At the Saturday Night Café…

 … you can talk about whatever you want. 

"At the Pentagon, staffers often share the meme of Homer Simpson backing into a hedge and disappearing from view to characterize their boss’s aversion to any limelight."

"But that reticence, [Lloyd] Austin’s backers say, reflects decades of cultural challenges for a Black man who has succeeded in the military by learning not to showcase too much of himself.... It has been more than a year since he appeared in the Pentagon briefing room to talk to reporters, and he usually avoids reporters who travel with him on his plane trips. Ditto for much of his staff; when traveling, he prefers to dine alone in his hotel room when he doesn’t have a scheduled engagement with a foreign counterpart. He does not like to schmooze or engage in lubricating political relationships.... He rarely bothers to defend himself to political critics.... 'We have now politicized a deeply personal and private issue in a deeply personal and private man,' Adm. Mike Mullen, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said in an interview. 'We should move on.'..."

Writes Helene Cooper, in "Lloyd Austin Confronts the Perils of Being a Private Man in a Public Job/President Biden said his defense secretary made an error in judgment in not keeping the White House informed of his hospitalization. But keeping a low profile has long defined the Pentagon chief" (WaPo).

"I firmly believe that by the time a person, man or woman, is 19, 20, 21, they know what they’re going to do with their life."

"And if you’re on that path and things are being done to your satisfaction, it’s easy to keep going to look for the next goal."

Said Ken Fritz, quoted in "He spent his life building a $1 million stereo. The real cost was unfathomable. Ken Fritz turned his home into an audiophile’s dream — the world’s greatest hi-fi. What would it mean in the end?" (WaPo).

"The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether an Oregon city can enforce its ban on public camping against homeless people...."

"San Francisco, which spent over $672 million during the last fiscal year to provide shelter and housing to people experiencing homelessness, told the justices in a 'friend of the court' brief that its inability to enforce its own laws 'has made it more difficult to provide services' to those people.... [In a 2018 case, the 9th Circuit] held that punishing homeless people for public camping would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment if they did not have access to shelter elsewhere. The court of appeals reasoned that, just as the city could not punish someone for their status – being homeless – it also could not punish them for conduct 'that is an unavoidable consequence of being homeless.'"

Writes Amy Howe, at SCOTUSblog.

Here's the 9th Circuit opinion: Johnson v. City of Grants Pass.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board quickly responded with "Is There a Constitutional Right to Vagrancy?":

When Obama won the Iowa caucuses in 2008 — "It felt then as if we were embracing modernity and inclusion, moving away from the image of John Wayne’s America."

"How could we have gone from such a hopeful moment to such a discordant one? Of course, every time there’s a movement, there’s a countermovement, where people feel that their place in the world is threatened.... Trump has played on that resentment.... Trump is a master at exploiting voters’ fears. I’m puzzled about why his devoted fans don’t mind his mean streak. He can gleefully, cruelly, brazenly make fun of disabilities in a way that had never been done in politics — President Biden’s stutter, John McCain’s injuries from being tortured, a Times reporter’s disability — and loyal Trump fans laugh. He calls Haley 'Birdbrain.'... Obama’s triumph in Iowa was about having faith in humanity. If Trump wins here, it will be about tearing down faith in humanity...."

Writes Maureen Dowd in her column this week, "Here Comes Trump, the Abominable Snowman" (NYT).

To repeat the question: "How could we have gone from such a hopeful moment to such a discordant one?" Does Dowd really believe it's all Trump's fault? Couldn't Obama himself have used his presidency more effectively and built American optimism? He promised hope, but why didn't he deliver more of it? Why did we end the Obama years with so much division and strife? Dowd puts no responsibility on Obama. It's all about the reactionaries — the countermovement that automatically follows any movement. It happens "every time." Dowd chooses to portray the American people as a machine, behaving mechanically — and perversely. And yet somehow it is Trump who is devoted to "tearing down faith in humanity." 

"On the Ballot in Iowa: Fear. Anxiety. Hopelessness."

A NYT article.

I'm linking if only to marvel at the photograph at the top of the page. The faces! Caption: "Vivek Ramaswamy spoke to voters at a town-hall meeting at Wellman’s Pub and Rooftop in Des Moines. Credit... Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times." 

The  article, by Lisa Lerer, is subtitled, "As Monday’s caucuses approach, voters casually throw around the prospect of World War III and civil unrest, anxious of divisions they fear are tearing the country apart."

Key concept: Anxiety.

Four years ago, voters worried about a spiraling pandemic, economic uncertainty and national protests. Now, in the first presidential election since the siege on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, those anxieties have metastasized into a grimmer, more existential dread about the very foundations of the American experiment....

But isn't it this fearful fragility the real threat to democracy? Why do mainstream media stoke despair and anxiety? Why don't they — why don't we — build our resiliency and optimism?

Today is my 73rd birthday, but, more importantly, 2 days from now is the 20th anniversary of the beginning of this blog.

That's a huge milestone! Is there anything I can do to mark the occasion? There are more than 71 thousand posts on this blog, quite evenly spread out over the years and days. It's not as though I can make a top 20 best posts list. 

Do I even have a favorite post from all these years? I used to say my favorite post — the post that exemplifies what I most hope will happen when I set out on a new post — was "Tattoos remind you of death." But that's from back in 2005. Surely, something in the succeeding years topped that.

I was just talking to my son John, and he urged me to include the post about "the Washington Post guy with the mustache." My post, from 2006, is here: "Of oversized things, MSM, and the internet."

John — wishing me a happy 10th bloggiversary (in 2014) — declared that it represented the "essence" of this blog.

So that gave me the idea to ask you, my dear readers, if you have some post — in there among the 71,000+ posts — that represents what you think is the best (or the essence) of this blog? I would like to learn something about what you think is the reason for doing this.

You don't have to like what you imagine is what I most want to do. Maybe you groan when I veer into tattoos-remind-you-of-death territory and wish I could give more clear answers about who should win the next election and how the Supreme Court should decide this or that case. That's okay. I'm just soliciting material for a blog post I feel I ought to write when we get to that milestone.

"We’re not interested in a war with Yemen. We’re not interested in a conflict of any kind."

"In fact everything the president has been doing has been trying to prevent any escalation of conflict, including the strikes last night."

Said John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, quoted in "The Regional War No One Wanted Is Here. How Wide Will It Get? With the U.S.-led attacks in Yemen, there is no longer a question of whether the Israel-Hamas war will escalate into a wider conflict. The question is whether it can be contained" (NYT).

I wouldn't have watched this "God Made Trump" video, but the NYT and other Trump antagonists are making it viral.

Here's the NYT article: "Iowa Pastors Say Video Depicting Trump as Godly Is ‘Very Concerning’/The viral video shows the former president, in starkly religious, almost messianic tones, as the vessel of a higher power sent to save the nation."

Rand Paul: "I'm ready to make a decision on someone I cannot support. I'm announcing this morning that I'm Never Nikki."

As I look over the field, I don’t think I yet have a first choice, but I do know one thing: count me in as #NeverNikki! pic.twitter.com/0RjbBhnwdc

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) January 12, 2024

"I don't think any informed or knowledgable libertarian or conservative should support Nikki Haley. I've seen her attitude toward our interventions overseas. I've seen her involvement in the military-industrial complex: $8 million being paid to be part of a team. But I've also seen her indicate that she thinks you should be registered to use the internet.... I think she fails to understand our Republic was founded on people like Ben Franklin, Sam Adams, Madison, John Jay, and others who posted routinely, for fear of the government... anonymously. And I think her failure to really understand that or to think that you should register through the government somehow for the internet is something that should disqualify her in the minds of all libertarian-leaning conservatives. So I'm announcing today: I'm Never Nikki."

"Donald J. Trump’s... impassioned defense during closing arguments... attacked both the New York attorney general who brought the case and the judge overseeing it...."

"[He] cast[] himself as a victim of what he claimed was their partisan crusade against him.... He took the microphone, said that he did not see how he could stick to the facts and the law when the case went beyond them and then monologued for five minutes. He attacked the judge, saying, 'You have your own agenda.' He went after Ms. James, accusing her of perpetrating 'a fraud on me.' Perhaps the most surprising feature of Mr. Trump’s closing argument was that he stopped willingly after five minutes. When the lunch break arrived, Justice Engoron asked him to finish, and Mr. Trump obliged...."

From "What to Know After Closing Arguments in Trump’s Civil Fraud Trial/A judge’s decision lies ahead, and appeals are highly likely. But this case could end Mr. Trump’s decades-long role in the New York real-estate business" (NYT).

The NYT writers find it "surprising" that Trump — who disrespects the Attorney General and the judge — respects lunchtime.

This part of the article makes me think it's clear what the judge is going to do:

"What explains the disjunction between the remote figure in the photos and the loving grandmother who once harvested onions?"

"Was it just the Trump family attempt at privacy? Or was it too hard for the media to make sense of a grandmother who seemed to prefer Manolos to fuzzy slippers?... Now, with her passing, we are learning more about Mrs. Knavs, and can connect the dots from her hardscrabble beginnings in a former Soviet bloc country to her recent life in Palm Beach. Acknowledging Mrs. Knavs’s origins during her lifetime might have gone a long way toward softening Mrs. Trump’s image during her time as first lady. Instead, Mrs. Knavs was presented to us as a near clone of her daughter, a retinal after-image of Mrs. Trump’s own inscrutable glamour."

So ends "The Inscrutable Glamour of Melania Trump’s Mother In public, Amalija Knavs did not adhere to the stereotypes of an American grandmother" by Rhonda Garelick, in The New York Times.

I was surprised to see this very positive-looking presentation on the front page:

Is the article positive? We're told in the end that Amalija Knavs could have been exploited to greater political effect, and we don't even know exactly why she wasn't. There was all this great material that could have been deployed to soften Melania Trump. Maybe when Melania dies, the NYT will discover material that could have been used to soften her.

The unexamined premise is that women are supposed to be soft. And that human beings are supposed to be used.

Found poetry.

I found "Incomplete Shopping List" by Siri:

"To condemn him for saying they should ‘believe’ what the scene is trying to convey, seems like nonsense."

Vincent Gallo is one of my best friends so I have to say something here. I know him to be brilliant, kind, insightful, and in the case of film making specifically, a truly professional and serious artist. Even if you read the description of these complaints, to me it is clear he… https://t.co/td4ZlTnXFz

— Seán Ono Lennon (@seanonolennon) January 12, 2024

From the Rolling Stone article:

At the Turnaround Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

That's yesterday's fox. Today it looked like this (in a photo by Meade):

It was nice to see the sun today, after snow again last night. Tonight, they're saying 8 to 13 more inches, with wind gusting to 35 mph. They're predicting 3 days of snow, followed by a week of very cold weather, as low as minus 13°. We stocked up on food today, with plans to make a lot of soup and pot roast and potatoes. 

Oh, and tomorrow is my birthday. I'm proud to turn 73.

"Biden’s Appeal to Black Voters Needs an Overhaul."

Writes Charles M. Blow, at the NYT.

The president’s speech [at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C.] was a chance to offer a vision for his second term, but there was hardly any vision in it. It focused on what his administration has done and not what it will do. It landed like someone coming to collect a payment for services rendered rather than to celebrate victories with a partner before mapping out future plans....