"The House voted on Tuesday to condemn as racist President Trump’s attacks against four congresswomen of color..."

"... but only after the debate over the president’s language devolved into a bitterly partisan brawl that showcased deep rifts over race, ethnicity and political ideology in the age of Trump," the NYT reports.

Some Republicans were... adamant in their defense of Mr. Trump: “What has really happened here is that the president and his supporters have been forced to endure months of allegations of racism,” said Representative Dan Meuser, Republican of Pennsylvania. “This ridiculous slander does a disservice to our nation.”...

“There’s no excuse for any response to those words but a swift and strong, unified condemnation,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said as the House debated the resolution. “Every single member of this institution, Democratic and Republican, should join us in condemning the president’s racist tweets.” As Republicans rose to protest, Ms. Pelosi turned toward them on the House floor and picked up her speech, her voice rising as she added, “To do anything less would be a shocking rejection of our values and a shameful abdication of our oath of office to protect the American people.”

Representative Doug Collins of Georgia, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, made a formal objection to the remarks, charging that they had violated the rules of decorum in the House, which call for lawmakers to avoid impugning the motives of their colleagues or the president.... Republicans sought to turn the tables and condemn Ms. Pelosi for her remarks about Mr. Trump — which many Democrats had echoed in their own speeches before her — touching off tumult as officials scrambled to review House rules and determine how to proceed.... The move by Republicans to have her words stricken from the record then failed along party lines, and Ms. Pelosi was unrepentant.

“I stand by my statement,” she said as she strode through the Capitol. “I’m proud of the attention being called to it because what the president said was completely inappropriate.”...

What a painful spectacle! I watched a good deal of it on C-SPAN and it struck me as a perversion of the legislative function — appropriating the institutions of government for the purpose of exaggerated, ugly political speech. Take it to Twitter, why don't you? The Democrats were interpreting the President's remarks, which were only, at worst, implicitly racist, and condemning him based on their interpretation — their partisan interpretation. That does not belong in Congress.

Justice John Paul Stevens has died.

He lived to the age of 99.

Linda Greenhouse has a long obituary in the NYT. Excerpt:

When he retired in 2010 at the age of 90, Justice Stevens was the second-oldest and the second-longest-serving justice ever to sit on the court. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was about eight months older when he retired in 1932, and William O. Douglas had served 36 years (1939-75)....

Justice Stevens served for 35 years.

Societal debates over the rights of gay men and lesbians, the role of race, private property rights, environmental regulation and the separation of church and state also made their way onto the Supreme Court’s docket, and Justice Stevens, a soft-spoken Republican and former antitrust lawyer from Chicago, was as surprised as anyone to find himself not only taking the liberal side but also becoming its ardent champion....

[In his early years on the Court his] reputation was that of a very smart, nonideological, slightly quirky loner who, if a case was decided by a vote of 8 to 1, was as likely as not to be the solitary dissenter, caring neither to lead nor to follow....

At the Lunchtime Café...

... take a walk on the dappled path.

(Or — if you must shop — think of using The Althouse Portal to Amazon. I don't really know what "prime day" is, but I read at Instapundit this morning that there were bargains "out the wazoo." I didn't even know that Amazon had a wazoo.)

"Pottery Barn is releasing a new collection inspired by Friends, including accessories, furniture and tabletop items."

"The items [include] the Pottery Barn apothecary table that Rachel convinced Phoebe was a one-of-a-kind antique in a legendary Season 6 episode titled – wait for it – 'The One with the Apothecary Table.' In that classic, Rachel bought the table from a Pottery Barn catalog, and then, upon learning that 'Phoebe hates Pottery Barn' from Monica, try to pass it off as a flea market find."

Deadline reports.

With certain topics, mainstream media completely forgets about the issue of climate change.

At least the first commenter brings it up: "Also: climate change still exists."

The article, in The Washington Post, is "Airfare is dropping — and you can enjoy the trend through September." It's a gung-ho promotion of air travel. You should do it because it's cheap, and there's not one word of caution or opprobrium, nothing but encouragement to stomp down the biggest possible carbon footprint. If low prices were the "trend" for gas-guzzler cars, WaPo wouldn't publish a hey-kids-check-out-the-bargains article.

Another commenter says, "If you love your children/grandchildren stay on the ground!/A humble request from a Swede," and gets pushed back with "I will only do that when you have convinced me that we have done everything else" and "The biggest burden on the planet comes from having children and grand children. That's my humble request."

Yeah, that's another topic where mainstream media completely forgets about the issue of climate change. Having children.

Everybody who's activated about climate change still has some amnesia-inducing topics. I like confronting people about it, to see how they fight back. Probably not with, Oh, you're right, I really do need to apply the same standard across the board and not be a hypocrite.

ADDED: The ultimate amnesia topic has got to be air conditioning. As the heat goes up — which it does every summer, quite apart from the long-term global-warming phenomenon — people want their air conditioning. As it gets hotter, they're going to be more resistant to giving up air conditioning, and I predict there will be a decline in concern about global warming as it increases, because the desire for air conditioning — now — is going to create a mental block about believing in something that is happening slowly and subtly. But wait. Why am I so pessimistic? I stop and Google "zero carbon footprint air conditioning" and find "WHAT IF AIR CONDITIONERS COULD HELP SAVE THE PLANET INSTEAD OF DESTROYING IT?" (Wired):

Using technology currently in development, AC units in skyscrapers and even your home could get turned into machines that not only capture CO2, but transform the stuff into a fuel for powering vehicles that are difficult to electrify, like cargo ships. The concept, called crowd oil, is still theoretical and faces many challenges....

First of all, you’d need to incorporate a filter that would absorb CO2 and water from the air. You’d also need to include an electrolyzer to strip the oxygen molecule from H2O to get H2, which you’d then combine with CO2 to get hydrocarbon fuels. “Everyone can have their own oil well, basically,” [materials chemist Geoffrey] Ozin says.

For this process to be carbon neutral, though, all those souped-up air conditioners would need to be powered with renewables, because burning the synthetic fuel would also produce emissions. To address that problem, Dittmeyer proposes turning whole buildings into solar panels—placing them not just on rooftops but potentially coating facades and windows with ultrathin, largely transparent panels. “It's like a tree—the skyscraper or house you live in produces a chemical reaction,” Dittmeyer says. “It's like the glucose that a tree is producing.”...

"The Justice Department will not bring federal charges against a New York City police officer in the death of Eric Garner, ending a yearslong inquiry..."

"... into a case that sharply divided officials and prompted national protests over excessive force by the police, according to three people briefed on the decision....  A state grand jury declined to bring charges against Officer Pantaleo in December 2014.... But a federal investigation into Mr. Garner’s death proceeded, sharply dividing the Justice Department under four attorneys general and two presidents.... The attorney general at the time of the death, Eric H. Holder Jr., said that evidence strongly suggested that the federal government should bring charges against Officer Pantaleo.... While career civil rights prosecutors agreed with Mr. Holder, prosecutors under the United States attorney in Brooklyn, Loretta E. Lynch, sharply disagreed.... After Ms. Lynch succeeded Mr. Holder in April 2015, officials... worked to convince her that the officers had used excessive force and had likely violated Mr. Garner’s civil rights.... But the case stalled again after Mr. Trump won the presidential election and appointed Jeff Sessions as his attorney general. Civil rights division prosecutors recommended that charges be brought, and they asked the deputy attorney general at the time, Rod J. Rosenstein, about indicting Officer Pantaleo. But Mr. Rosenstein did not allow the department to move forward on an indictment, and many officials said they believed that there was a good chance that the government would lose the case should it go to trial...."

From "Eric Garner’s Death Will Not Lead to Federal Charges for N.Y.P.D. Officer/The decision came five years after Mr. Garner’s dying words — 'I can’t breathe' — became a rallying cry" (NYT).

"How hot is too hot? Will we be, like, ow! all the time?"

Marianne Williamson is polling higher than Cory Booker, Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Jay Inslee...

I say out loud (as I read about a new poll of registered voters in New Hampshire).

The response from Meade was singing: "Hey, Marianne, what's your game now, can anybody play?" Based on:



It's a pretty small poll — only 390 respondents — but it's fascinating that Marianne Williamson got 1.5%, and "serious" candidates Cory Booker, Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Jay Inslee lagged behind (with 1.2, 1.0, 0.7, and 0.3, respectively).

ADDED: If a pollster called you up, why wouldn't you say "Marianne"? It says so many things. For example it says: I know who you are pollster, but you don't know me, you don't know anything about my world.

AND: Screw the pollsters! Everyone should say "Marianne."

Biden's entry in the game of words.

Joe Biden: "There has never been a President in American history who has been so openly racist and divisive as this man." pic.twitter.com/5KmkeT0q5C

— The Hill (@thehill) July 15, 2019

How well did Biden do? Pick what's closest to your reaction after watching the video clip.

He's doing the very thing he purports to decry — deploying racism and divisivenss.

Good — it was sharp-pointed but calm and mature. He's the grown-up here.

I've already forgotten what he said, it was so bland.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED:

"The Democrat Congresswomen have been spewing some of the most vile, hateful, and disgusting things ever said by a politician in the House or Senate, & yet they get a free pass..."

"... and a big embrace from the Democrat Party. Horrible anti-Israel, anti-USA, pro-terrorist & public..... .... .....shouting of the F...word, among many other terrible things, and the petrified Dems run for the hills. Why isn’t the House voting to rebuke the filthy and hate laced things they have said? Because they are the Radical Left, and the Democrats are afraid to take them on. Sad!"

Tweeted Trump, just now.

1. He's a master of Tweet-talk — he's tweet-talking us — but he makes language mistakes that I would edit out. He writes, "the petrified Dems run for the hills," but if you are petrified — the dead metaphor is turned to stone — you can't move, so you can't run. (The OED gives this example from Jack London's "White Fang": "The cub was in a frenzy of terror, yet he lay without movement or sound, frozen, petrified into immobility, to all appearances dead.")

2. But "petrified" is a slightly unusual word, so it works as a stimulant.

3. The implicit subject is that Nancy Pelosi is going forward with a vote to condemn Trump for his "Why don't they go back..." tweets (which we discussed here yesterday). Trump is certainly not backing down. He doesn't do that, and how could that possibly work? If he ever withdrew a remark and apologized, his antagonists would react by demanding another concession. So he plunges forward, in attack mode: "Why isn’t the House voting to rebuke the filthy and hate laced things they have said?" You don't like what I said, look at what you said. And on and on.

4. A return of the iconic "Sad!"

5. The key line is: "Because they are the Radical Left, and the Democrats are afraid to take them on." He's tying all the Democrats to a small, vocal group that the Democrats don't want as their brand. He's taunting them: You can't even distance yourself from this small group, within your own party, for your own sake. Implied: How can you be trusted to defend America?

6. Look at the arc of emotion in Trump's brief statement: It begins with hate (the "spewing" of "vile, hateful, and disgusting things") and proceeds to love ("a big embrace") and then to anger ("shouting of the F...word") and then to fear ("petrified Dems... afraid to take them on"), and finally sadness ("Sad!"). The hate and anger are projected outward from the small subgroup of Democrats. The love and fear are experienced within the fragile body of mainstream Democrats. And the sadness is Trump's idea of the appropriate reaction from anyone watching.

7. Look at the narrative of action: the small subgroup of Democrats spews. The more sensible Democrats have one strong action — the big hug — and the rest is weakness — frozen into immobility or running. Yes, there's that implied activity, voting to condemn Trump, but he doesn't mention it. His defense is to go on the offense. Yet he assumes the position of standing back and observing and finding it sad.

At the Windowbox Basil Café...

... you can pick your topic.

Why are Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna S. Pressley called "The Squad"?

I keep seeing the term without an explanation of its origin. It wasn't easy to Google — especially with all the clutter having to do with Trump's recent tweets, which we're already discussing here. This post is just about the term "The Squad."

I decided to search the NYT archive for the 4 names plus "the squad" and to look at the oldest  all of the returns. The oldest article was "For All the Talk of a Tea Party of the Left, Moderates Emerge as a Democratic Power" (June 30):

While the House’s liberal superstars are adept at promoting their progressive positions and routinely generate headlines for breaking with the party line, they have not made a habit of lobbying their colleagues to defy Ms. Pelosi en masse. Last week, the foursome known as The Squad...

No explanation of who started that term and why.

The second-oldest is "It’s Nancy Pelosi’s Parade/'If the left doesn’t think I’m left enough, so be it,' she told me," a Maureen Dowd column from July 6th.

I asked Pelosi whether...it was jarring to get a bad headline like the one in HuffPost that day — “What The Hell Is Nancy Pelosi Doing?” The article described the outrage of the Squad, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts are known.

The term is not explained in the Dowd column (and isn't used in the HuffPo piece).

Next oldest is "Tensions Between Pelosi and Progressive Democrats of ‘the Squad’ Burst Into Flame" (July 9th):

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said they have no following in Congress. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York shot back that she and three of her fellow liberal freshmen, darlings of the left known collectively as “the squad,” are wielding the real power in the party.... The contretemps began when Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, asked Ms. Pelosi about the squad’s fury over the border aid package... The squad and its allies argue that they are tapping into the real energy in the Democratic base with their uncompromising and unapologetic stances....

Again, the term is used with no explanation. Further down, we see:

“AOC and The Squad have changed the entire national debate,” said an email rehashing the spat from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which offered a colorful “I STAND WITH AOC” sticker to anyone who donated to their work “electing more AOC’s to Congress.”

That suggests that the women came up with that name for themselves. Why would they do that? Maybe they're taking an epithet and wearing it with pride. I don't know.

There's also this other usage of "squad" in that article:

“This is an inevitable tension between a few progressives with one priority, which is their ideology, and a speaker with many priorities, including preserving the majority in the House, electing a Democratic president against Trump, and responding to the consensus of her caucus,” said Steve Israel, a Democrat and former representative of New York. “To the extent that it distracts from Donald Trump and becomes a circular firing squad among Democrats, it can be lethal.”

I am going to guess that talk of a circular firing squad — there's been a lot of that — led to calling the 4 Congresswomen "The Squad." That would explain why the explanation of the origin is suppressed. Too violent. Too much like a death threat.

Consulting Urban Dictionary, I can see that the use of the term could be experienced as racist: "Crew, posse, gang: an informal group of individuals with a common identity and a sense of solidarity. The term is a bit flashy and is more likely to be heard in hip-hop lyrics than in spoken conversation"/"A word overused by teenagers that think they're ghetto to describe their clique of friends"/"A dumb word only used by white middle schoolers in suburban areas to describe their group of friends and try to sound ghetto. It doesnt make them sound ghetto, but actually increases their whiteness."

How embarrassing! Embarrassingness increases the likelihood that this is the real origin of the term, since the source of the term isn't talked about.

I get the feeling Maureen Dowd heard the term and thought it was hip/cute/clever and she went public with it without understanding the problem with it. Now, they're stuck with it and vulnerable if anyone is ever curious enough to ask about the origin.

ADDED: From Elle Magazine in 2015: "Meet Hillary Clinton's Girl Squad/On Wednesdays, they wear pantsuits." Also, from 2018: "What Happened to Taylor Swift's Girl Squad?/Taylor Swift practically invented #SquadGoals, and now she's traveling solo inside her own suitcase. What gives?"

"Law Profs Weigh In: What Is The Appropriate Response When A White Student Wears A MAGA Hat In Class?"

Lawprof Paul Caron follows up on his earlier post, "What Should A Black Law Professor Do When A White Student Wears A MAGA Hat In Class?"

I passed on blogging this story earlier, and I'm trying to remember exactly why. Was it that I knew the young lawprof was going to get slammed and I'd have to join the pile-on? Something like that. The professor —  Jeffrey Omari — scored a column in the ABA Journal. Excerpt:

I was unsure whether the student was directing a hateful message toward me or if he merely lacked decorum and was oblivious to how his hat might be interpreted by his black law professor. I presumed it was the former. As the student sat there directly in front of me, his shiny red MAGA hat was like a siren spewing derogatory racial obscenities at me for the duration of the one hour and fifteen-minute class. ...

As my blood boiled inwardly, outwardly I remained calm. In an effort to assuage the perceived tension, I jokingly told the student, “I like your hat,” when he raised his hand to participate in class discussion. Without missing a beat, the student mockingly grinned from ear to ear and said, “Thank you.”  

He was that angry, but he assures us he appeared perfectly calm and successfully delivered what others would receive as a joke. He knows what's in his head, and how he looks to others, which is reading the inside of their head. How could he know that the students didn't hear his joke as the sarcasm it was? He's sure he knows the student's grin was mockery? Did he consider that the student may have believed that outwardly he remained perfectly polite?

Anyway, all the lawprofs easily arrive at the opinion that a professor should allow students to wear their politically expressive clothing without regard to viewpoint and it was really wrong to publish an article calling a particular, identifiable student a racist.

I really don't see how a person can teach if they get angry at students. Even if you do have a superpower of preventing it from showing, you're the teacher, you're the one with the power. You shouldn't be getting angry at them.

His shiny red MAGA hat was like a siren spewing derogatory racial obscenities at me... MAGA hats are shiny?

"One day in early June, Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California, tapped the glass of the bakery case at a Blue Bottle coffee shop on a non-iconic block in Beverly Hills."

"No one seemed to know who she was—another polished professional woman, grabbing an afternoon coffee—which was fine by her. She had chosen the spot, presumably for the anonymity. A few minutes later, her body woman delivered her a cookie: caramel chocolate chip, covered in a light snowfall of flaky salt. As Harris broke off small pieces and popped them in her mouth, we talked about her early life, rummaging through the layers for identifying details. The child of immigrant academics who divorced when she was young—her mother, a cancer researcher, came from India, and her father, an economist, from Jamaica—Harris grew up between Oakland and the Berkeley flats, but also spent time in college towns in the Midwest and a few years in Montreal, where her mother was teaching. 'A very vivid memory of my childhood was the Mayflower truck,' she told me. 'We moved a lot.' She speaks some French. She loves to cook and enjoys dancing, puns. She tells her own story uneasily. 'It’s like extracting stuff from me,' she apologized. 'I’m not good at talking about myself.'"

The inauspicious beginning of "Kamala Harris Makes Her Case/The Presidential candidate has been criticized as a defender of the status quo/Can she prove that she’s a force for change?" by Dana Goodyear (The New Yorker).

Here's my screen shot of one of the 2 Blue Bottle coffee shops in Beverly Hills (from Google Maps):



Where do you go when you want to look like just another polished professional and you want to pop a light snowfall of flaky salt and talk about yourself without talking about yourself?

Did I read the rest of the article? Okay, I'll force myself to skim, but I take that opening to mean that Goodyear got nothing out of her. Let's see...

Harris, who is fifty-four, has a billboard smile, and brown eyes that soften easily but just as readily turn skeptical.

Josh Marshall applies "a hermeneutic of suspicion" to the what seems to be a decision by the US Attorney's Office in Manhattan to close its investigation into the Trump Organization without filing charges.

He comes up with this:

US Attorney Geoffrey Berman had to recuse himself from the Trump-related investigations because of his ties to the President. Supervision was undertaken by the Deputy US Attorney Robert S. Khuzami. But he left the US Attorney’s office in late March of this year. A month earlier, Attorney General Bill Barr was sworn in. So Bill Barr was sworn in about exactly five months ago – which seems to be roughly the time of the last contact between the US Attorney’s office and executives of the Trump Organization....

To be clear, I am not aware of any reporting documenting any interference from US Attorney Berman, Attorney General Barr or anyone at Main Justice. But given the Barr DOJ’s demonstrated record of consistently unethical behavior and more or less open efforts to protect President Trump, this requires some scrutiny.

"If 'Maple' is a kind of real-life 'Rosebud,' for Jeffrey Epstein, then maybe his money is not the root of all his evil."

"Maybe Epstein’s particular evil is not just rooted in his wealth and the arrogance it engendered, but in whatever happened in those years while he was raised on Maple Avenue by a mother and father who seemed to their neighbors to harbor only humility and decency."

Maybe maybe maybe!

Articles must be written. The one I'm reading is The Daily Beast, "Epstein’s Coney Island Days: From Math Nerd to ‘Arrogant’ Prick" by Michael Daly, who found a pathway to Trump:

[B]y the 1960s, Sea Gate was largely home to working-class people such as the Epsteins. The fence had become a protective barrier against urban blight and its accompanying dangers. Coney Island had been transformed from a summertime paradise to a crime-plagued ghetto with the help of real estate developer Fred Trump, who actively arranged for welfare recipients to move into what had been holiday bungalows. That caused residents of the year-round homes to flee, some of them to apartments at the new Trump Village that the developer had been having difficulty filling.

Street criminals still managed to cut through the chain link occasionally, but Sea Gate had its own private police force to patrol the streets and man the two gates, admitting only residents and guests. Sea Gate thereby remained an exclusive community in the sense that outsiders—particularly of the black and Hispanic variety—were excluded.

That caused Jeffrey Epstein and the other “Sea Gate kids” to be viewed as snobs by some of their classmates beyond the fence.

So Epstein's family was middle class, but — because of Fred Trump — poor people got housing nearby and that led to a social dynamic that cast Epstein, the middle class kid, as, essentially a rich kid.