Sunrise — 6:58, 6:59.

"When elites pine for a third-party candidate, they usually imagine someone like Michael Bloomberg, a fiscal conservative and social liberal."

"But the sweet spot for a third-party candidate has always been slightly left of center on economics and moderate to conservative on cultural issues — and that describes Manchin better than it does most American politicians."

Writes Ross Douthat in "Should Joe Manchin Run for President?" (NYT).

"The prosecution wishes to continue this travesty in darkness. President Trump calls for sunlight."

"Every person in America, and beyond, should have the opportunity to study this case firsthand and watch as, if there is a trial, President Trump exonerates himself of these baseless and politically motivated charges."

Wrote Trump's defense attorneys, quoted in "'Travesty in darkness': Trump backs drive to televise his D.C. election subversion trial Trump, who is facing four criminal prosecutions as well as several civil lawsuits, has been trying in recent weeks to leverage those proceedings to amplify his message to voters."

"To be sure, many men are fantastic people and partners, and I’m sure many women are loathsome, creepy, or otherwise disrespectful...."

"But rather than chiding people (mostly women, mostly single moms) to get married 'for the children,' how about a little empathy that we’re living through a juncture where various forces at play have made meaningful companionship hard to find?... [W]e should listen to the experiences of women who are attempting to find partners. We should care about the interior lives, not just the educational attainment or the employment status, of the men who could be those partners.... It requires taking the stories of single women seriously, and not treating them as punchlines.... [S]imply advising people to marry is not only, frankly, obnoxious for the many women out there trying — it’s also just not going to work."

Writes Anna Louie Sussman, in "Why Aren’t More People Getting Married? Ask Women What Dating Is Like" (NYT).

Frost at 7:08 a.m.

Jordan Peterson overwhelms the NYT columnist Pamela Paul and Cruz crushes Bill Maher.

Bill does stand down amusingly.

Watch "Overtime: Sen. Ted Cruz, Jordan Peterson, Pamela Paul | Real Time with Bill Maher":

"When you’re president and you’ve done a good job and you’re popular, you don’t go after them so you can win an election."

"They’ve done indictments in order to win an election. They call it weaponization. But yeah they have done something that allows the next party, I mean if somebody, if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them, mostly they would be out of business. They’d be out. They’d be out of the election."

Said Donald Trump, quoted in a Guardian article with a title that seems to have been written by someone pretending not to understand sarcasm: "Trump suggests he would use FBI to go after political rivals if elected in 2024 Trump said: 'If I happen to be president and I see somebody doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them.'"

"Progressive belief isn’t purely an elite phenomenon, but the Great Awokening has largely wielded influence through what Nate Silver calls the 'indigo blob'..."

"... a center-left network of schools and foundations and media enterprises and human resources departments. It has not really sought power through elections — in part, I would argue, because its project is fundamentally therapeutic and educational, placing soulcraft before statecraft. But also because when it’s been tested at the ballot box, it’s been a loser.... On the right-wing populist side, you have a rather different phenomenon, a political revolution — the earthquake of Trumpism, the similar shocks in Europe — that far outruns any theory of what it’s about or what it’s doing and leaves the intelligentsia rushing to catch up...."

 
Writes Ross Douthat, in "Conservative Thinkers Didn’t Create Trumpism" (NYT).

Here's Nate Silver's piece from last July, "Twitter, Elon and the Indigo Blob/The line between expertise and politics has become increasingly blurry. The demise of 'Old Twitter' could help to reverse that." ("Left-progressives, liberals, centrists, and moderate or non-MAGA conservatives all share a common argumentative space. I call this space the Indigo Blob, because it’s somewhere between left-wing (blue) and centrist (purple). The space largely excludes MAGA/right-wing conservatives — around 30 percent of the country....")

"She didn’t really like doing certain things.... She appeared to find it cringey the way Jill Biden always seemed to be hanging around Joe..."

"... once telling [Stephanie Grisham, her former chief of staff] that she didn’t need to 'hold her husband up' the same way. Being silent was 'Melania’s armor,' [her friend Stephanie] Winston Wolkoff said. 'It was a way to protect her by not letting anyone fully know who she is,' she said, adding that she and Melania had an 'ongoing pre-approved list' of words to describe her, such as 'confident' 'strong' and 'independent.' 'We discussed how her intentional lack of communication with the media would keep everyone guessing and ultimately maintain the narrative of being mysterious and an enigma,' she said. ... In a recent interview with Megyn Kelly, Trump stuck to the script when asked about Melania’s whereabouts, saying: 'I think part of the beauty is that mystery.'... Trump listens when Melania offers suggestions.... She has, for example, suggested he stop making fun of transgender athletes and refrain from his goofy arm-based dancing he often features onstage. He hasn’t stopped either. 'She said, "Darling, I love you, I love you, but this is not presidential,"' Trump told a crowd recently in Sioux City, Iowa, before later announcing: 'The country’s going to hell in a handbasket. Let’s do a little dancing."'"

From "Where’s Melania? The former first lady isn’t too hard to find. So why does it feel like she’s hiding?" (WaPo).

Sunrise — 6:39, 6:42, 6:43, 6:46.

"I’m just saying he has a path to victory. As the former Obama adviser David Axelrod has been saying, Biden has to make this a comparison election..."

"... him versus Trump. And I’d add that he has to make this a prosaic election. It’s not which of these two men do you dislike least, it’s which set of goods do you want to buy: low prescription drug prices or higher ones, some student debt forgiveness or none, abundant infrastructure jobs or few? If Biden can make this about concrete benefits to everyday Americans, I suspect he’ll be fine."

Writes David Brooks, in "Democrats: You Can Chill Out Now!" (NYT).

"With West Virginia off the Senate chessboard next year, Democrats must win every race they are defending — and depend on President Biden to win the White House..."

".... in order to maintain a majority.... With no competitive race [in West Virginia] in 2024, both parties will have tens of millions of dollars to spend on a second tier of battleground races. Last year, candidates, parties and outside groups spent more than $1.3 billion on 36 Senate races, including $737 million in just five states — Arizona, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — that are also on the ballot again next year. 'I think Wisconsin and Michigan are about to get a bunch of Republican money they weren’t going to get otherwise,' said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist who has worked on Senate races.... There is no top-flight Republican challenging Senator Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, but the party has been pushing for Eric Hovde, a businessman who ran for Senate in 2012....."

 
I'm reading "With Manchin Out, Democrats’ Path to Holding the Senate Is Narrow/While the party will be on defense in every competitive race, Republicans face some messy primaries and a recent history of nominating extreme candidates who have lost key contests" (NYT).

"One of the first questions men ask Angela Liu on dating apps is 'What are you reading?' The question is a softball for Ms. Liu..."

"... a self-proclaimed lover of literature. 'I really care about the human condition and emotions and stuff,' she said. What she has noticed, however, is that many men aren’t into those kinds of books, and a question that may have been intended to screen her often ends up backfiring. 'I can’t stand dudes who just read self-help books or things specifically related to the job that they’re doing and that’s all they read,' Ms. Liu, 27, said on Friday at a book club for singles in Manhattan."

From "Is Reading the Hottest Thing You Can Do as a Single Person? Pop culture has conditioned us to believe that a meet-cute that doesn’t happen in a bookstore is hardly worth having. But is being an avid reader truly essential to romance?" (NYT).

By the way, what are you reading? Is it some self-help or job-specific crap or something that shows you care about emotions and stuff?

Me, I'm reading "The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century" (Amazon Associates link). Excerpt:

Racial sensitivities spell an end to the long history of the political cartoon.

Have you been following the controversy over The Washington Post taking down one cartoon that had appeared on its editorial page?

The excellent cartoonist Michael Ramirez depicted a particular Hamas spokesman — with children and a woman strapped to his body — saying "How dare Israel attack civilians."*

Though this is a caricature of specific person, many readers perceived it as a stereotype of an Arab man or worried that other people would see it as a stereotype and that it might stir up race-based feelings of disgust or hatred. 

"So here’s my question, if as the Republicans claim DOJ is weaponized against republicans, how in the heck did this Democrat get prosecuted? Just asking republicans?"

The top-rated comment at The Washington Post, on "Ex-Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby guilty in federal perjury trial."

Baltimore’s former top prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, was convicted of two counts of perjury Thursday after she had been accused of lying about her finances to withdraw money from her city retirement account under a program designed to help people struggling financially during the coronavirus pandemic...

Prosecutors said she falsely claimed to suffer from financial hardships to access $90,000 from retirement funds that she later used to buy two homes in Florida....
The trial centered in large part on Mosby’s travel business, Mahogany Elite Travel....

"In Haley’s eyes, everyone else was a squish...."

"What advice, she was asked, would she give Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in his war with Hamas? She said that she had already offered it to him: 'Finish them. Finish them.' This wasn’t exactly a surgical performance. Haley is a bludgeon. She is a practiced enough politician that she will often begin with some statement of empathy—'as the wife of a combat veteran'; 'as a mom'—but she is often quickly on the attack. ... Haley’s martial posture was so constant and omnidirectional that it somewhat masked the fact that she is fighting for things (a straightforwardly neoconservative approach overseas, gestures toward entitlement cuts) that Republicans in the Trump era were supposed to have set aside.... Politically, Haley is a loner—that has always been one of her limitations.... She doesn’t really belong to the Christian right or the libertarian extreme, but she isn’t a moderate, either. When I’ve seen her on the trail, she has tended to leave audiences cold—who, they seem to wonder, is this all for?..."

Writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells, in "Nikki Haley Takes On the Scum at the Third Republican Debate/Donald Trump has dominated the primary season, but his former U.N. Ambassador is the best debater in the field—and she would probably be the G.O.P.’s most effective candidate against Joe Biden" (The New Yorker).