Up at 4, enjoying the setting of the supermoon.

Lots of beautiful pictures of it here.

I don't think I can get a good picture through the windows, and it's -5° so I don't really want to step out onto the deck.

But from my desk in front of a wall of windows, I'm getting hours of predawn supermoon right at my shoulder.

"Prudence will get us nowhere at this point. The lack of alarm in Congress and in the media is becoming alarming."

"It goes without saying now that Democrats need a majority in Congress to impeach, and if they get it they should, and they should not stop with Trump, but add Gorsuch and every other illegitimate lifetime appointment made by Trump. We must be as vicious and thorough in our opposition as Republicans have been craven with their gerrymandering and brazen with their now consistent encouragement for voter ID laws and other perverted methods of maintaining power being put forth by the Justice Department. The only way to be an optimist is to believe we can fix everything Trump breaks. Mr. Weiner's calls for sobriety are in reality an acquiescence to tyranny. Resist."

That's the top-rated comment — by far — on a NYT op-ed by Greg Weiner titled "How Not to Impeach." He wants Trump impeached, but warns that it must be done in a sober, slow enough way to not look too politicized.

Weiner begins by assuming that it's "increasingly plausible" that Democrats will take over the majority in both houses of Congress after the 2018 elections, which I've been hearing a lot whenever I put up with listening to a little TV news commentary. But how are Democrats going to do that if they spend the next 10 month slavering over impeachment?

In WaPo's world, everything's dismal, including the loss of a depressing suburban shopping mall.

Look at this array of downer headlines on the front page right now. Even the Iran uprising gets portrayed in a negative light. Click to enlarge:



I'm used to MSM portraying suburban shopping malls as soul-sucking places for boring people who don't know how hopeless they are, but when a shopping mall dies, they don't say, good, these places were always a blight on American small-town life, they bemoan the loss, as if whatever happens in Trump's America must be bad. The challenge is just to figure out how to say why it's bad. Today's story — "First, this town lost its Macy’s. Then Sears. Now, all eyes were on J.C. Penney" — strains to make WaPo readers feel for this town's aching loss. It begins:

HERMITAGE, Pa. — Barbara Cake had made the sale. A man was hovering near the gold bracelets at the J.C. Penney jewelry counter when she said, “Hi, sir, how are you?” Before long, he was swiping his credit card for both a bracelet and a pair of diamond earrings for his wife. But Barbara wasn’t done.

“If she doesn’t like these,” she told the customer, “then tell her you know a lot of ladies who would.”

“I just want my husband to buy me a watch,” she continued. “She should be truly happy with these.”

Barbara ripped the receipt from the register, pointed at the flimsy paper and, in a tone that sounded as if she were revealing a sworn secret, she delivered her favorite line.

“Just wait till you see what you saved.”

There were four days until Christmas, and this customer had decided against shopping online to come to a real store and talk to real people. To Barbara, that meant she had to provide something he couldn’t get from clicking buttons on a computer. Could the Internet assure the customer that he was making the right choice? Could it praise him for being a thoughtful husband? Could it make sure that he was getting the best possible deal?

The internet would not have an in-the-flesh lady named Cake to lure the man into buying bad diamond jewelry for his wife. The internet would not have Cake creepily flirt with the man by telling him he could tell his wife that other women want him. The internet would not bitch about presents it's not getting from its husband. The internet would just show us other things that customers who looked at this thing also looked at and comments by people who bought it telling us what they actually think of it. The internet wouldn't burden us with a "flimsy paper" receipt and lean in and murmur about it.

Oh, but these deplorable people need a mall for human contact. A "hovering" man needs a real-life woman massaging him with sexual innuendo if he is to accomplish what for him is the formidable task of buying a Christmas present for his wife.

"As long as she doesn't paint her face orange and have yellow hair..."

That anti-Trump comment is the top-rated comment at the Washington Post article "Carrie Underwood warns fans she ‘might look a bit different’ after ‘gruesome’ injury," which tells us that the country music star "tripped and fell on the stairs in her Nashville home" last November and is only now talking about the damage to her famously beautiful face:

“I’ll spare you the gruesome details, but when I came out of surgery the night of my fall, the doctor told Mike that he had put between 40-50 stitches in,” she wrote, referring to her husband, hockey player Mike Fisher. “Now here we are 7 weeks later and, even though I’ve had the best people helping me, I’m still healing and not looking quite the same.”

There's also this comment:

I don't know anyone who "fell down stairs" and ended up with 40 stitches on their face. An explanation of how that happens, rather than "I’ll spare you the gruesome details," would be interesting. I've fallen down stairs, I've seen others fall down stairs, I've had people tell me about falling down stairs, no one got a severely lacerated face and "gruesome details." The fact she hid the injury in an effort to see if she could literally cover it up, is interesting. I'm sorry she got hurt, but the "story" seems like a story.

We don't have a right to know the story of a person's private life, but perhaps because the face is famous, we feel entitled to an explanation. A celebrity is just the part of a person that person chooses to reveal. Here's a fictional story to tide you over:

"I wish the Iranian people success in their noble quest for freedom."

I wish the Iranian people success in their noble quest for freedom. pic.twitter.com/7MRC3UWzTz

— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) January 1, 2018

"These Photos Of Donald Trump's Robot Head Photoshopped Onto His Pics Are Truly Terrifying."

"Disney fans everywhere were shook as all hell when Donald Trump finally made his appearance in The Hall of Presidents at the Magic Kingdom...."

"The last thing dogs want to know is that they're helping cats."

At the Soft Organs Café...

... it's the first open thread of the year. Enjoy the true empathy and paradoxical intercourse.

And do consider getting your supplies for the new year through the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

That's the weird thing about words. They don't stay right where you put them. Other people come and move them around.

It's like those refrigerator poetry magnets.

I'm laughing at Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed News Media Editor, for his dumb plaint: "I Helped Popularize The Term 'Fake News' And Now I Cringe Every Time I Hear It/After a yearlong battle for its meaning and ownership, 'fake news' is now both an empty slogan and a deeply troubling warning sign."

Cringe on, little man. Or step up and join the world of adults — people who share words with others.

"And the NYT runs the story on New Year's Eve Sunday."

"Clinton backers David Brock & Susie Tompkins Buell steered a total of $700k to @LisaBloom’s firm to try to bring forward sexual misconduct accusations against Trump before Election Day" (Instapundit).

The headline on the NYT story is "Partisans, Wielding Money, Begin Seeking to Exploit Harassment Claims."

The photograph at the Times article is freaky. Gloria Allred, looking grim and evil, seems to be carrying a Summer Zervos robot.

The Times article makes the problem about "partisans," and not specifically Democrats. Paragraph 5 quotes a "Republican lawyer":

“I approach this with a pure heart,” said Jack Burkman, a flamboyant Republican lawyer known for right-wing conspiracy theories who is seeking to represent sexual harassment victims. “I don’t want to see it politicized, even though, in a democracy, you see the political weaponization of everything.”

Very funny — a lawyer asserting that he has "a pure heart."

You've got to go way into the article to find the $700,000 donation that Instapundit talks about:

Ms. Allred’s daughter, the lawyer Lisa Bloom, seized on the political potency of sexual harassment charges against Mr. Trump not long after he clinched the Republican presidential nomination. She said she reached out to a pro-Clinton “super PAC”... for money to help her vet a sexual misconduct claim against Mr. Trump....

Ms. Bloom would not identify the donors. But two Democrats familiar with the arrangements said a nonprofit group founded by [Democratic activist David] Brock, American Bridge 21st Century Foundation, gave $200,000, while the fashion entrepreneur Susie Tompkins Buell, a major donor to Mr. Brock’s suite of groups, gave $500,000 to Ms. Bloom’s firm for the last-ditch effort....

Ms. Buell, a longtime friend and financial supporter of Mrs. Clinton who helped found the clothing brand Esprit, would not comment on the financial arrangement....

ADDED: This story got me thinking about Larry Flynt. Here's a NYT column by Felicity Barringer from January 1999:

If a tree falls in a forest, is it news? Does it become news only if Geraldo Rivera, Larry King, Sam Donaldson, Matt Drudge, eight talk radio shows, five World Wide Web sites, four newspapers, three cable channels, two wire services and a late-night talk-show host take notice? Or, to be less metaphorical, can Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, get the press to give him a platform for his campaign of offering cash to anyone who can expose the sexual transgressions of a politician seeking to remove President Clinton from office?

Last week's coverage of Mr. Flynt's latest revelations showed that yes, he can get attention. But it also showed that, unless the target of his attacks responds, making news himself, self-appointed newsmakers like Mr. Flynt can't necessarily keep the press's attention very long....

Many of the filters that once kept such news from the American public are easy to bypass. It is now conventional wisdom that the Internet, talk radio and late-night comics provide a conduit through which half-baked news, gossip and innuendo flow to the public. Now new kinds of grass-roots editing seems to be evolving. When people hear purportedly scandalous news that doesn't meet their criteria of newsworthiness, they don't react. Since the whole rationale for putting out scandalous news is the potential for public and political reaction, no reaction means no story.

To put it another way, the generation that is learning to invest its own retirement money is now doing more editing of its own news....

Ha ha. And look where we are today, 2 decades later. We no longer have to say "World Wide Web sites" or capitalize "internet," but we're hungrier than ever for news about sex and still trying to build some competence at using our own brains to filter the real and the fake.

"The sincerity of Roberts' intentions can be judged by whether he re-visits Anita Hill's allegations against 'Justice' Clarence Thomas."

"Her testimony was clearly credible and were backed up by a federal judge who remembered Hill telling her about the events at the time they happened."

That's the most-liked comment on the Washington Post article "Chief Justice Roberts says courts will examine protections against sexual harassment." If you order the comments by what is most liked, you'll see just about everything near the top talks about Thomas.

Using state law to create loopholes to escape from the federal tax law.

"Democrats in High-Tax States Plot to Blunt Impact of New Tax Law" (NYT).

Kirk Stark, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has suggested that states encourage residents to donate money to their state governments, then let the governments credit those donations against their state income taxes. Such donations would qualify as charitable donations, which are still fully deductible on federal taxes.

Trump begins the new year of tweeting with shots at the leaders of Pakistan and Iran.

First, one hour ago:

The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!

Second, 45 minutes ago:

Iran is failing at every level despite the terrible deal made with them by the Obama Administration. The great Iranian people have been repressed for many years. They are hungry for food & for freedom. Along with human rights, the wealth of Iran is being looted. TIME FOR CHANGE!

No more... time for change...

Buttons.

The CNN headline — when you click through — becomes "Kim Jong Un offers rare olive branch to South Korea."

Olive branch... nuclear button... ???

Kim wants to "work together to alleviate the tensions and work together as a people of the same heritage to find peace and stability" — but you have to accept him as an equal:

"The entire mainland of the US is within the range of our nuclear weapons and the nuclear button is always on the desk of my office. They should accurately be aware that this is not a threat but a reality. No matter how much America wants to attack us with their military might and nuclear power, they know that now we possess such great nuclear power and therefore they will not dare."

Is there really a button on his desk? Or is that just a figure of speech... or a fake button...



Now that was a fake laugh, but give the lady credit for laughing her brains out when she must have been enraged that some staffers got the word wrong (and wrote "overcharged" instead of "reset" on the button they broke off the hotel whirlpool for that embarrassing cutesy ceremony).

Well, if you haven't heard: It's cold out there.



"Listen, big boy/You’ve got me hooked, and how/I would die if I should lose you now!/Button up your overcoat/When the wind is free/Take good care of yourself/You belong to me!/Oh, eat an apple every day/Get to bed by three...."

We're still here.

Happy New Year!

ADDED: My first wholly unnecessary self-imposed task of 2018 was to look up "survive" in the OED. You can see, without looking it up, that it is made out of the root that means "live" and the prefix that means "over," "above," "higher than," or "on top of." But it doesn't mean that when Mr. X survives Mr. Y, he's living a higher life. It means Y died and X did not.

"I did loue a Lady, But she is dead... Sil. Say that she be: yet Valentine thy friend Suruiues." That's Shakespeare, "Two Gentlemen of Verona." You can also survive some thing or the thing can survive you: "Yea though I die the scandale will suruiue." Also Shakespeare. "Lucrece."

So "survive" implies that something else died. Drudge's headline tells us that 2017 has died and implies, jocosely, that it aimed to kill us. Every year threatens to kill us, and many of us did not survive 2017.

But all who are reading the Drudge headline have survived, and perhaps, finding ourselves in this still-alive condition, we will back off on the hysteria that made 2017 so weird.

Some year out there — if not 2018, then one with a number that's not all that much more than 2018 — is going to kill you, and there's no sense degrading this year or any year with your raging morbid fears.

Lighten up. "Survive" has its "trivial use," the OED tells us, often in the phrase "I'll survive":

1902 R. Kipling Traffics & Discov. (1904) 30 ‘But it'll bore you to death,’ he says... ‘I'll survive,’ I says, ‘I ain't British. I can think,’ I says.
1928 M. Arlen Lily Christine xiii. 240 ‘All this trouble your silly husband has brought on you!’ ‘Oh, we'll survive that,’ she said lightly....
1958 ‘C. S. Forester’ Hornblower in W. Indies 184 ‘I don't envy you, frankly.’ ‘No doubt I'll survive, sir.’

That reminds me. My mother — who wanted to survive to "the year 2000" but died in 1999 — would often respond to complaints and alarmism with a deadpan "You'll survive." I wish I had performed what I now think is the best comic riposte and burst out in song:

At the New Year's Eve Café...

... what are you seeing in that crystal ball?