A conversation about the politics of the commenters on the Althouse blog.

There was an open thread on this blog last night, and while many of the comments were about the Super Bowl...

Patriots getting schlonged.

Bigly.

Coin toss wins. What a rip.

Like Hillary beating Bernie in Iowa caucuses.

Cubs... Trump... Pats... I'm liking the way things are going.

... there was some interesting talk about the politics of the Althouse commenters.

Jack Wayne said:

I think everyone that reads this blog has noticed the increased number of lefty commenters. It started about 6 months ago. At first I thought it was a paid Soros performance trying to sway the election. Find a moderate blog and swamp it with lefty sentiments. It kept up after the election and now we see a determined effort to bring down Trump. What I'm having trouble understanding is the end game and why pick on Althouse? The end game is Pence followed by Ryan. Is that a reasonable goal? I think not but lefties are acting nutty right now. The other question of Althouse is more opaque. The best I can come up with is that the lefties feel the need to herd Althouse back into the fold. But I think that effort is doomed. Any lefties in the know are welcome to tell us what you are trying to accomplish.

Henry responded with:

What I've wondered for a long time is why the comments section has so many social conservatives in it, ranging from instapundit-style libertarians to outright misogynists. The question in my mind isn't why so many lefties, but why the balance has always been against them.

Jack Wayne said:

Henry, my POV is that lefties are not rational, hence they are the target in a blog that does not delete comments like so many lefty sites do.

Yancey Ward said:

Henry asked why Althouse draws so many from the right side of the political divide?

The explanation is fairly easy — she pulls no punches for the most part. I know from her writing that she leans left, but she almost never tolerates bullshit from either side — so there is something here for people from both sides to both agree with and disagree with. However, the main reason the commentators here lean right more than left is simply this — she doesn't delete their comments for simply disagreeing with her — a very rare thing for bloggers who are to the left.

Since I won't generally even read a blogger who practices such censorship, I noticed about a year ago that I was suddenly down to just Althouse who could be identified as a liberal, and who had a comments section. I have lost some bloggers on the right, too, who do this, but nowhere near the percentage. My theory is simply that liberals and progressives are just less tolerant of differing opinions, and the commenters from the left are less likely to frequent a comments section where they might encounter an actual opponent.

And you know what — I think her commenters have probably had an effect on Ms. Althouse — she definitely has drifted to the center in the last 4 years.

Of course, we could all just be commenters paid by Putin.

Gaga solo.

The visual balance of those 2 words has me sidetracking into my favorite song from the late George Michael: Wake me up before you gogo/Gaga/I'm not planning on going solo....

Why did Lady Gaga go solo at the Super Bowl last night?

We're used to seeing the big star surrounded by lots of other stars. Last year, Beyoncé got assistance from Coldplay, Bruno Mars, Mark Ronson, Gustavo Dudamel, University of California Marching Band and Youth Orchestra L.A. The year before that Katy Perry had Lenny Kravitz, Missy Elliott, and Arizona State University Sun Devil Marching Band.

When Madonna performed in 2012, she had LMFAO, Cirque du Soleil, Nicki Minaj, M.I.A., Cee Lo Green, Andy Lewis, Avon High School Drumline, Center Grove High School Drumline, Fishers High School Drumline, Franklin Central High School Drumline, Southern University Dancing Dolls, and a 200 Person Choir consisting of Indianapolis locals.

I was going to say that Madonna seems like the closest thing to Gaga, but in Super Bowl halftime terms, she's as far from Gaga as Gaga can get.

We haven't seen a fully solo halftime act since 2010, when The Who performed... and The Who are a group and hence not as fully solo as the solo performer Gaga. And The Who were the last in a line of old-school rock acts that came out and performed like a band in a stadium. The immediately preceding years, in reverse chronological order were Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Prince (who had support from the Florida A&M University Marching 100 Band), The Rolling Stones, and Paul McCartney.

If you take one step further back, you get the notorious halftime show of 2004 when Justin Timberlake ripped Janet Jackson's bodice and exposed one nipple-shielded breast. That show was also crowded with Jessica Simpson, P. Diddy, Nelly, Kid Rock, and 2 different marching bands.

So why did Lady Gaga go it alone*? I think it was to show off the extreme energy and athleticism involved. She began perched on the rooftop, courageously dropped on a wire, powered through 13 minutes of song, and ended singing while running upstairs. It was a big brag: I'm stronger than everyone!

Was that about her or about all women? I heard someone assert that it was a "female empowerment" message. Maybe it was about Hillary Clinton. Lady Gaga was a high-visibility supporter of Hillary Clinton's failed run at the presidency. And Hillary Clinton tweeted her support for Gaga's Super Bowl "message."

The very last thing Lady Gaga did in her performance could be interpreted as a statement about Hillary: She fell off her platform.


_______________________________________

* She did have a gang of dancers with her some of the time. I was a bit puzzled by what they were supposed to be in their all-white costumes, which — with strips of fabric hanging off — seemed like bandages. They weren't behaving like mummies, and there were football helmets and shoulder pads, so I wondered if it was some sort of contribution to the football is so dangerous it should be abolished movement.

At the Walking-on-the-Lake Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

We were out walking on the frozen lake today.

(And, please, use the Althouse Amazon Portal if you're shopping.)

"One guy got up and said, 'Hand sanitizer gets rid of Sharpie. We need alcohol.' He found some tissues and got to work."

"I've never seen so many people simultaneously reach into their bags and pockets looking for tissues and Purel."

"In this case death just sat on the grass and wished he was a kid again."

Sweet rewrite of: "Sometimes death is busy and just says, 'Fuck it, I'll get them next time.'"

"A federal appeals court early Sunday rejected a request by the Justice Department to immediately restore President Trump’s targeted travel ban..."

"... deepening a legal showdown over his authority to tighten the nation’s borders in the name of protecting Americans from terrorism," the NYT reports.

In its argument for an appeal, the Justice Department had said the president had an “unreviewable authority” to suspend the entry of any class of foreigners. It said the ruling by [District] Judge Robart was too broad, “untethered” to the claims of the State of Washington, and in conflict with a ruling by another federal district judge, in Boston, who had upheld the order.

The Justice Department argued that the president acted well within his constitutional authority. Blocking the order, it concluded, “immediately harms the public by thwarting enforcement of an Executive Order issued by the President, based on his national security judgment.”...

The Ninth Circuit court moved quickly to reject the administration’s appeal, a measure of the urgency and intense interest in the case.

Despite Mr. Trump’s vehement criticism of the ruling and the certainty that it would be appealed, the government agencies at the center of the issue, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, moved quickly to comply.

On Twitter, Trump has been critical of the district judge's decision, but I don't think it's right to compare these criticisms to Trump's attack on the trial judge in the Trump University case. In the Trump University case, Trump said the judge was biased because of his Mexican heritage. In the current case, Trump's attack is not on the judge as a person, but on the decision he made, and the basis of the attack isn't some questionable (or offensive) extraneous material but the actual substance of the opinion. Trump is following the judge's order and using the judicial process to fight it.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with criticizing judicial opinions, and this one lays itself open to criticism:

“The executive order adversely affects the states’ residents in areas of employment, education, business, family relations and freedom to travel,” Judge Robart wrote. He said the states had been hurt because the order affected their public universities and their tax bases.

Still, Judge Robart’s order left many questions, said Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston.

“Does the executive order violate the equal protection of the laws, amount to an establishment of religion, violate rights of free exercise, or deprive aliens of due process of law?” Professor Blackman asked. “Who knows? The analysis is bare bones, and leaves the court of appeals, as well as the Supreme Court, with no basis to determine whether the nationwide injunction was proper.”

ADDED: The relevant Trump tweets are (in reverse chronological order):

Why aren't the lawyers looking at and using the Federal Court decision in Boston, which is at conflict with ridiculous lift ban decision?

Because the ban was lifted by a judge, many very bad and dangerous people may be pouring into our country. A terrible decision

What is our country coming to when a judge can halt a Homeland Security travel ban and anyone, even with bad intentions, can come into U.S.?

The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!

As some commenters are pointing out, the phrase "so-called judge" could be called an attack on the man. But the only basis for saying "so-called judge" is what the man in the robe is doing in this particular case. There's nothing against him as an individual. It's very close to saying, in a substantive legal way, that this is a man who is acting beyond his proper judicial power. This parallels what the judge is saying: Trump is doing things under the appearance of being President, but what he is doing is beyond the powers of the President. This is just a man, not someone who can wield governmental power. That's not a personal attack. That's the rule of law.

"The Government of the United States has been emphatically termed a government of laws, and not of men."

New word learned: Machicolation.

"A machicolation (from the French: mâchicoulis, German: Maschikuli, Italian: piombatoio) is a floor opening between the supporting corbels of a battlement, through which stones or other material, such as boiling water or boiling cooking oil, could be dropped on attackers at the base of a defensive wall."

The design was adopted in the Middle Ages in Europe when Norman crusaders returned from the Holy Land....

The word derives from the Old French word machecol, mentioned in Medieval Latin as machecollum, probably from Old French machier 'crush', 'wound' and col 'neck'. Machicolate is only recorded in the 18th century in English, but a verb machicollāre is attested in Anglo-Latin. The Spanish word denoting this structure, matacán, is similarly composed from "matar canes" meaning roughly "killing dogs", the latter being a reference to infidels.

Library Man.

"This is library."

"Trump’s thin-skinned when he wants to be, not when you want him to be."

Instapundit's observation, based on this post from yesterday.

After walking in Wisconsin, where the cold wind hurt my face, I had a conversation with Siri...

Here's where that last link goes "The 10 Best Weather Cities." It doesn't work for me because hot and dry is not my idea of "best." I like seasons and moisture.

"Third-party report finds that the Dog’s Purpose video was intentionally misleading..."

"The report falls in line with claims from numerous people involved in the movie’s production who have seen the full footage of the day’s events."

The video was originally discussed on this blog here: "Expensive dog movie — 'A Dog's Purpose' — struggles for its life in the roiling waters of public opinion after a video leaked out of one of the stunt dogs resisting pressure to serve his purpose of playing the role of a dog willingly leaping into roiling waters to save a human life."

"The first thing we're going to do is to go over some of the amenities of The Home Theater Experience."

"Portlandia" has been even greater than usual lately. The Home Theater Experience material from the new episode is the clip I found on line, and AV Club liked it best, but what I really wanted to show you was the "safe bully" part:

[Fred Armisen plays] “The Safe Bully,” who is brought in by a school after a PTA meeting where parents complain that their children don’t have enough grit. He picks on kids, but also helps them up, and even offers them food when they don’t have any lunch money. It’s a lot of cognitive dissonance for the children, but it ultimately works, as within three days, they gain the courage to stand up to him, and his work is done. Amusingly, the parents now complain that their children have too much grit, and they can no longer tell them what to do....

Beating out "1984" as the #1 best-selling book at Amazon — it's Milo Yiannopoulos.

Is this book even written yet? You can only advance-order it. The publication date is March 14th. Here's the link to buy it and simultaneously make a contribution to the Althouse blog (without paying extra).

My son John writes:

The Streisand effect: you attract publicity for what you were trying to conceal

The Milo effect: you get free publicity by rioters and arsonists trying to stop you from speaking, and your book becomes a #1 best-seller before it's released

And at that link, there are people talking about something I was going to bring up earlier this morning when I was writing a post about Robert Reich's floating the rumor that the Milo protesters were actually right-wingers. If we see that Milo benefits, it makes sense to explore the possibility that the protesters were pro-Milo. I don't believe that. I think the protesters are just very bad at understanding the consequences of their behavior (or they just don't care).

ADDED: "Dangerous" may have been #1 at some earlier point. At Breitbart, I'm seeing: "The book is now back at the top of Amazon’s rankings, holding the #1 best seller spot for books." Key word: "back." But the cause-and-effect of the protests is plain:

Pre-order sales of Breitbart Senior Editor MILO’s upcoming book Dangerous increased by 12,740% following the violent left-wing and “anti-fascist” riot that occurred at UC Berkeley on Wednesday in protest of a scheduled speech by MILO on campus.

"Vandals scratch sinister message into pensioner’s beloved yellow car because it ruins the view of their picturesque village."

"Tourists moaned about the 'ugly' car on medieval Arlington Row, which is on the UK passport’s inside cover.... The word 'Move' had been scratched into the bonnet of the car, and the driver’s side window and rear windscreen had been smashed."

"You should never have resigned. You didn’t do anything wrong. You only did what the president ordered. Why are you quitting? You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?"

What Neil Gorsuch said to his mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, when he was 15 years old, as reported in the NYT piece, "In Fall of Gorsuch’s Mother, a Painful Lesson in Politicking."

More than three decades later, Judge Gorsuch, a federal appeals court judge in Denver, has been nominated to the Supreme Court by President Trump and faces a political culture even more caustic than the one that destroyed his mother’s public career. Like her, he is a committed conservative and can expect strong opposition, but where she was bold and brash, he has advanced to the pinnacle of the judiciary with understatement and polish.

"How protesters plan to get under Trump’s skin wherever he goes."

A headline at The Washington Post.

By the way, wasn't that Hillary Clinton's plan for the debates — "get under Trump's skin"? Wasn't there an old idea way back then that Trump was "thin-skinned"* and could be defeated by getting under his skin? He'd self-destruct? That's how I've packaged my memories of how everybody who tried failed to keep Trump from winning.

Back to the WaPo article, which is by Perry Stein and David A. Fahrenthold:

Having sought to create unprecedented disruption in Washington, his critics will now seek to bring unprecedented disruption to his life as president — including demonstrations that follow him when he travels, and protests that will dog his businesses even when he doesn’t.

Why aren't these people afraid that Trump draws energy from this negativity?

There have been small gestures of pique: lipstick graffiti on the sign at Trump’s golf course in Los Angeles, and a plan for a mass mooning of his hotel in Chicago. There have also been more organized efforts to take time and money away from family businesses — a boycott of stores selling Ivanka Trump’s clothes and a campaign to flood Trump businesses with calls demanding that the president divest from his holdings.

For Trump’s opponents, these demonstrations are a way to change his behavior by denting the president’s own self-image, as a popular man with a successful business.

Why would what hasn't worked yet suddenly start working?