Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

This morning's sunrise — at 5:08, 5:26, and 5:45.

Posted: 31 May 2022 05:34 PM PDT

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Write about whatever you want in the comments.

I've selected 8 TikToks for you tonight. Let me know what you liked best.

Posted: 31 May 2022 05:40 PM PDT

"Ex-Clinton campaign lawyer Sussmann not guilty in Trump-Russia trial."

Posted: 31 May 2022 09:16 AM PDT

 The NY Post reports. 

The verdict came midway through the second day of deliberations following a two-week-long trial on a single count of making false statements to a federal agent. Prosecutors unsuccessfully sought to prove that Sussmann deliberately lied to then-FBI general counsel James Baker by claiming not to be acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and an Internet executive when the two met in 2016.

"Justice Scalia... could not have been clearer in the closing passage of Heller that 'the problem of handgun violence in this country' is serious..."

Posted: 31 May 2022 08:26 AM PDT

"... and that the Constitution leaves the government with 'a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns.' Heller merely established the constitutional baseline that the government may not disarm citizens in their homes. The opinion expressly recognized 'presumptively lawful' regulations such as 'laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,' as well as bans on carrying weapons in 'sensitive places,' like schools, and it noted with approval the 'historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of "dangerous and unusual weapons."' Heller also recognized the immense public interest in 'prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill.'... Heller [does not] prohibit giving law enforcement officers more effective tools and greater resources to disarm people who have proved themselves to be violent or mentally ill, as long as due process is observed.... Most of the obstacles to gun regulations are political and policy based, not legal; it's laws that never get enacted, rather than ones that are struck down, because of an unduly expansive reading of Heller.... As the nation enters yet another agonizing conversation about gun regulation in the wake of the Uvalde tragedy, all sides should focus on the value judgments and empirical assumptions at the heart of the policy debate, and they should take moral ownership of their positions."

Biden's in trouble, and the solution could be... Anita Dunn!

Posted: 31 May 2022 08:10 AM PDT

I'm reading "Inside a Biden White House adrift/Amid a rolling series of calamities and sinking approval ratings, the president's feeling lately is that he just can't catch a break — and that angst is rippling through his party" (NBC News):
Speculation is churning that Biden could shake up the West Wing staff, although that's not about to happen right away. Multiple people close to the White House said they've heard that chief of staff Ron Klain will depart at some point after the midterms, and one has heard him discuss leaving. Should Klain go, a potential successor is Anita Dunn, a White House adviser and Biden confidant whom he often turns to when his fortunes look bleak. Dunn began working at the White House at the start of the term, then left and returned in early May at Biden's specific request. No woman or person of color has ever been the White House chief of staff since the position was created after World War II.

Anita Dunn. What I remember about her is that in 2009, she got into trouble for quoting Chairman Mao: "You know, you fight your war, and I'll fight mine." And in 2011, it was revealed that she said that the Obama White House "actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women."

The idea that women will rescue Joe Biden is persistent and strange.

"She remains her husband’s fiercest defender—something voters glimpsed in March 2020 when she was likened to a linebacker for tackling a protester who rushed him onstage...."

Posted: 31 May 2022 07:56 AM PDT

"'I try to be a support for Joe, because I don't know how many people are saying to him, "That was great. That was brilliant." I try to be that person for him,' she says. 'Some days, I see Joe and I'm just like, "I don't know how you're doing it." It's the pandemic and then it's the war and then it's the economy and then it's the gas prices. You feel like you're being slammed.' Which is not to say that she holds back when he frustrates her. The president does not get a pass. During the Obama years, they took to hashing out their occasional spats over text to avoid fighting in front of the Secret Service. (They christened it 'fexting.') Not so long ago, she tapped out a message to him in a fit of pique. 'Joe said, "You realize that's going to go down in history. There will be a record of that."' She grins. 'I won't tell you what I called him that time.'"


Have you ever fexted?

ADDED: So they are in the same room and could talk out loud, but they don't want the Secret Service to hear it, and they just type out things? I've texted with someone who's in the same room and could be talked to. Haven't fexted though. I think if I just wanted to call my partner a "fucking idiot" — which I'm just going to assume is was Jill called Joe that time — I could do it just by thinking it and making eye contact. 

What's Elon talking about now?

Posted: 31 May 2022 07:48 AM PDT

"The Democrats lost an election they never expected to lose. They... lost to a reality TV show host when Hillary Clinton had all the backing of the establishment in the world."

Posted: 31 May 2022 05:41 AM PDT

"And instead of asking, what is it about our ideology that ruled the country for eight years, that drove people away from us into Donald Trump's arms, they instead decided they were going to blame everybody else. The Democrats simply replaced Trump with the same ideology they governed with for 8 years under Obama that caused people to run away from them as fast as they could. And now that people are doing that again, instead of asking 'why is that happening' they're getting poised to blame the electorate for being stupid -- for thinking the economy's bad when it's actually good." 

Said Glenn Greenwald, quoted at Real Clear Politics.

I remember when the incumbent President lost to a Democrat who said "It's the economy, stupid."

Now, apparently, the message is: If you think it's the economy, you're stupid.

By the way, who was getting called stupid in the 1992 Clinton slogan "It's the economy, stupid"?

It is often quoted from a televised quip by [Bill Clinton's strategist James] Carville as "It's the economy, stupid."... His phrase was directed at the campaign's workers and intended as one of three messages for them to focus on. The others were "Change vs. more of the same" and "Don't forget health care."

Was he calling the campaign workers "stupid"? It seems as though he was compelling them to focus on the economy by internalizing the taunt "Stupid!" — to be triggered if they ever stray into any other topic. It might have been heard as an insult to the President George H.W. Bush. He's so out of touch, he doesn't know the people are hurting. He's stupid. It can't be that they were calling us, the People, stupid. That wouldn't work. 

Anyway, right now, the Democrats aren't blatantly labeling us stupid. That's Greenwald's rhetoric. He's saying the Democrats are telling the People they are stupid if they think the economy is bad. So, I would add, that means the Democrats are taking the George H.W. Bush position and are vulnerable to the attack that brought down Bush: "It's the economy, stupid." 

***

In giving this post my "stupid" tag, I see an old tag I'd forgotten about: "the stupid party." I need to publish this post so I can click on it to refresh my memory of what that was about. I think it has to do with the way each party characterizes the other as the "stupid" one. Or maybe it was about how the 2 parties vie for the honor of being the "stupid" one.

At the Sunrise Café...

Posted: 30 May 2022 06:27 PM PDT

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... you can talk about whatever you want.

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"As one of the nation’s leading proponents of the insurrection hoax, Liz Cheney has pushed a grotesquely false, fabricated, hysterical partisan narrative. Look at the so-called word insurrection, January 6 – what a lot of crap."

Posted: 30 May 2022 11:12 AM PDT

Said Donald Trump, quoted in "Trump calls Capitol attack an 'insurrection hoax' as public hearings set to begin/Former president intensifies attacks on Liz Cheney at Wyoming rally and endorses her Republican primary challenger in midterm elections" (The Guardian).

I believe what he was calling a hoax was the "insurrection" characterization. That's why he said "the so-called word insurrection." Now, that's a bit inarticulate. Obviously, "insurrection" is really a word. The point is that entry into the Capitol doesn't fit the definition of an "insurrection," which isn't a surprising assertion. Trump gets back at his accusers by calling the "insurrection" characterization "a grotesquely false, fabricated, hysterical partisan narrative."

Has anyone on the Cheney side ever explained how it could be possible to think that overrunning the building could overthrow the government? I wish people on both sides would use accurate language, but of course, they won't.

"The mathematics books published by the People’s Education Press contain illustrations of people with distorted faces and bulging pants. Boys are seen grabbing girls’ skirts..."

Posted: 30 May 2022 10:57 AM PDT

and one child appears to have a leg tattoo. The books are reportedly used in elementary schools across the country, from Shandong province in the north-east to Yunnan in the south.... Some social media users came to the conclusion that the artwork was deliberately bad and provocative, noting a backwards Chinese flag in one instance and some clothing in the colour combination of the US flag... One commenter described the illustrations as 'evil' and warned of a 'worrying' future where 'the education department is infiltrated by the west, and the textbooks are manipulated by the people who have infiltrated the system.'"

From "'Tragically ugly' school textbook causes social media outcry in China/Education ministry orders publisher to rectify illustrations of children deemed inappropriate" (The Guardian).

"I’m beginning to question the idea of sex segregation in sport. We need to learn to sit with discomfort."

Posted: 30 May 2022 10:19 AM PDT

Said Anna Posbergh, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, "a former pole-vaulter who studies the mechanics of human movement and gender and athletes [who] sees notions of gender disadvantage in sports as rooted in culture and an outdated view of what women can achieve."

Quoted in "What Lia Thomas Could Mean for Women's Elite Sports/Although the number of top transgender athletes is small, the disagreements are profound, cutting to the core of the debate around gender identity and biological sex" (NYT).

What do you do with discomfort? Sit with it?

Ah! I see it's mental health jargon:
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