"... Alan Hale from 'Gilligan’s Island,' say, had Hale been slimmer, richer, more self-confident.... His trademark double-eye squint evokes that group of beanie-hatted street-tough Munchkin kids; you expect him to kick gruffly at an imaginary stone. In person, his autocratic streak is presentationally complicated by a Ralph Kramdenesque vulnerability. He’s a man who has just dropped a can opener into his wife’s freshly baked pie. He’s not about to start grovelling about it, and yet he’s sorry—but, come on, it was an accident. He’s sorry, he’s sorry, O.K., but do you expect him to say it? He’s a good guy. Anyway, he didn’t do it. Once, Jack Benny, whose character was known for frugality and selfishness, got a huge laugh by glancing down at the baseball he was supposed to be first-pitching, pocketing it, and walking off the field. Trump, similarly, knows how well we know him from TV. He is who he is. So sue me, O.K.?"
Writes George Saunders in a New Yorker piece titled "Who are all these Trump supporters?"
July 9, 2016
"My mother, who is a Tea Party person, started saying ‘government schools’ all the time... I remember thinking, ‘Wow.’”
Said a woman in Kansas, quoted in a NYT article called "Public Schools? To Kansas Conservatives, They’re ‘Government Schools.'"
Experts are also quoted, including linguistics professor Deborah Tannen, who was reminded of Ronald Reagan's famous line: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help’”:
Experts are also quoted, including linguistics professor Deborah Tannen, who was reminded of Ronald Reagan's famous line: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help’”:
“People tend to trace the demonization of government to Reagan,” Dr. Tannen said. “That’s kind of iconic, how he was using it. He set the government up as the enemy.”And I'm reminded of the 1923 Supreme Court case, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, that said:
The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.
The Looking-For-Something-Else Café...
... is a place where you can bring up some other topics. I wasn't trying to adhere to a theme-of-the-day approach to the blog this morning, so let me turn it over to you to talk about other things here.
"Race is intrinsic, pervasive and part of all our meaningful discussions in modern times, and I don’t think any group ... is going to find any respite from having to grapple with those difficult issues."
Said Madison's police chief, Mike Koval, quoted in "Mike Koval, Samba Baldeh feud comes full circle after Dallas shootings."
It was just a month ago when Ald. Samba Baldeh, who is black, leaned over his microphone in the Madison City Council chamber and said that he didn’t feel safe with Madison Police Chief Mike Koval, who is white, sitting behind him with a gun during the meeting.
Koval, a few days earlier, had published a lengthy blog post, laced with sarcasm and frustration, chastising council members for considering spending $400,000 on a review of his department’s operations and accusing them of not supporting police. The tone of the chief’s post and his behavior at the June 7 council meeting drew widespread criticism from elected officials.
On Facebook, Micah Johnson, the Dallas sniper, liked the New Black Panther Party and the African American Defense League.
The NYT reports. The New Black Panther Party is, according the Anti-Defamation League "the largest organized anti-Semitic and racist black militant group in the United States."
[T]he African American Defense League, which was formed in 2014 by a man named Mauricelm-lei Millere.
“Millere is known for calling for violence against police specifically, on a regular basis,” said Oren Segal, the director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “Usually after a high profile police-related shooting he takes to social media to encourage violence against police.”
After the killing of Laquan McDonald in Chicago, Mr. Millere called for “death to every blue, bastard, hypocrites, killer pig across the nation,” according to Mr. Segal.
July 8, 2016
"If Roger Ailes were how he's described, there's no way I would've stuck around. I don't feel like putting up with that stuff and I wouldn't."
"Even if he weren't doing it to me, I wouldn't want to work in that environment. I sort of feel bad for Gretchen Carlson because it's sort of a weird thing that she's done. What she's alleging is something that is alien to me. I've never heard it."
Said Greta Van Susteren.
Said Greta Van Susteren.
Jill Stein to step aside to let Bernie Sanders have the Green Party nomination.
The Green Party convention is in August.
“I’ve invited Bernie to sit down explore collaboration – everything is on the table,” she said. “If he saw that you can’t have a revolutionary campaign in a counter-revolutionary party, he’d be welcomed to the Green party. He could lead the ticket and build a political movement,” she said.ADDED: The headline is confusing. Stein has only made an offer. It would require Sanders to accept.
In search of a Free Society.
Here's a list of 17 demands presented in a leaflet that was distributed at the protests outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, as reported by Norman Mailer in "Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968." Boldface mine:
1. An immediate end to the War in Vietnam….ADDED: Googling some text, I find testimony from Abbie Hoffman (at the Chicago 7 trial) claiming authorship of the list:
2. Immediate freedom for Huey Newton of the Black Panthers and all other black people. Adoption of the community control concept in our ghetto areas….
3. The legalization of marihuana and all other psychedelic drugs….
4. A prison system based on the concept of rehabilitation rather than punishment.
5.…abolition of all laws related to crimes without victims. That is, retention only of laws relating to crimes in which there is an unwilling injured party, i.e. murder, rape, assault.
6. The total disarmament of all the people beginning with the police. This includes not only guns, but such brutal devices as tear gas, MACE, electric prods, blackjacks, billy clubs, and the like.
7. The Abolition of Money. The abolition of pay housing, pay media, pay transportation, pay food, pay education, pay clothing, pay medical help, and pay toilets.
8. A society which works toward and actively promotes the concept of “full unemployment.” A society in which people are free from the drudgery of work. Adoption of the concept “Let the Machines do it.”
9.…elimination of pollution from our air and water.
10.…incentives for the decentralization of our crowded cities…encourage rural living.
11.…free birth control information…abortions when desired.
12. A restructured educational system which provides the student power to determine his course of study and allows for student participation in over-all policy planning….
13. Open and free use of media…cable television as a method of increasing the selection of channels available to the viewer.
14. An end to all censorship. We are sick of a society which has no hesitation about showing people committing violence and refuses to show a couple fucking.
15. We believe that people should fuck all the time, anytime, whomever they wish. This is not a program to demand but a simple recognition of the reality around us.
16.…a national referendum system conducted via television or a telephone voting system…a decentralization of power and authority with many varied tribal groups. Groups in which people exist in a state of basic trust and are free to choose their tribe.
17. A program that encourages and promotes the arts. However, we feel that if the Free Society we envision were to be fought for and achieved, all of us would actualize the creativity within us. In a very real sense we would have a society in which every man would be an artist.
I will read it in the order that I wrote it. "Revolution toward a free society, Yippie, by A. Yippie.There was a #18 on the list:
And eighteen was left blank for anybody to fill in what they wanted. "It was for these reasons that we had come to Chicago, it was for these reasons that many of us may fight and die here. We recognize this as the vision of the founders of this nation. We recognize that we are America; we recognize that we are free men. The present-day politicians and their armies of automatons have selfishly robbed us of our birthright. The evilness they stand for will go unchallenged no longer. Political pigs, your days are numbered. We are the second American Revolution. We shall win."
"Thank you Jared for using something sacred and special to the descendants of Joe and Rae Kushner to validate the sloppy manner in which you've handled this campaign."
"From the references to 'Palestine' at the AIPAC conference (which got Donald jeered) to the justification of the itchy Twitter fingers your fatherinlaw has, you've managed to further prove what so many of us have known for many years. Kudos to you for having gone this far; no one expected this. But for the sake of the family name, which may have no meaning to you but still has meaning to others, please don't invoke our grandparents in vain just so you can sleep better at night. It is self serving and disgusting."
Writes Jacob Schulder, cousin of Jared Kushner, to whom he hasn't spoken in 10 years and whose father he helped Chris Christie put in prison.
Writes Jacob Schulder, cousin of Jared Kushner, to whom he hasn't spoken in 10 years and whose father he helped Chris Christie put in prison.
5 Dallas police officers shot dead by snipers at a Black Lives Matter rally.
7 other police shot, plus 2 civilians.
The Dallas police chief, David O. Brown, said the gunman who was killed had “said he was upset at Black Lives Matter, said he was upset about the recent police shootings. The suspect said he was upset at white people; the suspect said he wanted to kill white people.” He was especially upset at white police officers, said Chief Brown.... who is black....My link goes to the NYT which posits that this incident has "injected a volatile new dimension into the anguished debate over racial disparities in American criminal justice." That is, these murderers undercut Black Lives Matter by complicating the victims-and-brutes presentation.
“There has been a vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement,” President Obama told reporters Friday morning in Warsaw....
July 7, 2016
"I have always felt that a man cannot seek the Presidency and get it simply because he wants it."
"I think that he can seek the Presidency and obtain it only when the Presidency requires what he may have to offer (the Presidency was then a mystical seat, mystical as the choice of a woman’s womb) and I have had the feeling (comfortably pleasant and modest again—no phony Nixon here) and it may be a presumptuous feeling, that because of the vacuum of leadership in the Republican Party, because of the need for leadership particularly qualified in foreign affairs, because I have known not only the country, but the world as a result of my travels, that now time (historical-time—the very beast of the mystic!) requires that I re-enter the arena. (Then he brought out some humor. It was not great humor, but for Nixon it was curious and not indelicate.) And incidentally, I have been very willing to do so. (Re-enter the arena.) I am not being drafted. I want to make that very clear. I am very willing to do so. There has never been a draft in Miami in August anyway. (Nice laughter from the Press—he has won them by a degree. Now he is on to finish the point.)…I believe that if my judgment—and my intuition, my 'gut feelings' so to speak, about America and American political tradition—is right, this is the year that I will win."
Said Richard Nixon at a press conference just before the GOP convention nominated him for President in 1968, quoted in "Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968," by Norman Mailer, whose commentary appears in the parentheticals.
Reporters had challenged Nixon to explain why he was running for President again, and he said "this is the time I think when the man and the moment in history come together," and here's what Mailer said about that:
AND: I've added boldface to the quote. That was the line that jumped out at me as I was listening to the audiobook yesterday. I had to pause and think about this year's presidential election. I assume Nixon was bullshitting when he claimed to believe that the Presidency requires what he may have to offer, but I thought about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Imagine the 2 of them in a debate, presented with the Nixon quote and asked to say why the presidency requires what you may have to offer. It's easy to think of what Trump would say. Terrible deals have been made, and he had to come forward and offer his master dealmaking services. But what would Hillary say? What can she do that we need right now?
Said Richard Nixon at a press conference just before the GOP convention nominated him for President in 1968, quoted in "Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968," by Norman Mailer, whose commentary appears in the parentheticals.
Reporters had challenged Nixon to explain why he was running for President again, and he said "this is the time I think when the man and the moment in history come together," and here's what Mailer said about that:
An extraordinary admission for a Republican, with their Protestant detestation of philosophical deeps or any personification of history. With one remark, Nixon had walked into the oceans of Marx, Spengler, Heidegger, and Tolstoy; and Dostoevski and Kierkegaard were in the wings. Yes, Richard Nixon’s mind had entered the torture chambers of the modern consciousness!)By the way, mystical as the choice of a woman’s womb is not a reference to the right to choose an abortion.
AND: I've added boldface to the quote. That was the line that jumped out at me as I was listening to the audiobook yesterday. I had to pause and think about this year's presidential election. I assume Nixon was bullshitting when he claimed to believe that the Presidency requires what he may have to offer, but I thought about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Imagine the 2 of them in a debate, presented with the Nixon quote and asked to say why the presidency requires what you may have to offer. It's easy to think of what Trump would say. Terrible deals have been made, and he had to come forward and offer his master dealmaking services. But what would Hillary say? What can she do that we need right now?
Hillary Clinton has not held a press conference since December 4th, when she answered 7 questions.
"That must change, and what better moment than immediately, given the news that FBI Director James B. Comey has recommended that no charges be brought...."
What kind of President would she be, hiding from the press like this? The email problem itself arose out of a strange and deeply flawed secretiveness. How is this quality acceptable in a President? I lived through the Nixon administration, and I've never seen anything like this in a person who claims to be presidential material.
Is she thinking: f I speak, I will sound guarded, phony, stilted, and evasive, so it won't even work, so why take the risk?
Meanwhile, Trump is garrulous and convivial — the opposite extreme. I see he's getting criticized for continuing to talk about the shape of a star in an image he tweeted. The theory is supposedly that he should shut up about that and proceed to a new topic-of-the-day. As if the star would be forgotten by his opponents! It will forever be on a list of evidence that will be thrown out as proof that he's a bigot. But he's advised to stop defending himself.
What kind of President would she be, hiding from the press like this? The email problem itself arose out of a strange and deeply flawed secretiveness. How is this quality acceptable in a President? I lived through the Nixon administration, and I've never seen anything like this in a person who claims to be presidential material.
Is she thinking: f I speak, I will sound guarded, phony, stilted, and evasive, so it won't even work, so why take the risk?
Meanwhile, Trump is garrulous and convivial — the opposite extreme. I see he's getting criticized for continuing to talk about the shape of a star in an image he tweeted. The theory is supposedly that he should shut up about that and proceed to a new topic-of-the-day. As if the star would be forgotten by his opponents! It will forever be on a list of evidence that will be thrown out as proof that he's a bigot. But he's advised to stop defending himself.
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