Huh?

Former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, in an interview on Sunday, suggested that President Donald Trump is obsessed with her because he knows he is an illegitimate president and he has a guilty conscience about beating her.

The comments came when host Jane Pauley said that Ms. Clinton's name does not come up much in any campaign except the president's -- meaning that the members of her own party don't talk about her or her failed 2008 and 2016 campaigns. Now, the first blush thought about this lack of mention by everyone except her old opponent might be something like, well, Democrats don't want to remind anyone that they backed a campaign so awful its candidate could lose to Donald Trump. And the president, for his part, would very much like people to be reminded of exactly that as a way of suggesting that they are unlikely to do much better four years later. Every day he refreshes the electorate's memory of the unlikeable, short-sighted, secretive, smug, self-righteous 2016 nominee he increases the connection between that choice and whatever not-quite-so-clueless-but-pretty-damn-close choice Democratic primary voters make next year.

But even if the answers are more prosaic or more complex than that first-blush thought, Ms. Clinton's theory clearly indicates one of her key weaknesses as a nominee: She had a lot of dumb ideas. The president "knows" he is an illegitimate president? Right, because questioning the idea that he's the greatest thing since even before sliced bread came along fits Trump's personality to a T. He has a guilty conscience about defeating her? I understand why Ms. Clinton would like to believe that powerful and amoral men feel badly about doing things which cause her trauma or insult. But while that might have even been a little true in 1998 it's not even on the scope in 2019. She's met Donald Trump. She was at his 2005 wedding. What if anything that she knows about the man either personally or professionally suggests he has a guilty conscience? He slept with a porn actress while his wife was changing their new son's diapers, fer cryin' out loud!

Sure, she walks back the statement once she realizes what she's said with a lame remark about "insomuch as a he has a conscience," but she's already said that she thinks Donald Trump secretly feels badly about defeating her. Once again we see proven the old truism that despite his character Bill Clinton is a great retail politician, while Hillary Clinton is married to a great retail politician.

Timing

You know who really hates all of this fuss over the president's phone calls with the Ukrainian leader and the subsequent impeachment hoorah?

Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, that's who.

Yuck-Pourri

Some random political thoughts while I sit around and wait for the 2020 Libertarian National Convention to put a name to the space I’m already planning to mark on that November’s ballot:

— President Trump’s in trouble because someone who didn’t hear the actual conversation he had with the president of Ukraine says he suggested a quid pro quo arrangement between military aid and an investigation of Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Hunter Biden was named to the board of directors of a large Ukrainian natural gas firm while his father was vice-president because his history of lobbying, investment fund management and law practice in the United States made him well-suited to understanding how energy corporations in former Soviet republics operated. Anyway, a number of Democratic legislators and presidential candidates think that if the president really did that, he should be impeached. I’d agree, if it wasn’t for the fact that a big chunk of this same group seem to think that winning the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton was an impeachable offense and have conducted themselves accordingly.

— Some people have suggested second amendment activists have used Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke’s position on the possession of AR-15 and similar semi-automatic rifles to scare voters away from supporting all Democratic candidates. O’Rourke supports a “mandatory buy-back” program for these weapons, which I put in quotes to illustrate how those words don’t mean what O’Rourke says they do. If the government forces you to give up property you own (mandatory) and sets the price it will pay you, that’s not really “buying.” And if it didn’t sell you the weapon then it’s not buying anything back, since it never owned the item in question. In any event, as long as anyone quoting O’Rourke includes his qualifying phrase, “When I’m elected President” then the charge of scare-mongering is false, since no one other than O’Rourke thinks that will happen.

— United States Representative Sheila Jackson Lee must have been upset at all the contenders to her crown as the dumbest elected official in Washington because she reminded us why she holds that title. Lee, in arguing for gun control measures, said she had held an AR-15 rifle, which was as “heavy as 10 boxes that you might be moving” and fired .50-caliber rounds. The actual AR-15 weighs about seven and a half pounds and fires a .223-caliber round, under half the size she said. Now, any ordinary person can be dumb enough to make mistakes when listing design specifications for a rifle. But it takes a member of Congress to make the kinds of mistakes thirty seconds of Googling can correct. And it takes Sheila Jackson Lee to suggest that a common-use rifle owned by somewhere near 10 million Americans is as heavy as ten moving boxes and fires a round that comes in a cartridge almost five-and-a-half inches long.

— One of the worst things about having President Trump in office is the realization that when our nation could really use a potential opponent who displays the traits of character, clear-thinking and responsibility he lacks, his adversaries offer so little to choose from. Among his three most likely opponents we find lies about being Native American, the theft of another politician’s life story and claims it was the speaker’s own and a supposed socialist who owns three homes and who dropped “millionaires” from his litany of complaints about “millionaires and billionaires” after his book made him one.

Need to Read More?

Apparently I do, because it seems like a lot of people post inspirational quotes on Facebook that were said by people I’ve never heard of. I’m not sure what exactly that means, but I bet it means something.

Picturing the Final Frontier

Bored Panda shows 35 winners of the Royal Observatory Greenwich's Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest. The images are stunning, and several of them are...wait for it...out of this world.

Sorry not sorry.

Meet the Boss

Way back in the 1980s there would be movies with high school kids who would "come of age" through an experience that usually involved music or perhaps sports. The music might be a soundtrack, a special song played at a specific dance or the kid might join a band himself or herself. Through a variety of experiences connected to a cool, MTV-ready playlist, the youngsters would step out on their own, as their parents realized it was time to let their kids grow up and fly.

So when Gurinder Chadha came together with Sarfraz Manzoor to tell a version of Manzoor's own coming-of-age story in the late 1980s, they not only made a move about that time, they made a movie that could pretty comfortably be of that time. Which didn't pose much of a problem for the director of Bend It Like Beckham, Chadhas' 2002 story of a teenage Punjabi girl whose traditional-minded parents resist the idea of her playing soccer in their new London home. Thus an adaptation of Manzoor's memoir came to the screen as Blinded by the Light.

Viveik Kalra plays Javed Khan, the character based on Manzoor. Although he has lived in England most of his life, he feels separated from his classmates and neighbors because of his Pakistani origin and strong local prejudice. But his desire to write also clashes with his father's eyes-on-the-prize attitude of what he should do with his life. He has one longtime friend, Matt (Dean-Charles Chapman), and a new acquaintaince at his new school, a Sikh student named Roops (Aaron Phagura). One day Roops loans Javed two Bruce Springsteen cassettes and advises him to take a listen: As the trailer tells us, Roops thinks that "Bruce is a direct line to all that's true in this sh**y world." Javed is skeptical: What can the son of a working-class family in New Jersey have to say to the son of immigrants in Luton, England?

Plenty, as it turns out, since Javed's exposure to Springsteen's universal themes of longing, not fitting in and pursuing his dreams opens up new courage for him in showing his writing to his teacher Ms. Clay (Hayley Atwell), pursuing a young lady Eliza (Nell Williams) and throwing himself more and more into Springsteen albums and music. The natural clash with his father Malik (Kulvinder Ghir) is magnified by Malik being laid off from work and pushback from his sister Yasmeen (Tara Divina), who also thinks there is nothing in the music of an American singer for a Pakistani in London.

Two themes guide Blinded. One is Javed's discovery of his voice as a writer and as a person when he listens to Springsteen's own journey in his songs. Another is Javed's desire to be himself as an individual person, not defined for either good or ill by his skin, religion, country of origin or culture. Both the racism of the National Front movement active in that part of England at that time and his own family's desire for him to fit in a predefined role chafe as Javed Khan tries to learn who Javed Khan might be.

Although the cast and Chadha do great work, and the production design excellently evokes the atmosphere of the mid-to-late 1980s, Blinded could have stood more work. Malik is really the only other member of Javed's family who has a regular role; Javed's mother primarily looks at him worriedly and counsels her husband that he was once little different from the son he's raising. The sisters have less consequence except in specific instances. A conflict between Javed and Matt seems artificial, and a lot of the story points echo Beckham more directly than they should.

On the other hand, Blinded doesn't make Javed a spotless hero and he learns that there is a lot of value in his own culture, heritage and community. Rather than cast off his past as he would restraining shackles, he sees chances to synthesize old and new as he looks for his path in the world.

The latter may be one of the best parts of Blinded by the Light. As it turns out, a working-class white kid turned rock star does have something to say to a young Pakistani immigrant half a world away. There are some universals to human experience and sometimes they transcend our artificial lines, our boundaries and our mortal terror of cultural appropriation. Javed Khan learns that over the course of the movie, and that matters more than a movie character arc usually does because Sarfraz Manzoor learned it before Javed did... and Sarfraz learned it in the real world.

The Weight

For almost the last decade, physicists thought there was something weird about the proton. The subatomic particle seemed to shrink in the presence of another particle called a muon. Its diameter was 4% less in atoms where ordinary electrons were replaced with muons.

This is, to put it mildly, a big honking deal if true. Subatomic particles are not known for changing their size -- sure, they're so small that precise measurements can be tough, but recent discoveries have been able to really refine the ability of experiments to do so. If the proton grew or shrank depending on whether or not a muon was present, then a whole lotta stuff was going to be not so.

Then some physicists doing the same kind of measurements last year measured the proton with muons present and then without muons, just electrons. Turns out the earlier measurement of proton size without the muons was just wrong. They matched well within the margin of error.

None of the physicists was named Litella, although that would have been appropriate. Sometimes in science, the boring answer really is the right answer.