"I just wanted to get to my house — that is it"/"We all just want to do something in this world."

🚨 NOW: Anti-police “protestors” are SURROUNDING a woman’s vehicle in Madison, Wisconsin as she BEGS for them to let her go

Madison is going to end up burning.

BLM is doing their best to make sure of it. pic.twitter.com/dliDbWvNXp

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) July 25, 2026

ADDED: That's not a minor residential intersection but one of the most important intersections in downtown Madison.

Is that E Wash?
Do people understand how important arterial roads are on an isthmus? pic.twitter.com/Bcs9KQnxYw

— JoRL (@spaceghostRL) July 25, 2026

The protesters are not just expressing themselves but demanding that other people stop living their lives freely and become one with the protest.

I am reminded of something Michelle Obama said back in 2008: "Barack Obama ... is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed." You can find that quote in "It’s All About Him," a William Kristol column in the NYT (gift link).

"He's completely uncomfortable with this thing being about him. He was just telling me, I think there should be a little less of me here."

Michelle Obama says of Barack and his library:

"He's completely uncomfortable with this thing being about him."

"He was just telling me, I think there should be a little less of me here."

Lmaoooooo pic.twitter.com/8FLeg3XoDm

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) June 24, 2026

Pick the most true statement:

Barack Obama is genuinely embarrassed by the new monument to himself.

Michelle Obama thinks she's a comedian.

These two are so sweet and fun. I love it!

Ugh! I'm embarrassed. America is embarrassed. Terrible!

 

pollcode.com free polls

"[Michelle] Obama called [George W.] Bush 'a wonderful man' and 'a funny man.' 'I love him to death,' she said...."

"'It turns out the country is starved to see a White center-right Republican and an African American center-left Democrat having fun and being able to converse, not as political figures, but as citizens,' Bush said."

From "George W. Bush gifts Michelle Obama a tin of Altoids at Obama Center opening in an ode to their friendship" (CBS News).

"You did it all with such grace and class and cool that you made the hardest job in the world look like a walk in this beautiful park."

Said Michelle Obama, as "Mr. Obama looked down and wiped away tears."

She's quoted in "Presidents Line Up for Obama’s Long-Awaited Center in Chicago/Thursday’s opening drew four former presidents, as well as Bruce Springsteen, Bono and Jennifer Hudson. Chicago has seen years of planning and legal fights" (NYT).

Biden was there too, bearing with unbearable sorrow:

This skirt is messing Obama up.

Barack Obama "is really messed up. I'm giving him some time because this beautiful skirt that my stylist Meredith Koop picked out that is my favorite portrait of my mom. He didn't know it existed until just a few minutes ago. I've had a few weeks to settle down"
- Michelle Obama pic.twitter.com/YbjPXRy0OS

— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) June 16, 2026

ADDED: I've seen faces on shirts but I can't remember ever seeing a face on clothing below the waist. I went looking and found this from Jean Paul Gaultier in the 1990s. I think it works because the faces are small and numerous, making it not that different from, say, a floral print.

One giant face, larger than the face of the wearer, feels quite obtrusive. But it's long been accepted above the waist. How long have those things been around? I remember the Che Guevara shirts, circa 1970, but what was the original T-shirt with a big face? My quick research says it was probably the Thomas E. Dewey 1948 U.S. presidential campaign T-shirt — Dewey's face and the slogan "Dew-it with Dewey."

Equality? Ridiculous!

There's no way in the world that 7 of the top 14 novels here were written by women.

In fact, there's only one really great novel written by a woman in the past 200 years and that's Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchel.

I'd rate it as the greatest American novel of all time. https://t.co/6OJWFjTDk9

— Ted Joy (@TedJoy71) May 16, 2026

Here's the Guardian's explanation, "Who’s in, who’s out, and how many have you read? The story behind our 100 best novels list":

"President Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip portraying former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes...."

"The brief clip, set to 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight,' was spliced near the end of a 62-second video that promoted conspiracy theories about anomalies in the 2020 presidential election....In response to questions about the clip, which Mr. Trump posted Thursday during a late-night spree on social media, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said criticism of the video was 'fake outrage.' 'This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,' she said. 'Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.'"

I'm reading "Trump Posts Video Portraying Obamas as Apes/The White House press secretary dismissed criticism of the clip’s racist content, shared by the president’s Truth Social account, as 'fake outrage'" (NYT).

I don't know why Leavitt responded like that. If I hadn't read what she said, I would have assumed Trump shared the video because of the material that took up the first 97% of the video. Look at it here. It's somber technical material about tampering with voting machines in the 2020 election. I would have assumed that he never even saw the discordant image of the Obamas as apes that is spliced in at the very end, in the last 2 seconds.

I would have speculated that some sneaky person spliced that image in to trick Trump supporters into passing the video along unwittingly and becoming targets for accusations of racism.

Who sticks around for the full 62 seconds? Well, maybe some people do, and then when the Obama image pops up, they probably think What is this bullshit? It doesn't belong. Who put this here?

First Ladies read a Christmas story.

It's not a competition. We cherish diversity of expression. It's all a matter of taste...

 

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A post shared by Johnny Palmadessa (@johnnypalmadessa)

ADDED: Sorry, I didn't see the slur on Melania's name until I put this up. I am offering the contrast among the ladies in a neutral spirit. Anyone who assumes Michelle's reading is superior to Melania's is simply being very conventional.

AND: Here's the full reading by Melania:

"You are not ready for a woman!"

Michelle Obama says she's not making a run at the White House until the country grows up a bit. https://t.co/2f63yPvVFR

🎥: YouTube/michelleobama pic.twitter.com/RPQjmdh0bM

— TMZ (@TMZ) November 14, 2025

"'What I understood was that at some point I wanted to show up publicly with my hair fully as it comes out of my head,' she said."

"For her, that meant braids. 'It was just a question of when.'... Her hair was pressed during our interview, draping over her shoulders with a middle part and styled in loose curls. She said that choice was left to her hair and beauty team.... In 'The Look,' Mrs. Obama suggests that Black women’s personal style is often pulled in two directions: toward 'respectability' or toward authenticity.... 'We didn’t feel like we had the leeway to show up in the world as our full selves,' she said. 'I was a corporate lawyer before I was first lady: No one who was a woman of color was wearing braids or their hair naturally. Our mothers didn’t do that.'..."

From "Michelle Obama on the Restrictive Beauty Standards of Being First Lady/In a new book, Mrs. Obama unpacks the complexities of dressing and hairstyling during her eight years at the height of American politics" (NYT).

But Michelle Obama had tremendous support in the press, including support for whatever she chose to do with her hair, makeup, or clothing. She could have led the way in any direction. If she wanted to popularize natural hairstyles, she should have done it. She could do it now, but she interviews with the Times with her hair "pressed... draping over her shoulders... and styled in loose curls." She was "pulled in two directions: toward 'respectability' or toward authenticity"? Who is pulling her? She is monumentally empowered. 

"Blown away by the massive ordnance penetrators that have phallicized our world, female political stars seem to have disappeared off the map."

"We were promised Mamala and instead we got Mountainhead.... Why is mighty-voiced Michelle Obama relegating herself to that sappy podcast with her brother? Why are we supposed to admire 44-year-old former New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern, once idolized for her brave gesture of donning a hijab after a 2019 terrorist attack on a Christchurch mosque, for drippily dropping out in January 2023 because she found politics 'pretty unrelenting.'... And Gretchen 'Big Gretch' Whitmer [has]... now come out from behind the folder, but still… Meanwhile... Liz Cheney... now describes herself on X as 'proud rodeo mom, soccer mom, baseball mom, hockey mom, constitutional conservative'—in that order. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski... gives a full-throated waffle at the suggestion of daylight between her and the rest of her insane party. 'There is some openness to exploring something different than the status quo,' she said. To the barricades!"

Writes Tina Brown.

"Divorce rumors have been following the Obamas for some time.... Michelle, as a solo artist, has been out and about..."

"... particularly as she promotes her podcast... She’s also been a regular guest on fellow famous people’s shows. This month alone, she went on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang to talk about bickering with Barack over their thermostat, and on The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett, where she insisted once more that 'everyone would know' if she and Barack were breaking up. 'I’m not a martyr,' she said. 'I would be problem-solving in public: "Let me tell you what he did."'"

That's from New York Magazine, which has a sarcastic headline — "Michelle and Barack Obama Are Dating Again" — because it's pushing back on the New York Post article that's titled "Barack and Michelle Obama spotted on swanky date night in NYC as divorce rumors swirl."

Repeated insistence... sounds like protesting too much.

And is it really true that if she and Barack were breaking up she's be out in public, problem-solving, dishing on what he did? I'd like to think she would not, but it was only 5 days ago that I was blogging "Why are men's podcasts so different from women's...?" after Danica Patrick went on "The Sage Steele Show"

How Michelle Obama reminded me of Jordan Peterson.

I'd just listened to Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan's podcast. I blogged about some of it, here, yesterday. Peterson was criticizing woman who fail to develop beyond their natural, instinctive empathy. Let me give you a bit more of what he said:

"I've been lecturing to people for a long time about how to conduct themselves in life so they don't become a tyrant or a handmaiden to the tyrants, a silent handmaiden to the tyrants, let's say.... Because women are more agreeable, they're more prone to manipulation by psychopaths because their primary ethos is nurturing. For a naive woman, every victim is a baby...."

Now, you may find it odd, but I hear echoes of that as I am listening to Michelle Obama in "You Need to Learn to Say No (Even to an Inauguration)," the new episode of her podcast.

I know, your first inclination may be to mock the "poor me" aspect of this. She doesn't have a thing to wear... to the Inauguration. And not having a thing to wear, for her, means instructing her team of clothing wranglers to avoid readying the appropriate outfit, which they otherwise actively assemble for every possible occasion that might pop up (or "pop off"). She is not like other women. Very funny. But true! So work past that instinct to mock. I want you to think about how she is confessing to the agreeableness vulnerability that Jordan Peterson sees in women.

Michelle says:

"Stop trying to sane-wash, RFK Jr. Just. Stop. It."

That's the top-rated comment at The Washington Post's "Did RFK Jr. or Michelle Obama say it about food? Take our quiz" (free-access link).

All that's going on there — the supposed "sane-washing" — is that you are confronted with how much RFK Jr. and Michelle Obama sound like each other.

I closely followed this issue on a daily basis for the entire relevant time period, and I scored 3 out of 7 — worse than the average of random guessing!

And did you listen to the NYT "Daily" yesterday? Here's "How R.F.K. Jr. and ‘Health Freedom’ Rose to Power" (audio and transcript at Podscribe).

The classic "Fear and" title is "Fear and Loathing," but somehow, in these days of loathing, we've got "Fear and Joy."

I'm so skeptical... as I'm reading "Fear and Joy in Chicago/The excitement that radiated through the Democratic National Convention was the other side of what had until recently been a deep despair" by Fintan O'Toole (NYRB).

[T]he Democrats in Chicago were singing a redemption song. It had three parts: valediction, malediction, and benediction....

Having taken a break to listen to "Redemption Song" (see below), I will concentrate on the malediction:

[B]ad-mouthing Trump at a Democratic convention is not that hard. Yet it too had its complications. Just as the Democrats had to navigate between loving Joe and giving him a jubilant cheerio, they had to figure out how to manage another contradictory feat: cutting Trump down to size while retaining a clear sense of the threat he poses to the very existence of the American republic...

They seemed — to O'Toole — to be trying "to reconfigure Trump as the Wizard of Oz, a little man who has conjured an illusion of MAGA magnitude." 

Even the renegade Republican Adam Kinzinger was entirely on message when he called Trump “a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big…. He puts on quite a show, but there is no real strength there.”

I add my favorite blog tag, "big and small." 

"And multiple speakers delighted the crowd by alluding to the fabricated viral claim that Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, wrote in his memoir about having sex with furniture."

"'I wouldn’t trust them to move my couch,' Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said of the GOP ticket on the final night. 'I know a couch commando when I see one,' Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) said minutes later. The jabs were just part of a more expansive case against Trump that Democrats laid out over four nights in Chicago. But they reflected a broader shift in tone for Democrats toward a no-holds-barred kind of rhetorical warfare many in the party once eschewed. Eight years after the Philadelphia convention cheered Michelle Obama’s famous line 'When they go low, we go high' — and with Trump still waging a campaign full of personal insults and baseless accusations... some Democrats said they are tired of being polite...."

From "Democrats once strove to ‘go high’ against Trump. Not anymore. This year’s convention culminated recent efforts to needle Trump on topics known to strike a nerve in the former president, with some Democrats saying they are tired of being polite" (WaPo)(free-access link).

This gets my "civility bullshit" tag, which in this case reflects my belief that the old "When they go low, we go high" was just a strategy choice, to be abandoned when it didn't seem effective... or when the low material is tantalizing enough, like that well-upholstered couch that seems be calling out to you.

"Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it?... A familiar feeling that has been buried too deep for far too long."

"You know what I’m talking about. It’s the contagious power of hope. The anticipation, the energy, the exhilaration of once again being on the cusp of a brighter day. The chance to vanquish the demons of fear, division and hate that have consumed us and continue pursuing the unfinished promise of this great nation, the dream that our parents and grandparents fought and died and sacrificed for. America, hope is making a comeback. Yeah. But, to be honest, I am realizing that, until recently, I have mourned the dimming of that hope. And maybe you’ve experienced the same feelings, that deep pit in my stomach, a palpable sense of dread about the future.... For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us. See, his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black..... Doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better..... We need to overwhelm any effort to suppress us..... Let us work like our lives depend on it, and let us keep moving our country forward and go higher, yes, always higher than we’ve ever gone before...."

Said Michelle Obama — I've edited it down — at the Democratic National Convention last night.

Watch the whole thing for yourself and form your own opinion:

How many times did she say "hope"? I counted: 7.

How many times did she say "Biden"? I counted: 0.  

She said "Kamala"17 times. And, by the way, she said "Harris" only 5 times, and each time, it was the full name "Kamala Harris." I think she (and her speechwriters) are showing us the preferred locution — say either the full name or the first name. "Kamala" is distinctive in a way that "Harris" is not. Ask the person on the street, "What do you think of Harris?" and I bet most people will express puzzlement: Who's Harris?

"Going high is the only thing that works, because when we go low, when we use those same tactics of degrading and dehumanizing others, we just become part of the ugly noise that’s drowning out everything else. We degrade ourselves. We degrade the very causes for which we fight."

Said Michelle Obama, at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.

Quoted in "Walz’s 'couch' quip, and Democrats’ growing comfort in going low/The Democratic VP nominee’s apparent reference to a lewd, fake internet story reflects a more bare-knuckle campaign against a GOP presidential nominee who has spent years plumbing new depths." That's an essay by Aaron Blake, at WaPo.

It gets my "civility bullshit" tag, because civility has been advocated in the past, and Democrats are in a phase where they see an entitlement to reject it.

This also gets my "masturbation" tag. Who would have predicted that Democrats would lean heavily into masturbation shaming? It's 30 years since Bill Clinton fired Jocelyn Elders!

"And we're going to have some fun with this, aren't we?"

Harris murmurs into the phone to Obama and Obama:

Earlier this week, Michelle and I called our friend @KamalaHarris. We told her we think she’ll make a fantastic President of the United States, and that she has our full support. At this critical moment for our country, we’re going to do everything we can to make sure she wins in… pic.twitter.com/0UIS0doIbA

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) July 26, 2024

I call her "Harris." I was going to call her "my girl Kamala" — because that's what Mrs. Obama calls her in that phone call — but the powers that be have warned us not to call her "Kamala" and of course you can't say "girl" — unless you can — and "my" is a terrible problem, perhaps insinuating a perverse sense of ownership. So I'll keep my distance. "Harris" is it. Don't harass me.

Now, about this concept of "fun." It might be the new word of the day, the word on the memo that everyone got. It came up in this new Ezra Klein podcast, "This Is How Democrats Win in Wisconsin":

I mean, Sunday, I was still hearing from Democrats worried about Harris... And now, I mean, watching the party not just converge around her, but feel a real thrill around her, like really, really become passionate Harris stans, like watching the whole party fall outta the coconut tree and live unburdened by what has been, and only in the imagining of what could be. It's fun to watch Democrats have fun. They have not had fun in a long time. And it's also a good reminder that people don't know how something is gonna feel until it actually happens....

People talking about fun... enthusing This is fun... that's not a good marker of fun... whatever fun is....

I think of Zippy the Pinhead: "Are we having fun yet?"

And "And she'll have fun fun fun/'Til her daddy takes the T-bird away...."

And "Fun is the one thing that money can’t buy."

"No, you keen-eyed MAGA sleuths, Biden’s aides didn’t schedule an early debate so that they could replace him after he flails."

"Nor did they engineer Hunter Biden’s conviction just to look virtuous. Democrats, it is not the case that if journalists just stop talking about Biden’s age, many Americans miraculously won’t notice it. Nor are there tea leaves auguring a revolt against Trump at the Republican convention. A respected public intellectual privately promoted that idea to me. And Michelle Obama will not — abracadabra! — be riding to the rescue.... Indulging such illusions is dangerous. Those of us who believe that Trump’s return to the White House would be ruinous must prosaically and persistently make the case for Biden’s superiority, flaws and all. We must plan, plod, slog. No sorcery will save us."

Writes Frank Bruni, in "The Election of Magical Thinking" (NYT).

Is it just dangerous illusion and hope of "sorcery" that has us thinking about ways to replace Biden as the Democratic candidate?! Biden plainly looks and sounds as though he's not capable of performing the job anymore. Trusting him even until January 2025 seems like more of a dangerous game of magical thinking. Bruni has written his column to pooh-pooh those of us who are seriously worried about Biden and to take credit for pretending there's no problem worth talking about. 

But I don't think Bruni is delusional. I think he's bullshitting in print but in his head he's got it figured out. It's too hard to replace Biden* and it seems less likely to work than just crossing your fingers and — la la la — moving along as if nothing is amiss and you are crazy if you think so.** And you know who's really crazy? Donald Trump.

_______________________________

* Word that does not appear in Bruni's column: Kamala.

** There's a word for this: gaslighting.