"We do not have the luxury to fight amongst ourselves while that thing sits in the White House."

Said Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, at a meeting of the Democratic National Committee in Minneapolis last week, quoted in "Democrats let it all out at their party meeting" (Semafor)[SEE UPDATE BELOW].

But oddly enough, "that thing" is sitting in the White House after Republicans fought amongst themselves and Walz badly lost the election to him after Democrats went out of their way to avoid fighting amongst themselves. It would make more sense to use the epithet "that thing" to refer to the unwholesome agglomeration that is the Democratic Party.

The three-day meeting of the Democratic National Committee, held to welcome new members and start building the 2028 primary calendar, was the first under new chair Ken Martin.... The party, Martin vowed, was now bringing “a bazooka to a knife fight,” and would no longer “play by the rules” if Republicans broke them.

I'm guessing Martin deployed his "a bazooka to a knife fight" metaphor — in Minneapolis — before the the shooting of children that took place nearby. 

***

Bazooka (Wikipedia):

The name "bazooka" comes from an extension of the word bazoo, which is slang for "mouth" or "boastful talk"... 

That's fitting, for politicians.

During World War II, "bazooka" became the universally applied nickname of the new American anti-tank weapon, due to its vague resemblance to the musical instrument invented and popularized by 1930s American comedian Bob Burns.

Video of Burns playing the bazooka here.

UPDATE: In the comments below, Olson Johnson is right! observes that Semafor has taken Walz's words out of context:

Why Ayn Rand is trending on Twitter under the heading "Sports."

I thought this was odd:

 

But I clicked through and saw that it was no mistake:

Yes, I blogged Aaron's bookshelf gesturing — back on January 4th... in happier days....

Aaron Rodgers points out his copy of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand to Eli and Peyton Manning during Monday Night Football. pic.twitter.com/2qSOcSSb3m

— The Recount (@therecount) January 4, 2022

"Late night congress is great stuff! I'm switching between Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock and the impeachment hearings and it's all starting to make sense."

Said Mr. Forward in last night's "Are you watching the impeachment theater?/I walked out."

Me, I conked out early, got a full night's sleep, and am up at 3 a.m. to view the wreckage.

Headlines on the front page of the NYT:

Senate Adopts Framework After Acrimonious Debate

Republicans blocked Democrats’ efforts to subpoena documents and seek testimony, including from John Bolton. Witnesses could still be summoned later.

Chief Justice John Roberts admonished the House impeachment managers and President Trump’s lawyers to “remember where they are.”

At Davos, Trump Scoffs at Trial and ‘Prophets of Doom’/President Trump appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on the day his trial began.

Impeachment Trial Begins in Acrimony/Republicans made last-minute changes to their proposed rules to placate moderates, but they held together to turn back Democratic proposals.

The headlines kept changing on me, and I don't think "Acrimonious" and "Acrimony" were up at the same time, but I infer that they wanted a negative word to describe the emotional atmosphere and they converged on "acrimony."

"Acrimony" is "anger and bitterness: harsh or biting sharpness especially of words, manner, or feelings." It's the same root as "acrid," which is used to describe a taste or smell.

Remember smellovision?



PLUS: "They'll have to have subtitles for the smelling impaired." Hey, thanks for thinking of me, Weird Al.

AND: The word "acrimony" also appears in the NYT headline, "‘Nobody Likes Him’: Hillary Clinton Risks a Party Split Over Bernie Sanders," which went up yesterday, and that's intraparty acrimony:

Since Mr. Sanders endorsed Mrs. Clinton in July 2016, the acrimony between the two camps has lingered. Mrs. Clinton and her former aides maintain that his endorsement came too late and was too lukewarm to truly unify the party. Some supporters of Mr. Sanders still argue that the Democratic National Committee “rigged” the rules to help her secure the nomination.

Sometimes I feel I must make a note of articles I saw and didn't read.

Just this morning, before 5 a.m., I saw, but did not read, in New York Magazine:

And this, in Slate:

There are plenty of things I see and don't read. But sometimes my non-reading feels like active resistance, and I need to tell you about it.

Morning sun.

Up at 4 and with 4 posts up before 7, I got out early for a 3.4 mile walk along the lake. I love doing that in the summer. The temperature never rose above 68° — it's 79° now — and the early sun made the deep foliage come alive.

Adding tags, I realize I haven't used "written strangely early in the morning" in a long, long time. It just doesn't seem strange to me anymore. I love getting up early!

"It’s very hard to lose weight in the Trump era.... I’m trying so hard to have it not turn into 30 pounds."

"I think it tests our ability to not want to numb out. There’s so many things that are hard to hear every day that you do want to have some Oreos. Like people say, what do you invest in during the Trump era? I feel like, Hostess Cakes. Most of us are just scared and eating ice cream."

Said Judd Apatow. He was talking Maureen Dowd, whom he treated to a meal of "spinach omelets with hash browns and hot sauce that he has picked up after dropping off his daughter at school."

I extract these details from the column because:

1. It's a somewhat charming, self-effacing confession that anyone might make: What's happening in politics seems horrible to me, so I comfort myself with the sweet, creamy foods of childhood.

2. Apatow is a big old powerful movie maker, so why is he being such a big baby? My guess is that his success lies in channeling the mundane reactions of young and powerless people, so it serves him well to relax into immature thinking patterns. It's creative, lucrative work for him. Easy work! What a lucky guy!

3. He's eating Oreos? That's his food reference? Trump owns Oreos foolery:



4. What kind of rich man entertains his NYT interviewer by serving her a take-out spinach omelet with hash browns and hot sauce? Take-out is bad enough, but a take-out omelet? I think an omelet is something you get out of the pan and onto the table in seconds or you just don't serve it at all. And then to make it spinach? What the hell are you trying to say? It would make more sense to serve Oreos and ice cream.

5. Has Maureen Dowd ever indicated her amenability to omelets? Back in February 2010, she forefronted an omelet served to her in a restaurant — so presumably she ordered it — in the presence of Harold Ford Jr. — or maybe it's only what he's eating — and she connected said eggs to the grossness of Harold Ford's feet:

Between bites of an egg-white garden omelet at a bistro in his Union Square neighborhood, Harold Ford Jr. defended himself on pedicures and flip-flops.

“I either run or try to play basketball every day,” he said. “I have severe athlete’s foot — feet. I get a foot scrub out of respect for my wife because getting into bed with what I have when I take my socks off isn’t respectful to anybody.”

I'm not reading that as an OK on omelets. I'm reading that as wafting methanethiol. And that was a high-tone, fresh-cooked, designed-for-a-lady egg-white garden omelet, not something that would be dumped into a styrofoam container to be called back to life with hot sauce.

Happy New Year's Day — pre-dawn, quiet-house looking back on New Year's Eve.

Some of you spent at least some of the annual-nonsense evening at this blog's New Year's Eve post. I'm up working on what I can't really properly tag written strangely early in the morning. It's just not strange for me to be writing early in the morning. Maybe there are some topics that are strange to blog early in the morning, but the comments that arrived while I was sleeping isn't one of them.

MadAsHell said:

Haven't you used this video....er, pardon me....movie in an earlier post?? 

Yes, here. Back when I was editing home movies and posting them as I made them. But I never put this up on actual New Year's Eve before.

Charlie Currie said:

Wait, these are my family home movies...ha...I really need to work on getting mine digitized.

It's easy to get them digitized. I was happy with Legacy Box. The hard part is figuring out what belongs in a watchable edit and not getting distracted by thoughts about how they should have used the camera. It's pointless to say hold the camera steady, pan slowly, and stop showing people opening Christmas presents.

EDH said:

Did any children coincidentally arrive 9 months after that hootenanny?

My parents already had their 3 children, 2 of whom you see in bed in the beginning of the clip. As for "hootenanny," I'm sure the music was not folk. I'm guessing, since it was danceable, it was some kind of big band jazz or Latin music.

BJM said:

Great video Althouse! My folks had a Tiki party room with bamboo furniture, jungle floral drapes, a palm thatched roof over the bar and a pair of red & white conga drums ala Ricky Ricardo... corny as all get out now... but it was magical to an eight yr old creeping down the stairs in the dark to watch a very similar scene of merry making on New Year's Eve 1954.

Yes, everybody loved Ricky back then.



Lucy always wanted to get into his act, and she embodied all of America's desire to get up and dance. Americans really wanted to be happy.

rhhardin said:

Traditionally, I just go to bed on new year's eve and the dog wakes me up at midnight when the rural gunfire starts outside.

At 9:31 PM, Peg said:

I'm sitting here reading Ann's blog. You can imagine how thrilling my evening is! ;)

I outdid you by being asleep.

Earnest Prole said:

If I recall from years ago, it's your mother sitting in someone's lap showing off her garter -- remind us of the story.

I had to edit something out of that part of the video. But there's no "story" to tell. I don't know who the man is.

robother said:

God, the memories! Even in the mid sixties, girls had garters holding up nylons, the flash of which was an instant turn-on. Pantyhose didn't off[er] anywhere near the titillation, and presented whole different logistical issues in seduction by dashboard light.

If only you knew the struggle in the sliver of time when miniskirts overlapped with wearing stockings and garters. Stockings had a dark band at the top, and, when sitting, you had to take care not to let your "stocking tops" show.

Andy Cunningham said:

I like how everyone used to look so nice. Back when, men wore suits, ties, hats and pocket squares even while robbing a bank. People dressed up for meals. Singers and comedians dressed up. You could often discern a man's job since it came with a uniform (and hat). Now with the 60's riff raff running things we are all under-dressed even to paint a garage.

Here's a 39-second edit I made of home-movie clips of my father. Check out — at 6 seconds — what he wore to install patio bricks.

Big Mike said:

Happy New Year to Professor Althouse and the irrefutable Meade.

Irrefutable?! I'm going to use that.

Sane_voter said:

2016 ended wonderfully with Mariah Carey's epic fail live on ABC just before the ball drop....

Ah, yes. A bad start for the year for Mariah Carey....

Shit happens 😩 Have a happy and healthy new year everybody!🎉 Here's to making more headlines in 2017 😂 pic.twitter.com/0Td8se57jr

— Mariah Carey (@MariahCarey) January 1, 2017

But what are you going to do? Shit happens.

"Just as the three wise men did on that night, this Christmas heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King."

Wrote Reince Priebus.

Did Priebus intend to compare Trump to Jesus and the presidency to being a king?

Yes, and it's quite okay.

Yes, and it's awful.

No. It's just badly written.

No, and the writing is just fine.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"No matter how bad they were — all the Republicans — it was like a glass-bottom boat. I'm looking at those sharks, but they can't really get me."

"And now I feel like the shark can get me. Or anybody."

Said Bill Maher, who was once sued by Donald Trump. If Trump the private citizen would sue a man over what was obviously a joke, how much do you have to worry about how Trump the President will misuse power?



"The legal system in this country is not a joke. It's not a toy for rich idiots to play with."

"It Turns Out There Are 4 Different Types of Introverts..."

An interestingly animated video, but I'll bet a lot of people, as they hear each of the 4 types described, will identify with all 4 of them. I did (except the part in one of the types where you are not a morning person). And I'm not even convinced I'm an introvert.

"Once you grasp the geographical spread of Trump’s interests, it is hard to see how the potential conflicts of interest could ever be resolved."

"Take the Middle East, a region of the world that every modern American President has had to focus on. According to the Post, in addition to the Trump-branded real-estate development in Turkey, Trump has business ties to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, two oil-rich countries that have funded radical Islamic movements. And, just last year, Trump registered eight companies named after Jeddah, the second-largest city in Saudi Arabia. It’s not just that Trump won’t be seen as an honest broker in the Middle East. He wouldn’t be seen as broker of any kind but as a principal and business partner of some of the region’s repressive governments and their cronies. Even if, for the duration of his Presidency, Trump were to put his businesses into a properly independent trust, run by business executives not connected to him, the Trump-owned and Trump-branded companies would still be generating income for the President and his family. He and his advisers would know that. The governments of the countries where the companies are located would know that. And so would the rest of us."

Writes John Cassidy.

Poll results...

I assume some of the 2% in that last category are pranksters screwing up the poll. And yet maybe some of the people in the second-to-last category are racists trying to hide it.

6 blog posts by 6:15 this morning.

I'm just telling you this because I'm afraid you won't notice all the new material, including one post about what I googled at 2:30 a.m.: "Does Donald Trump sleep?"

"Puyallup man undaunted after losing Beatles mural in fire."

Headline in The Herald Tribune, which also has "Cartoonist grew up in Gig Harbor, lives in Auburn and likes unicorns."

"Jackie O had nothing on this First Lady. Wow! Michelle can be a stunner (in addition to a very classy lady)!"

"You took my comment. I wholeheartedly agree. While Jackie Onassis was certainly beautiful, Michelle Obama outshines her easily."

Over-the-top comments at that WaPo on the Robin Givhan piece "Diplomatic fashion crisis averted: Michelle Obama wears Vera Wang to China state dinner." The "crisis" was that Mrs. Obama got criticized, at the 2011 China state dinner, for wearing a dress from a British designer and at this state dinner she was wearing a dress from an American designer. The designer Vera Wang responded (as quoted in WaPo):

“It is such a privilege, as an American of Chinese heritage, to have dressed first lady Michelle Obama for this state dinner honoring President Xi Jinping and First Lady Peng Liyuan, of the People’s Rebublic of China,” tweeted Wang.

The typo "Rebublic" may be funnier than the fawning Jackie-disrepecting in the comments. By they way, when everyone else just says "China" and you're operating within the 140-character limitation of Twitter, why would you even attempt to write "People’s Republic of"? I guess it's that theater of pompous dignity that people assume when accepting honors. I'm privileged at the honor and honored at the privilege... blah blah blah. If we were at the Oscars music would play to tell you that's enough, and I love that Twitter is right there from the very outset, saying, okay, you've said enough, now get out of here. Go rebubble elsewhere. Twitter is not a Rebabble-ic.

Unlike a blog.

It's not even 6 in the morning and I have 2 more things to say about that article.

1. Michelle Obama's 2011 dress was blazing, daring, almost wacky. The new dress was utterly sedate. As Givhan put it: "It exuded Hollywood glamour of the sort that has long defined the red carpet. And Obama’s hair, styled in gentle waves and cascading down her right cheek, underscored the dress’s mood of old-fashioned stardust." In other words, pointedly old-old-fashioned. Givhan swathes Mrs. Obama in praise. There's no commentary at all on what I would call the squelching of Michelle Obama's exuberance and modernity.

2. I enjoyed the picture — the 4th photo at the first link — of Michelle adjusting Obama's tie. He's got a very cute expression on his face. You could say he's affecting a little-kid attitude just as his wife is tending to him, causing her to look more like his mother than his wife. But I'm going to say: playful, adorable, charming. And it's true (Deal with it!): The man is the most charming person to arrive on the national stage since JFK. I won't say JFK had nothing on this President or While JFK was certainly charismatic, Barack Obama outshines him easily. That goes too far.

"Seduction is the art of coercing somebody to desire you, of orchestrating somebody else’s longings to suit your own hungry agenda."

"Seduction was never a casual sport for me; it was more like a heist, adrenalizing and urgent. I would plan the heist for months, scouting out the target, looking for unguarded entries. Then I would break into his deepest vault, steal all his emotional currency and spend it on myself."

Creepy unpleasantness that would never have been published in The New York Times if it were written by a man.

I've got to call it female privilege — this sense that what would be stalking rapacity in a man is rather adorable in a woman.

The writer is Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the memoir "Eat, Pray, Love." Yeah, sic, it's "Pray," not "Prey," as you might think if all you know of her is this op-ed, which is, in fact, all I've read of her. But I do know of "Eat, Pray, Love." And I did finish this op-ed, which becomes instructively self-helperish in the end. She eventually "forced myself to admit that I had a problem" — there's a phrase — and realized after 20 years of "[s]tealing other women’s boyfriends" that her behavior wasn't, in fact, "feminist" — nice to get to some sisterhood after not noticing until you're — what? — 40?

She determines that "There is no way to stop a destructive behavior, except to stop" and goes "celibate" for the amazing time span of 6 months. She was "serious, working with a good therapist, trying to learn if I even existed at all when I wasn’t blazing in the heat of somebody’s longing gaze." And if you like reading sentences like that, you should be up for the cheeseball ending where she meets a guy she likes, wins an invitation back to his apartment, but she passes it up, and the two go get Italian ices instead. In the end, she walks away, "alone but calm" and "realized that the better part of my life had already begun."

Or she walks away alone and planning a piece of writing and realizing that she's got the better part of a neat narrative arc already composed in her head.

POTUS on Twitter... joking about Twitter...

... I don't believe in Twitter.

The mantis is ready for its closeup.

Wednesday morning at 4 a.m., this is what I'm staring into:


Reverence ibook from Elaine Strutz on Vimeo.

Via io9.

"It seems to me that people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood and, to themselves, justifying those views by the mood."

"I call this the 'fallacy of mood affiliation,' and it is one of the most underreported fallacies in human reasoning.  (In the context of economic growth debates, the underlying mood is often 'optimism' or 'pessimism' per se and then a bunch of ought-to-be-independent views fall out from the chosen mood.)"

Tyler Cowen wrote back in 2011. I'm reading that today — strangely early in the morning — because yesterday, the commenter HoodlumDoodlum said: "Professor Althouse: It sounds like what you're describing is what Tyler Cowen calls the fallacy of mood affiliation."

Was I saying the same thing? Not exactly, but there is some resemblance. Cowen's idea is that people — for some reason (I don't see him exploring why) — have a preference for the way they want to feel, and then they pick the ideas that give them that feeling. I'm saying people have a preference for feeling comfortable in the social environment where they find themselves and so they affect or adopt the ideas that are shared by others around them. That is, I'm specifying one preferred feeling — social comfort — and ascribing it to nearly everyone. And I'm saying that the ideas that follow on are simply the group's shared ideas. I was talking about how ordinary people haven't thought through these ideas and don't want to. The ideas didn't arise within their minds at all. What came from them is the desire to be liked and loved and included. Cowen's fallacious thinker is generating the ideas from within, but the generation process is influenced by the feelings the thinker desires.

My 703rd post about Scott Walker... finally getting around to what Gail Collins wrote last Friday.

This blog has 703 posts with the tag "Scott Walker" and is at risk of becoming absurdly Scott-Walker-focused as the country-at-large suddenly trains its eyes on the man who became the governor of my state 4 years ago and touched off massive protests, endless legal proceedings, passionate criticisms, and a bonus political campaign in the form of a recall election.

I've had 6 posts about Scott Walker since last Friday — mainly on 2 subjects: his declining to answer the question whether he feels "comfortable with the idea of evolution" and his lack of a college degree.

I'm experiencing active pushback from commenters who seem anxious to get me to stop monitoring the journalism and commentary that's so suddenly raining down on Scott Walker. I get accused of being a "spokesperson" for Walker or a "big fan." The truth is, I have an aversion to politics, but I read the news and I vote. And I blog. I blog about Walker because he's a long-entrenched topic here and has been ever since my city became Ground Zero for Walker-hating 4 years ago.

At this point, it's very hard to deal with every Walker topic that comes up as it comes up, especially since I don't want to be an all-Walker-all-the-time blog. But after 4+ years of following Scott Walker, it feels as though I'm doing something wrong if there's a significant Walker topic that non-Wisconsinites are blogging and I haven't even acknowledged its existence.

So here I am at 4:48 in the morning, driven by a weird sense of obligation to pay attention to that foolish Gail Collins column The New York Times published on Friday the 13th: "Scott Walker Needs an Eraser."

You'd think columnists who want to wield influence would be more careful about letting their murderous intentions glare. But Collins stupidly overreached, perhaps fed by the Wisconsin Walker-haters who've been chewing over a set of stock topics for years and now pass along the gooey pulp of their contempt.

Collins built her column on the story of a young teacher who won an award for excellence but then got fired due to budget cuts. Walker's name is associated with budget austerity, so Walker must be to blame for her job loss. This was a gross error, the teacher having lost her job the year before Walker became governor. It took 2 days for the Times to edit out the mistaken assertion (which left the column not making much sense). Walker's reforms were aimed at saving money at the school-district level and making it possible to keep excellent new teachers.

Yesterday, Politico latched onto the screwup with a piece that begins with a sentence that seemed to write itself: "In hindsight, perhaps the headline 'Scott Walker Needs An Eraser' wasn’t the best idea." I was settling in to read an article with some substance, but it's just a little pile of fluff:

Whoops.

Conservative news sites had a field day with the error over the weekend, with The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack calling out the (since deleted and corrected, but archived) mistaken section in question.

The New York Times gets caught in a bad factual error and one of its main columnists — did you know Collins is a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board? — exposes herself as a Walker-hater, and Politico casts the incident as an occasion for conservatives to have "a field day." Like it's all just a big militarized operation, and one side got an occasion for a grand, showy triumphing.

Oh, how I loathe all the politicos out there — those who are labeled "Politico" and, worse, those who are labeled "New York Times." But I'm sticking with this little enterprise of mine. It's 5:44 a.m. now, and I'm as dedicated as ever to monitoring these politicos, even though in my heart, I'm an artist. My real inclination — as I've been toiling over this post in the pre-dawn — has been to go off on a tangent about the meaning of the term "field day" (originally, a day when military troops are assembled for some sort of review or exercise) or to go into a reverie about erasers I have known and loved, like the rubbery pink Pink Pet (not to be confused with the upstart Pink Pearl) and the mystifyingly fragrant Art Gum, which, when I was a schoolgirl, I used to like to rub into an inch-deep pile of dust which I'd invite my classmates to palpate.

Everyone who touched my little evanescent creation was delighted.