"Fred Dalton Thompson, the former Republican senator from Tennessee and veteran character actor, died Sunday at age 73."

"POLITICO takes a look back at Thompson's political and personal maneuvers, from Watergate and the campaign trail, to his performances on 'Law & Order' and 'Persecuted.'"

"At Timothy Foster's trial in Rome, Ga., the prosecutor used four of his nine peremptory strikes to knock out all the qualified black jurors in the jury pool."

"The defense cried foul, but the trial judge and every appellate court after that, including the Georgia Supreme Court, accepted the non-racial reasons. The prosecutors gave as many as a dozen reasons for striking each black prospective juror. These justifications included things like 'failure to make eye contact,' looking 'bored,' being 'divorced,' or 'a social worker,' and so on."

From Nina Totenberg's report on a case that's up for oral argument in the Supreme Court today.

"I’m sure he’s a nice man and I know he has a family and I think he deserves closure and to be allowed to put this behind him.”

Said Samantha Geimer after a Polish judge declined to extradite Roman Polanski.

Geimer was 13 in 1977 was she was the victim of Polanski's admitted sexual predation.

“He said he did it; he pled guilty; he went to jail. I don’t know what people want from him,” she said....

Polanski apologized to Geimer in a 2011 documentary — and Geimer says she thinks he is sincere. She even sees herself as one of his supporters.

“We somehow ended up on the same side,” she explained. “Things have to go pretty wrong for them to end up this way.”

"No one saw it happen, but a crack 50' wide and 6 football fields long has opened in Wyoming..."

No one saw it happen, but a crack 50' wide and 6 football fields long has opened in Wyoming https://t.co/IPfMmtQvju pic.twitter.com/i0SZSeQcfd

— 9NEWS Denver (@9NEWS) October 30, 2015

WaPo quotes some "experts" "allay[ing the] fears" of social media folk who are speculating about volcanoes and earthquakes.

"The break-up of a Russian passenger jet in mid-flight over the Sinai peninsula was not caused by malfunction or pilot error..."

"... the airline said Monday, deepening the mystery over the disaster but leaving open probes into some kind of plot or attack."

... Alexander Smirnov, deputy general director of the airline, insisted the tragedy could only be the result of some “mechanical impact on the aircraft.”... He declined to elaborate on the theory of an “impact.”

Did you know Thomas Paine was a corsetmaker?

"In London, Paine's revolutionary writings were dismissed as the work of 'Tom the Bodicemaker'..."

Great cartoon fodder, wonderfully deployed:





I'd never noticed this historical fact before. I learned it from a NYT crossword from 2012 that came up in my crossword app last night. Paine wasn't much of a corsetmaker though:

Young Tom's formal schooling ended at twelve, when his father took him on as an apprentice to learn the family trade. Yet an uncertain economy made for a bad climate for a new tradesman, and Paine's efforts as a staymaker (and in several other subsequent careers) failed. After he sailed for America in 1774, he never practiced the staymaking trade again....

So metaphorical!

"So a glorious run of a Mets season, a trip deeper into the terra incognita of the postseason than anyone had reason to expect in midsummer, ended in an improbable string of sorrows."

"It was as if the Kansas City Royals made a margin call on the joy and luck the Mets experienced this autumn, and not just in that endless and deadening 12th-inning denouement."

The New York point of view. It's very sentimental:

Manager Terry Collins, who was on a golden postseason roll, went with sentiment and let Harvey pitch the ninth inning. “He said, ‘I want this game in the worst way,’ ” Collins said. “So obviously I let my heart get in the way of my gut. I love my players. It was,” he added, “my fault.”

The heart/gut dilemma. Reminds me of the old baseball song "You Gotta Have Heart":



There's always next year. Next year, with possibly more gut.

(Note: At Meadhouse, we were rooting for the Royals. Something about the trajectory of the playoffs made that happen. We love the National League Central Division and would have supported the Cubs, and we were rooting for the Royals in the American League all along.)

"Look, I know that I got to get better at doing the debate. I'm a grinder."

Said Jeb Bush, grinding out an answer to the question — on "Meet the Press" — how he's going to become a better debater.

I mean, when I see that I'm not doing something well then I reset and I get better. And I'm... going to be better.... Well, I'm going to do what you have to do. This is not debating. I mean... whatever it's called, it's certainly not debating. Because I can complete a sentence in the English language pretty well, and I have ideas that will lift people up....

David Brooks made what might be the stupidest joke I have ever heard a serious person make publicly.

On "Meet the Press" today, there was a panel discussion of President Obama's decision to put "boots on the ground" in Syria, a change from what Obama had been saying. We see tape of Obama on 3 separate occasions: 1. "In no event are we considering any kind of military action that would involve boots on the ground," 2. "I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria," 3. "The notion that the United States should be putting boots on the ground I think would be a profound mistake. And I want to be very clear and very explicit about that."

When it was Brooks's turn to speak, he began: "Yeah, first of all they should wear sneakers so we can get out of the boots thing."

That is so poor, given the context of death and despair for the Syrian people and Obama's dire predicament. Maybe somewhere behind the scenes — where gallows humor is needed — that joke might be okay, worded less awkwardly. I could imagine political comedian saying something like: Obama said he wanted to very clear and very explicit that he would not put boots on the ground in Syria. Absolutely no boots on the ground. How do you get around that? Sneakers! They're going to be wearing sneakers. Sneakers on the ground!

I'm hearing the comedian in my head and I'm ready to boo him. But David Brooks on "Meet the Press"? How could he possibly have believed that joke was appropriate?

ALSO: Brooks had this advice for Jeb:

If I were him I'd lead with his strengths. And just say, "I'm boring. I'm boring. Is our problem in Washington we don't have enough boringness? No. We've got too much craziness. And so I'm going to be a sedative. I'm going to be a laxative, I guess. You know, I'm going to calm you down."

That's sort of good advice — I, myself, want boring politicians — and Jeb pretty much already is doing this. But laxative? Something is very wrong with the mind of Brooks. Maybe he worked on his material when he had more time to drag out the image. "I'm going to be a sedative... I'm going to calm you down" — that makes sense. But why stop in the middle of saying that to bring in "laxative"? Washington is full of shit? The legislative process is constipated?

"You're kind of a health nut. How are you going to get the smell of smoke out of the speaker's office?"

Chuck Todd asked Paul Ryan on "Meet the Press" today. (Boehner was " John Boehner is a well-known chain smoker.")

Ryan said: "That's a really good question. We've been talking about that, they have these ozone machines, apparently, that you can detoxify the environment. But I'm going to have to work on the carpeting in here. You know when you ever go to a hotel room or get a rental car that has been smoked? That's what this smells like."

It's especially a problem for Ryan because he lives in Janesville, Wisconsin, and doesn't keep a separate living space in Washington. He goes home every weekend, but during the week, he's in his office all day and also sleeps there: "I start my day at 6:00 in the morning. I end at about 11:30 at night. It's just become a really efficient way for me to do the people's business by just staying right here."

Imagine! The "perfect jewel"!

That's an ad from page 67 of the September 18, 1960 issue of The New York Times — an issue I was reading yesterday, for my "Moscow Suspicious of Hillary" post.

I love paging through all the old ads. There's one in that issue for "Fantastic, magical: typewriter correction tape — "Type-Out" —  to "save hours of costly re-typing." And there's one for "Daylight Blue" TV that "Adds a Tint of Blue" to improve the clarity of black-and-white TV. The TV is "big... like a movie screen" when it's only 23". And I love that the elimination of glare is attributed to something called "Ultra-Vision Glarejector."

What got me thinking back the transistor radio I'd seen was this Tech Times article Meade just texted me:

Electrical engineers from the University of Wisconsin have developed a flexible silicon phototransistor, which to date is the fastest and most responsive ever created... Just like mammalian eyes, phototransistors collect light and then transform this into an electrical impulse. In mammals, this pulse is transported by the brain's nerves but in digital devices, the electrical charge becomes a binary code that software converts into a digital image. Many phototransistors are flat because they are fabricated on rigid surface but the new phototransistor is flexible so it can easily mimic the behavior of the eyes of mammals....

"This is the just fourth game in pro football history between two clubs with at least six wins, no losses and no ties."

Tonight's Packers-Broncos game is a "monumental showdown."

"I'm here trying to clear her name and let them know I consented to that, I just didn't finish the job as you could say."

"Everyone wants to do something spontaneous. I'm not being disrespectful to you. Have you ever done anything spontaneous?"

A man defends his woman, who was arrested for after having sex with squatting on top of him when he was unconscious...  on a parking lot... in broad daylight.

ADDED: The way the article (in The Daily News) is written, I pictured them on the surface of the parking lot, but — after I said they both should have been arrested — Meade says, "They were in a car!" Public lewdness is a crime, but when do the police actually arrest people for it? How exposed to other people were they? Have you ever done anything spontaneous? If so where? Perhaps in a car. Probably not on the surface of a parking lot.

Now, I've clicked through the link within the link, and I can clearly see that they were on the surface of the parking lot. They were also fully clothed. And the woman was charged not with anything in the realm of sexual assault, but only public drunkenness.

UPDATE: I've been pointed to the Daily Mail article and, as a result, crossed out "They were also fully clothed."

Ivana Trump said "Yes, but the problem is, what is he going to do with his third wife?"

The "yes" was a response to someone telling Ivana that she would have made a great First Lady. The "third wife" is Melania Trump. According to Ivana, "She can’t talk, she can’t give a speech, she doesn’t go to events, she doesn’t (seem to) want to be involved." Ivana nevertheless thinks Donald will be "a great President": "He’ll surround himself with the right people. He was always meant to be a politician."

Ivana said that she "suggested to Donald that he should run for President in the ’80s... Then he got involved with Marla Maples and America hated him."  Maples was the second wife, the one who made him need to wait 30 years to do that run for President and to need to have to do it with a wife who can't even talk and doesn't want to be involved instead of the wife who would have been a first wife and would have made a great First Lady.

And that's the way the first wife tells it.


(Photo source.)

"As much as Poppy Bush scoffs at 'the D-word,' as he calls any reference to dynasty, the Bushes do consider themselves an American royal family."

"They have always pretty much divided the world into Bushes and the help. The patriarch once sent me a funny satire referring to himself and Barbara as the Old King and Queen, W. as King George of Crawford and Jeb as the Earl of Tallahassee. At 91, 41 is living to see Jebbie become president. He is mystified by a world in which Trump, whom he considers a clown, could dethrone the crown prince."

Writes Maureen Dowd, who's been looking closely at the Bushes for a long time. ("In 1993, I went on the road to watch Jeb run for governor in Florida and W. run for governor in Texas.... It was soon clear to me that the Good Son was not as scintillating a campaigner as the Prodigal Son... This was going to be the year that settled sibling scores. Jeb would get what his parents considered his birthright....")

I was interested in the phrase "divided the world into Bushes and the help." The help. That reminds me of a discussion here on the blog the other day. I'd written "Majed Abdulaziz Al-Saud allegedly yelled at 3 female servants in his mansion near Beverly Hills," and a commenter, Carol, said: "I had no idea they were still called 'servants' in this country." And SOJO said: "Servants"? Wtf? Employees." I scrambled to defend myself against what I see as a charge of political incorrectness. I posted 4 comments in quick succession.

1. I took responsibility:

That was my word choice. The LA Times called them "workers."

2. I defended myself:

What's wrong with "servants"? If something is wrong with it, then we shouldn't have switched to calling waiters and waitresses "servers."

3. I re-defended myself:

"Servants" seems like the right word for people who occupy the servants' quarters within a house, especially when the reference is to a big estate with a lot of personnel serving a rich person, a person who might say things like this prince did. ["I am a prince and I do what I want! You are nobody!"]

4. I retreated into scholarship and distanced humility:

From the OED, there's this historical context that might explain an aversion to the word: "b. In the North American colonies in the 17–18th c., and subsequently in the United States, servant was the usual designation for a slave.... 1852 H. B. Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin II. xxii. 67 Why don't we teach our servants to read?"

The idea that "employees" was the right word struck me as wrong. Particular jobs have names, and "employee" isn't the name of a job. What's the name for employees who live in someone else's house and do all sorts of work that might be required within the household? Is it the word Dowd used, "help"? Or did Dowd use "help" because it's amusing to deploy somebody else's euphemism? Is "servant" insulting?

Oddly enough, Jeb Bush likes to call himself a "servant":

"There are a lot of talkers in politics," Bush said. "Trust me, I was on the debate stage, I see it; some really good people that are really good talkers. I hope you want someone with a servant's heart, that acts on principles — that does things rather than just talks about them."

Halloween baseball pain.

That chicken suit man, a favorite fun face in the Mets crowd, is the face of New York suffering when this happens.

ADDED: When things go bad for the home team in baseball, the fans often look like they are praying.