Althouse

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• Sunrise — 5:17, 5:20, 5:38.
• Here are my TikTok selections of the day. 8 of them. Let me know what you like best.
• About 20 million people watched last night's prime-time January 6th hearing.
• Judy Garland is 100.
• What kind of people...?
• At Britney Spears' wedding, Spears, Madonna, Paris Hilton, Selena Gomez, Donatella Versace, and Drew Barrymore attempt a spontaneous rendition of Madonna's hit song “Vogue.”
• "[Ivanka Trump] recalled when [Attorney General] Barr had said publicly on Dec. 1 that there was no evidence of fraud on a scale that would change the outcome of the election."
• "It was brought to the community’s attention that the Buddhist symbols were experienced differently and some individuals experienced harm from their presence on the building."
• Chris Wallace is trending on Twitter.
• Now that WaPo has fired Felicia Sonmez, it feels like a good time to start following her on Twitter.
• "I’m standing now, but I can sit, whatever. I want to be fully compliant. So whatever they want me to do, I’ll do."
• "You could go from vegetarianism to cannibalism in one fell swoop."
• "Aware of the power of the potential public attention, the [January 6th] committee brought former ABC News president James Goldston on board to assist in the presentation."
• "You will see that Donald Trump and his advisers knew that he had in fact lost the election. But despite this..."
• Sunrise — 5:14, 5:18, 5:19.
• I only have 3 TikToks today. Maybe you'll like at least one!
• "Sonmez on Friday used her Twitter account to call attention to a colleague, David Weigel, for retweeting a sexist joke."
• Sunrise — 5:23.
• "Start with the fact that Asians are the fastest-growing racial group in the country and Democrats have viewed their vote..."
• "He seems incapable of small talk or explaining his craft, instead delivering a series of observations about the slippery nature of time, the mutability of consciousness and..."
• "The House’s Jan. 6 committee is going prime-time.... But will Americans watch? Or care?"
• "A jobsworth is a person who uses the (typically minor) authority of their job in a deliberately uncooperative way, or who seemingly delights..."

Sunrise — 5:17, 5:20, 5:38. Posted: 10 Jun 2022 05:36 PM PDT Talk about anything you want in the comments.

Here are my TikTok selections of the day. 8 of them. Let me know what you like best. Posted: 10 Jun 2022 05:13 PM PDT 1. A demonstration of skill. 2. Sister Monica — an Episcopal nun — describes her mother's Southernisms. 3. He's got a message for architects. 4. The paradise that was high school in the 80s. 5. When a Gen Z person is kidnapped. 6. "If you're not in medicine: Try reading this...." 7. A straight man who just wants to wear high heels and a skirt. 8. "Hey, bear. It's okay."

About 20 million people watched last night's prime-time January 6th hearing. Posted: 10 Jun 2022 04:59 PM PDT That "pales next to presidential debates (63 million to 73 million) or this year's State of the Union address (38 million)," but "it's still much larger than the audience that would normally watch a daytime congressional hearing. And it's in the ballpark of television events like a big 'Sunday Night Football' game or the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade." That's how the NYT puts it. I wonder how many of them already agreed with the Committee's findings and how many were the target audience of people who needed convincing.

Judy Garland is 100. Posted: 10 Jun 2022 12:48 PM PDT

What kind of people...? Posted: 10 Jun 2022 01:15 PM PDT For the annals of Incomplete Questions.  ADDED: Freeman Hunt did her own search and writes, "Ha! Finally at the end there is a bit of interest in the non-fictional world":

At Britney Spears' wedding, Spears, Madonna, Paris Hilton, Selena Gomez, Donatella Versace, and Drew Barrymore attempt a spontaneous rendition of Madonna's hit song “Vogue.” Posted: 10 Jun 2022 10:20 AM PDT I found that at the NY Post, which calls it "awkward." I think they were just standing together and needing to pose, so the lyric "Don't just stand there, let's get to it/Strike a pose, there's nothing to it" worked as a comical way to get in the spirit of producing a good visual for still photography. We weren't really meant to listen. And let me say they all look great. I especially love Madonna's dress and find Drew Barrymore's giant black bag pretty funny. I'm sure it must mean something, maybe something like the polar opposite of a wedding dress. Drew is not currently married (and has 3 ex-husbands).

"[Ivanka Trump] recalled when [Attorney General] Barr had said publicly on Dec. 1 that there was no evidence of fraud on a scale that would change the outcome of the election." Posted: 10 Jun 2022 09:33 AM PDT "When asked how it impacted her, she responded, 'It affected my perspective. I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying.' The opening statement by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) presented this as Ivanka Trump effectively saying she agreed with Barr, though Trump's words in the excerpt — that Barr's opinion 'affected' her view and that she 'accepted what he was saying' — were not quite so direct. She certainly indicated that she found Barr's perspective compelling. Donald Trump said in response that his daughter was just 'trying to be respectful to Bill Barr' and didn't study the election results herself.... The clips the committee played Thursday night seemed geared toward suggesting that even Trump's own child...  knew better. But so far, the evidence is piecemeal, with Barr's testimony being the most compelling, and the committee will have to build upon it." From "How damning was the Ivanka Trump and Mark Meadows testimony? The clips of them being informed that Trump's claims were bogus are worth parsing — as are others featured by the Jan. 6 committee" by Aaron Blake (WaPo). They should be scrupulous in how they use evidence or they ruin their own credibility. This seems like a blatant example of stretching — of making the evidence fit the conclusion you want to draw.

"It was brought to the community’s attention that the Buddhist symbols were experienced differently and some individuals experienced harm from their presence on the building." Posted: 10 Jun 2022 01:18 PM PDT Said a letter from a "socially and environmentally conscious" California camp called Hidden Villa, quoted in "Bay Area Camp Suddenly Closes After Staffers Quit Over Swastika Scandal" (Daily Beast). The swastika on the property is there because a couple who once owned the place, Frank and Josephine Duveneck, spent their honeymoon in Asia in 1913, and brought back tiles with various traditional symbols, including a swastika.  The Los Altos Town Crier reported that camp director Philip James, who is Black, quit because of alleged institutional racism and also took issue with the swastikas. Camp assistant director Mimi Elias, who is a queer person of color, told the newspaper, "Every day I had to go to my place of residence and had to look at swastikas and walk beneath them." She also resigned....  "The decision to cancel Camp has been heart-wrenching and staff is still triaging care for all involved," the letter concluded....  Despite the camp's outward socially progressive ideology, some former campers and staffers believe inequality is embedded in its system. "So your statement is completely blaming the staff for the cancellation?? Take accountability for your toxic white supremacy driven organization," Alex Roth-Dunn posted on Facebook. "The problem is MUCH MUCH MUCH more than some tiles in the Duveneck house. The fact that you focus on that in the letter is laughable and all too classic," said former staff member Eve Javey.

Chris Wallace is trending on Twitter. Posted: 10 Jun 2022 06:32 AM PDT Lots of stuff like this: I'm old enough to remember when Democrats said Chris Wallace was one of the "good Republicans." There is no such thing. Democrats need to stop buddying up with every Republican that occasionally says something bad about other Republicans. https://t.co/yCsZHXc0Tz — nick (@ncknvme) June 10, 2022   Here's the piece at The Hill, with this, from 7:22 last night: "I'm kind of skeptical about what we're going to see tonight and over the next couple of weeks," Wallace said. Asked why, Wallace cited a couple of reasons, including the "hype" and "over-selling" of the committee.  "You've got Jamie Raskin, one of the members of the committee, saying 'this is going to blow the roof off the House,' you've got Adam Kinzinger saying 'It's going to change history."  He also mentioned the hiring of a former ABC executive to produce the event. "I think that's a bad look both for the committee and the mainstream media to seem that they are hand in glove with each other.".... That's about exactly how I felt about it. Let me just quote — without linking — a bunch of tweets about Chris Wallace that are part of this morning's trending of his: • Is Chris Wallace a far right conspiracy theorist now? • Chris Wallace has been enabling liars his entire career. Why stop now? • Chris Wallace angling for a job back at Fox? • A skeptical Chris Wallace means he doesn't recognize the truth....poor rat bastard.

Now that WaPo has fired Felicia Sonmez, it feels like a good time to start following her on Twitter. Posted: 10 Jun 2022 05:54 AM PDT To those bizarrely attacking me for speaking out, or snidely saying things like "Day 7" — of course I'm still speaking out. This is about systemic issues that run far deeper than a single tweet by any employee. Pushing for change takes far longer than 7 days. 15/ — Felicia Sonmez (@feliciasonmez) June 9, 2022 And here's the Vanity Fair article from 2 days ago, containing a lot of background, "'CLUSTERF--K': INSIDE THE WASHINGTON POST'S SOCIAL MEDIA MELTDOWN/A flurry of Twitter flare-ups and Slack spats involving Post journalists, along with a controversial suspension, have upended the newsroom and are presenting a major test for executive editor Sally Buzbee, who urged staff Tuesday to "be constructive and collegial'": Sonmez has a history of taking the paper to task. Last year she sued the Post and some of its highest-ranking newsroom members for temporarily preventing her from covering sexual-misconduct stories after she publicly identified herself as a sexual assault victim; the case was later dismissed.... In the past, Sonmez has had widespread support in the newsroom; hundreds of colleagues signed a letter on her behalf in 2020, after [the previous executive editor Marty] Baron suspended her for tweeting an article detailing a rape allegation against NBA legend Kobe Bryant shortly after his death. (A "newsroom revolt" is how this publication described it at the time.) Soon after the paper's guild sent that letter to management, she was reinstated.  But since then, there have been multiple instances of Sonmez calling out the paper publicly—and she has done so internally in response to a staff email as well. About two weeks ago, Gold, the National editor, sent out an email urging colleagues to "take time to assess how you are doing" and "seek help if you need to talk to someone" in the wake of the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde and the anniversary of George Floyd's murder.  "Just a reminder that I was punished after I told an editor that I had to take a walk around the block after reading a difficult story," Sonmez replied—to the entire National staff—according to emails reviewed by Vanity Fair.... On Thursday, after the initial publication of this article, Sonmez responded on Twitter: "I stand by what I wrote in that email. In 2018, I was punished after I told my editors I needed to take a walk around the block after reading a difficult story. Other colleagues have been punished for their trauma far more recently, but their stories aren't mine to tell. I'm not 'discouraging reporters at the Post from seeking help they need.' Far from it. The Washington Post's own actions are doing that. I care deeply about my colleagues, and I want this institution to provide support for all employees. Right now, the Post is a place where many of us fear our trauma will be used against us, based on the company's past actions."

"I’m standing now, but I can sit, whatever. I want to be fully compliant. So whatever they want me to do, I’ll do." Posted: 10 Jun 2022 06:36 AM PDT Said Nicholas Roske, in a 911 call, quoted in "New 911 tapes show how man accused in Kavanaugh murder plot abandoned plan/Authorities say Nicholas Roske was set to sneak into justice's home with pad-soled boots for quiet walking" (WaPo). As detailed as Roske's plans may have been, court records and newly released 911 calls also document how quickly he abandoned them. Once arriving to the home early Wednesday, Roske spotted two deputy U.S. marshals, part of Kavanaugh's security detail, standing outside a car, according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court. He walked away, turned a corner and called 911 to turn himself in....  On the 911 recordings, Roske calmly answered questions, telling the operator... "I've been having [bad thoughts] for a long time.... I'm from California. I came over here to act on them.... I just came from the airport.... I need psychiatric help."

"You could go from vegetarianism to cannibalism in one fell swoop." Posted: 10 Jun 2022 05:06 AM PDT  I wrote, here.

"Aware of the power of the potential public attention, the [January 6th] committee brought former ABC News president James Goldston on board to assist in the presentation." Posted: 10 Jun 2022 04:55 AM PDT "Did it help? It took nearly an hour into the cluttered hearing to show a clip of Trump son-in-law and close aide Jared Kushner's testimony. A video of favorite offspring Ivanka Trump saying that she 'accepted what he (Barr) was saying' about the lack of validity of the former President's election fraud claims was a ripple in the fact and data packed hearing when it could have been a tsunami.... What should have been John Dean moments revealing a cancer on the Presidency and the ravages of Trump's desires right at the top of today's presentation was instead too little, too late and, perhaps worse, likely inconsequential.... [T]he battle for hearts and minds was pretty much lost tonight before it began.... At least so far, the mixture of video segments and witness testimony unveiled no smoking gun. Leaning into history and not the immediacy, what the hearing did mainly show in its first vital hour was a stream of talking points and underwhelming clips.... [T]he audio rarely matched the video for impact, and TV is a mainly a visual medium, as any rookie reporter can tell you.... Over on Fox News... a lower third on the screen tonight read: 'Today's Hearing Is Political Theater.' The Fox hosts were right in their assessment. What they failed to state is that the hearing wasn't produced that well and may actually only harden the MAGA/GOP opposition in this year of midterm elections...." Writes Dominic Patten, in "January 6 Primetime Hearing Proves An Anemic Made-For-TV Special, 2022 Style – Commentary" (Deadline). The hearing wasn't produced that well... It was on prime time, and they brought in former ABC News president James Goldston, so it was a show. And it wasn't a good enough show, Patten says. Fox News called it "political theater." Patten doesn't seem to have a problem with that. His problem is that it wasn't good theater. They barged into prime time, preempting scheduled broadcast TV, which said to the world: It's showtime! But then it wasn't an exciting, gripping show. Do Americans still sit down in the evening and watch what's airing in real time on the networks? I don't think there's an automatic audience like that anymore. It seems like a picture of America in the 1960s or 70s.

"You will see that Donald Trump and his advisers knew that he had in fact lost the election. But despite this..." Posted: 10 Jun 2022 04:33 AM PDT "... President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to convince huge portions of the U.S. population that fraud had stolen the election."  Said Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, quoted in "'Trump Was at the Center': Jan. 6 Hearing Lays Out Case in Vivid Detail" (NYT). That seems to be the crucial question: Did Trump genuinely know he had lost the election? Then there's the idea that's built on that: a big conspiracy to take over the government. As the chair of the committee, Representative Bennie Thompson, put it: "Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy. And ultimately, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down the Capitol and subvert American democracy."

Sunrise — 5:14, 5:18, 5:19. Posted: 09 Jun 2022 06:33 PM PDT Write about anything you want in the comments.

I only have 3 TikToks today. Maybe you'll like at least one! Posted: 09 Jun 2022 06:35 PM PDT 1. Moms talk about what words you can't use in their house. 2. A man tests out the Acapella app with the Scottish folk song "Water Is Wide." 3. Human composting.

"Sonmez on Friday used her Twitter account to call attention to a colleague, David Weigel, for retweeting a sexist joke." Posted: 09 Jun 2022 06:41 PM PDT "'Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!' Sonmez tweeted in response.... Weigel apologized for the retweet and deleted it from his account. The Post subsequently suspended him without pay for a month for violating its social media policies.... In the ensuing days, Sonmez continued to use her Twitter account to focus on the incident, retweeting criticism of Weigel.... Over the weekend, Jose A. Del Real, another Post reporter, asked Sonmez to cease her criticisms, tweeting, 'Felicia, we all mess up from time to time. Engaging in repeated and targeted public harassment of a colleague is neither a good look nor is it particularly effective. It turns the language of inclusivity into clout chasing and bullying.' Del Real later tweeted that his back-and-forth with Sonmez prompted a 'barrage of online abuse directed by one person but carried out by an eager mob.' Sonmez then posted screenshots of Del Real's tweets and wrote: 'It's hard for me to understand why The Washington Post hasn't done anything about these tweets.'" From "Felicia Sonmez terminated by The Washington Post after Twitter dispute" (WaPo).

Sunrise — 5:23. Posted: 09 Jun 2022 08:04 AM PDT

"Start with the fact that Asians are the fastest-growing racial group in the country and Democrats have viewed their vote..." Posted: 09 Jun 2022 07:56 AM PDT "... as an uncomplicated and burgeoning asset for them. However, starting in 2020 there were troubling signs of attrition in Asian support for Democrats.... One problem has been that Asians are worried about public safety and leery of a Democratic party that has become associated with 'defund the police' and a soft approach to containing crime. Another has been that Asians, like Hispanics, are a constituency that does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and how it must be remade to cleanse it of intrinsic racism and white supremacy.... They are far more interested in how they and their families can get ahead in actually-existing American society. Finally... Asian voters... see [education] as the key tool for upward mobility.... But Democrats have become increasingly associated with an approach to schooling that seems anti-meritocratic, oriented away from standardized tests, gifted and talented programs and test-in elite schools.... This of course was a huge issue in San Francisco, where the School Board pushed this approach up to and including replacing the rigorous entrance test for the famed Lowell School with a lottery. That move, combined with the School Board's bizarre obsession with an 'anti-racist' school renaming project even as schools remained closed and students suffered, angered Asian parents and others so much that they took the lead in successfully recalling three of the ringleaders of this approach, a clear precursor to the current recall." Writes Ruy Teixeira, in "Time for the Democrats' Chesa Boudin Moment! If Not Now, When? If Not Him, Who?" (Substack).

"He seems incapable of small talk or explaining his craft, instead delivering a series of observations about the slippery nature of time, the mutability of consciousness and..." Posted: 09 Jun 2022 06:35 AM PDT "... the way people (and mice, apparently) fabricate their own realities. When asked how he arrived at the structure of his novel, which zigzags from the 1990s to the 1970s to the 1940s and then forward again, he replied with a koan-like commentary on the illusion of chronology: 'We settle ourselves into a grand fiction of present time. It is a fiction. Technically present time does not exist. Our sense of present time is technically impossible, because when you lift a foot from the ground, lifting it up is already past, setting it down on the ground is already future.' Herzog bristled slightly when I asked why he is drawn to stories of zealots who go to extreme lengths to pursue their obsessions — figures like Timothy Treadwell in 'Grizzly Man,' whose quest to commune with bears ended with his being mauled to death, and Lope de Aguirre, whose mission to find a lost city of gold was chronicled by Herzog in his 1972 historical drama 'Aguirre, the Wrath of God.' 'They are all family. You recognize your siblings,' he said of his subjects. 'I think none of my characters are extreme nor strange. They are dignified human beings, and they take the struggle of life as it's thrown at them.'" From "Werner Herzog's Fever Dreams/The filmmaker behind 'Grizzly Man' and 'Fitzcarraldo' makes a late-career foray into fiction with his new book, 'The Twilight World.' He feels he has finally found his medium" (NYT). The book — which you can pre-order at Amazon — comes out on the 14th. The audiobook is read by Herzog. The book is about Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who continued fighting World War II for 29 years after it ended.

"The House’s Jan. 6 committee is going prime-time.... But will Americans watch? Or care?" Posted: 09 Jun 2022 07:20 AM PDT That's from the written introduction to "Will Prime Time Undermine or Elevate the Jan. 6 Hearings?/Our panelists discuss how televising the House committee sessions could shape the long-haul defense of democracy" — the new episode of the NYT podcast "Sway." Panelists, we're told, "talk about what key moments and witnesses to watch for in the hearings and whether any revelations will, as one committee member, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, suggested, 'blow the roof off the House.'" Will Americans watch? I won't. If there's anything that blows the roof off the House — funny to use the metaphor of an explosion in the Capitol building — I'll read about it in the news. I'm not interested in pyrotechnics. I don't put up with committee hearings anymore. I'm sure the highlights will be unavoidable clips, and I'll play those when the time comes. But I won't sit still for the politicians' presentation.   Will Americans care? I care about something, but I won't care in advance and place myself in the hands of partisan Congresspeople who want to push me around until I care about it their way. ADDED: I will try to listen to this podcast... at least until I can't stand it anymore. Quite aside from the content, the sound quality is very poor, at a level that the most small-time podcaster would want to avoid. Why is the NYT putting out such low quality audio?  AND: Kara Swisher (the host) asks: "Is it good or bad that it's being produced like a TV special?" ALSO: It's a 41-minute podcast. I almost made it to 9 minutes. That's it for me.

"A jobsworth is a person who uses the (typically minor) authority of their job in a deliberately uncooperative way, or who seemingly delights..." Posted: 09 Jun 2022 04:58 AM PDT "... in acting in an obstructive or unhelpful manner. It characterizes one who upholds petty rules even at the expense of effectiveness or efficiency. 'Jobsworth' is a British colloquial word derived from the phrase 'I can't do that, it's more than my job's worth,' meaning that to do what is requested of them would be against what their job requires and would be likely to cause them to lose their job. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as 'A person in authority (esp. a minor official) who insists on adhering to rules and regulations or bureaucratic procedures even at the expense of common sense.'" Wikipedia defines "Jobsworth," a word I just learned. I encountered it in the context of a Reddit discussion of that Disney employee who intervened in a marriage proposal. (Video at the link.) Somebody commented: "What a jobsworth….karma will deal with his decision to destroy a once in a lifetime moment for that couple." The OED finds the earliest use in print in the September 1970 issue of the magazine Melody Maker: "If you are a taxi-driver, jobsworth or policeman, you will now be able to understand hippie lingo." Oh, now I desperately want to read Melody Maker's guide to hippie lingo! Of course, there are many other lists of hippie lingo, but I want one written in 1970. Here's something from 2021, informing us of the too-obvious: bread, dough, bummer, dig, downer, flow (in "go with the flow"), fry, the fuzz, grok, groove, groovy, hang-up, head, hit, heavy, the man, the establishment, mellow, primo, psychedelic, threads, trip, trippy, vibe.  And then all the phrases, like "blow your mind." Too numerous to type out here. But they left out my favorite: "Do your own thing."  That's the problem with being a jobsworth. You're quite specifically not doing your own thing. I was just rewatching the movie "The Times of Bill Cunningham," about the street fashion photographer. At one point, he says: "You see, if you don't take money, they can't tell you what to do, kid. That's the key to the whole thing. Don't touch money."

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