At the Whiptail Grill...

... you can ask all the hard questions.

(And if you've got some hard shopping to do, you really ought to do it through the Althouse Amazon Portal.)

"The President was 'hot' and exasperated Thursday night after Sessions' recusal..."

"... a source familiar with the situation said, considering it hasty and overkill," reports CNN.

When the President returned to the White House Thursday evening from a day trip to Virginia, there were "a lot of expletives." The source said for more than a week Trump had been lamenting that his senior staff "just keep getting in their own way."

"The President had a fantastic week advancing his agenda to lift up all Americans and keep the nation safe. His joint session speech will go down in history as one of the best," White House spokesman Sean Spicer said in response to CNN's reporting.

The President is showing increasing flashes of anger over the performance of his senior staff and daily developments about Russia overshadowing his message, multiple people inside the White House and outside the administration told CNN.

We walked up the Golden Canyon today in Death Valley.

I got all the way to the Red Cathedral:



But I couldn't take the final steep incline over slippery gravel, with a sharp drop off to one side, so I didn't make it to the highest lookout, where Meade took these 2 pictures:

"There’s a confluence between the alt-right and the alt-left regarding Vladimir Putin and the..."

"... ratfucking (to use a venerable Watergate-era term) performed by Russian hackers, trolls, and bots. The Tyler Durden Fight Club alt-right idolizes Putin as a bare-chested manly man, as opposed to a metrosexual like Obama and an emasculating harpy like Hillary. This isn’t a beefcake fetish the alt-left shares. Instead, it invokes McCarthyism and the specter of a new Red Scare to characterize rising alarm over the Russian cyber-warfare as a rehash of Cold War bogeyman tales. In a widely noticed Facebook post, director Oliver Stone (whose most recent film was a soft-focus portrait of Edward Snowden) reminisced, 'I remember well in the 1950s when the Russians were supposed to be in our schools, Congress, State Department—and according to many Eisenhower/Nixon supporters—about to take over our country without serious opposition (and they call me paranoid!).' Stone ascribes the hysteria over the Russian hijacking of the democratic process to mainstream-media mau-mauing. 'As much as I may disagree with Donald Trump (and I do) he’s right now target number one of the MSM propaganda—until, that is, he jumps to the anti-Kremlin track because of some kind of false intelligence or misunderstanding cooked up by CIA. Then I fear, in his hot-headed way, he starts fighting with the Russians, and it wouldn’t be long then until a state of war against Russia is declared.'"

The Alt-House is trying to read James Wolcott's article "Why the Alt-Left Is a Problem, Too/Much of the media spotlight has been on the 'alt-right.' But the 'alt-left' provides a mirror image distortion: the same loathing of Clinton, rejection of 'identity politics,' and itch for a reckoning."

Despite the talk of the "deconstruction" of the administrative state....

... Trump's approach to regulatory reform is really quite reasonable and good, according to Cass Sunstein.

"Trump, citing no evidence, accuses Obama of ‘Nixon/Watergate’ plot to wiretap Trump Tower."

WaPo reports.

"Citing no evidence" doesn't mean he has no evidence. What happens next?

Trump offered no citations nor did he point to any credible news report to back up his accusation, but he may have been referring to commentary on Breitbart and conservative talk radio suggesting that Obama and his administration used “police state” tactics last fall to monitor the Trump team. The Breitbart story, published Friday, has been circulating among Trump's senior staff, according to a White House official who described it as a useful catalogue of the Obama administration's activities.

What's "credible news" these days? Maybe Trump is fighting fire with fire. The Russian business is a conspiracy theory so why not distract with a conspiracy theory on top of the conspiracy theory? There was a conspiracy to plant a conspiracy, etc. etc.

But Trump is accusing Obama of wiretapping his New York office. That's a very specific charge. Presumably Trump has high-level security within his homestead. Maybe something was detected. Here are Trump's tweets this morning:

1. "Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!"

2. "Is it legal for a sitting President to be 'wire tapping' a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!"

3. "I'd bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!"

4. "How low has President Obama gone to tapp* my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!"

#3 feels vaguely like a threat to get a criminal investigation going against Obama. This is a big move by the art-of-the-deal master. Perhaps the goal is to get his attackers to stand down.
____________________

*"Tapp" would be a good name for an app.

ADDED: Meade is saying "You over-educated professional class elites, you don't understand TrumpTweet." Most important, he says, is that Trump put "wires tapped" and "wire tapping" in quotes and that misspelling "tapp" could have been intentional. Is it some figure of speech? Is there a special way of speaking within Twitter that the grownups don't understand?

Putting the egg in Schwarzenegger...."

... Arnold, who was unwatchable as the new star of "The Apprentice," blames Trump.

I could see blaming Trump for playing the role so well that Arnold's badness was overly obvious, but Arnold is blaming Trump for weighing the show down with "baggage."

“With Trump being involved in the show, people have a bad taste and don’t want to participate as a spectator or as a sponsor or in any other way support the show,” Schwarzenegger said in that interview. “It’s a very divisive period now, and I think this show got caught up in all that division.”

To be fair to Arnold, Trump was kind of mean to him from the outset, tweeting crap like...

Wow, the ratings are in and Arnold Schwarzenegger got "swamped" (or destroyed) by comparison to the ratings machine, DJT. So much for....

being a movie star-and that was season 1 compared to season 14. Now compare him to my season 1. But who cares, he supported Kasich & Hillary

... but, yeah, maybe Schwarzenegger started it by being for Hillary.

"Kathleen Biden accused estranged husband Hunter of reckless spending on 'drugs, prostitutes, and an $80,000 diamond' in divorce docs..."

"...days before his affair with widowed sister-in-law Hallie was revealed," The Daily Mail reports.

Kathleen goes on to explain in her Plantiff's Motion to Enjoin Dissipation of Assets that her estranged husband has been the 'sole source of funds to support the family throughout the entirety of the parties' marriage.'

She claims that Hunter's office had been sending her a monthly transfer of approximately $17,000 for herself and their three daughters - Naomi, Finnegan and Maisy - but that this amount was drastically decreased to just $7,500 in October of last year.

Don't you hate to see a divorce played out in the press? Should documents like this be kept out of the public eye, or do you like getting your chance to have an opinion on the loathsomeness of Hunter Biden? Give all the money to Kathleen, right?

"But critics said that [Charles] Murray shouldn't be treated simply [as] a person with whom they had differing political views."

"Many noted that he is classified as a white nationalist by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which sums him up this way: 'Charles Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has become one of the most influential social scientists in America, using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women, and the poor.'"

From "Shouting Down a Lecture/Middlebury students chant and shout to prevent Charles Murray from speaking. He later is led to a private location, where a discussion with a professor is livestreamed. After the event some attack car carrying Murray and a professor," at Inside Higher Education.

The quoted argument is not — I hope it's obvious! — something I agree with. It's a terrible argument, the same kind of argument that has been used to justify throwing out professional journalism principles to disrupt the Trump administration: The person we're out to get is not normal, therefore we get to be abnormal.

The delusion that your principles remain intact is laughable.

A computer operating system, the 1895 French film, "Arrival of a train at La Ciotat," a $50 Amazon gift card, and a few other things....

... are all stored in one gram of DNA.

A perfect 10.

Zeus is 10. Happy Birthday!

(Photo, by Meade, is from August 2014).

At the New Water Rock Café...

... we are on the road again, leaving Zion National Park, where the rocks are too big to explain in a little photograph, which is what the water reflection is meant to express.

Please use this post to talk about anything you want. I'll be back later today. The plan has us arriving somewhere I drove through long ago when I was alone and the place was frightfully hot. For years, I've wanted to get back and get outside and really see this place.

"One of the world’s three surviving northern white rhinos will soon become an endling, as will one of the thirty surviving vaquita porpoises, down from sixty just last year."

"Though the word hasn’t yet met Merriam-Webster’s standards, it does have its own Wikipedia entry, which Erickson has read with great interest. When he first opened the page, a small black-and-white image of the last known thylacine 'gave me a chill,' he said. Though he never expected 'endling' to survive, much less to come to personify extinction, he is glad that the word has found its niche. 'We don’t name the things we choose to ignore,' he said. 'So, somehow, naming it gives it a value that wasn’t there before. If that’s what the word is doing, I’m really proud to have been a part of it.'"

From "What Do You Call the Last of a Species?" (in The New Yorker).

"Wikipedia had to put Garfield’s page on lockdown last week..."

"... after a 60-hour editing war in which the character’s listed gender vacillated back and forth indeterminately like a cartoon version of Schrödinger’s cat: male one minute; not the next."

WaPo reports.

In other comics news, also from WaPo, "Bob Mankoff will step down as the New Yorker’s cartoon editor":

Since he became editor, “the biggest change was that cartoons, even of the very benign variety that appear in the New Yorker, now have great power to offend — at least among the easily offended, a class whose numbers grow even as I write,” Mankoff says. “Now, even Canadians take offense at being stereotyped as polite.”

Mankoff jokes about the shift, but when he inherited the lofty office from Lee Lorenz, he had to cultivate cartoonists who worked in comic tones increasingly absurd and meta — talents who, “when they use a cliche, they destroy it,” he likes to say.

"TIL Some people are actually afraid of being too happy because they think something tragic is going to happen soon. This is known as Cherophobia."

A Reddit post — linking to the Wikipedia "Aversion to happiness" article — that gets the predictable but great comment "I thought Cherophobia was the fear of life after love" and perfect follow-on comments to drive home the joke.

"You May Want to Marry My Husband."

An excellent title for an excellent essay (in the NYT) by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. AKR is an author who is dying of ovarian cancer after 26 years of marriage to a man she finds a bright, humorous way to tell us about.