"A liberal blogger who wrote satirical critiques of the Maldivian government and the spread of radical Islam..."

"... died Sunday after being stabbed in the stairway of his apartment building."

[Yameen] Rasheed was best known for satirical Twitter posts and weekly posts on his popular blog, The Daily Panic, which riffed on the week’s headlines, often criticizing the government’s use of religion to appeal to the public....

Celine Peroni, Mr. Rasheed’s girlfriend, said he was “just the smartest, wittiest and sweetest person I’ve ever met.”...

“He was aware of the threats, but cautious,” she said. “He wanted the voice of the truth to be heard, despite the risks.”

With Gorsuch, will the Supreme Court take the cake?

We've been waiting and waiting to see if they'll take the cake.

So this week’s conference will be the first for Gorsuch. That fact is reflected in this week’s unusually long roll of relists, which are plentiful enough that it appears that the court may have simply rolled over the entire “discuss list” from last week’s conference. Three of last week’s relists return again, including the closely watched six-time relist and potential blockbuster Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 16-111, involving a cake decorator who refused on religious grounds to make a cake for a same-sex wedding....

"We did not want to make this pink-washed. This is not a girl’s condom."

"It’s not just like, ‘Hey, I’m the guy, I bring the condom.’ It’s people involved together making decisions for their sexual health."

Said Bruce Weiss, Trojan’s vice president of marketing, explaining a new product with "more gender-neutral purple packaging" and "a carrying case that could slip easily (and discreetly) into a purse," quoted in a NYT article titled "XOXO Campaign: Will It Spell Profit or Trouble for Condom Maker?"

The "trouble" is, we're told, that in today's "unforgiving environment,"* Trojan could get criticizes for seeming to shift responsibility onto the woman when it — like the condom — belongs on the man.

Fortunately for Trojan, the NYT extracted a quote from Naomi Wolf, who enthuses:

“It wonderfully addresses women as adults who can take responsibility, not victims of whatever the guy happens to have in his pocket or not,” Ms. Wolf said. “It addresses women as adults who are thinking about their sexual health.”

Victims of whatever the guy happens to have in his pocket — great phrase.

_________________

* E.g., the reaming given to Pepsi for seemingly trivializing Black Lives Matter. 

"Fire Spicer and hire O'Reilly. It would be the most fun ever."

Surfed wrote in the comments to the post about the Trump interview transcript.

Meade wrote:

I said that very thing just a few days ago. So great minds think alike. A least I've heard they do. I don't know. Maybe great minds don't think alike. But I've heard it. From great scholars. The greatest. So I'm pleased either way.

I can vouch for Meade. He really did say that. About Spicer and O'Reilly. Not about great minds thinking alike. I don't think they do. See?

By the way, recently Trump said: "I’m not firing Sean Spicer. That guy gets great ratings. Everyone tunes in."

Trump even likened Spicer’s daily news briefings to a daytime soap opera, noting proudly that his press secretary attracted nearly as many viewers....

During an intimate lunch recently with a key outside ally in a small West Wing dining room, for instance, Trump repeatedly paused the conversation to make the group watch a particularly combative Spicer briefing....

ADDED: Also in the comments on that other post and before Surfed made his proposal, EDH wrote:

Here's what I propose: Trump hires Bill O'Reilly. They set up a fake "old school" cathode ray tube TV cabinet in the Oval Office. Bill O'Reilly then does The O'Reilly Factor show live in person from inside the hollowed-out TV cabinet while Trump watches the program.

Trump asked.

Here's John Henry in the comments to the post on Trump's interview transcript:

I sold machinery for 22 years and now sell myself as a consultant. I used to read a lot of books and listen to a lot of motivational tapes on how to be a better salesman. They really do work. They helped me a lot.

If I had to pick one thing that a successful salesperson does and that the moderately or un-successful person doesn't do, it's this: ASK FOR THE ORDER!!!!!

A lot of different ways to do this and phrase this but it is amazing how many times salespeople fail to do this and then can't understand why they didn't close the sale.

So something that jumped out at me from the interview was this:

AP: Can you tell me a little bit about how that came about?

TRUMP: No, just — you know, I asked the government to let her out. …

TRUMP: You know Obama worked on it for three years, got zippo, zero.

AP: How did you hear about this story?

TRUMP: Many people, human rights people, are talking about it. It’s an incredible thing, especially when you meet her. You realize — I mean, she was in a rough place.

AP: Did you have to strike a deal with (Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah) el-Sissi over this?

TRUMP: No. No deal. He was here. He — I said, “I really would appreciate it if you would look into this and let her out.” And as you know, she went through a trial. And anyway, she was let go. And not only she, it was a total of eight people.

And there was this with the Italian Primo:

TRUMP: He’s going to end up paying. But you know, nobody ever asked the question. Nobody asked. Nobody ever asked him to pay up. So it’s a different kind of a presidency.

President Trump has been a salesman all his life. You may or may not like what he is selling but he has been a master of it. He knows that the most important part of the sales process is knowing to ask for the order. Knowing how and when is important but the most important is asking.

We saw that in his campaigning style. He went out among the people and asked for the order (their vote) Loser-loser Hillary couln't be bothered. She could have had Wisconsin for the asking, probably. She didn't ask.

Ya don't ask, ya don't get.

Let's read the full transcript of Trump's interview with AP White House Correspondent Julie Pace.

Talking Points Memo put the whole thing up here. I'm cutting and pasting the whole thing before reading it, and as I read it, I'll be cutting it down to what I'm interested in blogging. That is, if you start reading as soon as I put this up, the whole thing will appear below. If you arrive at this post later, it will have been cut down to my taste, and you'll need to go to the link for the full text. I haven't read what anyone else has said about this interview, so my cut-down will show what jumped out at me.

AP: I do want to talk to you about the 100 days.

TRUMP: Good.

AP: I want to ask a few questions on some topics that are happening toward the end of the interview.

TRUMP: Did you see Aya (Hijazi, an Egyptian-American charity worker who had been detained in the country for nearly three years) …

Trump takes control of the interview, depriving Pace of control of the narrative arc. Don't let Pace pace it. 

AP: Can you tell me a little bit about how that came about?

TRUMP: No, just — you know, I asked the government to let her out. …

TRUMP: You know Obama worked on it for three years, got zippo, zero.

He's bragging, taunting Obama, using the benevolent, suffering woman — Hijazi — as the centerpiece for his dance of triumph. 

"Marine Le Pen Is In A Much Deeper Hole Than Trump Ever Was."

Writes Nate Silver. 

Are we still hanging on the wisdom of the Nate Silver? The headline suggests he knows he has a credibility problem. (This time he really means it.) But let's look beyond the headline. There's a lot of stuff crunched over there — that's the confidence-building methodology — and here's how it ends:

There’s still some uncertainty about the outcome.... Although the polls haven’t systematically underestimated nationalist and right-wing parties, they also haven’t been all that accurate in pinning down their support, having come in both high and low in different elections. In cases since 2012 where the right-wing party polled at 25 percent or more, the polls missed the party’s actual support by an average of 3.6 percent of the vote. That translates to a true margin of error (or 95 percent confidence interval) of about plus or minus 9 percentage points. And because any vote that Le Pen gets is one that Macron won’t get, the margin of error for the gap between Le Pen and Macron is twice as large, or about 18 percentage points.

An 18-point margin of error is huge! But it still isn’t enough when you’re 26 points behind, as Le Pen is against Macron.... She could beat her polls by as much as Trump and Brexit combined and still lose to Macron by almost 20 points.

That's excitingly put and it sounds strong. As I said, confidence-building. But we're all skeptical now, aren't we? 

This was the final prediction, published on America's Election Day, at Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight:

"Why Trump likes his freewheeling Oval Office schedule/The loose set-up allows friends and unofficial advisers to whisper in the president’s ear on policy issues."

Reports/speculates Politico.

That routine traces back at least to his days in real estate. "I try not to schedule too many meetings," Trump wrote in “The Art of the Deal.” "I leave my door open. You can’t be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much structure. I prefer to work each day and just see what develops. There is no typical week in my life.”

One thing he does is watch television. Sometimes he sees somebody on television saying something nice about him and he calls them up, invites them over. Or he just calls in his advisers to talk about what came up on the TV news.

"Number one, he's lonely. It's part of why he's reached out to me," said one confidante of the president who Trump has contacted many times by phone since taking office. "He's always been a creature of routine."

Creative/lonely... who knows? The man is an enigma, an enigma who watches TV and talks about the shows. 

I decided after all to read "Shattered."

I'm 16% of the way into the book that goes "Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign." (I know the percent because I'm reading it on Kindle (in combination with the "whispersync'd" audio version, useful when walking around).)

I just wanted to quote 3 things:

1. At the 5% mark, the unholy mess: "The campaign was an unholy* mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority, petty jealousies, distorted priorities, and no sense of greater purpose. No one was in charge, and no one had figured out how to make the campaign about something bigger than Hillary. Muscatine felt that the speech said nothing because it tried to say too much."

2. At the 9% mark, Huma, the croc-filled moat: "[Huma Abedin] had the final say on where Hillary went and who had access to her. Rather than just being a gatekeeper, Abedin took on the role of channeling Hillary for the rest of the campaign... That made her indispensable to both the candidate and the rest of the team... But many feared speaking their minds around her. She couldn’t be counted on to relay constructive criticism to Hillary without pointing a finger at the critic. If Hillary was a candidate often isolated from her formal campaign — and she was — Abedin was the croc-filled moat encircling her. The Royal Huma Guard made it harder for Hillary’s senior- and midlevel aides to get time with the candidate, and that made it impossible to really know the woman they were selling."

3. At the 14% mark, the Brianna/Bianna screwup: "In May [2015], as Bernie was starting to campaign in earnest and it was becoming clear that the press wouldn’t let the e-mail story go, Hillary’s aides began planning her first national television interview of the campaign, a chance to strike back at the widely held perception that she was hiding from the press. Palmieri asked Abedin to find out which newscaster Hillary would prefer, and the answer that came back was 'Brianna.' That meant CNN’s Brianna Keilar, and Palmieri worked to set up a live interview on CNN. Only it turned out that Hillary had said 'Bianna'— as in Bianna Golodryga of Yahoo! News, the wife of former Clinton administration economic aide Peter Orszag. By the time the mistake was realized, it was too late to pull back. Hillary went through with the interview on July 7, and it was a disaster." Here's what her own people perceived as a disaster:



___________________

* The use of the word "unholy" to just mean awful or dreadful interested me. I wondered how long that completely nonreligious application of the religious-seeming word had been around. The OED finds the first published use in a letter written by Charles Dickens in 1842: "I am reminded of my promise to see to the Pantomime, and am called out at this unholy hour." A similar word is "ungodly," first recorded in the nonreligious meaning in a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, "Olalla" (1887)(whole text here):

I went to bed early, wearied with day-long restlessness, but the poisonous nature of the wind, and its ungodly and unintermittent uproar, would not suffer me to sleep. I lay there and tossed, my nerves and senses on the stretch. At times I would doze, dream horribly, and wake again; and these snatches of oblivion confused me as to time. But it must have been late on in the night, when I was suddenly startled by an outbreak of pitiable and hateful cries. I leaped from my bed, supposing I had dreamed; but the cries still continued to fill the house, cries of pain, I thought, but certainly of rage also, and so savage and discordant that they shocked the heart. It was no illusion; some living thing, some lunatic or some wild animal, was being foully tortured...

Fritillaria, redbud, serviceberry.

All photographed by Meade — and grown by Meade.

At the Tulip Café...

... it's a place to talk about the subjects that haven't been offered up for conversation so far here at Althouse.

And consider using The Althouse Amazon Portal. (But don't buy a leaf blower! All you need is a broom. And a rake.)

"How can anyone barbecue with the smell of meat near political prisoners fighting for their country?"

"Torturing" hunger strikers.

"Their cleverest scene together is the one in which Benjamin asks Mrs Robinson if they can't, for once, talk about something."

"Conventionally, that would make him the 'sensitive' one - the one who wants a meaningful relationship, rather than just uncomplicated rutting. But it comes across as cruel and heartless: He's too insensitive to sense her vulnerability, and too uncaring to try to figure it out. So, even in the New Hollywood, Benjamin is a traditionalist - opting for romance and conversation over sex and compartmentalization. Mike Nichols' genius was in finding the sweet spot where edgy sells, providing you smooth out all the rough stuff."

Writes Mark Steyn (on the occasion of the return of "The Graduate" to theaters on its 50th anniversary). (Can you see it in Madison? Yes. But only at 2:00, and it's a beautiful, warm day here. To go to the movies this afternoon would be like taking Elaine to a strip bar, no?)

"When it comes to really bad ideas, the leafblower ranks right up there with adding lead to gasoline and using CFCs in aerosols."

"Leafblowers are diabolical machines. Even if the claims their promoters make for them were true, the damage leafblowers do outweighs such meager benefits by many, many orders of magnitude."

ADDED: Here's an article written in a more sober style, "On Banning Leaf Blowers" (in the NYT):

Most landscapers use leaf blowers with two-stroke engines, which are light enough to carry but produce significant exhaust and noise. The gas and oil mix together, and about a third of it does not combust. As a result, pollutants that have been linked to cancers, heart disease, asthma and other serious ailments escape into the air....

United Airlines must be really glad that this American Airlines character got caught abusing a passenger.

"American Airlines flight attendant 'whacks a mother in the head with a metal stroller while she holds her twin babies and reduces her to tears' - then is filmed challenging a passenger to a FIGHT and yelling 'hit me!'"

A social force has been unleashed and who knows where it will end? The passengers feel empowered and feisty, and the flight attendants cannot maintain peaceful order within their sweet, smiling persona anymore. The iPhones are ready to record video that MSM and social media snap up and viralize.

The airlines try to compartmentalize: It's just United. It's just this one rogue flight attendant. I don't think so. I think this is the new normal: Passengers in rebellion and flight attendants in over their head.

I scan the French election headlines.

1. Simon Heffer in the U.K. Telegraph writes under a headline that seems internally contradictory: "France is resigned — Marine Le Pen may win." So there's this collective entity, "France," and it's having an election, which is a means of choosing what it wants. What's to be "resigned" about, if it's getting what it wants? I can't read the whole column because I don't have "premium" access, so I'm forced to guess. It could mean that the "France" that matters — the elite, the good people — don't want Le Pen, but this other France that doesn't deserve to be called "France" is choosing her. But it might mean that the run-off style of choosing ensures that Le Pen will get through to Round 2 and her opponent will not present an adequate not-Pen choice, so she might win even though she's opposed by a solid majority. It could be kind of like the way Trump won, jazzing up about a third of the electorate, then only having to beat an opponent who was, at best, uninspiring.

2. Kenneth Rapoza in Forbes, "In France, If Le Pen Cracks 30% 'She Could Win It All.'"

"I'm not ready to make a call yet on a Le Pen victory," says Vladimir Signorelli, founder of Brettonwoods Research in Long Valley, NJ. Brettonwoods correctly called the Trump win. "I've been telling my clients that if she gets over 30% of the vote on Sunday, she has a good chance to win it all. She will make it to the second round and when she does, all she needs is roughly a third of the remaining votes from the other candidates who didn't make it," says Signorelli.

Scandal-plagued Republican candidate, Francois Fillon, is rising in the ranks at the last minute with around 19% today. Melenchon has about the same percentage. There are more similarities with Fillon and Melenchon to Le Pen than there [are] to Macron. This does not bode well for Macron....

Brettonwoods Research also suspects a 3% to 4% under-representation of support for Le Pen in the polls, based on past polls that just missed Brexit and Trump....

3. Andrew O'Hehir at Salon, "Democracy’s dyin’, who’s got the will? What France’s election tells us about the state of modern discontent/With the left facing disarray and defeat amid a new age of revolution, it's time to ask: Is democracy over?" This is a phenomenon I've been following since the Wisconsin protests. (The side that had just lost the election laid siege to the state capitol building and chanted "This is what democracy looks like.") What makes left-wingers think that when they lose, there's no democracy? There seems to be a delusion that they embody the people, so the actual voting by people is a failure of democracy if the stupid people bumble into voting for the right. I'm just riffing on the headline. Is that what O'Hehir says? He writes: "I see a bunch of people on both sides of the Atlantic desperately trying to pretend that democracy isn’t broken and may yet yield an acceptable and/or 'progressive' outcome." Ha! I think I'm right!

4. Unnamed writer at Fox News, "France election: Marine Le Pen sees Trump-like boost in support, but victory far from assured." What's the "boost" and why is it like Trump? Trump didn't get a terrorist attack on the eve of the election. What's Fox News blabbering about? This is the kind of incoherence you get when you want to use multiple ideas and don't have a way or don't take the trouble to weave it together. I suspect Fox News of being committed to throwing Trump into the story because they think it's too hard for American readers to care about France unless it's about us, and they say one thing and then another and don't think the readers will notice if the statements don't make sense together. Maybe they think it will be good because it's "Trump-like." Isn't that the way Trump does those speeches some people like so much?

5. Nikita Vladimirov at The Hill, "Ex-Obama aide [Ben] Rhodes: Le Pen victory in France would be 'devastating.'" Oh, this is one of those articles that just takes somebody's tweet pumps it into an article. The tweet is embedded and then the text quotes the tweet and there's a bit of filler to make it look as though it's something more than just the tweet. My take for that species of fake news is: MSM reports what's in social media.

6. JTA in Forward, "Should France’s Jews Leave If Le Pen Wins Elections?" The question is apropos of Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar's statement: "If Marine Le Pen is elected president of France, the Jews must leave." Lazar also said: "Putin was the first president to publicly speak out against anti-Semitism and did the most for the Jews in Russia. There is no institutional anti-Semitism in Russia."