At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk all night.

The "No Kings" rally in Madison was very mellow. Lots of homemade signs and costumes. People milling and lolling about in the sunshine and shade.

This afternoon in Madison, Wisconsin, we've got the Wisconsin/Ohio State football game and the big "No Kings" rally.

Am I worried about the chaos? Here's a helpful chart:

In short, it's a big Saturday, but a normal Saturday. A protest at the Capitol and a big football game at Camp Randall. The crowds should flow in and back out as crowds have ebbed and flowed from the isthmus from the beginning of football.

UPDATE, the next day: I'm seeing estimates that 10,000 to 15,000 attended, so that was much more than the "expected crowd" Grok put on the chart I asked it to make. The crowd was very peaceful. Reminding me of the Tea Party gatherings of yore. No one got arrested. I didn't see any hecklers or counter-protesters. There also weren't traffic problems. We easily drove downtown and parked in a parking structure a couple blocks from the Capitol. 

"Enough blood has been shed, with property lines being defined by War and Guts. They should stop where they are."

Said President Trump, quoted in "Trump urges armistice at current battle lines in Ukraine after Zelensky meeting/The president said he wants both sides to stop where they are. Zelensky signaled openness to such a ceasefire as a starting point to talks" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Zelensky came to Washington seeking long-range U.S. missiles that could strike Moscow and beyond. Trump sounded receptive to the proposal earlier this week after a series of calls with the Ukrainian leader. His tone changed after speaking with Putin on Thursday....

“I would much rather have them not need Tomahawks. I would much rather have the war be over,” Trump said before a private lunch....

"Guys. No one believes you on here."

The White House joins Bluesky. 

The results are predictable:

Scroll here to see more of how Bluesky receives the White House.

Here's how AP reports it: "White House joins Bluesky and immediately trolls Trump opponents." That's fair, because...

The first post included mentions of the administration’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico, a doctored image of Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries adorned in a sombrero with a faux mustache, and stream of photos and video from other big moments in the early going of Trump’s second term.

“What’s up, Bluesky?” the White House said in a message accompanying the video. ”We thought you might’ve missed some of our greatest hits, so we put this together for you. Can’t wait to spend more quality time together!”

Here's that first post:

What's up, Bluesky? We thought you might've missed some of our greatest hits, so we put this together for you. Can't wait to spend more quality time together! ❤️🇺🇸

[image or embed]

— The White House (@whitehouse-47.bsky.social) October 17, 2025 at 4:21 PM

Sunrise — 7:07, 7:08.

Write about whatever you like in the comments.

"[Maduro] has offered everything. He's offered everything. You're right. You know why? Because he doesn't want to fuck around with the United States."

FAFO. pic.twitter.com/Zh9v18ynzy

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) October 17, 2025

A Lincoln sunrise.

Write what you want! 

"If you can’t bear to leave them where they are, get the kids to kick them into a corner, stick them in a pile, let the hedgehogs and earthworms use them."

From "Should you sweep up leaves? Gardeners say no — here’s why/Experts say leaving fallen leaves in your garden could be the simplest act of conservation by providing food for worms and shelter for hedgehogs" (London Times).

By "sweep," I think they just mean rake. When we Americans say "sweep," we picture a broom.

Speaking of brooms.... have you ever heard of "The Broom of Destruction"? Here, it's in Isaiah 14:22-23:

‘I will rise up against them,’ declares the Lord Almighty. ‘I will wipe out Babylon’s name and survivors, her offspring and descendants,’ declares the Lord. ‘I will turn her into a place for owls and into swampland; I will sweep her with the broom of destruction,’ declares the Lord Almighty.

"Sparked by a 2022 Twitter commenter who asserted that 'Yeah, Anne Frank had white privilege,' it reimagines Anne as 'Anita' — a pansexual Latina hiding from the Nazis..."

"... in a radically inclusive attic with her militant black mother, her neurodiverse father and assorted other disordered personalities.... For Peter, Anita’s love interest, the real challenge isn’t evading the Nazis; it’s daring to live your authentic self. Before coming out as non-binary, he laments to Anita: 'Outside, they’re fighting a war, but in here, I’m fighting expectations!'.... [T]he show’s real target isn’t Jews (or Nazis, for that matter) but the performative politics that have come to infect so much of cultural life...."

From "Inside Slam Frank — the ‘offensive’ Holocaust musical that could save Broadway/A show has turned the tragedy of Anne Frank into an ‘inclusive’ commentary on wokeness. And New York City audiences can’t get enough" (London Times).

And here's the review at Forward: "The new Anne Frank musical wants you to laugh at ‘woke culture’ — but is it funny? In ‘Slam Frank,’ it’s hard to tell who’s in on the joke and who is just…in it":

"After Racist Texts, New York G.O.P. Is Set to Disband Young Republicans."

The NYT reports.

The planned vote comes days after Politico disclosed how leaders of Young Republican groups across the country exchanged messages that included racist and antisemitic comments, with some participants’ discourse including comments about raping their political enemies and placing them in gas chambers.... One state Republican official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the effort to disband the group, which was first reported by Newsday, would allow for a fresh start. By eliminating the group’s charter, the official said, Republican officials can reconstitute it and then bring in new leadership.

Good! 

"Mamdani’s artist wife skips mayoral debate to teach ceramics class in trendy Brooklyn bistro."

I love that headline... in the NY Post.

The $95-a-ticket workshop began at 5 p.m. and ended at 7:30 p.m. — a half hour after Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa took to the debate stage.... The workshop was set to focus on “fruit iconography with damascene tile design,” where participants would design their “own ceramic tiles to take home”....

Rama Duwaji was scheduled to teach people who'd paid $95 for the experience and to take home a tile on which they'd painted some fruit. Sounds like a children's birthday party idea, but okay. She has a life of her own. She's not just some little woman sitting there, gazing at her man from the audience.

ADDED: I don't want to seem to belittle Damascene tiles, so here you can see a tile panel from the Metropolitan Museum collection, made in the Ottoman province of Syria, 16th/17th century.

"In Iran, gay men and lesbians can be punished by public flogging and the death penalty."

"As a result, the United Nations Human Rights Council found, many gay and lesbian Iranians who are not trans are 'pressured into undergoing gender reassignment surgery without their free consent.'... Sam, 32, a trans man from Orange County, Calif., is currently in Tehran to pursue a hysterectomy and metoidioplasty, a kind of penis-construction surgery. Requesting anonymity to discuss a sensitive medical procedure, he said he was drawn to Iran because he believed the doctors there were 'more confident' than those in the United States.... Iran’s experience with transition surgery stems from a fatwa issued in the 1980s by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founding supreme leader of the Islamic republic, who declared that transgender individuals could gain legal recognition of the gender with which they identified, but only on the condition that they underwent transition surgery."

From "Iran Lures Transgender Foreigners for Surgery but Forces Operations on Locals/Iran became a pioneer in gender transition operations by forcing procedures on L.G.B.T.Q. Iranians. Desperate for cash, the Islamic republic is hoping to attract trans patients from around the world" (NYT)(free-access link).

Sunrise — 6:53, 7:03, 7:12, 7:22, 7:35.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

Meade photographs the lampposts of Madison, Wisconsin.

"But my goal was to push the justice on... whether her preferred legal theory, originalism, can bend and flex in response to prudential and political concerns."

"[Amy Coney] Barrett believes strongly that it shouldn’t, that justices should rule without worrying about public opinion or who happens to be in the White House. But I tend to think real-world politics constantly tests and limits that ideal. So in our conversation, I’m trying to find those limits and the ways in which even justices devoted to the original meaning of the Constitution have to deal with the highly unusual pressures of right now."

Writes Ross Douthat in the introduction to his podcast, which is an interview with Amy Coney Barrett — "Amy Coney Barrett Is Looking Beyond the Trump Era."

I'll let you listen to that and decide if Douthat got what he said he was pushing for. It's a well-worn road, and I was distracted by the phrase "the highly unusual pressures of right now." It made me think of "the fierce urgency of now." It's always now. Is the pressure of the now that happens to be today's now really so highly unusual? There's too much melodrama!

I began to fritter away precious time thinking of mellower alternatives to "the highly unusual pressures of right now"/"the fierce urgency of now." I thought of: The gentle nudge of somewhat later.