April 27, 2024
"The 'money shot' of food being inserted into mouth, usually to a soundtrack of proto-sexual groans..."
From "The Mixed Martial Artist Who Became the King of Tidy Eating/Rapturously messy food reviews are all over the internet. Keith Lee’s discreet eating style rises above them all" (NYT)(free access link, so you can learn about this man who is getting a NYT article about his fastidiousness and see more descriptions of on-camera sloppy eating).
"He... compared Zionists to white supremacists and Nazis. 'These are all the same people' he said."
From "Columbia Bars Student Protester Who Said ‘Zionists Don’t Deserve to Live'/After video surfaced on social media, the student, Khymani James, said on Friday that his comments were wrong" (NYT).
April 26, 2024
"Concern for posture, as a matter of etiquette, has been around since the Enlightenment, if not earlier, but poor posture did not become a scientific and medical obsession..."
From "Beth Linker Is Turning Good Posture on Its Head/A historian and sociologist of science re-examines the 'posture panic' of the last century. You’ll want to sit down for this" (NYT).
"Biden, asked if he’s planning to debate Trump, says 'I am happy to'" — asked by Howard Stern.
Mr. Biden’s announcement, made in response to a question from the radio host Howard Stern, comes after pressure from television networks and Mr. Trump’s campaign for the president to agree to participate in debates.
Hey, I'm surprised he submitted to an interview... and irked and amused that the interviewer his people chose was Howard Stern.
When Mr. Stern asked Mr. Biden if he would debate Mr. Trump, the president replied: “I am, somewhere, I don’t know when, but I am happy to debate him.”
That should be his motto: "I am, somewhere, I don’t know when, but I am happy."
Mr. Biden’s remarks appeared to be off the cuff, rather than a planned announcement of a shift in his campaign’s strategy, according to a top Democratic official familiar with its thinking...
Oh? Let's see how they weasel out of it. It was a gaffe, right? Somehow it will be impossible to get the conditions right.
"What Harvey Weinstein’s Overturned Conviction Means for Donald Trump’s Trial."
A good title. It's something I was trying to parse on my own yesterday.
The article is at The New Yorker, written by Ronan Farrow. Subheadline: "The legal issue behind Weinstein’s successful appeal is also at the heart of the former President’s hush-money case." The subheadline in my head was: Big man brought down by sex. Or should it be: Pile everything together and the monster will be visible?
Consider this: Farrow's book about Weinstein was called "Catch and Kill" (commission earned), and in Trump's trial, David Pecker has been testifying about the National Enquirer’s "catch and kill" scheme.
From a CBS News story about Trump's lawyer's cross-examination of Pecker:
Pecker said he first gave Trump a heads up about a story in 1998.... [Trump's lawyer Emil] Bove had Pecker walk through negative stories that he had killed about other figures, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tiger Woods.
"The days when Democrats could get away with thinking of Hispanics as one of 'their' minority groups are, or should be, over."
In terms of voting intentions, Biden leads by just one point among working-class Hispanics but by 39 points among their college-educated counterparts. Interestingly, this 38-point reverse class gap is actually larger than the class gap in this poll among whites (30 points).... And here’s something that should concentrate their mind when considering the working-class Hispanics problem and how seriously to take it. The simple fact of the matter is that there are far, far more working-class than college-educated Hispanics. According to States of Change data, Hispanic eligible voters nationwide are 78 percent working class. And working-class levels among Latinos are even higher in critical states like Arizona (82 percent) and Nevada (85 percent).
I'm giving this post my "Biden's racial nightmare" tag, though I can't remember what made me invent that tag and will need to publish this post and click on it to find out.
UPDATE, right after posting: I now see why I created the tag. It's a pretty different topic, but I want to go back into it. It was August 13, 2020:
"If it is felony 'election interference' for a candidate to try to keep private the details of a seamy relationship, what other candidate concealments — of a lawful and entirely personal nature — must be reported?"
Writes Kimberley A. Strassel, in "Alvin Bragg and Democrats' 'Election Interference'/His theory in New York state’s Trump case is crazier than you think" (Wall Street Journal).
Dear Dan Rather: Are you trying to allude to a Beatles title?
Pardon me for fussing over a headline when the country is collapsing into chaos.
"Who is going to buy TikTok?"
At the heart of the government’s case... is that TikTok is the beating heart of a social-media industrial complex that mines our data and uses them to manipulate our behavior....why, if the government believes this is true, should anyone have access to these tools?...
One analysis of TikTok’s U.S. market values the app at $100 billion—a sum that rather quickly narrows down the field of buyers....
[A]s we’ve seen from Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, putting the fate of a social-media platform into the hands of a few highly motivated individuals can quickly turn into a nightmare.
April 25, 2024
6 quotes from today's oral argument in Trump v. United States.
The implications of the Court's decision here extend far beyond the facts of this case. Could President George W. Bush have been sent to prison for... allegedly lying to Congress to induce war in Iraq? Could President Obama be charged with murder for killing U.S. citizens abroad by drone strike? Could President Biden someday be charged with unlawfully inducing immigrants to enter the country illegally for his border policies?
So what about President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to intern Japanese Americans during World War II? Couldn't that have been charged under 18 U.S.C. 241, conspiracy against civil rights?
3. Justice Gorsuch makes a brilliant suggestion. If Presidents didn't have immunity from prosecution, they could give themselves the equivalent by pardoning themselves on the way out. And note the reminder that Obama could be on the hook for those drone strike murders:
Listen to the live oral argument in Trump's immunity case.
ADDED: I've listened to the whole argument and have notes, but I need the transcript to write the things I have in mind, so please carry on the discussion without me.
AND: Here's what Adam Liptak wrote in the NYT:
"New York’s highest court on Thursday overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crime charges.""
The NYT reports. Free access link.
In a 4-3 decision, the New York Court of Appeals found that the trial judge who presided over Mr. Weinstein’s case had made a crucial mistake, allowing prosecutors to call as witnesses a series of women who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them — but whose accusations were not part of the charges against him.
Citing that decision and others it identified as errors, the appeals court determined that Mr. Weinstein... had not received a fair trial....
Now it will be up to the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg — already in the midst of a trial against former President Donald J. Trump — to decide whether to seek a retrial of Mr. Weinstein....
If he is not retried, he still faces a 16-year sentence in California, where he was convicted of rape.
Here's the opinion. Excerpt:
"[T]ensions between the White House and the [New York] Times... had been bubbling beneath the surface for at least the last five years."
Writes Eli Stokols, in "Inside the NYT-White House Feud" (Politico).