"They’re all infesting the Cotswolds. F*** them. They’re not resilient … They had every advantage of state power. They had the high ground."

"And guess what, we broke them and now they’re whining like little children...."

Said Steve Bannon, from his house in Arizona, referring to Ellen DeGeneres and others who are relocated, out of fear of the Trump administration.

Quoted by Louise Callaghan in "Steve Bannon: Maga can rule for 50 years and Farage will be PM/For the firebrand Trump guru, beating ‘whining’ Democrats was just the beginning — at home and abroad" (London Times).

“We are so close,” he tells me. “We just need to see this through.” Trump may have won the presidency, but to enact the sweeping changes he wants to make — chief among them destroying the administrative state and deporting millions of undocumented migrants — he needs to move fast, with the support of his party.

The revenge of Uncle Fluffy.

This is another piece in the NYT about Will Smith — it's by Melena Ryzik, Nicole Sperling and Matt Stevens — and I think it's worth reading, because it raises the more general problem of what happens to a person who chooses the strategy of niceness:

From his start as a goofy, G-rated rapper and sitcom star through his carefully managed rise as a blockbuster action hero, Will Smith has spent decades radiating boundless likability. But his amiable image was something of a facade, he wrote in his memoir, noting that a therapist had nicknamed his nice guy persona “Uncle Fluffy.”...

Mr. Smith wrote that he had another, less public, side: “the General,” a punisher who emerged when joviality didn’t get the job done. “When the General shows up, people are shocked and confused,” he wrote in “Will,” his 2021 memoir. “It was sweetness, sweetness, sweetness and then sour, sour, sourness.”

I'm interested in the wages of niceness. You can try to be nice, but if it's a strategy — a means to an end — it's only going to work until you snap or — even if you never snap — it can fail because other people perceive you as phony or because they may rely on you to keep up the niceness charade while they proceed to take advantage of you more and more.  

Remember the "Queen of Nice"? Who was that? Rosie O'Donnell? Ellen DeGeneres? Neither of them turned out to be very nice, and maybe deploying the "nice" persona made them even less nice than they'd have been if they'd gone ahead and been straightforward. And yet, where would they be if they hadn't played "nice"? Where would Will Smith be? Would he have been a big success in rap music if he hadn't taken the "goofy, G-rated" lane?

But most of that NYT article is about how he's hurt his family's brand, which was "rooted in his seemingly-authentic congeniality":

For several years, a growing branch of Smith family enterprises has adeptly delivered reality-style revelation and emotional intimacy across an expanding number of platforms. Beyond Mr. Smith’s acting career and his introspective, best-selling memoir, there is the popular “Red Table Talk” show on Facebook Watch, in which Ms. Pinkett Smith, their daughter, Willow, and Jada’s mother, Adrienne Banfield Norris, hold forth on everything from racial identity to workout routines to the Smiths’ unconventional marriage....

How they sold that "unconventional marriage" as part of a "goofy, G-rated" "congeniality," I don't know. I haven't been watching. I'm surprised by what counts as wholesome and mainstream sexuality these days.  

“I think most people would give him the benefit of the doubt,” said [Jonathan] Murray, a co-founder of the production company Bunim Murray, which pioneered reality TV. “But it really will rest on whether we believe that he is authentically dealing with this.”

There's that word "authentic" again — used, again, not to mean actual authenticity, but the perception of  authenticity. It's  "seemingly-authentic" and "whether we believe" we're seeing authenticity. The authenticity can be completely phony baloney, but the question is, are we — the idiots on the sofa — buying it?

"The Real Scare of Jennifer Aniston’s Friends Prank Is How Nobody Loves Rachel."

Writes Devon Ivie at Vulture about this segment of the "Ellen" TV show, which Aniston guest hosted on Friday:



"[S]he squatted behind the famous couch and jumped out to scare those unsuspecting tourists [who were visiting the 'Friends' set]— but by the sixth round of people declaring their love for every Friends character besides Rachel Green, we can’t help but feel Aniston herself is the one being pranked here. (Someone even said Ross is their favorite. Ross!)"

By the way, Ross is my favorite Friend.

ADDED: I watched the Aniston guest-host show, and it gave me a lot of respect for Ellen. It's hard to seem natural in the phony-baloney role of afternoon-talk-show woman. Aniston just won a Screen Actors Guild for playing the role of a TV-talk-show woman in some Apple TV series called "Morning Show" or some generic title like that. And Aniston's "Ellen" appearance was completely scripted, so all Aniston needed to do was to be a TV actress, which she most certainly is, at the highest level. But I could feel the fakeness. I guess fiction shows have an understood fakeness to them. The additional ease and naturalness that Ellen enacts is not something Aniston was able to achieve.

"Brunei's interpretation of Islamic law now imposes death by stoning as a punishment for sex between men and adultery, as well as amputation of limbs for theft."

"Lesbian sex can carry a penalty of up to 10 years in jail, the BBC reports... The new laws stipulate the death penalty for offenses such as rape, adultery and the defamation of the Prophet Muhammad, though the death penalty was already on the books in Brunei and the country has not carried out an execution since 1957....  Ellen DeGeneres, George Clooney and other high-profile celebrities have called for a boycott of Brunei-owned hotels in protest of these additions to the penal code. Brunei Investment Agency, a government-owned corporation founded by 72-year-old Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, owns luxury hotels across the U.S., U.K. and Europe, including both the Beverly Hills Hotel and Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, The Dorchester in London and Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan....  Brunei released a statement on Saturday defending the laws, saying the penal code criminalizes and deters acts against the teaching of Islam and 'aims to educate, respect and protect the legitimate rights of all individuals, society or nationality of any faiths and race.'"

From "Death By Stoning Among Punishments In New Brunei Anti-LGBT, Criminal Laws" (NPR).

There's a phrase, "legitimate rights."

"So now the slander on my name is all homophobia. So now I’m a little upset. Because I know who I am. I know I don’t have a homophobic bone in my body."

Said Kevin Hart to Ellen DeGeneres, who backs him up:

“There are so many haters out there on the internet,” DeGeneres told Hart. “Don’t pay attention to them... You can’t let them destroy you.... I think it’s perfect that all this happened... Because there has to be a conversation about homophobia... You’ve grown, you’ve apologized, you’re apologizing again right now, you’ve done it. Don’t let those people win, host the Oscars."

They still need a host, but should Hart reverse his decision? Watch the clips at the link. I think the stronger position for him is to resist them, unless they truly crawl.

“We’re back with this year’s Oscar host Kevin Hart,” DeGeneres joked after [a] commercial break.... He said he would be “evaluating” his decision to step down, but still seemed aggrieved over the “malicious attack” on his character.... 

He should be aggrieved! I'd love to hear how he talks about all this when he's not in the warm, fuzzy Ellen DeGeneres showcase. She did a fine job with her role, but notice how she's acting like she's boosting his self-esteem and challenging him, as if he needs to step up and be a winner. I think the people who drove him out are now exposed as the losers, so sticking to his decision isn't "letting them win."

ADDED: Ellen is getting flak for defending Hart.

Watching TV naked... is that weird?

McDonald's buys cure to viral criticism for $50,000.

Pranksters do a great job of identifying themselves as the place to put the money to gain absolution.

So everybody wins. Right? Everybody feels good. Even Ellen.

Popular TV shows canceled for political reasons...

...  that's what I googled as I was thinking about ABC's canceling of "Roseanne." I realize we could argue about whether reacting to an expression of racism is political, but: 1. Racism and the pressure to strictly sanction it is political, 2. "Roseanne" has been under attack all through its reboot season because Roseanne has expressed support for Trump, and 3. That's what I googled, because I wanted to know what else might belong in the same category as the canceling of "Roseanne."

I mean, you've got a very popular show. It's making money for the network. Some large segment of the American public wants to watch the show. Under the circumstances, it's a big deal to ax it. Has it even happened before.

The main thing that came up in my search was the cancelation of "Last Man Standing," one year ago. At Vox, Todd VanDerWerff wrote "5 reasons ABC might have canceled the Tim Allen comedy Last Man Standing/Only one involves Trump."

It’s not often a network cancels its second most-watched comedy in a sudden, surprising move. Usually, if a show that important to a network has to go out, it’s granted some sort of “this will be your final season” reprieve.... The cancellation has left some conservative pundits wondering if Last Man Standing was canceled because Allen himself is conservative, and his character on the series is as well....

I think there are a bunch of really good business reasons for the show to end — but I also don’t know that its increased reputation as “a sitcom for Donald Trump supporters” didn’t hurt it just a little bit...

Any time the only show of one type or another, even if it’s “the only sitcom headlined by a major Trump supporter,” leaves the air, it’s hard not to wonder.

There's also the old Bill Maher show, "Politically Incorrect":

Kanye West was "talking about cleansing."

Kim Kardashian explains what she thinks her husband meant to be saying:

"I mean, I hear him say all these things in the house just about — I think what he was saying about, really to everything, he was talking about clarity, and he always talks about how we should not have our phones first thing in the morning and in the house when we’re with the kids, let’s not have our phones. It’s our rule that we really try to live by. So I think he was talking about cleansing."

At Craps' Last Café...

... you can remember the unattainable laxation, sneer at what you call your youth, and close with a yelp to Providence. What remains of all that misery? A girl in a shabby green coat, on a railway-station platform? No?



Will Althouse figure out how to escape from the casino? I don't know but consider using The Althouse Amazon Portal.

Female privilege.

Happy birthday, @KatyPerry! It’s time to bring out the big balloons! pic.twitter.com/w84DMphK3V

— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) October 25, 2017

ADDED: You might think: Katy Perry is not objecting, but what can she do but keep smiling and show herself to be a good sport? She can't improvise, and she can't step on Ellen's effort at comic performance. Ellen is the comedian. She's the comedian with a show, a media outlet to the fans. You can shut that door if you choose, but what's the motivation?

Katy Perry clearly wants her breasts to be noticed and admired — or at least she's decided to use them as devices to further her career. So why would she complain (as long as Ellen doesn't become a target of #MeTooism)?

Ellen is clowning in a style that reminds me of Jerry Lewis, so I went looking for a photo of Jerry Lewis staring at a woman's breasts. I couldn't find one, but I did find this example of Jerry doing the complete opposite of staring at a woman's breasts:

Expensive dog movie — "A Dog's Purpose" — struggles for its life in the roiling waters of public opinion...

... after a video leaked out of one of the stunt dogs resisting pressure to serve his purpose of playing the role of a dog willingly leaping into roiling waters to save a human life.

Dennis Quaid, one of the stars of the film, said on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” on Monday that “the video does not tell the entire story,” and that the animals “were treated with the greatest respect and care and compassion.”...

The kind of people who would be interested in this movie are the kind of people who will feel they need to avoid it if they've heard the story at all. 

Here's Quaid — cheered on by gentle Ellen — paddling furiously in the raging current:



UPDATE: "Third-party report finds that the Dog’s Purpose video was intentionally misleading."

"And so he was really trying to dominate and then literally stalk me around the stage and I would just feel this presence behind me."

Said Hillary Clinton, talking about the last debate to Ellen DeGeneres. She also said: "He was really all wrought up, and you could just sense how much anger he had."

Sexist claptrap, in my opinion, but Trump's response, which starts out okay, ends in what I'm seeing as a rape joke:

“So I’m standing at my podium by my chair. She walks across the room. She’s standing in front of me, right next to me,” Trump claimed.“And the next day I said what did the papers say? They said, ‘he invaded her space,’” he said. “Believe me, the last space that I want to invade is her space.”

IN THE COMMENTS: A lot of people are unable or unwilling to see the innuendo that I see, perhaps because you want to protect Trump. For example I Have Misplaced My Pants says:

I see no evidence that he is referring to Clinton's [I presume Althouse suggests] vagina. Althouse, you have a dirty mind. You do this a lot. Is your mind and your blog--just want to counterbalance!

On the other hand, Unknown says:

Of course he was using double entendre. How dense are you people?

And then there is EDH:

Althouse: "ends in what I'm seeing as a rape joke" ... which I guess is okay if you're a liberal, like Norman Lear?

"Who'd wanna rape you, anyway?"

Fan reaction to the news that Hillary Clinton will appear on the same Ellen DeGeneres episode as the actresses from the new "Ghostbusters."

@TheEllenShow @HillaryClinton @Ghostbusters pic.twitter.com/mqKpaqTwcf

— Jayson Evans (@JaysonEvans1971) May 17, 2016

I found that via the NYT, which reports that Sony Pictures is unhappy that Hillary is horning in on their long-scheduled publicity for a movie that it really needs men not to hate:

“Get your Woman Cards ready,” Ms. DeGeneres wrote on Twitter to her 60 million followers, a reference to the Republican contender Donald J. Trump’s criticism that Mrs. Clinton had relied on playing “the woman’s card.” The show’s website added, “This Wednesday, Ellen’s sitting down with some powerful women!”

But Sony's "marketing team has been fighting to tamp down what it sees as a misogynistic, Internet-based assault on the movie."

In the best of circumstances, film studios are reluctant to let a big-budget film — “Ghostbusters” cost more than $150 million to make — become identified with a political candidate. Mr. Trump, who must overcome major weaknesses among female voters, has also shown a willingness to fuel the unwanted “Ghostbusters” gender debate:

A video posted by Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) on Jan 28, 2015 at 9:28am PST

I don't think too many men watch Ellen DeGeneres, so what's the real problem for Sony? The NYT is trying to weave this into the usual gender politics, but I think the real problem for Sony is that it wants to sell the movie to women — that's the point of going on Ellen DeGeneres — and putting Hillary on the same show saps the fun out of something that absolutely needs to be very, very fun.

Anyway, for Donald Trump, this looks like more evidence that everything ends up working for him. I hadn't seen that Instagram before. It's from last January, and now it's getting a boost. Some people may argue that it's sexist, but he's only asking a question: "What’s going on?" He has a way of stirring up your thoughts, not exactly telling you what to think, but making your mind feel activated. The thoughts that result feel like your own.

That image at the top of this post casts Trump as the villain and Hillary as the hero, but damned if he doesn't come out ahead again. She of the eternal pantsuit has been reenvisioned in the worst pantsuit ever — a beige jumpsuit. And he's looking cute as a little green monster — with the Ellen show logo looking like a halo. So unfair! But everything bounces to his favor, it seems. How does he do that?

The Ellen slot machines.

Photographed Friday night in Las Vegas, U.S.A.

When is it okay to think it's cute that your kid stands on the dog to reach the counter?

Sarah Palin thought it was worth posting on Facebook, but why?

1. As she presented it — it showed her child Trig overcoming an obstacle — "a lazy dog blocking his way" — turned the negative into a positive, using the dog as "his stepping stone." Pure sweet inspiration, a boost for all of us.

2. She predicted she'd get criticized, and like clockwork, PETA was there: "It's odd that anyone — let alone a mother — would find it appropriate to post such a thing, with no apparent sympathy for the dog in the photo." And Palin fans love the action when some lefty organization takes a shot at Sarah ... or, better, Sarah and Trig.

3. She had an ace in the hole. When the predictable criticism rolled in, Palin played this Ellen DeGeneres Facebook post from last summer:

Post by Sarah Palin.

Ellen's Oscar selfie stunt was product placement...

... for Samsung.

As part of its sponsorship and ad pact for the Oscars with ABC, the TV network airing the show, Samsung and its media buying firm Starcom MediaVest negotiated to have its Galaxy smartphone integrated into the show, according to two people familiar with the matter. ABC is a unit of Walt Disney Co.

As I complained at 8:33 Central Time on the night of the show:

And they keep trying to incorporate the idea of social media — Ellen tweeting from the stage, that sort of thing. They need to keep up the grandeur or it's just incoherent and boring. Eh. We turned it off. It was sluggish and draggy. We're out....

Disrespecting Judy and Liza.

Last night at the Oscars, in the opening monologue — TV-style, isn't it, beginning with a comic stand-up routine? — Ellen DeGeneres made Liza Minelli uncomfortable. The camera zoned in on Liza, and Ellen described the person on camera as "one of the most amazing Liza Minnelli impersonators that I have ever seen in my entire life." Liza — who'd done seemingly all she could to look fabulous — squirmed in obvious psychic pain.

It was only much later that I got a clue why Liza was there and why anyone would focus on her of all stars present in the arena. There was a tribute to the movie "The Wizard of Oz," which came out exactly 75 ago — as if the 75th anniversary of something is especially big. And the same year — 1939 — was the year of "Gone With the Wind." Given the prominence of "12 Years a Slave" amongst the nominees last night — it ultimately won Best Picture — it would have been apt to delve into Hollywood's most famous presentation of slavery, especially since the Academy awarded an Oscar to a woman who played the slave called Mammy, Hattie McDaniel:



That was for Best Supporting Actress, and last night the Academy gave the Best Supporting Actress Award once again to a black woman who played a slave, Lupita Nyong'o.

But forget the absurd resonance and strange racial history of Hollywood. The 1939 movie that got a long segment last night was "The Wizard of Oz." Who knows why? But there was Liza in the audience, not on stage singing. She was listening to Pink singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," while a montage from the 75-year-old movie played in the background. When the first image of Judy Garland went up, I thought the audience should have erupted in cheers and applause, but there was silence. Generally, the audience last night was stiff and dull, filling the seats as if according to instructions from management. Maybe when they saw Judy mouthing the words "There's no place like home," they felt something, a desire to be out of the un-Oz-like hall, at home or at least at some after party.

Pink was wearing a big glittery red dress that looked as if it had been made out of the skin of a thousand pairs of Dorothy's ruby slippers. After Pink had fully emptied the contents of her prodigious lungs, there was an empty stage and finally Ellen tripped out, in a makeshift Glinda-the-Good-Witch costume. The comic trope was that Ellen was one of these "Wizard of Oz" fans who might paste together a DIY costume of a favorite character for a night at the movies. Ellen joked:

"Did I miss it? Is it over? Not cool, guys, they were gonna call me. I'll do it by myself, 'You had the power' ... Oh, never mind."

She mocked Liza, and then she mocked the loser-fans who believe in the magic of movies, the people who really love Judy and Liza.

Oscars. Are you watching at all?

We did for a bit, but have signed off. Interesting seeing Kim Novak, but she was used irrelevantly. Nervy of Jim Carrey to imitate Bruce Dern right at Bruce Dern. Carrey declared it "intense," and we enjoyed the contrast to Ellen DeGeneres, whose squishy niceness doesn't really fit the grandeur of the occasion, and then she was bitchy to Liza. I didn't get that. And they keep trying to incorporate the idea of social media — Ellen tweeting from the stage, that sort of thing. They need to keep up the grandeur or it's just incoherent and boring. Eh. We turned it off. It was sluggish and draggy. We're out. But keep up the Oscar talk here if you like.

"It's a shame. He took over management in 2008 and he turned the team around, getting into the playoffs..."

"... but they just can't win in the playoffs. That's very important. That's baseball. They say that about all kinds of things, but when a team does not advance, then it's management. I'm sad for Dusty, because I think this will be the end of his career. He had that heart attack last season, and he's 65 or 64, and now, if you'll excuse me, I have things I need to know, like 5 things I need to know about Jodie Foster's new girlfriend."

That's what Meade said when I requested a quote on the occasion of the Cincinnati Reds firing Dusty Baker. Meade, who moved to Madison from Cincinnati, has been a Reds fan since 1972, when the Reds were in the World Series and — Meade starts talking again — "they were just an exciting team. That was the beginning of The Big Red Machine. Probably what really drew me to them in 1972 was Pete Rose. I kind of hated him, but I was fascinated by him."

"So have you learned anything about Jodie Foster's new girlfriend?"

"Yeah, she's Ellen DeGeneres's old girlfriend...."

"Anything else?"

"She's tall, dark, and handsome."

"That might offend people. Is that in the article?"

"Yeah. No."