"He is definitely the only guy in my life whom I ever call ‘honey.'"

Wrote President Trump in "The Art of the Deal," quoted in "President Trump’s brother Robert dies after hospitalization in NYC" (NY Daily News).

“Robert, who is two years younger than I am, is soft-spoken and easygoing, but he’s very talented and effective,” Trump wrote. “I think it must be hard to have me for a brother, but he’s never said anything about it and we’re very close. He is definitely the only guy in my life whom I ever call ‘honey.' Robert gets along with almost everyone, which is great for me, since I sometimes have to be the bad guy."

What's the "extra innings rule"?

Taking advantage of the extra innings rule. #CarryTheFreight I #ThisIsMyCrew pic.twitter.com/BU3Ev0bAut

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) August 16, 2020

I had to look it up.

Major League Baseball’s new extra-innings rule, in which a baserunner is automatically placed at second base with no outs to start every half-inning, is probably the most material change to the way the game is played since the adoption of the designated hitter. And considering the DH has been around in the American League since 1973 and still generates, um, spirited debate, I think it’s safe to say we’re not likely to see baseball fans ever come to 100% agreement on whether the freebie runner is a good idea.

But it’s definitely a good idea for this shortened 2020 season, for reasons I’ll get into in a moment. And having seen the rule in action a handful of times already, I’m willing to go so far as to say -- with all apologies to the purest of purists -- it might be a good idea for future seasons, too.

At the Saturday Night Café...

... you can talk about anything you like.

I photographed the water lilies of Lake Mendota at 1:27 in the afternoon today. No sunrise picture today. I skipped the ritual for a couple inadequate reasons.

Is the biggest story in the world today the Postal Service?

That's how it looks in The Washington Post. The top left 2/3s of the home page:



You may wonder: What about Trump's Middle East deal? Isn't that the big news? Well, it is over there on the right-hand side under the heading "Opinion," the 4th item down, a column by Max Boot: "Despite the UAE-Israel deal, Trump will leave the Mideast a bigger mess than he found it."

It's easy to understand. Whatever happened, it's bad for Trump, and it's important to the extent that it's bad for Trump.

I see I have a tag "going Washington Postal." I'm adding it because it seems randomly appropriate and because I want to publish and click on it to see what it really is.

Facebook invites me to share a "memory" from November 2010... and it takes me a little while to get my head around it.

Here's my original blog post from 2010, when Trump was considering running for President in 2016 and said: "I am thinking about things. And I'm looking at this country ... and what's happened in terms of respect, and the respect for this country is just not there. I have many people from China that I do business with, they laugh at us. They feel we're fools. And almost being led by fools. And they can't believe what they're getting away with."

ADDED: This is a post about how Facebook confused me today, but maybe I'm confusing you. What's the time line? Today's suggestion from Facebook, if you read the fine print, says that I put this on Facebook 4 years ago, which was during the 2016 presidential campaign. It's a screen shot from something I'd put on the blog in 2010 which was 10 years ago. I think it's interesting again, as Trump runs for reelection.

Can Biden escape criticism for the political use of race by accusing the critics of racism?

I'm reading "Australian newspaper cartoon of U.S. candidates Harris and Biden criticized as racist" (Reuters):

The cartoon by Johannes Leak in The Australian newspaper, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and is known for its conservative views, depicted a beaming Biden saying, “It’s time to heal a nation divided by racism.” The drawing then showed him pointing to Harris, the first Black woman on a major-party U.S. presidential ticket, and saying, “So I’ll hand you over to this little brown girl while I go for a lie-down.”...

The cartoon drew immediate criticism from some officials, and other critics. “It’s offensive and racist,” Andrew Giles, an Australian Labor politician and shadow cabinet minister, said on Twitter. Former attorney-general Mark Dreyfus tweeted, “If The Australian has any respect for decency and standards it must apologise immediately, and never again publish cartoons like this.”

The Australian’s editor-in-chief, Christopher Dore, stood by the cartoon, saying Leak was mocking Biden’s own words. “The words ‘little black and brown girls’ belong to Joe Biden, not Johannes, and were uttered by the presidential candidate when he named Kamala Harris as his running mate yesterday; he repeated them in a tweet soon after,” Dore said in a note to the newspaper’s staff, provided to Reuters by News Corp.... “The intention of Johannes’s commentary was to ridicule identity politics and demean racism, not perpetuate it.”

In fact, as the article points out, Biden introduced Harris as his running mate by saying, “This morning, all across the nation, little girls woke up - especially Black and brown girls who so often feel overlooked and undervalued in their communities - but today, today, just maybe, they’re seeing themselves for the first time in a new way: as the stuff of presidents and vice presidents.”

That is, Biden used race for political purposes. He said the words "black and brown girls" as he presented his running mate as an exemplar. Maybe that's okay. Maybe that's excellent. But it's not above mockery. The idea that the cartoonist is a racist is an effort to defend Biden, to give him free rein to use race and to make anyone who would criticize him afraid that they'll get called a racist and cancelled.

There are people who think that any use of race is racist. These people are mostly on the right. They'll say that anti-racism demands austere colorblindness. But these people are not dominant in mainstream politics and culture at the moment. So speaking in racial terms is quite common among people who don't want to be considered racist. But no one can control where the line is between the talk about race that's worthy and beneficial and where it begins to get racist. The cartoonist was implying that Biden's use of race is at least a little racist, and one defense of Biden is to say that the cartoonist was racist.

One thing is clear to me: If Biden is going to use race the way he has, he must be open to ridicule for using it the wrong way or using it too much. We are lost if we let American culture degenerate into power-seekers who use race as a manipulative tool and masses of people who look on blankly and nod because they don't know how to object without getting accused of racism.

ADDED: Here's the cartoon:

At the Friday Night Café...

... go ahead and write about anything.

As for that photograph, it was taken at 6:02 this morning, and we spent a lot of time trying to understand the unusual orange shape on the water — an elongated doughnut shape. It's a clear sky — Type #3 — sunrise. I've seen that many times. But the shape on the water brings uniqueness to this sunrise.

What? You believed me??!! — It was a debate.

If you’ve never have food poisoning, it’s roughly like this... pic.twitter.com/KEUZpvQmk9

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) August 14, 2020

"It’s a geopolitical earthquake."

"Just go down the scorecard, and you see how this deal affects every major party in the region — with those in the pro-American, pro-moderate Islam, pro-ending-the-conflict-with-Israel-once-and-for-all camp benefiting the most and those in the radical pro-Iran, anti-American, pro-Islamist permanent-struggle-with-Israel camp all becoming more isolated and left behind.... It was Trump’s peace plan drawn up by Jared Kushner, and their willingness to stick with it, that actually created the raw material for this breakthrough.... This deal will certainly encourage the other gulf sheikhdoms — Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia — all of which have had covert and overt business and intelligence dealings with Israel, to follow the Emirates’ lead. They will not want to let the U.A.E. have a leg up in being able to marry its financial capital with Israel’s cybertechnology, agriculture technology and health care technology, with the potential to make both countries stronger and more prosperous. Three other big winners here are: 1) King Abdullah of Jordan. He feared that Israeli annexation would energize efforts to turn Jordan into the Palestinian state. That threat is for the moment defused. 2) The American Jewish community. If Israel had annexed part of the West Bank, it would have divided every synagogue and Jewish community in America, between hard-line annexationists and liberal anti-annexationists. This was a looming disaster. Gone for now. And 3) Joe Biden. Biden, if he succeeds Trump, will not have to worry about the thorny issue of annexation, and he should have a much stronger pro-American alliance in the region to work with. The big geopolitical losers are Iran and all of its proxies: Hezbollah, the Iraqi militias, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis in Yemen and Turkey...."

From "A Geopolitical Earthquake Just Hit the Mideast/The Israel-United Arab Emirates deal will be felt throughout the region" by Thomas Friedman (NYT).

"Adolph Reed and his ilk believe that if we talk about race too much we will alienate too many, and that will keep us from building a movement."

"We don’t want that — we want to win white people to an understanding of how their racism has fundamentally distorted the lives of Black people," said Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a Princeton professor of African-American studies and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, quoted in "A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury/The cancellation of a speech reflects an intense debate on the left: Is racism the primary problem in America today, or the outgrowth of a system that oppresses all poor people?" (NYT).

Also quoted, Cornel West, the Harvard professor of philosophy, who is a Socialist: “God have mercy, Adolph is the greatest democratic theorist of his generation. He has taken some very unpopular stands on identity politics, but he has a track record of a half-century. If you give up discussion, your movement moves toward narrowness."

From Reed himself: "An obsession with disparities of race has colonized the thinking of left and liberal types. There’s this insistence that race and racism are fundamental determinants of all Black people’s existence."

Buried in the article is Reed's opinion of Joe Biden: his “tender mercies have been reserved for the banking and credit card industries.” I'd like to hear more of that — skepticism about Biden's racial politics.

"Young White House aides frequently mocked Biden’s gaffes and lack of discipline in comparison to the almost clerical Obama."

"They would chortle at how Biden, like an elderly uncle at Thanksgiving, would launch into extended monologues that everyone had heard before....  Obama and [Hillary] Clinton both viewed themselves as pioneers who worked their way through America’s elite colleges. Obama went to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he headed the law review; Clinton went from Wellesley to Yale Law School. They shared a work style as well, always sure to do their homework and arrive at a meeting prepared to get to the crux of an issue. 'They do the reading,' said one former Clinton aide. 'In Situation Room meetings, she had the thickest binder and had read it three times.' Biden’s own academic career was unimpressive—he repeated the third grade, earned all Cs and Ds in his first three semesters at the University of Delaware except for As in P.E., a B in 'Great English Writers' and an F in ROTC, and graduated 76th in his Syracuse Law School class of [1968].... He was not a binder person, Clinton and Obama aides said.... Biden’s tendency to blurt out whatever was on his mind rankled Obama, who wasn’t afraid to needle him for it. In his first press conference in 2009, the young president quipped 'I don’t remember exactly what Joe was referring to—not surprisingly'.... Biden has long been defensive about suggestions of being dumb or a lightweight—a narrative that took hold during in his first campaign for the presidency, in 1988...."

From "'The President Was Not Encouraging': What Obama Really Thought About Biden/Behind the friendship was a more complicated relationship, which now drives the former vice president to prove his partner wrong" by Alex Thompson (at Politico). Lots more at the link.

"That’s what real leadership looks like. We just witnessed real leadership, which is Joe Biden said that as a nation, we should all be wearing a mask for the next three months..."

"... so what real leadership looks like is Joe Biden to speak up, sometimes telling us the stuff that we don’t necessarily want to hear, but we need to know. And the need for this mandatory mask wearing will also be about what Joe has articulated....  So again, Joe Biden is about real leadership in our country, and I’m honored to be with you, Joe."

Said Kamala Harris, after taking off her mask to speak into the microphone into which Joe Biden had just spoken. He too took off his mask before speaking. I thought it was funny that she kept saying he's what "real leadership looks like," when we were looking at him without his mask as he was saying "every single American should be wearing a mask when they’re outside for the next three months at a minimum."

Transcript. Video.

To be fair, they were inside. My understanding is that the virus is more dangerous inside, but they want every American to wear a mask all the time when they're outside. I don't know why everyone would be asked to wear a mask everywhere outside in America. What if you're in your own backyard and there's no one else around or working on your rural property or in the backwoods somewhere? I guess they want a simple rule, one size fits all, and they're thinking about the crowded cities where their voters reside. Or maybe they think people are too dumb to apply a standard that's anything but a flat rule. Maybe they're hoping to irritate Middle America and cause the deplorables to act out and say stupid things.

I'll just focus in on Harris's last line. The delivery is astoundingly insincere — the boredom, the smirk, the rush to get the hell out of there...



... so bizarrely inconsistent with the "what leadership looks like" theme.

ADDED: The real reason for the statement "every single American should be wearing a mask when they’re outside for the next three months at a minimum"? I think it's a set up for an accusation that will be made against Trump in the coming months.

If the president had acted sooner, just one week earlier, it would have saved 30-some-thousand lives. Two weeks earlier, I think it was 51,000 or 57,000 lives. I hope we’ve learned a lesson. Hope the president has learned a lesson, but again, this is not about Democrat, Republican or independent. It’s about saving America’s lives, so let’s Institute a mass mandate nationwide starting immediately, and we will save lives. The estimates are we’ll save over 40,000 lives in the next three months if that is done.

That is, Biden said on Thursday, everybody start wearing masks all the time now. He's not President, so we're in imagination land, where everyone took the order from the President and masks were worn, and you can make up the number 40,000 and say that 40,000 people died because President Trump didn't say what Joe Biden said. Watch for that number.

ALSO: Here are Joe and Kamala exposing themselves to reporters long enough to make the shooing away of reporters look awkward. The one question we hear is a ludicrous softball:

"So Trump’s Suburban Lifestyle Dream is basically a walled village that the government built for whites, whose gates were slammed shut when others tried to enter."

"What is Biden proposing to remedy at least some of these injustices? Reasonable, significant, but hardly revolutionary stuff — things like expanding rental vouchers while cracking down on redlining and exclusionary zoning. Trump may claim that such policies would 'destroy suburbia,' but that only makes sense if you believe that the only alternative to bloody anarchy is a community that looks exactly like Levittown in 1955....  [T]he big difference between the parties now is that Biden and Harris are trying to make things better, trying to make us more like the country we’re supposed to be. Trump and Mike Pence, by contrast, are basically trying to make open racism great again."

Writes Paul Krugman in "Trump’s Racist, Statist Suburban Dream/Racial inequality wasn’t an accident. It was an ugly political choice" (NYT).

The second-highest-rated comment is from Phyliss Dalmatian of Wichita, Kansas:

Trump has turned the usual GOP dog whistle in a Tornado Siren. Blaring, omnipresent and undeniable. The Party Of, by and for White Males, with their stepford wives and perfect blue eyed children. That’s the myth, and the aspiration. Join us !

Except Johnny starts fires, bullies younger kids and has started stealing pain pills from relatives homes. And Sally has dreams of a glamorous life as a FOX spokesmodel, the epitome of GOP womanhood, before aging out. At 30. But, she’ll find a rich Husband before that, no problem.

Professor, to the very, very large majority of the GOP, not white people are an afterthought, at best. Takers, Moochers, Lazy, irresponsible, criminal, blah, blah blah.

Dream on, GOP. Your time is nearly done. You won’t be able to WIN, irregardless of vast and inventive Cheating.

Trump is your Epitaph. You own Him.

A wild fever dream from Wichita — replete with random capitalization, "irregardless," and raging contempt for white people. What's up with Kansas? I love the inclusion of the "Tornado Siren." Makes me want to conjure up some "Wizard of Oz" jokes. Maybe something with Toto and a Dalmation....

"I’ve been using 'Black' and 'African-American' somewhat interchangeably here. But there’s a good case to be made that this is a mistake..."

"... that 'Black' denotes a racial category and is inclusive of Americans throughout the African diaspora, while 'African-American' refers to national origins, specifically descendants of American slaves. But some Black Americans who are not descendants of slaves claim the term 'African-American,' and some who are descendants do not. And 'Black' also tends to be used in reference to the cultural heritage of Americans of African descent. This column is about 'blackness' as a category and a culture, so I will stick with 'Black' as my preferred terminology. My main point is this: Black American identity within the United States emerges from the interaction between structures of oppression — slavery, the slave trade and race hierarchy — and the needs and goals of those enmeshed within them.... Because of heritage, upbringing and the realities of American racism, [Kamala] Harris calls herself Black and is also understood as Black by people within and outside the Black community.... There has never been some essential element to blackness, no singular quality or attribute that makes someone a Black American.... [I]t might be better to ask 'Why do so many Americans of African descent claim blackness?'"

From "Black Like Kamala/Republican efforts to deny Senator Harris’s identity as an African-American and turn her into a noncitizen are destined to fail" by Jamelle Bouie in the NYT, reacting to Mark Levin's statement "Kamala Harris is not an African-American, she is Indian and Jamaican. Her ancestry does not go back to American slavery, to the best of my knowledge her ancestry does not go back to slavery at all."

Notice that Bouie speaks of "claiming" blackness, and Levin stresses outwardly checkable facts. It's a bit like the way people of the left and the right speak about gender.

By the way, why would you capitalize "Black" but not "blackness"?

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can write about anything you want — until the break of day.

Who was the first person to say "groovy" in a movie?