At the Saturday Night Café...

... you can write about anything.

Susan Rice talks about doing Sunday show appearances after the Benghazi attack — She was "a team player."

From an interview in The Atlantic with Edward-Isaac Dovere:

Dovere: The Sunday-show appearances around the Benghazi attack have become so much of your public identity. Your mother actually warned you not to do it, and thought Hillary Clinton should have instead. In the end, that became an issue getting in your way to be Obama’s secretary of state, and continues to be an issue Republicans attack you over now.

Rice: She said, “Why you?” And I said, “The White House asked me to do it.” And she’s like, “Well, where’s Hillary?” And I said that she’d been asked, but declined. And I presumed—I hadn’t had this conversation with her—that she had had an extraordinarily draining week, having lost four Americans in an American overseas facility, and all the pain and trauma that that entails for the people of the State Department, for the families, for everybody. But I agreed, as a team player. And her instinct was, “I smell a rat. You shouldn’t do it.” And I said, “Mom, don’t be ridiculous. I’ve done this many times before.” She was absolutely right.

Dovere: What did that experience teach you about the way that politics, and at least cable news, political media work?

"When you commit arson with an accelerant in an attempt to burn down a building that is occupied by people who you have intentionally trapped inside..."

"... you are not demonstrating, you are attempting to commit murder. I believe that city staff could have died last night. I cannot and I will not tolerate that.... Don’t think for a moment that if you are participating in this activity, you are not being a prop for the re-election campaign of Donald Trump — because you absolutely are. If you don’t want to be part of that, then don’t show up."

Said Ted Wheeler, quoted in "Portland mayor rips into rioters for ‘attempting to commit murder" (NY Post).

"Some say, 'It’s a great opportunity for my kids to learn compassion.' I’m a pretty compassionate person, but..."

"... at least show some respect. [The Department of Homeless Services] is just putting 283 people into a neighborhood basically in the middle of the night?... It’s this slow slide... How can families stay here? Does the city want families to stay?"

Said a woman quoted in "NYC moms fleeing Upper West Side amid crime and chaos" (NY Post).

The Lucerne, on 79th Street and Amsterdam, and Hotel Belleclaire, on 76th Street and Broadway, were recently converted into homeless shelters, with nearly 300 vagrants between them. Ten of the men are registered sex offenders, including convicted rapists, child molesters and child-porn possessors — all living a block away from a school playground.

Sunrise, 5:59 and 6:17.

"It is entirely possible that, with the benefit of hindsight, we will conclude that measures to control the virus shortened or stunted more lives in the long run..."

"... than were saved in the short run. Intellectually, we may accept that we are harming more than we are helping but emotionally, morally, we bridle at the notion of putting a price on life. The over-seventies, we say (I write this on my 71st birthday) plus those with underlying health conditions, are real, living, breathing people, whom we can count and who are known to us. It feels indecent to weigh their worth against an abstract idea of humans unknown who could be future casualties of our efforts to save loved ones today. Save those we know! Let the Devil do his work, but save the physically fragile of 2020. That, however, is not always how we act. Deep down, we know we can’t. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) uses quality adjusted life-years (Qalys) to compare the worth of medical procedures, treatments and drugs. One Qaly equals one year of perfect health (or two years of 50 per cent health, and so on). The NHS is said to regard a £30,000 Qaly as the upper limit for good value for money..... It may be crude, callous, arbitrary, tasteless, but we have to make choices and to make choices we have to weigh. What’s more, we do weigh — all the while protesting otherwise. We should be more honest."

From "We can, and must, put a price on human life/This pandemic has brought into sharp focus a question that Christians have been encouraging us to dodge for centuries" by Matthew Parris (The London Times).

I'm not endorsing his statements. £30,000 per "Qaly" sounds like a scary warning about single-payer health insurance to me. I'm interested in the problem of focusing on shortened lives to the point of not  being sufficiently concerned about stunted lives. And yet when a life is shortened — that is, when a person dies — it's a specific event. You can count the deaths (even if you can't count the "quality" and quantity of the years that were lost).

How can you count the stunted lives?! You can only guess what the losses in the future are. You won't even be able to measure the losses a year or 5 or 10 or 20 years from now. Who knows what the kids who are languishing at home now would have done if they could have gone to school more? Who knows what careers would have developed if this had been a good time to start or grow a business?

And surely there will be some benefits to this period of forced inaction. We'll never be able to figure out what they are, but maybe we're becoming less shallow and materialistic. We're seeing what economic activity is nonessential, and there's got to be some creative destruction in the wreckage.

Wow! What a blunder in Maureen Dowd's new column!

Do you see it?

"It’s hard to fathom, but it has been 36 years since a man and a woman ran together on a Democratic Party ticket."

Hello?? It's been 4 years. What's the problem here? When the woman isn't the secondary member of a pair, it's hard to see her as a woman at all??!

Here's the whole column: "No Wrist Corsages, Please/Has America grown since 1984, or will the knives still be out for Biden’s running mate?"

How long will it take to get a correction? There's already at least one comment over there taking her to task for this blunder.

By the way, check out the photograph of Geraldine Ferraro: she's wearing a dress with a pattern I've got to call brick wall.

UPDATE at 9:39 a.m.: The gaffe has been corrected. It's rewritten this way now: "It’s hard to fathom, but it took another 36 years for a man to choose to put a woman on the Democratic ticket with him."

At the bottom of the column is an acknowledgment of the rewrite: "Correction: Aug. 8, 2020/An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated the history of the Democratic ticket. It has been 36 years since a man chose a woman to run as his vice-president on the Democratic ticket, not 36 years since a man and a woman ran together on a Democratic Party ticket."

"Why We’re Demanding No Cops for Veep/If Joe Biden wants to signal his commitment to the message of the Black Lives Matter movement, he shouldn’t pick a former police officer or prosecutor."

Headline at The Nation.

Since its inception, our policing system has been used to terrorize, subjugate, and, when necessary, kill Black people.... Finally, space is opening up for real, substantive change to systemic racism and policing in America.... Former vice president Biden must stand with this movement, including the Black women who propelled him to the Democratic nomination, and make clear through policy and his VP choice that he is on the right side of justice and will put in place policies that protect Black people. This means he cannot have someone who has been a top cop or in the pocket of the police on the ticket, because doing so would not only signal that he is not committed to protecting Black lives but also might discourage the voters he needs to defeat Donald Trump....

Excluded by this demand — as detailed in the article — are Senator Amy Klobuchar, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Senator Kamala Harris, and Representative Val Demings. Acceptable are: Senator Elizabeth Warren, Representative Barbara Lee, Representative Karen Bass, and Stacey Abrams.

"Where Do Republicans Go From Here?/The party looks brain-dead at every spot Trump touches. But off in the corners, there’s a lot of intellectual ferment."

That's just the new David Brooks column, but I'm linking to it because it has a very cool illustration by Tim Enthoven. And I like that it fits so squarely into my tag "what Trump did to the GOP" which you might enjoy clicking on for a trip down memory lane.

Here's some Brooks:

If you came of age with conservative values and around Republican politics in the 1980s and 1990s, you lived within a certain Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher paradigm. It was about limiting government, spreading democracy abroad, building dynamic free markets at home and cultivating people with vigorous virtues — people who are energetic, upright, entrepreneurial, independent-minded, loyal to friends and strong against foes....

But somehow that wasn't enough. Other Republicans offered other "paradigms." First on the list, Brooks himself!

On Sept. 15, 1997, William Kristol and I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal on what we called National Greatness Conservatism. We argued that the G.O.P. had become too anti-government.

They argued for "ambitious national projects, infrastructure, federal programs to increase social mobility." Brooks thinks John McCain, in 2000, represented their idea. George W. Bush, who won that year, had his own paradigm:  Compassionate Conservatism. That was, per Brooks, "an attempt to meld Catholic social teaching to conservatism." There were more paradigms offered up:

Sam’s Club Republicans, led by Reihan Salam and my Times colleague Ross Douthat, pointed a way to link the G.O.P. to working-class concerns. Front Porch Republicans celebrated small towns and local communities. The Reformicons tried to use government to build strong families and neighborhoods. The Niskanen Center is an entire think tank for people who have leapt from libertarianism.

Trump speaks as if he's lost the ability to think and is just reading from a note card.

From the August 6th transcript, I'm talking about everything after "radical left agenda":

Joe Biden’s policies put China first and America last, and that’s what he’ll continue to do, if he ever got this shot. And you will have a disruption in the market, the likes of which our country has never seen. You will have a crash in the markets, because he’s going double and triple your taxes. He’s going to do things that nobody ever would ever think even possible. Because he’s following the radical left agenda. Take away your guns. Destroy your second amendment. No religion, no anything. Hurt the Bible, hurt God. He’s against God. He’s against guns. He’s against energy, our kind of energy.

No anything?!

Just yesterday, I was saying that Biden had spoken as if he "is losing the ability to maintain the boundary between what is said behind the scenes with his advisers and what is appropriate for speech to the general public." Trump spoke as if he were losing the ability to maintain the boundary between his inner thoughts and what is appropriate for speech to the general public. Within your own mind, I can see having short prompts for areas of thoughts like "Hurt the Bible, hurt God," but these are reminders to use material that conveys that feeling. They are not the actual material that you would present for public consumption!

"Hurt God" is especially ridiculous. Does he believe in God? Is God not omnipotent in Trump's theism? Did he mean hurt God's feelings?

Sunrise enigma.

It was an austere sunrise:



But right at my vantage point, I found this:



Nice performance art!

"His first self-imposed date for naming a running mate, around Aug. 1, came and went. The first week of August, another timeline he publicly floated..."

"... is nearly over, and an aide confirmed that an announcement would not happen this week. Mr. Biden has reached the final stage of his deliberations and is expected to name his choice shortly before the Democratic National Convention, which begins on Aug. 17.... This kind of approach — being openly meditative about the issue at hand, with a penchant for missing his own deadlines as he mulls his options — is in line with how Mr. Biden has made other big political choices throughout his career. Those who have worked with him over the years describe nonlinear decision-making processes with input from allies and family members, a barrage of questions from Mr. Biden, and a habit of extending deadlines in a way that leaves some Democrats anxious and annoyed, while others say it brings him to a well-considered decision, eventually.... Yet as the process has stretched out, each day has also brought intensive lobbying, uncertainty for the contenders and, increasingly, visible factions...."

From "Why Joe Biden Keeps Missing His Own V.P. Deadlines/On issues big and small, Joseph R. Biden Jr. will not be rushed, including the critical choice of a running mate. He’s deliberative, and he doesn’t mind extending his timetable — again and again" (NYT).

Did that article answer the question why Biden keeps missing his own deadlines? Nonlinear decision-making processes?? Isn't the answer really more about how he limited his range of choices by promising to pick a woman and then got overtaken by events that made it seem as though he had to pick a black woman and now he has no good choice? I wouldn't call that nonlinear. I'd call that disastrously linear!

By the way, there's no difference between "decision-making" and "decision-making processes," so "nonlinear decision-making processes" really set off my bullshit detector.

"Crunchy candy bar since 1930 – I’m a candy enthusiast and I’ve never even heard of a Zagnut bar."

"But," writes CrossBoss, about today's NYT crossword, "I did enjoy watching this commercial."

"Faizel Khan was being told by the news media and his own mayor that the protests in his hometown were peaceful, with 'a block party atmosphere.'"

"But that was not what he saw through the windows of his Seattle coffee shop. He saw encampments overtaking the sidewalks. He saw roving bands of masked protesters smashing windows and looting. Young white men wielding guns would harangue customers as well as Mr. Khan, a gay man of Middle Eastern descent who moved here from Texas so he could more comfortably be out. To get into his coffee shop, he sometimes had to seek the permission of self-appointed armed guards to cross a border they had erected. 'They barricaded us all in here,' Mr. Khan said. 'And they were sitting in lawn chairs with guns.' For 23 days in June, about six blocks in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood were claimed by left-wing demonstrators and declared police-free.... On Capitol Hill, business crashed as the Seattle police refused to respond to calls to the area. Officers did not retake the region until July 1, after four shootings, including two fatal ones.... Much of the violence [business owners] saw and the intimidation of their patrons came from a group these business owners identified as antifa, which they distinguished from the Black Lives Matter movement. 'The idea of taking up the Black movement and turning it into a white occupation, it’s white privilege in its finest definition,' Mr. Khan said. 'And that’s what they did."

From "Abolish the Police? Those Who Survived the Chaos in Seattle Aren’t So Sure/What is it like when a city abandons a neighborhood and the police vanish? Business owners describe a harrowing experience of calling for help and being left all alone" (NYT).

The top-rated comment over there — by a lot — is:

This is pretty amazing because I certainly don't recall the NYT reporting on the chaos while it was occurring. The NYT reports made it sound like Seattle was having a block party when in fact the opposite was true. I saw some reports of the chaos on Facebook, but figured it was just right wing propaganda. I guess I'll have to get serious about getting the truth from many news sources going forward. It's naive to think that news reporting is not influenced by political agendas of those reporting it. I'm liberal, but I still like to know the truth even if it flies in the face of my beliefs and forces me to rethink them rationally.

2 highly rated responses to that comment:

This morning at sunrise — the first bit of fall color.

"Hello. I am Mark Zuckerberg. I am a human. Just like you."

I like this cartoon.