The most charming bookstores in the world...

.... here... including that one in DUMBO that fit the path of my wanderings 7 years ago during my exile in Brooklyn.

"Among the early risers... are Pope Francis, who gets up at 4:30 a.m. to meditate..."

"... novelist John Grisham, who began his habit of rising at 5 a.m. to fit in time to write his first novel; and Apple CEO Tim Cook, who thoughtfully plans his schedule beginning at 4:30 a.m."

From the press release for "12 Qualities of Highly Successful People," which I stumbled across as I googled to find out when Daylight Saving Time begins, which I needed to know because I want the darkness pushed forward so I can get back to rising before dawn.

Darkness Pushing Time begins on March 7th.

At the Rose Rug Café...

... take off your shoes and settle in.

And please use the Althouse Amazon Portal if you need to do any shopping. Me, I just bought season 3 of "Shameless," 5 "Big Ass" Bands, a ceramic coffee mill,  toe separators, and this cocktail shaker.

ADDED: The cocktail being shaken around here is the Negroni, which was possibly "invented in Florence, Italy in 1919, at Caffè Casoni... [when] Count Camillo Negroni... [asked] the bartender, Fosco Scarselli, to strengthen his favorite cocktail, the Americano, by adding gin rather than the normal soda water." (And I know it's more common to serve a Negroni over ice. I don't like ice in drinks. It hits your face! I don't even like restaurant ice water. Just give me cold water. One of the best things about the below-zero temperatures we've been having in The North is that the tap water is perfectly icy cold.)

"Behold the beast the Democrats never intended to create..."

"... a thrice-elected Republican governor in a swing state with a cult following, appreciated by both the establishment of his party and the conservative base...."

Giuliani's rollback.

In the Wall Street Journal.

If you care. I think it's all a lot of blather about rhetoric, including rhetoric of a kind Obama himself uses, and I'm sick of wasting time on it.

This morning, I watched my recording of the 'In Memoriam' section of the Oscars show...

... and I thought it was really bad because of that cheeseball "watercolor" effect that was slapped onto the photographs and because it was full of executives and behind-the-scenes people who had no place in our hearts.



It should have been more about us, more of a show, and less about them, less like an industry convention.

ADDED: Apparently the standard for inclusion is membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. That's why Joan Rivers didn't make the cut.

The Washington Post goes after the top 2 GOP presidential contenders... in interestingly different ways.

This is for Jeb: "Documents show the expensive tastes of Jeb Bush’s low-key wife."

And this is for Scott: "Walker’s anti-union law has labor reeling in Wisconsin."

These are both big articles, served up for Monday morning, and both are low blows.

The attack on Walker is low, because it uses the terms "union" and "labor" without specifying what I think must always be specified to be fair: Walker's reforms were about public employee unions. The Walker article is absurdly emotive and sentimental, larded with quotes from nice people who are bewildered and sad. You have to read to paragraph 5 to get the first indication that Walker's law only had to do with the special problem of public unions, whose collective bargaining is not with private management, but with the government, the representatives of the people, not any commercial operation.

There are over 4,000 comments on the Walker article already, and the top-rated one is: "No wonder Walker scares Democrats so much. He's taken down one of their most lucrative money making scams as well as one of their favorite sources of street muscle." The second highest rated is: "The left is scared to death of Walker." So maybe WaPo's effort to type-cast Walker as a right-wing meanie won't work, but it won't be because WaPo's not trying. And, yes, I know I'm purporting to read The Mind of the Washington Post, even as I'm writing about Scott Walker, The Man Who Cannot Read the Mind of Others.

The low blow for Jeb is a shot at his wife.

In 1999, Columba Bush... was detained and fined by federal customs officials for misrepresenting the amount of clothing and jewelry she had bought while on a solo five-day shopping spree in Paris.... Jeb Bush said the first lady had misled customs officials because she did not want him to know that she had spent about $19,000 on the trip....

What's wrong with a rich woman spending $19,000 shopping when she's gone to Paris by herself? I'm not believing Jeb's explanation. First, why didn't he accompany her? Why'd she have to go alone? I assume it's because she wanted to shop. How could he not know why his wife went to Paris, and why go to Paris to go shopping and not spend an amount of money that corresponds to your level of wealth? 1999 was the year Jeb became Governor of Florida. He was in business before then. I'd say $19,000 was a normal amount of money for his wife to spend on her Paris shopping spree.

WaPo continues:

The ordeal did not stop her from spending freely, however. Less than a year later, she took out a loan to buy $42,311.70 worth of jewelry on a single day, according to records filed with the state of Florida by Mayors Jewelers.

Took out a loan? Why would she need to take out a loan? You have to go way to the bottom of the article to learn that Mayors offers better terms on these loans than are offered by credit cards (which I'm sure she had). Again, I don't see the problem with the wife of a rich man spending money on clothing and accessories that correspond to the family's wealth. I guess there's a political embarrassment, which is what WaPo hopes to visit on Jeb. Jeb's wife is thought to be a political advantage, since she was born in Mexico and her father was a migrant worker. So you see the point of portraying her as another rich lady (and a dishonest one at that).

"Investigative reporter Ken Silverstein has resigned from First Look Media’s The Intercept after 14 months..."

"... saying he and others were hired 'under what were essentially false pretenses [by being] told we would be given all the financial and other support we needed to do independent,inter important journalism, but instead found ourselves blocked at every step of the way by management’s incompetence and bad faith.'"

Women working in Hillary Clinton's Senate office were paid 72 cents for every dollar paid to a man.

"During those years, the median annual salary for a woman working in Clinton’s office was $15,708.38 less than the median salary for a man, according to the analysis of data compiled from official Senate expenditure reports."

I'm sure she can explain that based on things like education, seniority, and experience, but the problem is that's the explanation that undercuts the whole equal pay agenda. 

"Edward Snowden couldn't be here for some treason," said Neil Patrick Harris, the Oscars host, when the documentary about him won an award.

The award — for best documentary — to "Citizenfour" was expected, so the scriptwriters had plenty of time to come up with that joke. It's a neat joke, with its language precision. Or near-precision. The New Yorker's Amy Davison says:

Treason isn’t one of the crimes Snowden has been charged with—the government wants to prosecute him under the Espionage Act—but both the praise and the joke point to why this Snowden Oscar mattered. What he did was useful, and dangerous.

That wouldn’t have been enough if the movie were bad. But "Citizenfour" is worth watching....

Worth watching... in my book, that's a high standard. And "Citizenfour" didn't meet it, nor did the Oscars show, nor did any of the movies that were nominated (except one, "Grand Budapest Hotel," which I noticed in the HBO "On Demand" listings).

I liked the joke, because of its language precision and because it seemed at least a tad risky in the context of Hollywood celebrating itself. Or maybe it wasn't. Having given the award to "Citizenfour," Hollywood may have needed to get right with the Obama administration. "No, I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot" is what Obama has said.

To get a link for this post, I googled "treason" and "patrick" — "patrick" because I didn't want to risk misspelling "neil" and I stopped before adding "harris" because I knew "treason" and "patrick" were enough to pull up the quote from last night in Google. This is pure happenstance:



And isn't Obama's "No, I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot" a fascinating quote to recall after a week of chewing over Giuliani's Obama-not-a-patriot remark?

I watched 1 minute of the Oscars and turned it off right after I heard myself say...

"They all look so unhappy to be there."

"Paradoxically, these bitter attacks are still more evidence that Clarence Thomas is now leading the national debate on race."

Writes Juan Williams in the Wall Street Journal.

"Scott Walker feeling the heat" — says Politico, but how does Politico know what Scott Walker feels?

Ironically, the assertion is that he feels the heat over his statements that he doesn't know how Barack Obama feels — doesn't know whether Obama feels love for his country and doesn't know whether Obama feels in his heart that he is a Christian.

It's easy for me to see the simple accuracy of Walker's statement that he doesn't have access to the interior sensations of another human being's body, and I'm having difficulty understanding why Politico imagines it knows that Scott Walker is feeling heat.

Maybe MSM are feeling the heat as the kind of questions that used to generate heat aren't heating things up like they used to. They've been hoping to have some fun watching Republicans self-incinerate, after all these years dutifully admiring the cool character they call "No Drama Obama."

ADDED: "Scott Walker feeling the heat" resembles the schoolyard bullying that comes in the form of taunts like: "Oh, the little baby got his feelings hurt! He's going to cry! He wants to run home to mommy!"

"I know this might be something silly to rant about, but my heart is breaking for my son."

"We invited his whole class (16 kids) over for his 6th birthday party today. Not one kid came."

1. Her heart broke and our hearts are supposed to be lifted by this story about the response a Florida woman got when she posted those words on Facebook: 40 strangers showed up at her house on that very day — 15 children and 25 adults — and brought presents for the child. And now there's a follow-on media to-do about the child's suffering and his supposed subsequent happiness and the supposed meanness of some people and the charity of others.

2. Is any of this good for the child — as opposed to us, the consumers of media melodrama? Consider that the child is autistic — autistic and 6.

3. Why invite the whole class — 16 kids — to any 6-year-old's birthday party? Either he has friends who care about him or he does not. Inviting everyone is like inviting no one. Nobody feels he is really wanted or special. How would you feel if your 6-year-old child were invited to a birthday party where everyone in the class was invited? You'd probably ask your child if he was friends with the birthday kid, and you wouldn't pressure him to attend just to avert the possibility that you and he would stand accused of insensitivity on Facebook and other media.

4. When I was a child, back in the 1950s, my mother cited what seemed to be a standard rule for the proper number of children a birthday party: the number of guests should equal the age of the child. According to that rule of thumb, there should be 6 guests at a 6 year old's birthday party. Not 16. And certainly not 40. In those days, parents didn't crank children up into a frenzy of excitement, and you also never heard about anyone's being hyperactive or autistic. Maybe the classrooms and homes of America were teeming with undiscovered hyperactivity and autism. I don't know, but I do think we are depriving children of the child-scale environment where they can develop and flourish.

5. Here's a more radical idea: Don't celebrate birthdays!

[B]irthdays are unlike other holidays, for they are times "when all the presents and good wishes are for oneself. The birthday cake, splendid with colored icing and shining candles is a personal tribute. Other holidays lift the heart, but birthdays warm the ego." Is it a good idea for Christians to engage in celebrations that "warm the ego"? Speaking to the proud Pharisees, Jesus warned that "whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted."

"A New York teen who became an Internet sensation for a 'laser cat' yearbook photo..."

"... died in an apparent suicide Thursday night, according to a report."

"The narrative is we have a chance to elect the first woman as president of the United States, something I think we should have done a long time ago."

"I just don’t think it should be Hillary Clinton. There’s a lot of other women I can think of in the Republican Party who would be a much better alternative to that and some day will be. But if it’s a narrative like that, I think we run into trouble. If we shift the narrative, and I think, Hillary Clinton, you even saw with this story, with her book tour, the statements about her and Bill being broke when they came out of the White House. …You see the size of the fees she’s asking universities and colleges to pay, when you look at some of the other things, when she talks about not having driven a car in all those years, I get why that’s true, but it’s why I like to get on my Harley Davidson… every once in a while to drive myself and not have someone else do it for me. I just think those are all things that penetrate this out of touch persona. And to me to win I think the argument has got to be change it from a narrative of two personalities to Hillary Clinton represents Washington."

Said Scott Walker, on the important question of how the GOP candidate plans — or is willing to say he plans — to defeat the presumptive Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.

This quote comes from the same event where Walker refused to comment on the secret contents of Barack Obama's heart after Rudy Giuliani proclaimed that Obama doesn't "love America." The event — I'm just seeing this now — was supposedly intended to be off the record, but — per Politico — "that request wasn’t made to POLITICO and other reporters attending the dinner until after he’d already begun speaking."

Obviously, the candidates have to assume that anything said at a sizable event like this — a big dinner at the 21 Club — will leak out. In fact, the very thing that is most useful to your opponents is likely to come out and get even more attention because you seem to be speaking confidentially to a subgroup in terms suitable only for them. To illustrate my point in the previous sentence, I need only show you the tiniest shorthand: bitter clingers and 47%.