Scott Walker announces his candidacy with a video that stresses winning while sticking to principles.

Line most likely to cause the home viewer to heckle out loud: "In Wisconsin, we didn't nibble around the edges...."

Here's the NYT article on the announcement. Excerpt:

After his remarks here [in Waukesha], Mr. Walker will visit the four early nominating states — Nevada on Tuesday, South Carolina on Wednesday, New Hampshire on Thursday and Iowa for a three-day “Winnebago tour.”

The recreational vehicle reflects a Midwestern, Everyman image of Mr. Walker that he has highlighted on the campaign trail with his stories about riding his beloved Harley-Davidson motorcycle and shopping for discount clothing at Kohl’s.

“He has an instinct, because he is so middle class, of absorbing information and facts and putting it through that middle-class filter,” said Ed Goeas, a senior adviser to Mr. Walker and veteran pollster. “Most people I work with are in one of two categories: You walk through an issue with them and they say, ‘Here’s my position,’ or you walk through an issue with them and they say, ‘Here’s my position, but what do the polls say?’” Mr. Goeas said. “The unique thing about Scott is, and I’ve never seen this with anyone else, he does a gut check after taking a position. He says, ‘Tell me, if we do this, if this is the solution, the one test I want to run is, will this make people’s lives better?’”

Not all grandparents cotton to your stereotype about grandparenthood.

Marc Maron was interviewing Ed Asner last week. One hour and 15 minutes into it, there's this exchange. Maron, the comedian/podcaster, is 51, childless, and lives with cats. Ed Asner is 85. He has 4 adult offspring and 7 grandchildren. 

"And you got grandkids? How's that? It's great?"

"It's all right."

"Come on!!"

"No, no, I don't — you know — drop my pants at the joy of grandkids. They're just another [pause] sperm order fulfilled."

"NO!!!"

"Yeah!"

"You don't fill with love in your heart?"

"Eh... eh...."

"No?!"

"I try to give them a fair shake. Let's put it that way."

Ha ha. Brilliant. Now, I feel like I know what you're going to say. I'm going to stereotype you. (Please resist!) I think you're going to bring up his politics, characterize him as a liberal, and use his hilarious crusty-pants'd old-man statement as proof that liberals have terrible values. Sperm order fulfilled ≈ aborted embryo is only a clump of cells. That kind of thing.

There, I hope my stereotype of you was sufficiently annoying that you'll say something more original and amusing. 

Chuck Todd and Doris Kearns Goodwin instruct us not to think about Donald Trump.

This exchange happened on "Meet the Press" this morning:

CHUCK TODD: Doris, we've seen versions of Donald Trump over the years. And I just don't mean versions of this Donald Trump, but I mean, you know, a George Wallace and things like this. This does happen. And they do strike a chord.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: I think the important thing is not to understand the chord he's striking. 

The important thing is not to understand the chord he's striking! Wow. We paused and rewound. She said "not" — the important thing is not to understand? Not to understand the chord.

Now, let's be clear what is meant by the chord. The chord is the people. We the people have something in us that resonates when struck a certain way, and Trump does strike it. Why shouldn't we want to understand that? It sounds like one of the most important things about American political life, and yet Doris Kearns Goodwin says no! Don't look at that, look at this:

But we, as journalists, have a responsibility to question: Is this the kind of person who could truly be a leader, a person so quick to anger, a person who yells at other people, a person who bullies, person who's loose with the facts, saying lots of things that aren't true, person who has conspiracy theories about whether Obama was born here, about vaccines, about climate change is a hoax?

So her point is, don't try to figure out what the people are looking for that Trump is appealing to, just fixate on Trump, the man. Keep saying — it's our responsibility to keep saying — that Trump is a nasty, contemptible lout. 

I think it's too much to give him the credit that he's entertaining, and that we like what he's saying but it's interesting. We, as journalists, have a responsibility to figure out which candidates are likely to be our leaders. 

There's that word "responsibility" again. The journalists must perform a filtering process for the people and exclude those who must not be taken seriously. We know in the end Trump can't win, she says. He may be at the top of the polls, but nevertheless, the journalists know he's a nasty, contemptible lout and they must pursue their lofty calling and keep the people from looking at this awful man.

I remember talking with Tim Russert about this. Rather than who's got the most money, who's saying the most outrageous thing, who has the highest polls, who is likely to be a leader? They've shown qualities already. This guy has shown qualities I cannot imagine him as a presidential leader.

CHUCK TODD: No, I don't think anybody can.

And by "anybody," he means anybody he knows. Or anybody that matters. By definition.

"The book that really made me a reader was a pretty bad book indeed: Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand."

"When I read it I was a young and hungry lunkhead who was just realizing that the world was leaving me behind: her perfect reader. I’d been a screw-up in high school and only in my senior year had started to realize that a certain train (Success) was leaving the station and that I might not be on it. Atlas Shrugged seemed to say that my being left behind was not my fault – the whole system was corrupt, and run by whiny jerks, and such an unjust system naturally discriminated against genuine and uncorrupt people like me. I also liked the idea (if Rand was to be believed) (and she was so forceful!), that all I had to do to be good was to believe very strongly/selfishly in myself – which, lo and behold, came naturally. I liked the easy way the Rand reader was encouraged to understand and dismiss suffering as the fault of the (weak, self-indulgent, handout-seeking) sufferer. This eliminated a lot of things I didn’t like: ambiguity, confusion, the struggle of ideas, the possibility that all was not known. In my defense, I hadn’t read a novel since third grade, so the very act of reading a novel was pretty wonderful – all those pages, situations, speeches! Rand’s ideas seemed to be coming to me from a world I had never been to – they seemed European, encoded, sophisticated. All that certainty! All those apparent rapes that actually were, we would later find out, pretty much consensual!"

Writes George Saunders in "The Book That Made Me A Reader..."

I've been intrigued by enouement and tormented by jouska.

Names for feelings you've probably had.

"Here's a guy, Sergeant Bergdahl. We get Bergdahl, a traitor, a no-good traitor, who in the good old days would've been executed, and they get five killers who are right now out on the battlefield."

Said Donald Trump — one quote of many in a Business Insider piece titled "Donald Trump just gave an amazingly surreal speech in Las Vegas."

Is that headline an attempt at humorously emulating Trump's way of speaking? It must be, and I'm wondering at what point the strategy of regarding him as a clown will be abandoned. I'm giving up my failed strategy, which was: If I don't view him as real, he is not real.

"[P]assengers trapped in the moving train huddled at both ends of the car and watched in horror as [Jasper] Spires punched 24-year-old Kevin Joseph Sutherland until he fell to the floor, then stabbed him until he was dead."

"Court documents say the victim was cut or stabbed 30 or 40 times, in the chest, abdomen, back, side and arms. Police said the assailant then threw the victim’s cellphone and returned to stomp on Sutherland’s body."

“We were in a moving train,” said a 52-year-old woman, who spoke on the condition that she not be named because she is both a victim and a witness to a crime. “You’re not really sure what you need to do. . . . This man is holding a bloody knife. I don’t think anyone was going to try and stop him... I watched [the attacker] drop-kick him in the head several times, like he wanted to kick his head off... We saw the perpetrator kicking the man. He had him on the ground, punching him, kicking him and stabbing him.... I would have to say that my instinct was to stay put and try to become as small as possible.... I’m looking, but I don’t want to be noticed by him.... I really thought when he had my dad stand up and he was standing up close to him that he was going to knife him. I didn’t know what he would do after he got money off my father.... I think we were all trying to stay away from him considering he had a knife... People who were in front of us were saying, ‘Don’t do that.’... I did not want him to think that he had to hurt us because we would identify him. I wanted him to think that he could walk away from this, and that’s what he did."

I've compressed the woman's quote from a longer article, which is in The Washington Post and titled "Horrified passengers witnessed brutal July 4 slaying aboard Metro car." The headline writer, for whatever reason, decided not to frame things in terms of the failure to help, which is horrifying witnessed from a distance much farther than the length of a Metro car. 

Education policy remains one of the few areas of unsettled debate within the Democratic Party."

"President Obama’s education agenda has often infuriated the teachers’ unions, and last year, the head of the National Education Association, another union representing teachers, called for the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, to be fired. Advocates of changes to the system, including some major Democratic donors, consider Mr. Obama an ally and have been pressuring Mrs. Clinton to adopt Mr. Obama’s posture. But in meetings with the A.F.T. last month, Mrs. Clinton said that teachers shouldn’t be the 'scapegoat' for society’s ills. After that meeting — members also heard from Mr. Sanders and Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor — [Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers,] praised Mrs. Clinton’s performance and detailed responses to members’ concerns."

And yesterday, the American Federation of Teachers endorsed Hillary Clinton.

That's from an article in the NYT — "Hillary Clinton Picks Up Teachers’ Union Endorsement" — that doesn't remind us what Obama is doing that has infuriated the teachers' unions.

I found this from June 2014: "AFT’s Weingarten smacks Arne Duncan about his praise for Vergara decision":

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten just sent a letter... to Education Secretary Arne Duncan blasting him for his statement praising a California judge’s decision to throw out five state statutes that provide job protections to teachers.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu handed down a ruling in Vergara vs California Wednesday siding with plaintiffs who argued that California children who live in low-income families receive an inadequate education because they get the weakest teachers who can’t be fired....

"For the striving youths of 19th-century America, learning was often a self-driven, year-round process."

"Devouring books by candlelight and debating issues by bonfire, the young men and women of the so-called 'go-ahead generation' worked to educate themselves into a better life. Is this old-fashioned culture of self-improvement making a comeback? The mainstream school system — with its barrage of tests, Common Core and 'excellent sheep' — encourages learning as a passive, standardized process. But here and there, with the help of YouTube and thousands of podcasts, a growing group of students and adults are beginning to supplement their education. School isn’t going away. But more and more people are realizing what their 19th-century predecessors knew: that the best learning is often self-taught...."

From "D.I.Y. Education Before YouTube."

"Are creeps, and their defining quality—creepiness—to our age what anxiety was to postwar life?"

"The proposition is embarrassing, but, then, so is everything the pruney fingers of creepiness touch. Half a century ago, there were squares and libertines, stalwarts and histrionics, private lives and public personalities. Today, in our self-scrutinizing, liberated time, these categories have got scrambled, and distinguishing between a charmingly revealing Instagram post and a bomb of oversharing requires daunting feats of judgment. Looming behind many missteps is the threat of creepiness: a fear that, out of all the free paths open to the modern social actor, you have picked the one that is invasive, obviously needy, and perverse...."

From "The Age of Creepiness" (in The New Yorker).

"Women seem to use [the dash] a lot … . as if it were a woman’s prerogative to stop short without explanation..."

"... to leave things open-ended. A friend of mine once swept aside all rules governing punctuation by saying 'Whenever you feel a pause, you put in a dash.'"

She provides a strong—and moving—example with the note from Jacqueline Kennedy to Richard Nixon, responding to his letter of condolence after President Kennedy’s assassination. The note is punctuated entirely by dashes, and Norris shows what it would be like if punctuated by a copy editor: “The conventionally punctuated version gives the prose the appearance of being tightly under control, buttons buttoned, snaps snapped, and jaw clamped shut. Jackie’s dashes are spontaneous and expressive, full of style and personality.”

She = Mary Norris, author of "Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen."

ADDED: The 2 versions of Jackie's letter don't appear at the link, but I found Jackie's letter (and you'll have to picture it with periods and commas_:

Dear Mr. Vice President –

I do thank you for your most thoughtful letter –

You two young men – colleagues in Congress – adversaries in 1960 – and now look what has happened – Whoever thought such a hideous thing could happen in this country –

I know how you must feel – so long on the path – so closely missing the greatest prize – and now for you, all the question comes up again – and you must commit all you and your family’s hopes and efforts again – Just one thing I would say to you –if it does not work out as you have hoped for so long – please be consoled by what you already have – your life and your family –

We never value life enough when we have it – and I would not have had Jack live his life any other way – thought I know his death could have been prevented, and I will never cease to torture myself with that –

But if you do not win – please think of all that you have – With my appreciation – and my regards to your family.  I hope your daughters love Chapin School as much as I did –

Sincerely
Jacqueline Kennedy

"Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's Twitter account got ahead of him on Friday evening... 'Scott is in. Are you? Join our team today.'"

"Attached was a black and white photo of Walker under the caption: 'SCOTT WALKER IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT.'"

The message quickly disappeared from Walker's Twitter feed, but it could still be viewed on his account for several hours. On Friday night, Twitter spokesman Nu Wexler said in a statement: "We're looking into today's issue, and we've determined the Walker team was not at fault."

So who's at fault? (I don't get it.)

"FBI: Breakdown in background check system allowed Dylann Roof to buy gun."

WaPo reports:

Roof had been arrested for possession of narcotics in February, a felony charge that alone did not disqualify him from buying a gun. But [FBI Director James B.] Comey said Roof’s subsequent admission of the drug crime would have triggered an automatic rejection of his gun purchase if the information had been properly recorded in criminal-record and background-check databases.

Instead, Comey said, the data was not properly entered in databases of criminal records that are submitted by state, local and federal law enforcement agencies, and in records kept by the bureau.

So, now I see what information and data did. Information failed to get properly recorded. Data didn't get properly entered. Were any human beings involved?

Seriously, who screwed up? I can't tell from those sentences.

I haven't read any commentary on this story, but I assume this is an occasion to criticize Obama (and others) for calling for more gun control and to repeat the standard line that what we need is to enforce the law we already have.

Ridiculously opinionated article at the NYT about Ellen Pao's ouster at Reddit.

"It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit."

I know, you're going to say, why are you surprised? It's the New York Times. Why do you even read it? But put the usual reflexive retorts aside for a moment and take a look at how bad this example is. It's a news report, not an opinion piece, and it assumes, over and over, that Pao is the victim of sexism (even though her downfall had to do with her involvement in the firing of another woman):

Ellen Pao became a hero to many when she took on the entrenched male-dominated culture of Silicon Valley...

Ms. Pao’s abrupt downfall in the face of a torrent of sexist and racist comments, many of them on Reddit itself, is quite likely to renew charges that bullying, harassment and cruel behavior are out of control on the web — and that Silicon Valley’s well-publicized problem with gender and ethnic diversity in its work force persists....

Atticus Finch said "The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people."

Michiko Kakutani reveals in her NYT review of "Go Set a Watchman," discussed in an earlier post, where I wonder about the discussion Harper Lee had with her publishers that led to the rewrite of the story, making Atticus Finch an idealize father and lawyer.

Let me guess, Lee and/or her publishers said Americans are still in their childhood as a people. This needs to be a children's book.

I reread "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 1999, when I was invited to respond to another law professor's critique of it. Steven Lubet focused on the way Atticus Finch cross-examined the purported rape victim. Could Mayella have been telling the truth? I objected to Lubet's revisionist view of Atticus Finch precisely because the book is written to be understood by children:

That Mayella’s injuries were on her right side, that her father is left handed, and that Tom’s left arm is so entirely useless it slips off the Bible as he is taking the oath, clearly establishes Harper Lee’s overeagerness to assure us that Tom is innocent and to squelch any speculation to the contrary. (Professor Lubet breaks free of the author’s firm hold.) The author’s decision to forgo the usual subtleties of the novelist’s art undermines attempts at assessing Atticus’s legal skills. Indeed, Lee’s cartoonishly overdone evidence generates its own difficulties: Tom’s left arm is an entire foot shorter than his right arm and it hangs “dead at his side” and dangles a hand so shrivelled that Scout detects its inutility from the balcony, yet Atticus is able to trap both Bob Ewell and Mayella into testifying in a way that would require Tom to have an effective left arm, as if they had never laid eyes on him. Given this glaring lapse in the evidence, it is not surprising that Professor Lubet can pry a number of holes in the evidence and construct an interpretation that Tom is guilty, but I would still maintain that Atticus can be credited with an absolute belief that Tom is innocent and that readers entering Lee’s simplified moral world are compelled to adopt this belief as well.

ADDED: Lubet's argument is discussed in this Malcolm Gladwell article from 2009, "The Courthouse Ring/Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism."

America's Dad — the fictional character — has a very bad week.

1. Bill Cosby.

2. Atticus Finch.