Self-Destruction

One of the best things about the growth of the Substack newsletter format and one of the reasons I hope for its longterm success is the way certain writers that have previously leaned heavily on the book format now produce new content in between book releases. The shorter format gives a reader a chance to appreciate something important that they have to say that might not by itself be long enough for a book but is still good to grapple with.

Recently, for example, music and culture writer Ted Gioia put out an article on his The Honest Broker Substack about Columbia Records' purge of its old-school jazz roster in the early 1970's. For someone like me who is much more of a skimmer of jazz music than a deep-sea diver like Gioia, it's a great piece of history of the music to learn. But it probably would make a very thin -- or very padded-out -- book. This way, it need not be either. For the writers, of course, it turns out better because instead of a blog post that pays nothing they can produce content that people might subscribe to and pay them for. And no, I'm not considering a Substack model. I don't need confirmation of what this blog is worth in real monetary terms; my own feelings of inadequacy confirm it just fine, thanks.

I haven't yet subscribed to any of these newsletters, although I'm considering a few. My gut tells me that the company is probably trying to work out a system whereby you could bundle some of your preferred writers at a slight discount and I'm waiting to see. I'm also waiting to see newspaper publishers see that happen and kick themselves for not coming up with that model of online content before they collapsed. But as Gioia's article makes clear, sometimes large media corporations are not nimble thinkers and they have a gift for making the wrong changes.

Color Clash

The extensive use of Zoom meetings during pandemic lockdowns made several people scramble to find good backgrounds for their video calls. One of the go-to setups was in front of bookshelves, so naturally advice began to be dispensed about how one's bookshelf should be arranged. "Non-professional" titles were banished to off-camera shelving. Some folks may even have ordered a few titles from Amazon that they didn't actually read but they figured would create a better impression if the cover caught someone's eye.

Writing at something called Lifehacker, Aisha Jordan offers what the headline calls "How to Display Your Books Like a More Sophisticated Adult." But the only advice she really offers is remove the dust jackets and sort them by color -- and as the comment section shows, that's not the way that people who actually read books put them on a shelf. A couple of other ideas, such as wall-box shelves or a suspension shelf, just seem weird or at best a little impractical.

I think I'll just leave mine where they are the way they are; if someone is nonplussed by my having all of the volumes of the Robert Jordan/Brandon Sanderson "Wheel of Time" series and a bunch of David Weber's Honor Harrington series, so be it. I can't believe anyone who's known me longer than 15 minutes doesn't know I'm a sci-fi nerdy type anyway.

Kick 'Em When They're Down

Which I guess you could say this entry does for the hapless Rob Manfred, Commissioner of Major League Baseball. The other day I made fun of his decision to move the 2021 All-Star game from Atlanta to Denver because of uproar claiming Georgia's new voting law is designed to suppress minority turnout. I suggested that it was another in a line of lunk-headed moves by the men given the authority to act "in the best interests of baseball" but who aren't alway smart enough to do so.

I didn't list Bowie Kuhn, but it turns out that Manfred will in his way follow one of Kuhn's clearest blunders. Hank Aaron started the 1974 season with 713 home runs, one shy of Babe Ruth's career record. But his Atlanta Braves started the season on the road, meaning Aaron might very well set the new mark outside his team's home field. Braves staff wanted to sit Aaron for that first series, but Kuhn ordered him to play at least two of the three games. Aaron tied the record on the road but did break it at home -- only to be given his commemorative watch by a representative from the commissioner's office, Monte Irvin. Kuhn himself wasn't at the game, citing a previous engagement.

Earlier this year, Hammerin' Hank departed this life. almost certainly bound for the celestial Hall of Fame his longtime Catholic faith promised him. Which means that this year's All-Star game could have been an occasion to celebrate one of baseball's most elegant, dignified and honorable men, who never responded with hate to the flood of racist mail drawn by his pursuit of Ruth's record. It could have been, but as commissioners of major league baseball seem to have a habit of doing, Rob Manfred thought something else was more important than honoring and respecting Hank Aaron.

On the Shoulders of Giants

Following the 1919 gambling scandal involving the Chicago White Sox, the organization of major league baseball clubs gave its office of the commissioner extreme power to act in "the best interests of baseball." At times the men occupying that office have used this near-dictatorial authority wisely, and at other times less wisely.

We have the first commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, allowing clubs to collude to prevent African-American players from appearing on major league rosters. Ford Frick, without ever using an actual asterisk, did everything else to slight Roger Maris's 61 home runs in a 162-game season compared with Babe Ruth's 60 homers in a 154-game season. Bud Selig allowed a tie in the All-Star game.

And now Rob Manfred has moved the All-Star game and the site of the Major League Baseball draft from Atlanta as a protest against a new Georgia election law. Detractors, including President Joe Biden, have said the law is designed to suppress voting, especially among minorities. The Washington Post's fact-checker gave the President its highest possible rating for saying something inaccurate, four Pinocchios. Even opponents of the law, like political activist and 2018 Georgia gubernatorial loser Stacey Abrams, didn't want companies and organizations to boycott Georgia over it because they believed job losses would cause more harm to the people on whose behalf they said they were advocating.

According to ESPN stories quoted by Hot Air columnist Ed Morrissey, Manfred will set the game in Colorado at Coors Field; home of the Colorado Rockies. Morrissey lists the many folks who took a look at Colorado's election laws and found them either similar to or more restrictive than the law Georgia just passed. To be fair, Colorado's law affects far fewer African-American persons than does Georgia's. As Morrissey notes census data shows Georgia to be 31% African-American while Colorado is 4% African-American in population.

The old saying is that we should never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence. So I would without question reject the charge that Manfred has some vendetta against Atlanta or Georgia. But since he is in a position where he can make some significantly unilateral decisions he's all the more likely to expose whichever attribute he has. And considering that his last big idea was to start extra innings in tie games with a runner already on second we can perhaps sense which one he displayed here.

On Beyond Sense

When news came out recently that Theodor Seuss Geisel's publishing company would stop printing new editions of six books that it said had potentially harmful illustrations in them, a furor arose.

A number of folks on my Facebook newsfeed linked to or quoted extensively from opinion pieces that said this was in no way nohow anything like "cancel culture." One said, "This was his own publishing house deciding to no longer print some of the titles," conveniently leaving aside that the author has been dead for more than 30 years and it is highly unlikely that anyone currently at "his own publishing house" had much of a connection with him or could be said to acting according to what his wishes would be were he alive and properly indoctrinated into woke culture today.

These same voices offered no opinion on whether or not the online retailer Ebay's announced decision to remove all copies of those same books from its listings was evidence of the "mythical 'cancel culture'" which I have read exists only in the fevered conspiracy theorist minds of conservative thinkers. My suggestion for those wishing to make some money with their copies of the offending books is to title them Mein Kampf or Protocols of the Elders of Zion or some other book that Ebay still finds acceptable but somehow secretly encode in the product description that one is actually selling McElligot's Pool.

No, not really. That would be fraud, and wrong. No one should do that.

In any event, leave it to linguist and cultural commenter John McWhorter to get at the meat of the problem with one of the illegal books, On Beyond Zebra. Seuss's exploration of the sounds that could be described with the letters of the alphabet that might come after the letter "Z" is right up McWhorter's alley and actually happens to be my favorite Seuss book as well. McWhorter highlights how specious the supposed offense is and how worthwhile the book is for children exploring the world of the alphabet and how many more sounds can be made from its letters than just a plain old 26.

Which, coincidentally, happens to be the IQ rating of the people who came up with this idea.

The Twenty-First Century Can Ruin Anything, Part MCMXVI

Thanks to an ad on Facebook, I have now seen one of the new "Looney Tunes" cartoons produced by Warner Bros. As you may have read, Elmer Fudd was divested of his shotgun in the interests of reducing gun violence in the United States. Below is a screen grab of Elmer after he has attempted to split Bugs Bunny's head with a gigantic axe in the short "Hole Lotta Trouble:"

Clearly the studio has made an important statement about the role firearms play in making our society unsafe.

Over the course of the cartoon, Bugs tricks Elmer into reaching his hand into a box of scorpions, who sting it so much it is impossible to withdraw from the rabbit hole entrance. After a couple of sight gags -- Bugs "milks" Elmer's now udder-like hand, causing him to completely deflate and then reinflates him by blowing into the hand -- the wascally wabbit paints the pathetic hunter's now ginormous floating rear end with a heavily-made up lady bear face, which draws an amorous male bear to appreciatively leer at it. Before we can do more than shudder at where a cartoon on HBO might take that narrative line, the bear hugs Elmer so hard his inflated hindquarters explode, freeing his trapped hand but shooting him so far in the air that when he returns to Earth his head is now stuck underneath the ground. Bugs then coats the hapless hunter's abused hindquarters with glue, attaches a lit stick of dynamite and then drags the soon-to-explode section of Elmer's body around the edge of the screen and underground, where he knots it to Elmer's bugging eyes until the dynamite explodes and Elmer falls through the hole to the bottom of the rabbit warren, his pants shredded and his bare reddened tuckus on display. At that point voice actor Eric Bauza utters Bugs' only words in the short, "Now that's what I call a bare bottom!" 

Almost none of the comments below the ad that I read -- about 20 of the more than 600 at the time -- rated the short as anything other than awful. A couple talked about the way that this new cartoon dishonored the original Bugs and Elmer characters. That, of course, is silly, since they were just animated characters. "Hole Lotta Trouble" doesn't dishonor them. Should Chuck Jones, Friz Freling, Mel Blanc and several other pioneers of the real Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons ever rise from the grave, though, there are a number of current Warner Bros. employees who should start running.

The 21st Century Way

Burning books is old-fashioned and messy -- and probably, in the minds of the complainers in this story, environmentally problematic. If you just threaten the stores that sell books you don't like you can have the same impact without the risk of burning yourself. Or, you know, looking like the kind of people who burn books.

Updates

-- Last week this space mocked the Food and Drug Administration for its plans to assess a $14,000 fee on small distilleries that had switched production lines to creating hand sanitizer in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Well it turns out that this blog is read by the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, because he directed the FDA to not only not collect the fee but to remove it from the Federal Register. You may say that's because he read about it in one of the mainstream media outlets that reported on this matter as well, but until you produce conclusive proof that he does not read this blog I'll say it my way and you can say it yours.

-- Last May 4 some officers of the Lethbridge Police Service in Lethbridge, Alberta Canada responded to emergency calls about a person with a weapon in front of the Coco Villa Galactic Cantina. On arrival they observed a person in white plastic clothing and a helmet obscuring their features holding a black weapon of the general size of a rifle. They immediately ordered the person to drop the weapon and get on the ground, using force only when the subject failed to immediately comply with police commands. Officers also warned people away who were attempting to interfere with the performance of their duties. The subject was handcuffed and placed in the back of a patrol car while both she and the Cantina owner were questioned, and she was released when it was determined that no crime had been committed.

That's the way that the Lethbridge Police Service would like the story told, but people who remember it know that account leaves out the fact that the white plastic clothing and helmet were a Star Wars "stormtrooper" costume and the weapon was a chunk of plastic shaped like a "blaster." And it leaves out that the woman wearing the costume was trying to get to the ground in the mobility-limiting armor when she was shoved down hard enough to get a bloody nose and that the people warned away were recording this whole textbook exercise in stupidity on their cell phones when they were threatened with arrest for doing so, and that the owner was threatened when he was yelling that the woman was his employee, dressed up for a "May the Fourth Be With You" day at the business.

The Lethbridge Police Service did not investigate its own officers' conduct -- although you'd think that admitting you were smart enough to know your officers erred and how would be the wise course of action -- but turned it over to the Medicine Hat Police Service and the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team. Those bodies, after a thorough review of the evidence that took only seven months -- two months faster than the development of a vaccine for a brand-new virus the world had never before seen in humans -- have decided that the incident warrants the filing of no criminal charges against the officers.

Which, OK. If the investigation was trying to see if the officers' errors rose to the level of felony crimes I'd have to agree. And maybe even misdemeanors are a little excessive, but you'd think there's be something that they could at least write someone a ticket for. Like maybe "Failure to recognize one of the most ubiquitous characters of one of the largest movie franchises in history on a pop culture holiday dedicated to that franchise." Or, "Failure to differentiate between inert plastic toys shaped like no known firearm because they are meant to be fictional ray guns and actual firearms." That one probably with aggravated circumstances, because it occurred in broad daylight instead of some dimly-lit alley. Perhaps, "Failure to understand that if a stiff bullet-proof vest makes moving around harder to do then a head-to-toe suit of stiff plastic might make it even more so."

But no. So now any disciplinary action will come as a result of an internal professional misconduct investigation by the Lethbridge Police Service. My personal recommendation is that all of the officers be required to do foot patrol wearing Princess Leia's metal bikini for at least one full week. That has the advantage of potentially punishing whichever Lethbridge resident called police to begin with, by making sure he or she is exposed to the sight.

Erm...

Colleges and universities are places of learning, where people go to acquire knowledge and sometimes to develop specific skills though training and education.

The people who provide this information are called, variously, professors, instructors, doctors, lecturers and so on. They share the characteristic of extended study within a field and the task of communicating some of that study to students who enroll in their classes. Outside their fields their knowledge is often no better or worse than any average person, even though some of them will claim that their expertise in, say, entomology (specifically butterflies) means their understanding of population theory merits the same deference to their policy ideas despite evidence to the contrary. In other words, colleges and universities employ as instructors people who are really smart and knowledgeable in one or two directions and more or less average in most other directions.

Outside the classroom, though, colleges and universities employ people who think that indoor balconies in a college dorm are a good idea, which would indicate that those people are dumb in every direction.

Artificial Tunage

So the Spotify music streaming service is trying to develop a system in which an Artificial Intelligence algorithm will compose music with no human input whatsoever.

I suppose that the proper way to phrase the question is something like, "Why?" or "What do they want to accomplish?" or something equally measured and polite. And avoiding the comparison jokes that imply how a significant percentage of the pop music released today seems to have no human input whatsoever either. So I'll do both.

Nah, I can't. I'll ask the question in the way I think it is best phrased: "What the hell do you want to go and do that for?"

This Will End Well

The customer-review social media platform Yelp will now allow people to call out businesses that display racist behavior. If you have questions, that's because you have more neurons than does the Yelp "User Operations Team" that decided on this new feature.

Sure, if you read the company's post at its blog you see language that says the warning will go up in order to let people know that an accusation has been made and so there might be an influx of bad reviews by people who just want to run the business down but who have never been a customer. And you see them saying that if an alert -- helpfully colored scarlet, doncha know -- is added to the page then there will be a link to a "credible news source" that reports on it.

As Kyle Smith notes at National Review, the world of social media reviewing platforms is often less than worthless. It's not just restaurants; I listen to a dozen or so podcasts regularly and they all ask you to give them five-star reviews because anything less than a 4.8 gets overlooked.

The problem is that it's not hard to create a sensational enough claim of racist treatment that it makes headlines in "credible news sources" even though it will later turn out to be false. And the removal of Yelp's scarlet R will draw a tenth of the attention that its placement did, perhaps permanently harming the business. That might be an acceptable risk if the placement of a racism warning via Yelp did anything real to advance the cause of racial equality, but no one who doesn't work for Yelp thinks that it does.

If they're going to go through with it, though, they might need a sweeping of their own house for starters.

I'm Not Sure...

Automation can produce disruption as machines and computers take over jobs that human beings used to have. But that process, while creating significant problems for the people who are put out of work by the new technology, at least has a purpose. A man named Liam Porr recently used an artificial intelligence (AI) program to write clickbait on a blog and drew quite a few hits to his computer-generated post.

Computers: Doing the jobs humans shouldn't do...

Statuesque

Public monuments should be subject to public approval. If a constituency wants to remove a statue of someone, then it more or less should probably be removed. Of course, this should be done by a ballot box and with proper re-positioning of said statue as a part of the plan. Cowardly people who don't want to push against anything that might push back and who might not even know who the statue is of do not make up a constituency.

It would probably better to add something to the statue instead of removing it, as a way of making sure the history the statue is supposed to represent and the history its placement represents are fairly explained. Many of the monuments to Confederate soldiers in different town squares went up not in the immediate aftermath of the war, but during the early part of the 20th century as a way of reinforcing the idea of Jim Crow laws and segregation. A new marker could be placed on them describing how bigotry and prejudice during those times prompted the spate of remembrances and their monuments.

So when I read that the United States Congress is weighing a bill to remove the bust of 19th century Chief Justice Roger Taney, I immediately disagreed. It's not because I like Taney. He served as Chief Justice from 1836 to 1864 and wrote, among other decisions, the horrid majority opinion in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857 that claimed that African-Americans, whether free or enslaved, had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." It was an opinion that echoed earlier rulings in which he had concurred, such as Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) that ruled states which did not permit slavery still had to honor federal fugitive slave laws.

As the first Chief Justice after the great John Marshall, Taney also had a role in shaping how the federal judiciary would operate alongside the other branches of government. He helped decide many cases on issues other than slavery that created some of the concepts of the way government law-enforcement agencies are allowed to operate. He opposed President Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, a bedrock legal principle that Lincoln tried to work around in order to arrest saboteurs and other potential Confederate sympathizers.

Be that as it may, his decision in Scott is by itself enough to make his tenure a disaster -- an associate justice actually resigned in protest. Which is exactly why his memorial bust should remain on display in the old Supreme Court chambers inside the U.S. Capitol. Our current dependence on the court to make law instead of interpreting it -- because none of those supposed to make law have time in between campaign fundraisers and talking-head appearances on cable TV news shows -- means that too often we defer to the court as though its nine members are somehow wiser than either the 545 members of the legislative branch or the one member of the executive branch. Admittedly, their intellectual superiority over certain legislators and executives can be taken as a given, because some of the first two groups are very dumb. But the courts still get it wrong. They are fallible human beings who can operate just as much from prejudgment, confirmation bias, incorrect assumptions and plain ol' political agendas as can anyone else, and they often do.

As long as a bust of Democrat Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1836 to 1864, remains on display we have a good reminder how that court can indeed get it wrong and what happens when it does.

Maybe Get a Clue, Eh?

The immediate reaction to reading about three Lethbridge, Alberta police officers knocking a woman in a Star Wars stormtrooper costume to her face on the ground is to realize they have all played goalie without wearing a helmet. But that would stop too early.

Since yesterday was May 4, the Coco Valley Galactic Cantina asked a female employee to wear the costume, which includes a plastic "blaster" replica. According to another item, the Lethbridge Police Service received more than one 911 call about a firearms complaint at the restaurant, meaning there are several residents of Lethbridge so minimally sentient that they can't tell the difference between a movie prop and a real gun. Or it's possible the police officer who claims that there were calls is not telling the truth; we'll see why that may be possible in a moment.

Three LPS officers responded, guns drawn, and ordered the woman to drop her fake gun and get on the ground. She could do the first but not the second so easily because of the costume, but did manage to get to her knees. At this time the investigative skills of the officers were able to determine that the gun was not, in fact, a gun, but they continued to order the woman to lay down on the ground, eventually shoving her down with enough force that she bloodied her nose on the inside of the helmet. The story at the second link has a photo of the blood left on the parking lot after the helmet was removed. She was handcuffed and put into the back of a patrol car, but not arrested or charged.

The officers, showing the same keen grasp they had displayed all along of how to de-escalate situations, threatened to arrest a person who recorded the incident on his cell phone. They also threatened to arrest the owner as he explained the employee was working for him and the costume restricted her movement.

Initially, their superior -- the same one who claimed "multiple 911 calls" as mentioned in the story -- said the matter "seemed" to be a misunderstanding but defended some of his officers' actions by using a lot of Canadian words that translate, "I also played hockey goalie without a helmet."

Now, as the version of the story at the first link points out, there will be a "service investigation" of the matter to see if the officers' actions were appropriate. There does not need to be any investigation. There need to be multiple summary terminations. Let the officers argue their way back into the privilege of wearing a badge. Let them demonstrate that, despite copious evidence to the contrary, they do have the judgment required to be agents of the state's monopoly on legal force. Let their supervisor argue that, despite his mealy-mouthed "she started it" speech, he is capable of actual leadership and recognizing when his people do not know their holsters from holes in the ground.

I know many law enforcement officers and I am constantly grateful for the way that thousands of them risk life and limb every day to keep people safe. I am amazed by the bravery they display on a common, sometimes everyday basis. But these three showed they do not merit the job they have and the trust placed in them. This woman could have been shot dead -- that is, after all, why the police point loaded weapons at you, because they have decided they might need to use them. Their defenders might say it wouldn't have come to that, but nothing about what they did gives me any reason to believe that.

If they do not have the judgment to recognize that they are facing a person in a movie costume after they learn the "weapon" is molded plastic and after the store owner says, "That's my employee!" then why should anyone believe they would know when they should or should not pull their triggers?

Permanent Record

We're sometimes told that true leadership shines in a crisis. The mayor of New York City is about as bright as a blade of grass, in both senses of the word "bright."

Since NYC has been dealing with the most COVID-19 infections and serious consequences, the mayor issued a shelter in place directive and prohibited gatherings of more than 10 people. He got in a last workout at the Y before it went into effect, of course, because he's tone-deaf that way.

Well, not everyone has been diligent about the emergency order -- it seems some houses of worship have continued to gather and those meetings have exceeded the 10-person limit. Quite properly, the mayor mentioned this problem during a press conference and warned that such gatherings could bring citations. He probably pushed a little too hard when he said law enforcement agencies could be called to shut the services down; threatening folks with the power of law enforcement may get them to do what you want but it will never get them to help you do what you want.

But then he went ramming speed with the stupid, saying that congregations which repeatedly violated the executive order could find their houses of worship shut down "permanently." This is just dumb whether he meant it or he was exaggerating for effect. If he meant that a repeated violation of the emergency order would actually lead to the forced shuttering and disbanding of a religious congregation then he has no understanding of the First Amendment -- either in terms of freedom of religion or freedom peaceably to assemble. The mayoralty of our nation's largest city sometimes seems to attract those whose egos can be seen from space, but none of them to this day have believed they had the authority to override the United States Constitution. That sound you heard when he said what he did was the sound of every lawyer in the country opening up a blank "new lawsuit" form on their computers and getting ready to type in the name of the first religious group so affronted.

Of course, the mayor could have been using a little hyperbole. He would not be the first New York City person holding high office these days to do so. But because everyone knows the threat is an empty one, it just makes him sound ineffective and dumb. It lessens the impact of the actions he might legitimately take and also lessens -- if this is possible -- the tendency of his people to take him seriously.

It will be a pleasure to watch Mayor DeBlasio fade into obscurity when term limits prevent him from running again. Few deserve it as much as he has shown himself to do.

Viral Insanity

One of the burdens borne by folks who live alone during our time of crisis is that one of our means of engaging with the world -- ye olde internet and its simple cousin, Social Media -- is also the source of large amounts of weapons-grade stupidity. Hence my quote of National Review writer Jim Geraghty yesterday as he observed there is a very narrow window of appropriate concern about COVID-19 and it almost precisely coincides with one's own opinion of what that concern is.

But now and again comes an opinion which you would think literally could not be held by someone able to type and form sentences. Dr. Sophie Lewis, writing for Open Democracy, suggests that the COVID-19 crisis provides us with an opportunity to take a critically needed step regarding the family: abolition.

Dr. Lewis notes a couple of things in her article which are true. For example, the requirements to shelter in homes present significant danger for people in abusive situations. Because of the web of dependency in which they're enmeshed, abuse victims often have a lot of trouble leaving their abusers for good. Safer-at-home requirements add a layer to that and make it harder to overcome, and restricting the abuser to the home presents more opportunities for abusive behavior to manifest.

She also notes that many homeless people can't effectively shelter in place because the shelters themselves are poor environments for social distancing to begin with and only grow worse if they are filled with people dealing with substance abuse and mental health issues. The homeless often have more physical health problems than others which can leave them more vulnerable to COVID-19 infection and less able to survive a bout with the virus.

But her proposed solutions include the abolition of the nuclear family, freeing prisoners from jails and seizing hotels and large privately-owned homes and letting workers go live in them while still paying them for not working. I'll freely confess I lack the imagination to picture a society organized along these lines, so I'll take Dr. Lewis's word that her ideas would solve the problems she identifies. But the number of problems it creates in their place would easily dwarf them, with the main one being that we had allowed our nation's laws to be designed by a whacko.

Error

President Trump, as many people have noted, is a man of poor character, poor impulse control and more narcissism than half of Hollywood put together. It's tempting to say he says some of the stupidest possible things that can be said by a self-proclaimed conservative person in politics.

Yield not to temptation, though, for comes now one Michael Dale Huckabee of Arkansas -- the man who would not quit the 2008 race for the GOP nomination even after it became mathematically impossible for him to win, saying, "I didn't major in math, I majored in miracles...." The former Arkansas governor and two-time primary loser today dropped this one on the world: President Trump would be eligible for a third term if he won re-election next year, "due to the illegal attempts" to remove him from office.

It was late, I was tired and I'd thought about going to bed without posting. Thanks to Mike Huckabee, I rolled my eyes so far back in my head I had to call AAA to pull them back in line and now I can't sleep.

Shaker Scandal?

When I was a reporter, I would sometimes find myself without something to do or cover, so I'd dig around the AP wire thread to see if anything showed up that could be stretched out into a story with a local angle. Or even an interesting one. Sometimes the strategy worked, and sometimes it didn't and I looked like a guy who was desperate for something to throw my byline over in order to justify my paycheck.

Over at Business Insider, James Pasley assumes that role with his photographic essay on how President Trump has bigger salt and pepper shakers than does anyone else eating at the table with him, and how his three predecessors were content with condiment dispenser equality.

Every time I see a story like this I both groan and roll my eyes. The eyeroll comes from the obsession of the majority of media outlets in finding any possible way to make the President look bad, especially compared with other presidents and doubly especially with former President Obama. And some of it comes from the fact that President Trump is a twerp. The groan comes from the realization that these idiots will not stop doing stuff like this until the president is re-elected in 2020, based at least partly on the belief of his supporters that if the mistrusted media are against him this much, he must be doing something right.

We're in for four more years of this crud and the best hope the Democrats have of defeating the president challenged an 83-year-old man to pushups the other day because he didn't like the question he was asked.

Anniversary

So 78 years ago today, the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service visited Pearl Harbor and asked to have their collective ass well and truly kicked. Although the request was more than a little impolite, the United States generously obliged.

Worth It?

When he won in 1992, Bill Clinton was seen as a boon to the Democrats, showing a path forward for a party that had been sitting in the hole George McGovern dug for the previous 20 years. He was able to gather the southern voters who had taken a chance on but been burned by Jimmy Carter, and who had been left to shrug confusedly at Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

Whether it was true or not, several Democratic leaders felt a second George H.W. Bush win would mean decades of being an also-ran party when it came to the White House, as Bush the elder could institutionalize the Reagan Revolution and marry it to the kind of middle-of-the-road GOP Bush represented. In defeating him, Clinton showed that Democrats could run viable candidates and win elections -- an important message in a country that tends to bandwagon winners.

But Bill brought baggage -- a platform for the political ambitions of his wife Hillary. Although her Senate win was fueled as much by the part of her image that generated sympathy for the wife of a known adulterer and womanizer, she probably could have found a way to stay in the public eye had Bill been either more faithful, more truthful or more careful. From the Senate she cast her gaze on her own presidential run, which finished with the embarrassing primary loss to a first-term senator from Illinois just two years removed from his own state legislature. She did her party duty by taking a role in the administration of her former opponent, and from that undistinguished tenure made a second "can't miss" run for the Oval Office.

She found, unfortunately, a country far more divided than she had known when she was more active politically and one far less willing to forgive her disdain and complete lack of skill as a retail politician. So she went down in defeat again, this time to a man who'd been a Republican for about 15 minutes and who engendered nearly as much antipathy as she did. In the process she deepened the nation's political divisions and served as a reminder that a chunk of the Democratic party looks upon large swathes of the United States citizenry as bigoted Neandertals.

And she continues to do more to help Republicans and President Trump than almost anyone who doesn't work for his campaign except maybe Beto O'Rourke. As Taylor Millard writes at Hot Air, her recent intimations that Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the 2020 race, is a "Russian asset" may or may not be as unhinged as they sound. But either way, they are incredibly stupid.

A number of GOP folks have tired of the president and seek an alternative to him, as well as to the current three Democratic front runners -- one of whom pretends to not be a millionaire, one of whom pretended to be Native American and one of whom pretended to be Neil Kinnock. And while Gabbard seems a little too ready to be friendly to foreign autocrats, she'd at least reduce the number of them on the Oval Office speed dial down to one. They might squint and hold their nose to vote for her, but they'll down a bottle of bourbon and pull the lever again for Captain Combover if one of the current three leaders wins out.

Every time 2016's defeated nominee blasts forth with yet another of her deranged theories about her loss that doesn't include an admission that she was a lousy candidate who ran a terrible campaign, she reminds iffy voters why they didn't want her in the White House. And she reminds them of the party that nominated and supported her, and why they believe they can't trust it.

Things were pretty good for Democrats, White-House wise, from 1992 to 2000. But the price continues to be high long after they figured they'd made the last payment for it.