Governor Evers doesn't want to spend any time on "that bullshit that others are talking about."

You can ask him 100 times, and he's "going to give you the same damn answer: The issue is around getting things done."

"We're going to spend time on that bullshit that others are talking about on Twitter? Please."

Gov. Evers campaigning for David Crowley tonight in an attempt to stop Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong from winning next Tue: "You can ask me 100 times, and I'm going to give you… pic.twitter.com/336tlTDfhB

— Matt Smith (@mattsmith_news) August 4, 2026

I'm afraid "getting things done" is awfully generic. Francesca Hong is the frontrunner. You can't just refuse to talk about her. I'm not even sure what he's calling "bullshit." Is it Hong's issues or is it what her antagonists are saying about her? I don't see how refusing to engage and asserting that your candidate will "get things done" can turn things around. I'm here in Wisconsin, planning to vote in the primary, and monitoring the news every day, and David Crowley has made no impression on me. Personally, I'm a sucker for blandness and normality and moderation, but I understand the appeal of a candidate like Hong who stands for something and offers to shake everything up.

ADDED: I published this post and clicked on my "David Crowley" link and realize "that bullshit that others are talking about" may refer to the dirt (McGirk) about Crowley. Crowley had made an impression on me, 2 weeks ago, but the impression had worn off. Evers cleverly kept me from remembering it. I'll give him that.

"He is not the Word made flesh but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair."

It's obviously laughable to pay Ezra Klein $40-70k to hear his vapid, DNC-donor-pleasing, liberal clichés.

That said, I would pay him some substantial portion of that fee to come to a wedding or birthday party to perform a dramatic reading of this hilarious passage he wrote: https://t.co/q0fX4EL2S8 pic.twitter.com/isZtqbNkRs

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 28, 2025

I don't know what irritates me more — the capitalization of one "word" but not the other, or the italics for "over." So he's not the Messiah but his excellent speech conquers... well, everything... or something. 

ADDED: I think Klein deserves this fee. He's a well-known figure who embodies the idea of moderation and civility and he will have to set aside his regular work to travel to and from your event. That's going to cost you at least $40,000. There must be all these Democrats fretting about how to not look so awful and the calming stately presence of Ezra Klein might help them believe there will be an answer.

"Eisenhower said that politics is like the road, the left, the right is the gutter, and the center is drivable."

"And it's exactly the way it is in politics. You have to understand that there's a sweet spot. You know, like the teaching in golf, hit the sweet spot, or in tennis to hit the sweet spot. All this, there's a sweet spot to find exactly so you can get a deal made... It's not exactly your way.... I wanted to wipe out, you know, the deficit. And I was not able to do that with all these Democrats around it. They, they love to spend money. So, so, so I was, I was stuck with it. So, but the fact of them is we could improve the situation and I was able to work together with the Democrats on environmental issues and infrastructure issues... education and all of this stuff. And we, we, we did really fine and had a great time up there being governor of the state of California.... You have to face reality. The trick is just to be, to not hate the other side because they think differently. It's just kind of like figuring out how can we work together and how can we do something that's really good for the people...."

Said Arnold Schwarzenegger, on Theo Von's podcast the other day.

"At a moment when the creation of art at such a scale feels impossible without a corporate sponsor, when most visual stunts are shallow cries for publicity..."

"... the preservation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s legacy feels urgent. And a crucial part of their oeuvre is that the inception of their grand, internationally known works happened humbly, in an unglamorous, gritty industrial building.... At first, only Christo was recognized as the artist behind the pieces, but in the mid ’90s, he started sharing equal credit for outdoor works with Jeanne-Claude. She also acted as his publicist and began hosting dinner parties, inviting influential dealers and gallerists. 'She was notorious for being a terrible cook.... They had no money at all, so she would cook flank steak and canned potatoes. That was it.' ... [T]he dealer Ivan Karp described one of the gatherings as 'a disastrous, bleak evening with some of the worst food served in a private home, ever!' Still, some people returned — two frequent dinner guests were Marcel Duchamp and his wife, Teeny.'"

From "Where Christo and Jeanne-Claude Cast Their Spells/The couple’s lives are preserved in a SoHo building where for decades they plotted their monumental projects" (NYT)(free-access link).

Lots of cool pictures of the Christo real estate, so go check them out at that link, but I want to show you this picture of Teeny, by Henri Matisse (who was her father-in-law during her first marriage):

Duchamp was her second husband. He said: "Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase." Christo went colossal, but Duchamp went small. And he was married to a woman named Teeny.

Is there some idea that you should either go very big or very small? What springs to mind is the related idea of hot or cold: "I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth." File that under: Things Jesus Said In Someone Else's Dream.

Looking for quotes that credit the very small and shun the medium-sized:

Beware the panicans and the entryists.

I'm reading "How Trump Worship Took Hold in Washington/The President is at the center of a brazenly transactional ecosystem that rewards flattery and lockstep loyalty," by Antonia Hitchens, in The New Yorker:

Jack Posobiec, a maga operative and podcaster, emerged as a primary enforcer. “Crush panicans, destroy panicans, deport panicans, roundhouse kick a panican into the concrete, slam dunk a panican into a trash can, banish filthy panicans,” he tweeted, to his 3.1 million followers....

The tone of that tweet. It rang in my head like the voice of Divine:

"Panicans," by the way, is a portmanteau of "panic" and — not pelicans — "Americans."

Back to The New Yorker. Hitchens writes:

"Do you think, do you think... when you don your tinfoil hat and and velcro, the chinstrap... that this is a grand plan to destroy civilization?"

Joe Rogan asks Tim Dillon:

Dillon says he doesn't know if there's "a grand plan," but, he says, there are "two things that are happening simultaneously." First, there are "people that believe in like nothing," "like empty suit Gavin Newsom types." And second, there are "the craziest people in the world that somehow have gotten hold of a ton of money and a ton of influence on social media." It's a terribly destructive combination:

"On the sensitive and divisive issue of gender identity, Ms. Harris’s change in tone is especially telling."

"In 2019, she introduced herself at a CNN town hall by saying, 'My pronouns are she, her and hers.' Today, she changes the topic when asked whether she would honor her pledge to guarantee that detained immigrants, prisoners and anyone else under the government’s care can access gender affirming surgery. 'I think we should follow the law,' she said in a recent interview with NBC News, moving on quickly.... At the same time, Ms. Harris has not explicitly acknowledged any distance from the party’s left flank.... The question for those in the progressive wing of the party is whether they continue to pursue some of their more polarizing ideas about identity.... Whether Ms. Harris wins or loses next week, few expect full capitulation or retreat...."

Writes Jeremy W. Peters, in "In Shift From 2020, Identity Politics Loses Its Grip on the Country/There are signs that society is moving away from the progressive left’s often strict expectations about how to discuss culture and politics" (NYT).

"Harris, characteristically, has made a lawyerly assessment of pros and cons. She and her advisers have queried whether, given the limited number of ATACMS available..."

"... they might be more useful striking Russian targets in occupied Crimea — especially given intelligence reports that Russia has pulled its aircraft that target Ukraine back to bases beyond the missiles’ 300-kilometer range. Another concern for the Harris team is whether the Russians might retaliate by giving long-range missiles to adversaries, such as the Houthis in Yemen, further threatening Red Sea shipping and perhaps Israel.... Lawyers have played a decisive role in national security policy — from Dean Acheson to Jake Sullivan. Harris would sustain that long line of lawyerly balancers and trimmers who weigh risks and benefits before they take action. She might turn a page in our domestic life, but not so much in foreign policy."

Writes David Ignatius, in "These people have seen Harris in the Situation Room. Here’s what they have to say. Harris is 'more hard-line than most people think,' says a retired four-star general who has briefed her many times" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Ignatius assumes we understand what "trimmers" are — "lawyerly balancers and trimmers." There are a lot of meanings to the word "trim," including distracting slang usages (see Urban Dictionary). But, relying on the OED, I've got to choose the nautical meaning: "To distribute the load of (a ship or boat) so that it floats on an even keel." There's also: "To adjust (the sails or yards) with reference to the direction of the wind and the course of the ship, so as to obtain the greatest advantage." But the load distribution metaphor is the one that has been used in politics. The OED has a separate entry for "trimmer," and meaning #5 is expressly political: 

Consider Trump the moderate.

"... Trump is not a movement conservative, not an ideologue outside of core obsessions like trade and immigration, and he no longer has to fear revolts from his right the way he did in the days when he felt the need to pick a religious-conservative Reaganite as his vice president. Glance over the G.O.P. platform, focus on the substance... and you can see outlines of the pitch the moderate version of Trump wants to make to swing voters. I’ll be right-wing on crime and immigration, but I won’t touch your retirement programs. I’ll be anti-woke and pro-patriotism, but I won’t be Mike Pence on social issues. I’ll keep the tax cuts I passed last time, but I won’t necessarily pile on more tax cuts for the rich. I’ll keep America out of unnecessary wars."

I'm reading "From Moderate to Caesarist: 4 Scenarios for Trump 2.0" by Ross Douthat (NYT).

The other 3 versions of Trump are: Trump the doctrinaire right-winger, Trump the imperial president, and Trump the great mobilizer of opposition.

"And so the British and US right have apparently condemned themselves to a political doom loop: savaging the progressive values of younger generations..."

"... and in doing so driving them further into the arms of the left. This bile may serve a short-term political purpose in rallying the core vote of the Tories and Republicans, but it seems that conservatives have thought little about what will happen as younger generations come of age politically and culturally. Perhaps rightwingers believed that the historic precedent of voters shifting rightwards with age would automatically assert itself, however much the young remained locked out of the prosperity their parents had enjoyed. What’s intriguing is how rightwing politicians and commentators alike have doubled down on poisonous invectives that alienate young people. Perhaps this is evidence of a fatalism: they know their fate is sealed, so nothing is to be gained from restraint."

Writes Owen Jones in "The right thrives on bullying 'snowflakes.' But who will vote for it when they grow old?" (The Guardian).

"[S]hortly after he cinched the Democratic nomination, [Bill] Clinton gave a speech to [Jesse] Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition group — in which he attacked the group..."

"... for also hosting a relatively obscure rapper named Sister Souljah, who in the wake of that year’s Los Angeles riots said in an interview, 'If Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?' Clinton told the Rainbow Coalition that 'if you took the words "white" and "Black" and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.' Jackson was furious and called on Clinton to apologize — exactly the response Clinton was hoping for. The Black syndicated columnist Clarence Page later wrote that by picking the fight, Clinton 'impressed swing voters, particularly white suburbanites, with a confident independence from Jackson that other Democratic presidential candidates had not shown.' A loudly performed repudiation of a putative far-left extremist would come to be known as a 'Sister Souljah moment.' Clinton ran for president as a factional candidate, against the Republicans but also against his party’s liberal wing, so that when he won, he remade the Democratic Party in his own — and the D.L.C.’s — image. In 1995, midway through Clinton’s first term, 23 moderate House Democrats formed the Blue Dog Caucus to, in their words, 'represent the middle of the partisan spectrum.'"

From "The Vanishing Moderate Democrat/Their positions are popular. So why are they going extinct?" by Jason Zengerle (NYT). This is a very long article. I've just pulled a little snippet from it.

"[T]he fact that Biden did not lead his party to a landslide will... give him certain political advantages. He will not be permitted..."

"... to re-enact the New Deal or the Great Society, but neither will he be tempted into ideologically driven debacles like Bill Clinton’s failed health care push or even Donald Trump’s failed attempt to repeal Obamacare. Having Joe Manchin and Susan Collins as the most powerful figures in the Senate will not be good for progressivism’s policy objectives, but it could be very good for Biden’s popularity, enabling him to chart a moderate course while telling the left, sorry, but my hands are tied.... Science should guide the coronavirus response, [Xavier] Becerra is a peculiar choice [to run Health and Human Services]: a partisan politician from a deep-blue state whose health care experience is mostly in legal battles with the Trump White House over Obamacare.... It’s less odd, though, if you anticipate using your cabinet agencies the way the Obama White House did in its otherwise-gridlocked second term — as aggressive instruments of partisan policymaking... [such as] immigration amnesties and gun-control executive orders... [and] college sexual-assault policies and school-bathroom regulations... [and forcing] the Little Sisters of the Poor to cover contraception.... ... Biden won the presidency in part because he was more popular than his party (to say nothing of the press), and deploying his bureaucracy aggressively for liberal ends would be the easiest way for him to squander some of that advantage...."

Writes Ross Douthat in "The Biden Opportunity and How to Blow It/The president-elect won promising conciliation. His choice of Xavier Becerra to run Health and Human Services promises culture war" (NYT).