"After 59 years of friendship, laughter, tears, jail cells and lost brain bells [sic], we have handed over our lovely lead singer Wayne Fontana to the big band in rock and roll heaven."

Wrote Peter Noone ("Herman"), quoted in "Wayne Fontana, British singer who topped US charts with Game of Love, dies aged 74" (The Guardian).

Born Glyn Geoffrey Ellis in the Levenshulme area of Manchester, Fontana took his stage name from the Elvis Presley drummer DJ Fontana. Backed by his band, the Mindbenders, he released his debut single in 1963 and further singles grew ever more successful: Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um reached No 5 in the UK in 1964, with The Game of Love reaching No 2 the following year and going on to become his signature song....

He was arrested on an arson charge in 2005 after setting fire to a car owned by a bailiff who had come to his house for an unpaid congestion charge fine, and who was inside the car as it was set alight. He faced a possible 14 years in prison, though was eventually sentenced to 11 months, which had already been served.

A "congestion charge" is a fee you have to pay to drive your car in Central London: "The charge helps to not only reduce high traffic flow in the city streets, but also reduces air and noise pollution in the central London area and raises investment funds for London's transport system."

I was wondering why the obituary didn't mention my favorite Mindbenders song, "A Groovy Kind of Love." Answer: Wayne Fontana had left the group by this point, 1965, and the lead guitarist Eric Stewart became the vocalist.

I've never much liked "The Game of Love" and to me "Um Um Um Um Um Um" is a Major Lance song. I didn't even know The Mindbenders had a version of it. In the UK, I guess.

I only got started writing this post because I love "A Groovy Kind of Love":



And here's the 1988 Phil Collins (which I include because I know people are talking about Phil Collins this week):

Biden once again tweets the lie that he put in his announcement video — the lie that caused me to say "If Biden does not come forward and retract this video and apologize and commit himself to making amends, I consider him disqualified."

I’m not a Trump fan but this is a flat out lie... https://t.co/Y1Lha9XzAR

— Ethan Nicolle (@AXECOP) August 13, 2020

Here is the post I wrote on April 19, 2020, "Biden's announcement video is anchored in a demonstrable lie":

I'm blogging this morning in a public place, so although I've put up 2 posts about Biden's announcement video, I had not yet listened to it. I finally got out my headphones out so I could  listen, but I could not get through to the end, because I became so angry at the LIE and the continued music and montage became torture to me.

In the part that I did see, we were shown images from the Charlottesville march — replete with the "Jews will not replace us" chant and swastikas — and then Biden's blandly earnest face asserted that Trump said some of them "are fine people." But Trump did not say that! It's absolutely established that Trump excluded those people explicitly before saying that there were some fine people on both sides of the question of keeping Confederate statues. (At the time of the fine people remark, Trump said, "I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.")

How dare Biden rest his campaign on a blatant lie — a lie that has been used to stir up fear and racial discord?! The hypocrisy of offering to bring us together and embrace lofty values when he is either repulsively ignorant or just plain lying!

I could not finish watching that video. I tried, but I couldn't force myself. It's utterly toxic bilge.

If Biden does not come forward and retract this video and apologize and commit himself to making amends, I consider him disqualified. He does not have the character or brain power to be President.

Sunrise, 6:02 a.m.

Please feel free to use the comments section to write about anything you'd like.

The delicate new avocado tree in the morning sunlight.

"On social media, Indian politicians and commentators also exulted in the selection of Harris."

"The fact that someone of Indian origin could be 'a proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency is thrilling,' wrote Shashi Tharoor, a politician with the opposition Congress Party. Ram Madhav, a senior official in India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, saluted the history-making nature of the pick.... In Tamil Nadu, the south Indian state where Harris’s mother grew up, there was special pride. Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, a local politician, praised the 'inclusiveness' of the choice and wished Harris well in the election. Harris — whose first name means 'lotus' — has said that after her parents’ divorce, her mother raised her two daughters with an appreciation of their dual heritage. 'My Indian mother knew she was raising two black daughters,' Harris said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2015. 'But that’s not to the exclusion of who I am in terms of my Indian heritage.'... Harris visited India regularly as a child and understands some Tamil, her relatives said."

From "Kamala Harris pick sparks delight in India and Jamaica" (WaPo).

There's something quite sad about saying "My Indian mother knew she was raising two black daughters." Why wasn't that mother — who did the work of raising the daughters and who contributed equally to their genetic makeup — allowed to feel pride in raising two Indian daughters? I know the stock answer. I just think it perversely gives power to the worst people.

ADDED: When Kamala Harris said "My Indian mother knew she was raising two black daughters," her mother had already died and was therefore in no position to speak for herself about how she conceived of her role as a mother. The mother,  Shyamala Gopalan "was an India born Tamil American cancer researcher and civil rights activist": "She insisted on giving her daughters names derived from Indian culture to help preserve their cultural identity."

Ah! The return of the snake chart! And there's Wisconsin! The most important state of all!

Nate Silver has his prediction model running again, with excellent graphics.

ADDED: Silver writes:

Our model says there’s an 81 percent chance that Biden wins the popular vote — compared to his 71 percent chance in the Electoral College.... [O]ur projection as of Tuesday had Biden winning the popular vote by 6.3 percentage points nationally, but winning the tipping-point state, Wisconsin, by a smaller margin, 4.5 percentage points....

[A]s a rough rule-of-thumb, perhaps you can subtract 2 points from Biden’s current lead in national polls to get a sense for what his standing in the tipping point states looks like. Add it all up, and you can start to see why the model is being fairly cautious. Biden’s current roughly 8-point lead in national polls is really more like a 6-point lead in the tipping point states. And 6-point leads in August are historically not very safe....

"The scenery that annually draws 120 million tourists would not exist if not for cows grazing."

"It has been cultivated over seven centuries of farmers driving their herds to mountainside meadows in the summer. The animals’ hoofs firm the soil, their tongues gently groom the grasses and wildflowers. In the process, they continually sculpt verdant pastures — beloved backdrops for movies like 'The Sound of Music.' All that seemed at stake when a court in the western state of Tyrol found [a farmer named Reinhard] Pfurtscheller solely responsible for the [death of a German woman hiker who was trampled by his cows] and ordered him to pay more than $210,000 in damages to her widower and son, plus monthly restitution totaling $1,850. The 2019 decision shocked farmers, and not just in Neustift im Stubaital, a village of fewer than 5,000 inhabitants who live at the foot of a glacier promoted as the 'Kingdom of Snow.' As foreclosure on Pfurtscheller’s home and farm loomed, some farmers contemplated banning hikers from their land, a move that would cut off access to the Alps. Others threatened to stop taking their cows into the Alps altogether, a move that would allow nature to cut back in. Forests would soon begin to take over.... Governments quickly acted to keep cows on the pastures. State governors, federal ministers, even the Austrian chancellor spoke out in support of Pfurtscheller, a slender man of 62 who has been farming since he was 10. Last year, federal law was changed to block similar litigation.... "

From "In the Alps, hikers on the trails and cows in the pasture make for perilous pairings" (WaPo).

It's dangerous to walk around cows! "Walkers in Britain, it seems, are killed by cows all the time," writes Bill Bryson in "The Road to Little Dribbling":

Four people were fatally trampled in one eight-week period in 2009 alone. One of these unfortunates was a veterinarian out walking her dogs on the Pennine Way, another long-distance trail, in Yorkshire. This was a woman who understood animals and liked them, probably had treats for cows in her pocket—and they still trampled her. More recently, a retired university lecturer named Mike Porter was trampled to death by an angry herd—yes, angry—in a field near the Kennet and Avon Canal in Wiltshire, a place where I had been walking only the year before. “It looked like they wanted to kill him,” one eyewitness breathlessly told the Daily Telegraph. It was the fourth serious attack on walkers in five years just by this one herd. 

"At this moment, the difference between the candidates is a chasm. There has never been a greater difference...."

"Take Biden's campaign positions. Farther to the left than any Democratic candidate in memory on things like climate. It's far better than anything that preceded it. Not because Biden had a personal conversion or the DNC had some great insight, but because they're being hammered on by activists coming out of the Sanders movement and others. The climate program, a $2 trillion commitment to dealing with the extreme threat of environmental catastrophe, was largely written by the Sunrise Movement and strongly endorsed by the leading activists on climate change, the ones who managed to get the Green New Deal on the legislative agenda. That's real politics.... This is not support for Biden. It is support for the activists who have been at work constantly, creating the background within the party in which the shifts took place, and who have followed Sanders in actually entering the campaign and influencing it. Support for them. Support for real politics. The left position is you rarely support anyone. You vote against the worst. You keep the pressure and activism going."

Said Noam Chomsky, quoted in "Noam Chomsky wants you to vote for Joe Biden and then haunt his dreams/The lion of the left on the pandemic, the election, the word Bernie Sanders needs to stop using, the Harper's letter, the 1619 Project, patriotism, and the greatest social movement in U.S. history" (The.Ink).

At the Tuesday Night Café...

... you can write about whatever you like.

"Years before meeting [Kamala] Harris, [Douglas] Emhoff was married to a woman named Kerstin, and they had two children together: Cole (after jazz saxophonist John Coltrane)..."

"... and Ella (after Ella Fitzgerald, of course). When Emhoff and Harris hit it off, the future attorney general was initially very wary of the idea of meeting his kids because she knew just how important they were to him. 'As a child of divorce, I knew how hard it could be when your parents start to date other people... And I was determined not to insert myself in their lives until Doug and I had established we were in this for the long haul. Children need consistency; I didn’t want to insert myself into their lives as a temporary fixture because I didn’t want to disappoint them. There’s nothing worse than disappointing a child.'"

From "Kamala Harris Husband, Douglas Emhoff, Is Her Number One Fan/Douglas Emhoff is the unofficial president of the #TeamKamala fan club" (Marie Claire).

View this post on Instagram

Grateful every day to be Momala to Ella and Cole.

A post shared by Kamala Harris (@kamalaharris) on May 12, 2019 at 4:13pm PDT

Trump has an anti-Kamala ad ready to go.

pic.twitter.com/jXoffXyZed

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 11, 2020

After all that! It's Kamala Harris.

"Joseph R. Biden Jr. selected Senator Kamala Harris of California as his vice-presidential running mate on Tuesday, embracing a former rival who sharply criticized him in the Democratic primaries but emerged after ending her own campaign as a vocal supporter of Mr. Biden and a prominent advocate of racial-justice legislation after the death of George Floyd in late May" — the NYT reports.

It's so much the obvious choice that all I can wonder about is: Why did he almost not pick her?

ADDED:

maya rudolph the next time lorne calls pic.twitter.com/nYSBbdtF18

— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) August 11, 2020

AND:

Why would Kamala Harris want to be part of Biden’s administration when she believes he helped pass segregationist legislation?
pic.twitter.com/SrQQgFFM1w

— Eddie Zipperer (@EddieZipperer) August 11, 2020

"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez survived her primary. Rashida Tlaib did, too. Now it’s Ilhan Omar’s turn on Tuesday..."

"... and the Minnesota congresswoman faces the stiffest challenge of any member of the Squad.... Bankrolled by pro-Israel donors, Antone Melton-Meaux has spent more than twice as much as Omar on television ads, and outside groups have kicked in to increase his advantage.... Omar drew the ire of pro-Israel leaders this year when she made comments that many of them have deemed anti-Semitic. She tweeted once that Israel had 'hypnotized the world' and said that U.S. lawmakers supportive of Israel had a dual allegiance to that country and their own. Progressive groups, who spent big to help Tlaib in her primary last week, have not done much to back up Omar. The congresswoman’s internal polling from early July showed her with a big lead — but some operatives in the party fear this primary will be much closer than Tlaib’s...."

Politico reports.

"Like all the rich people leaving locked-down locales, parents removing kids from locked-down public schools have scared public officials."

"If just 10 percent of public-school kids homeschool or join a private school for two years, that is a watershed moment for the social undercurrent of animosity towards public schools.... This is dangerous to Democrats’ political dominance because the education system tilts voters their way through cultural Marxism, and because public education is a huge source of Democrat campaign volunteers and funds. Now Democrats have detached people from their conveyor belt. The consequences will be huge."

From "Why Democrats Have Started To Cave On Reopening Schools/The pressure to reopen schools is on everywhere now that New York is doing it. This means something else big: Their hard opposition to school reopenings is politically devastating for Democrats" (The Federalist).

That article links to "East Coasters are Snapping Up Vacation Homes Amid Coronavirus/Sales in resort and rural areas are surging as homebuyers look for getaways from Covid" (at Mansion Global). That shows the incredibly nice houses in beautiful places that the rich people of New York City have bought and relocated to. If they live there, they can send their children to school there. What a fantastic advantage!

"Joe Biden’s campaign, in conjunction with influential women’s groups, is preparing to blunt 'sexist' attacks aimed at his prospective running mate."

"That’s all well and good, but where does Sarah Palin go to recover her career? If I didn’t know any better, I’d think the Democrats (and women’s groups, and liberal elites in the media) are a bunch of hypocrites. After all, their sexist attacks helped batter a young female rising star deemed as an existential threat, and now they’re warning that the same thing might actually happen (gasp!) to them? Don’t get me wrong. Pushing back against sexism is good. But it also strikes me as a bit self-serving, coming from the party that has been less than chivalrous to women who got in the way of their liberal agenda (see Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, and—most appropriately—John McCain’s running mate)."

Writes Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast, but you have to subscribe to read the whole article, unfortunately. I would subscribe — it's $35 a year — but then I would need to think about going to The Daily Beast because I've subscribed, and I don't want that burden. I haven't found The Daily Beast useful enough over the years to feel that I'm missing something. But I would like to read this whole article. I think we have enough of the idea in what we can see. Attacks on Biden's VP choice will be effective because Democrats who defend her can be confronted with their treatment of Sarah Palin and called hypocrites.

I wonder if Sarah Palin is presentable these days. If so, she can be used to lambaste whoever calls the VP attackers sexist.

And by "relish" you must mean enjoy looking on from the distance I am eager to put between me and this activity.

"I look forward to seeing how this department moves forward through the process of re-envisioning public safety. I relish the work that will be done by all of you," said Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best, quoted in "Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best announces resignation/Best's resignation comes after the Seattle City Council voted to cut spending for the Seattle Police Department on Monday" (at King5).