"He would have his operatives fan out, going house-to-house, convincing voters to let them mail completed ballots on their behalf as a public service."

"The fraudster and his minions would then take the sealed envelopes home and hold them over boiling water. 'You have to steam it to loosen the glue,' said the insider. He then would remove the real ballot, place the counterfeit ballot inside the signed certificate, and reseal the envelope. 'Five minutes per ballot tops,' said the insider. The insider said he took care not to stuff the fake ballots into just a few public mailboxes, but sprinkle them around town. That way he avoided the attention that foiled a sloppy voter-fraud operation in a Paterson, NJ city council race this year, where 900 ballots were found in just three mailboxes. 'If they had spread them in all different mailboxes, nothing would have happened,' the insider said. The tipster said sometimes postal employees are in on the scam. 'You have a postman who is a rabid anti-Trump guy and he’s working in Bedminster or some Republican stronghold … He can take those [filled-out] ballots, and knowing 95% are going to a Republican, he can just throw those in the garbage.'"

From "Confessions of a voter fraud: I was a master at fixing mail-in ballots" (NY Post).

"[A]t a virtual gathering of the National Guard Association of the United States, a group he addressed while speaking against a backdrop of American flags, with a flag pin affixed to his suit lapel," Biden asserted "I’ll never use the military as a prop."

"I promise you, as president, I’ll never put you in the middle of politics, or personal vendettas. I’ll never use the military as a prop or as a private militia to violate rights of fellow citizens. That’s not law and order. You don’t deserve that."

Quoted in "Biden, Speaking to National Guard Group, Takes Aim at Republican Criticism on Crime/The Democratic presidential nominee hit back at attacks delivered at the Republican National Convention" (NYT).

Some day, I hope there will be movies on big screens with an audience full of living breathing human beings. I hope to sit amongst the fortunate people of the future one day. I hope to gaze upon a dramatization of the 2020 campaign for President of the United States. I hope the scene described is in the movie, and the line is used verbatim. I see us all laughing quite heartily.

What a line! It's almost on the level of "Gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"



Using the military as a prop, Joe Biden said "I’ll never use the military as a prop." That's rich.

In the middle of politics, Biden promised this military group, "I’ll never put you in the middle of politics."

Expressing his personal vendetta against President Trump, Biden told the group "I’ll never put you in the middle of... personal vendettas."

"You don’t deserve that," he observed, giving them exactly what he's saying they don't deserve.

Can you guess from this NYT headline whether a person of the right shot a person of the left or a person of the left shot a person of the right?

Here's the headline this morning: "Deadly Shooting in Portland After Pro-Trump Ralliers Clash With Protesters/A caravan of supporters of President Trump drove through downtown Portland, which has seen nightly protests against police violence and racial injustice. One person was shot and killed in the conflicts that erupted."

First sentence of the article: "A man was shot and killed Saturday as a large group of supporters of President Trump traveled in a caravan through downtown Portland, Ore., which has seen nightly protests for three consecutive months." No answer yet.

Next 2 paragraphs:

The pro-Trump rally drew hundreds of trucks full of supporters into the city. At times, Trump supporters and counterprotesters clashed on the streets, with people shooting paintball guns from the beds of pickup trucks and protesters throwing objects back at them.

A video that purports to be of the shooting, taken from the far side of the street, showed a small group of people in the road outside what appears to be a parking garage. Gunfire erupts, and a man collapses in the street.

There isn't even a person holding a gun — just "Gunfire erupts." A classic example of portraying violence as if it is a disembodied entity.

Finally, in paragraph 4, we find out about the man:

The man who was shot and killed was wearing a hat with the insignia of Patriot Prayer, a far-right group based in Portland that has clashed with protesters in the past.

ADDED: Via Instapundit, you can hear in this video "Hey! Hey, we got one right here! We got a Trumper right here!" — spoken right before the 2 gunshots:

Listen closely. This was the instant of the murder in Portland.

A: "Hey! Hey, we got one right here! We got a Trumper right here!"
B: "Right here?"
<Two gunshots>pic.twitter.com/UxUGdKZ1tJ

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) August 30, 2020

"A federal judge said on Friday that there was enough evidence in Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times Company to send it to a jury trial..."

The NYT reports.

The suit, filed in June 2017, is centered on a Times editorial published that month under the headline "America’s Lethal Politics." In her complaint, Ms. Palin said the newspaper’s editorial board had wrongly and intentionally linked her to a 2011 mass shooting in which Gabrielle Giffords, a congresswoman from Arizona, was severely wounded and six people were killed...

The judge, Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan, dismissed Ms. Palin’s suit two months after it was filed, saying of the mistaken editorial: "Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not." Last year, a three-judge panel overturned that decision and reinstated the case. On Friday, weeks after lawyers for Ms. Palin and The Times made arguments at a hearing, Judge Rakoff denied a Times motion for summary judgment. In ordering the case to proceed, he said there was "sufficient evidence to allow a rational finder of fact to find actual malice by clear and convincing evidence."...

The editorial, as it was first published, argued that 'the link to political incitement was clear' in the 2011 shooting. It also suggested a connection between a map circulated by Ms. Palin’s political action committee and the shooting. The map showed 20 targeted electoral districts held by Democrats, including Ms. Giffords’s seat, under stylized cross hairs...

The disputed material had been added to the editorial by James Bennet, the editorial page editor at the time. The outcome of the case rests on whether he behaved with "actual malice," meaning that he knew what he wrote was false, or acted out of "reckless disregard" for the truth. ...

Mr. Bennet resigned from The Times in June, after the publication of an Op-Ed by Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, that called for a military response to civic unrest in American cities.

Palin needs to prove that it's clear that there was actual malice in saying that the connection between Palin and the shooting of Gifford was clear. It's clear that the connection was not clear, but for Palin to win, it needs to be clear that Bennet knew it was not clear or recklessly disregarded whether it was clear. What the trial judge said was that the question whether it was clear that Bennet knew or recklessly disregarded whether it was clear is unclear enough that a rational jury could find that it was clear.

Is that clear?!

Isn't it interesting to see Bennet in the center of things again? Here's what I wrote last June about the problem with what Cotton had written:

[Cotton wrote about] "left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes," but the NYT has not yet reported that the violent element was antifa. Its news story on June 1 had said "conservative commentators are asserting with little evidence that antifa, the far-left anti-fascism activist movement coordinates the riots and looting."

I was bothered at the time — and I'm still bothered today — that there isn't "more reporting in the NYT about who's responsible for the violence and disorder accompanying the protests." I continue to feel that the NYT is "not pursuing it or they are suppressing what they have because it impugns the left." By comparison, the Times was ridiculously eager to see a connection between a conservative — Sarah Palin — and one sudden act of violence.

Perhaps Bennet, in approving what Cotton had written, was thinking of balancing out the NYT tendency to blame conservatives for violence, which is what got the Times in trouble and made it vulnerable to Palin's lawsuit. But letting Cotton blame left-wingers for violence sparked internal dissension at the New York Times, and Bennet got booted out.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can write about anything you like.

"And I do think — the Democrats, I think, have come to understand, they somehow got on the wrong side of order."

"And they got somehow attached, even though Biden is not actually attached to it, to the idea of defunding the police. And they need to somehow make some gesture to show they understand the insecurity of the American people. The country has been through an anxious time, with the pandemic, economic turmoil. There's just this great sense of fear, of fear and a sense of unsafety, physical unsafety, from the pandemic and everything else. And somehow they have to address that. Now, a lot of law and order talk is code word for racism. There's no question about that. But I think a lot of it is not. And I think Democrats would be making a mistake if they just said, oh, you're all just a bunch of cryptoracists. I think people have legitimate concerns about expressing their opinion safely, about living safely. And so I think Biden really would do well by himself to somehow address this issue and say, no, we're for policing, we want to reform policing, but we will keep you safe. This is just an elemental issue of politics stretching back 3,000 or 4,000 years...."

Said David Brooks (on PBS Newshour last night).

They need to somehow make some gesture....

They need more than some gesture! Show some leadership. Why should they be trusted when they've been running the cities with the worst problems with crime and the police?

"Cryptoracist" is a useful word. Reminiscent of "cryptofascist" (which which is what Gore Vidal said he meant to call William F. Buckley when he called him a "crypto-Nazi"). Brooks's use of "cryptoracist" is to mock the notion that there are lots of such people out there.

The OED has an entry for "crypto" as a free-standing word: "A person who secretly belongs to or supports a particular political group; esp. a crypto-communist." There's a Churchill quote: "Pacifists or ‘cryptos’, or that breed of degenerate intellectuals."

Did you, like me, attempt to use the word "aye-aye" in today's NYT Spelling Bee puzzle?

Here is the wild aye-aye:


cc nomis-simon

Wikipedia: "The French naturalist Pierre Sonnerat was the first to use the vernacular name 'aye-aye' in 1782 when he described and illustrated the lemur... According to Sonnerat, the name 'aye-aye' was a 'cri d'exclamation & d'étonnement' (cry of exclamation and astonishment). However, American paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall noted in 1982 that the name resembles the Malagasy name 'hai hai' or 'hay hay,' which refers to the animal and is used around the island. According to Dunkel et al. (2012), the widespread use of the Malagasy name indicates that the name could not have come from Sonnerat. Another hypothesis proposed by Simons and Meyers (2001) is that it derives from 'heh heh,' which is Malagasy for 'I don't know.' If correct, then the name might have originated from Malagasy people saying 'heh heh' to avoid saying the name of a feared, magical animal.... The aye-aye is often viewed as a harbinger of evil and killed on sight. Others believe, if one points its narrowest finger at someone, they are marked for death. Some say that the appearance of an aye-aye in a village predicts the death of a villager, and the only way to prevent this is to kill it. The Sakalava people go so far as to claim aye-ayes sneak into houses through the thatched roofs and murder the sleeping occupants by using their middle finger to puncture the victim's aorta." Note the extra-long middle finger.

Here's today's Spelling Bee puzzle, with the letters Y-A-E-I-C-N-T. I'm sure "aye-aye" was rejected because the hyphen is necessary. I reached "genius" level anyway, with 16 words. (You have to use the Y, you can repeat letters, and the words must be at least 4 letters long. Extra points for getting a pangram.)

No one knows the mind of Melania.

This was so weird. #RNC2020 pic.twitter.com/YHReTl0bfT

— Dana Goldberg (@DGComedy) August 28, 2020

"AITA for kicking this girl out of my house after she mistook my UK flag for a confedrate flag? And was planning to get us fired from our jobs?"

A discussion at r/AmItheAsshole.

I notice that she is just video taping a lot, so I am like Kate can you check on your friend like whats going on? Turns out.. she thought that the UK flag we have hanging in our living room was a confederate flag. And she was getting "Evidence against us." When she found out that it wasn't everyone just acted like it was a huge joke....

Typos in the original.

"The cops involved in the shooting of Jacob Blake... were attempting to arrest him for violating a restraining order stemming from an alleged sexual assault..."

The NY Post reports.

Blake, 29, was forbidden from going to the Kenosha home of his alleged victim from the May 3 incident, and police were dispatched Sunday following a 911 call saying he was there.

I can't tell whether the woman is black. Does it matter?

The responding officers were aware he had an open warrant for felony sexual assault, according to dispatch records and the Kenosha Professional Police Association, which released a statement on the incident on Friday.

That police union statement also claimed that Blake was armed with a knife at the time of the shooting — and had put one cop in a headlock and shrugged off two Taser attempts while resisting arrest....

"Cathy was a great lady. Men were drawn to her, and she used to make me jealous. But I don’t have a bad thing to say about her."

Said Gordon Lightfoot, quoted in a NY Post item teased on the front page as "Back-up singer best known for killing John Belushi dead at 73." The more dignified headline at the link is "Cathy Smith, who injected John Belushi with fatal overdose, dies at 73."

Until Belushi’s death, Smith was known in rock music circles for singing back-up for Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, later founding members of The Band, and in the early 1970s becoming Lightfoot’s girlfriend and muse. Lightfoot wrote the #1 1974 hit “Sundown” about his tumultuous, extramarital and occasionally violent relationship with Smith, the dark lyrics masked by a lilting, bluesy melody: “[I can see her lyin' back in her satin dress/In a room where ya do what ya don't confess/]Sundown you better take care/If I find you been creepin’ ’round my back stairs.”

Smith claimed the Band song "The Weight" was about her.

"Kamala Harris has this revealing verbal tic, where she simply repeats herself over and over when she cannot construct a logical argument."

"One example was her 'It was a debate!' non-explanation of her maligning of Joe Biden's character. Same when she said 'it's a movement' and 'they're not going to stop, they're not going to stop' over and over again."

Says Wince, in the comments to the first post of the day. I'd written about an author who said that the "peaceful protesters" and the rioters are not 2 different groups — that it's one movement — and he linked to this:

FLASHBACK: As violent rioting continues across Democrat controlled cities, Kamala Harris' comments from June are striking: Protesters "should not" let up.

Does Harris believe the rioting and rampant vandalism in Kenosha should let up? pic.twitter.com/hqkLmC5nRu

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 27, 2020

And here's "It was a debate!":

If you’ve never have food poisoning, it’s roughly like this... pic.twitter.com/KEUZpvQmk9

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) August 14, 2020

Mayhem and tussling.

WaPo reports:

Some protesters who stayed in the District after the March on Washington ended Friday afternoon continued to spread their message, and elements of mayhem, around the city by temporarily shutting down major roads and tussling with police, even while rain deluged the area at nightfall.

I had a hard time reading that sentence. Why is there a comma after "message"? It caused me to read "elements of mayhem" as the subject of an independent clause, and I had to backtrack to see that "protesters" is the subject and "message" and "elements of mayhem" are what the protesters "continued to spread." The "mayhem" seems to consist only of road blockage and "tussling with police." Tussling with police?

WaPo tells us that the protesters often "received gestures of support from motorists trapped in the sudden gridlock." The gesture of support is, I believe, indistinguishable from the gesture of please don't target me and my car, so I totally believe that lots of trapped motorists were acting as though they were pleased with their predicament.

"Looting... provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be."

"And I think that's a part of it that doesn't really get talked about—that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory."

Says Vicky Osterweil, author of "In Defense of Looting," interviewed at NPR.

[A] trope that's very common is that looters and rioters are not part of the protest, and they're not part of the movement. That has to do with the history of protesters trying to appear respectable and politically legible as a movement, and not wanting to be too frightening or threatening. Another one is that looters are just acting as consumers: Why are they taking flat screen TVs instead of rice and beans?... All these tropes come down to claiming that the rioters and the looters don't know what they're doing. They're acting, you know, in a disorganized way, maybe an 'animalistic' way. But the history of the movement for liberation in America is full of looters and rioters. They've always been a part of our movement....  

I don't know if other people in "the movement" are happy to see that idea spoken aloud. I've been hearing that there are 2 groups of people — the peaceful protesters and these mysterious other people, who, I've noted, the journalists don't seem to care to identify and investigate. Osterweil is saying these are not 2 different groups. It's one movement, and it's been going on for a long time.

Osterweil says it's a Republican/right-wing myth "that the small business owner must be respected, that the small business owner creates jobs and is part of the community." She conceptualizes the small businesses as agents of oppression within the community. They're not innocent victims, unfairly targeted. So don't worry about them. In fact, as Osterweil tells it, the looting is a cogent argument — an attack on "the idea of property... the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions." In this view, it's "unjust" to have to work to make money to buy the things you need and want, because "the world is organized that way, obviously, is for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories." Looters "get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.... Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police."

That seems to present looting as street theater with a message. It makes an argument. A terrible argument. We've heard that argument in words many times over the years, and most Americans reject it. We want to work and build wealth and enjoy our lives and we want the great mutual benefits of hard work and wealth. Osterweil's looting is a switch from making the argument against property in words and to speak with actions — the destruction of property. But that doesn't make the argument more convincing! It's a nasty tantrum thrown because you can't convince people with your ideas. Ironically, fortunately, it makes the argument for the other side.

At the Stormy Sunrise Café...

... write about whatever you like.

Did you watch Trump's New Hampshire rally this evening? Strange that he went out immediately after the convention and did a rally. He was mocking Joe Biden's plan to go out campaigning 10 days from now.

That's a Type #2 sunrise, you know. Completely cloudy sky but texture to the clouds. I think it's nice.

"'This is an insult to injury,' one of Blake's uncles told media Thursday. 'He is paralyzed and can’t walk and they have him cuffed to the bed. Why?'"

"During an appearance in Kenosha on Thursday, Gov. Tony Evers said he 'couldn't imagine' why handcuffing a paralyzed man 'would be necessary.' I would hope that we would be able to find a more, a better way to help him … in recovering. That seems counterintuitive. It seems to be bad medicine."

From "Family says Jacob Blake is handcuffed to his hospital bed; has retained Racine Attorney Patrick Cafferty" (madison.com).

Here are some possibilities that I can imagine: 1. It's not true that Blake is handcuffed to the bed, 2. It's not true that Blake is fully paralyzed, 3. There's a concern that others might help Blake escape, 4. Blake is capable of doing dangerous things with the part of his body that is not paralyzed.

Also at that article, we get some additional information about Blake: "According to a criminal complaint, at around 6 a.m. on May 3, Blake entered his ex-girlfriend's home the 2800 block of 40th Street — the same block where he was shot three months later — in an attempt to retrieve his property. While there, Blake is accused of having penetrated the woman with his fingers." They should add "without consent"! That's what makes it a crime. The crime is sexual assault. In other words, rape. He deserves to be under arrest, and he resisted arrest vigorously. There is reason to feel empathy for any human being who suffers a grievous injury, but let's not forget about the seriousness of the charge of rape!

I need to read the criminal complaint.  Here (boldface added):