Now, here's The Daily Wire collecting other statements to the same effect:
National Review Washington Correspondent John McCormack noted: “‘colorful lights…’ ‘decorative brick…’ If a Republican released this ad…”...
Popular Twitter account Comfortably Smug wrote: “This whole ad is a homophobic dog whistle: decorative sidewalks and lights and pet adoption? Discomfort with African Americans? WHAT IS BIDEN SAYING?”
ADDED: This post got my "homophobia politics" tag, and I clicked and looked back to see where that went. The original post that motivated me to make the tag was "Emerging trend: Democrats insinuating that Republican politicians are gay" ("I'm saying this is a trend to watch, because I'm seeing the second example of something within one week"). That was something that was going on in 2014. Remember? I didn't.
AND: Lots of interesting stuff in the "homophobia politics" tag. Remember the homophobia politics used against Michele Bachmann (because of her husband)? John Roberts (because of his plaid pants)? Mitt Romney (because he said "marvelous”)? Eric Cantor (because the Governor of Montana had "gaydar")? Scott Walker (because as a young man, he did not respond to the young women who hung all over him)?
"The video, which was still posted on Twitter on Saturday, was apparently made by manipulating a 2018 video of Ms. Pelosi sampling chocolates on 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.' Facebook said that video violated a policy against showing people eating Tide pods, which it created in 2018, after videos spread on social media encouraging people to bite down on the brightly colored laundry detergent packets."
Big Streisand effect here. The NYT links to the Donald Trump tweet with Pelosi ripping up the SOTU after each of the most moving parts of the speech, encouraging readers to watch a video they have missed, the NYT has directed me to another Pelosi-mocking video — in this case, one that I had missed. They didn't give the link for this but they told me where to find it. Here:
I don't know when Twitter added that "Twitter Safety" bit, but it's interesting that the NYT didn't mention it when it contrasted Twitter and Facebook. I think the Twitter approach of labeling is much better than Facebook's outright censorship. It's important to be able to make comic videos!
That's today's sunrise, photographed at 7:11 — 5 minutes after the actual sunrise time. It was too overcast to see the sun though. Ice fishing was well under way.
Now that Pete Buttigieg has been victorious (yes, victorious) over fourth-place Joe Biden in Iowa, and New Hampshire polls show Buttigieg continuing to gain momentum heading into the first primary, Biden has released an attack ad that paints Buttigieg as a mayor with misplaced priorities.
Biden's ad says Buttigieg "installed decorative lights under bridges" to create "colorfully illuminated rivers," and he "la[id] out decorative brick" on sidewalks.
So Biden is repeatedly trying to associate the word "decorative" with Buttigieg, the first openly gay candidate with a serious chance at becoming president.
The repetition of that word — "decorative" — could not have been an accident.
One of the oldest stereotypes about gay men is that they're interested in interior decorating.
Yes, I know: someone's going to say I'm reading too much into it, oversensitive, etc. I know that response.
I also know that political attack ads are designed to operate on a subtle and sometimes subliminal level.
ALSO AT JOHN'S POST: The music playing when the ad talks about Buttigieg sounds an awful lot like "The Sugar Plum Fairy."
This is more effective than any ad any pro-life group could run.
I was pro-choice for decades.
Then the “shout your abortion” movement happened, and I realized this was a form of human sacrifice that would make the Aztecs envious. https://t.co/jdUWTg6iFw
... watch the video before seeing what I thought...
... I saw it as anti-abortion.
UPDATE: The short TikTok video that was embedded in this tweet no longer displays. Did the TikTok or the person who put up the video take it down? Why? I suspect that the person who made the video didn't expect to get so much attention and wasn't comfortable with it. I didn't think it was a person actually getting an abortion and smiling in the end. I thought it was a comedy sketch, making fun of parents revealing the gender of the unborn. In the video, the woman acts like she's going to reveal the baby's sex — I'm saying "sex" because how is it "gender"? — and the text says something like "It's a" and a paper is opened up to say "borted" — It's a/borted. I don't know if the person who made the video intended for it to be in the #ShoutYourAbortion genre. The reason I thought it felt anti-abortion — rather than #ShoutYourAbortion (that is, pro-abortion) — is that laughing at abortion feels cruel. The pro-abortion position should focus on the woman and her autonomy, not on the unborn whose life is lost.
UPDATE 2: I see now that the person who made the video has set her TikTok account to private.
@realDonaldTrump returns to the White House from Charlotte, North Carolina. Photo by William Moon at the South Lawn of the White House on February 7, 2020 pic.twitter.com/n1a1Z93LrJ
DT was captured on camera by a guy named William Moon -- a self-described White House correspondent and photographer, who doesn't appear to be part of the official press corps. or White House staff, but clearly has access of some sort to snap shots like these....
In Moon's photo, the outer edge of Trump's mug seems to be in stark contrast to the rest of his face ... showing a color distinction between pale and what looks to be orange or tan. Getty Images has the same pic, though ... and it's not nearly as saturated as this.
Now, it's possible Moon caught the Prez at a different angle with different lighting than the Getty photog did ... perhaps the photo isn't edited at all. Doesn't seem likely, however.
This is the big controversy of the day, apparently, so things are looking rosy for Donald J. Trump.
Pete Rose played Major League Baseball for 24 seasons, from 1963-1986, and had more hits, 4,256, than any other player (by a wide margin). He gambled, but only on his own team winning, and paid a decades long price. GET PETE ROSE INTO THE BASEBALL HALL OF FAME. It’s Time!
"... who spent decades in mental institutions; even more, he said, he had discarded correspondence that she had received from the Irish expatriate playwright Samuel Beckett, Joyce’s onetime secretary, with whom Lucia had fallen in love. 'No one was going to set their eyes on them and re-psychoanalyze my poor aunt,” [Stephen] Joyce told The New York Times that year. 'She went through enough of that when she was alive.... I didn’t want to have greedy little eyes and greedy little fingers going over them. My aunt may have been many things, but to my knowledge she was not a writer.... Where do you draw the line? Do you have any right to privacy?... What are people going to do to stop me?'... His refusals to grant access to the Joyce archive could seem arbitrary. He rejected the request of one author whose work was being published by Purdue University because he deemed the nickname of Purdue’s sports teams, the Boilermakers, to be vulgar."
I like how Maher trashed Trump for calling people "evil" and then ended the interview by calling Bannon "evil." And then Maher walked over to the table with a panel of guests and where everyone freely denounced Bannon. One of the panelists asserted that what Bannon had just said was "maniacal." So desperate.
This gets the "civility bullshit" tag because Maher argued against Trump's rough speech, then turned around and used the same kind of harsh speech himself and with the panelists who mirrored his ideology.
"... and instead favor obedience to a mandate from Washington? Or to explain that disagreements about architectural style speak to a healthy, democratic society in action? After all, there is no single style of architecture that represents nationhood — or that does not, and should not, provoke debate. The executive order borrows language from the 'Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture' that Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in 1962 when the future senator was working in Kennedy’s Labor Department. Moynihan believed that federal architecture 'must provide visual testimony to the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of the American government.' The new proposal also refers to dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability. But it undoes the key principles on which, as Moynihan made clear, those goals depend — that design must 'flow from the architectural profession to the government, and not vice versa,' because expertise matters, and that 'an official style must be avoided.'"
"He became a disciple of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, 'Me and the Orgone.' (The orgone was a pseudoscientific theory about a universal life force.) When the book appeared in 1971, Mr. Bean returned to America with his wife and four children and for years led a nomadic life as an aging hippie and 'househusband,' casting off material possessions in a quest for self-realization. 'We were so sure we didn’t want to be possessed by things and so intent on not having them that we gave away almost everything we owned,' he wrote in a 1977 Op-Ed in The Times. 'We entered what I now call our late hippie stage. We tossed the kids into the van, bummed around the country, sponging on our friends and putting the kids in school wherever we happened to light.' In his dropout years, as he recalled in a memoir, he experimented with psychedelic drugs, communal sex and other excursions into self-discovery. His peripatetic family collected driftwood and books, and at night read aloud to one another."
If you remember Orson Bean, it is probably not for his hippie phase. As the NYT puts it, he is "remembered for early panel shows, which, in contrast to the culture of greed, noise and kitsch of modern game shows, were low key, relatively witty and sophisticated." You know, stuff like this:
He also acted in plenty of of movies and TV shows, notably the "Mr. Bevis" episode in the first season of "Twilight Zone." Clip:
Another distinction: Orson Bean was the father-in-law of Andrew Breitbart.
ADDED: Bean did not die of old age. He was struck by a car as he crossed the street in Los Angeles.
Bean said Breitbart resonated with so many people because he was fighting to right that culture, which he said is decaying, with optimism and joy. And he did it in an unconventionally fresh and unique way that warranted Breitbart’s name to be a trademarked, one-of-a-kind brand. Bean said it was Breitbart’s larger-than-life spirit that makes people come up to him to this day with tears in their eyes, saying, “you’re Andrew Breitbart’s father-in-law!”
Breitbart, who once was a fierce liberal, may never have been a conservative or built the foundation for his media empire had he not seen a Rush Limbaugh book in Bean’s library.
“Take it home and read it, Andrew,” Bean recalled telling his son-in-law.
Who the hell knows? But here’s what I do know: Sanders might get 280 electoral votes and win the presidency and maybe we keep the House. But there’s no chance in hell we’ll ever win the Senate with Sanders at the top of the party defining it for the public. Eighteen percent of the country elects more than half of our senators. That’s the deal, fair or not.
So long as [Mitch] McConnell runs the Senate, it’s game over. There’s no chance we’ll change the courts, and nothing will happen, and he’ll just be sitting up there screaming in the microphone about the revolution.
The purpose of a political party is to acquire power. All right? Without power, nothing matters.
That is, it isn't even worth winning with Sanders. Another way of looking at this is: The Democrats need to refocus their strategy on winning the Senate. That's a reachable goal, and the fight for the presidency is overshadowing and endangering it.
"... raises everyone up: 'From the pilgrims to our Founders, from the soldiers at Valley Forge to the marchers at Selma, and from President Lincoln to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Americans have always rejected limits on our children’s future.' Trump wants to remind black Americans that this inheritance of striving and overcoming belongs to them, too.... It was clear from the choice of guests [at the State of the Union] that President Trump is going all out for the black vote, with personal stories of courage, success, and hopes answered. The first five featured guests were African American. The Democrats scowled through it all.... President Trump co-opted and promoted initiatives Democrats once claimed, making them his own: incarceration reform, family leave for men and women, infrastructure, high-speed internet for all communities, stamping out human trafficking...."
I say out loud after poking around on all sorts of articles — a fact check here or there, assorted quotes but not a complete transcript, the old "winners and losers" roundups, and I noticed I was drifting off into articles about finding an apartment in NYC and how to travel together as a couple and Kim Kardashian's regret that her shapewear doesn't have a "peehole." I rewatched this TikTok baby 10 times.
There's my son John's live-blog from last night. He continued long after I fell asleep, but ended in a way that confirmed the wisdom of taking the sleep route out of the tiresome ordeal:
Haven't been updating this post in a while, and I can just repeat what I said in the last debate: "I've been zoning out on the rather dry discussion of who's for what trade deals."
Stephanopoulos prompts each candidate to give a canned statement on child poverty. This debate hasn't had any drama for a while now.
And it's over. Not the most exciting debate, and I'd be hard-pressed to say anyone "won" or "lost" tonight.
I'll just say one thing I remember. I wanted to get hold of the transcript to do this more accurately, but memory alone will have to suffice for now. I remember Tom Steyer saying — on 2 different things — that they need to focus on how Donald Trump is and will be arguing for himself and have real and specific arguments to push him back. The 2 things are the economy and appealing to black people.
I don't know if Steyer or any of the others had any specific arguments, so to me Steyer's warning worked mostly as a prediction that all of these candidates are doomed. Maybe that's why I withdrew.
The economy is going great, and Trump is pointing that out and saying you've got to keep me. I know what the Democrats tend to say to this prompt: You people at the bottom need to feel resentful that others are doing better than you are, and we're going to switch everything around somehow.
As for black people, Trump offers specific programs aimed at improving conditions for black people and impugns the Democrats for mismanagement of American cities and for taking the black vote for granted. In response, the Democrats have taken the black vote for granted.
[The country's Vice Premier Sun Chunlan] demanded four types of people in Wuhan be put into mandatory isolation in quarantine stations: confirmed cases, suspected cases, people who have close contact with the former two, and those who have fever....
'There must be a 24-hour shift pattern. During the wartime condition, there must be no deserters, otherwise they will be forever nailed onto the pillar of historical shame', Ms Sun said, according to state broadcaster CCTV.
The Communist leader instructed the Wuhan government to send workers to every household to take the temperature of all family members in order to block the source of the outbreak.
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