing Lonnie Mack's reputation a... favor. If I'm wrong about that, I would want to take it down. I know, with respect to Prince, that he did not want it. He had a different approach to his reputation, closely guarded. So I'm not being incoherent or inconsistent.

And then:

Anyway, what does "preview only" mean? We're previewing it... whatever that means. How do you "preview" something? When you're viewing it, you're viewing it. How are you somehow viewing it before viewing it?

I know. There's a George Carlin routine about this. Wish we could preview it.

Ah! Yes (language warning):

"Was that a meteor?! Did you see that?"

I asked last Saturday evening after Meade and I saw a spectacular light streak across the northern sky, east to west.

Reader MadisonMan checked to see if the UW-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center rooftop webcams had caught it, and isn't it cool that they caught the view we saw:



So there! A meteor! Beautiful!

"Cop Who Sought Photos of Teen’s Erection in Sexting Case Commits Suicide Moments Before Arrest."

"Police Detective David Edward Abbott, a member of the Northern Virginia-Washington D.C. Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, committed suicide Tuesday before law enforcement could arrest him on suspicion of sexually abusing minors," Hit & Run reports.

Abbott, you will recall, was the detective in the noteworthy teen sexting case from July 2014, in which the authorities sought a warrant to take the 17-year-old male suspect to the hospital, inject him with a drug that would give him an erection, photograph his genitals, and compare the photo with existing pictures of his genitals the police had confiscated from his 15-year-old girlfriend’s phone....

Abbott sued the boy's lawyer for saying "Who does this? It's just crazy." He called that defamation, in that it made him look like a pedophile. Later, he was suspected of having sexual contact with 2 adolescent boys, and when the police came to arrest him, he shot himself dead.

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan points to my July 2014 post about Abbott's proposal to photograph the boy's medically induced erection and the lawyer's "Who does this?" reaction. My reaction on seeing that old post is:

Wow, I'm surprised to see that I blogged about that... and only last year. When I read [about the case] this morning, I felt I'd never heard of it and was very shocked that the police would propose to do this. (Did they ever do it?) I must have some strong repression reflexes. I really felt, this morning, that if I had ever seen this before I would have blogged it, so I didn't remember blogging it or ever seeing it, even though it makes a big, very distressing impact on me.

MadisonMan looks through the comments at the old post and singles out this, from Fernandiande:

You can see a picture of the child-abusing sex pervert here: "Master" Detective Abbott.

"This shows that in China now we’ll try almost anything that we see on the Internet."

"Nobody knows what it means, but we do it anyway."

When the trend started a few months ago, it was usually just a humble bean sprout clipped to the hair and erect like a little green flagpole.... Now heads are bristling with clover, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, lavender, mushrooms, chilies, cherries, gourds and pine trees....

The most common explanation on the streets was that the floral fascinators just looked cute — “meng meng da,” in a cloying term made popular on the Internet.

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said: "Should I wear my deely-boppers in a show of support -- while playing with my klick-klacks?"

Oh, yeah, deely-boppers... That name always bothered me. I think of Dealey Plaza. But what were klick-klacks? Hmmm...

"Speaker John A. Boehner, under intense pressure from conservatives in his party, will resign one of the most powerful positions in government and give up his House seat at the end of October..."

"... throwing Congress into chaos as it tries to avert a government shutdown. Mr. Boehner made the announcement in an emotional meeting with his fellow Republicans on Friday morning...."

IN THE COMMENTS: David Begley said:

From altar boy and Jesuit college to meeting the Jesuit Pope in the House. Crying allowed. 

Yes, that was my first thought: The Pope made that happen.

AND: There I was yesterday mocking the so-called "breaking news" of the Pope's meeting with John Boehner as "the height of banality."

ADDED: I'm watching Newt Gingrich on FoxNews, asked why is this happening now: "John had been thinking about doing it... probably a month later. But I think the emotional impact of the Pope coming, John's a very devout Catholic, this is something he'd always wanted to see happen. Yesterday, in many ways, is the high point of his speakership, and in that sense, I think, it kind of makes sense to say: I want to go out with something that he will treasure the rest of his life."

ALSO IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said...

I thank him for his service -- it can't be an easy job -- and I thank him for leaving. I'm not sorry to see him go. It's too bad he was re-elected so many times.

I wonder what the real story is. He's ignored the Conservatives base for so long...what's different now? 

And Bobby said:

I'm wondering the same thing. A colleague (rating: B3) has suggested that Boehner and the conservatives cut a deal on the Planned Parenthood funding to avert the government shutdown -- i.e., the conservatives will let Boehner fund the government, and he will be forced out so they have their own victory to celebrate. Theory is the Planned Parenthood battle has gotten so large that the conservatives now need to get something tangible for losing that battle, and shooting Boehner out of the saddle is a very convenient win for them.

Bacon.

I'd said I was going to to step away from the computer to cook up a second pre-breakfast. Tank said: "Second pre-breakfast?... What are you a Hobbit? Or perhaps feeling a little eleven o'clockish? (It's always eleven o'clockish somewhere)." And I said: