January 30, 2017

"For more than 100 years, the Boy Scouts of America... have ultimately deferred to the information on an individual’s birth certificate to determine eligibility for our single-gender programs."

"However, that approach is no longer sufficient as communities and state laws are interpreting gender identity differently, and these laws vary widely from state to state."

The acting attorney general refused to defend Trump's immigration order... and Trump fired her.

I did not have time to blog about her refusal — I would have said it's up to Trump to fire her — before Trump fired her.
Taking action in an escalating crisis for his 10-day-old administration, Mr. Trump declared that Sally Q. Yates had “betrayed” the administration, the White House said in a statement. The president appointed Dana J. Boente, United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, to serve as acting attorney general until Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama is confirmed....

The extraordinary legal standoff capped a tumultuous day in which... Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, went so far as to warn State Department officials that they should leave their jobs if they did not agree with Mr. Trump’s agenda, after State Department officials circulated a so-called dissent memo on the order.

“These career bureaucrats have a problem with it?” Mr. Spicer said. “They should either get with the program or they can go.”
ADDED: "went so far"? 

At the Black Ice Café...

P1050727

... you don't have to stick with what real. You can slide on the ice — eyes, -ize — like we did 6 years ago, the last time there was black ice on Lake Mendota.

I'm tapping the past for a seasonally appropriate photograph for a post. It's been too winter-dull here lately for me to want to get out the camera.

And, please, remember The Althouse Amazon Portal — it's how you can support this blog simply by thinking of me when you're doing shopping that you're doing anyway. 

"It’s like five, 10 years ago, when it was the True Religion jeans, really baggy. It’s like going from those to skinny jeans."

"You can’t bend over. I tried it one time, and it felt like it was really restrictive," said Mike Smith, a goalie for the Arizona Coyotes hockey team.

The new tight pants are not a fashion statement or an attempt to get women to watch. It's to make it easier to score. It makes sense: Having giant pants is not an athletic achievement. You want to watch what a man can do, not what big pants can do.

"Obama, who left office vowing to uphold the presidential tradition of not criticizing his successor..."

"... but also promising to speak out when he saw core values under threat by Trump, made it all of 10 days before releasing a statement following Friday's executive order that temporarily halted the nation's refugee program and severely restricted immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries."

Politico reports.

Here's my post from January 19, when Obama made his statement which, as I noted at the time was not much of a promise.
He's not promising to withdraw and leave the presidential stage to his successor, which is what George W. Bush did for him.
Obama had said: "There’s a difference between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake." But we knew very well, I said, that "there's this meme that the new President is not normal."
Bush, like his father, adhered to an absolute principle. Obama respects the principle by cushioning it with a malleable escape clause: where core values may be at stake. And what a wide door that is! Not only is the concept "core values" subject to infinite debate, but — whatever these values are — they don't have to be severely threatened, only "at stake." And they don't even need to be at stake. It's enough that they "may" be at stake. Well, then there's really no one-President-at-a-time principle of withdrawal at all.

Normalize, Part 3.

From the comments on "Normalize, Part 2": Chuck said:
What a wonderful, quintessentially Althouse post.

And of course Donald Trump wasn't thinking much about any of this when he employed "normalize." He's not on the same wavelength as Althouse, right? Am I right? You know I'm right. Trump uses less complicated words. Less complicated, but great. Really great words. Great, beautiful words. I guarantee it, that you will think that they are beautiful words. You will think that they are such beautiful words, you'll say, "Please, Mr. Trump! Your words are too beautiful! We can't take any more beautiful words!" But you're going to love it. Big time.

"You know, I think people are exhausted. I think a lot of Republicans are exhausted. The flurry of activity this week has been really a dizzying pace. It's so hard to keep up..."

Said CNN political commentator Ana Navarro on Jake Tapper's Sunday show yesterday.

Navarro is on the GOP side, but she worked on Jeb Bush's campaign and has been very anti-Trump. She talks about unnamed "friends" who tell her they disagree with things Trump is doing but it's "such a... steady rain of things" in an "emotionally exhausting week." And not just emotional exhaustion, but they are saying: "I can't survive politically if I am confronting the man every day."

She said "Republicans need to appeal to their sense of consciousness, to their principles to what is right and wrong to American values, and they need to speak up." We laughed at that because the normal word to use there would be "conscience" (or "conscientiousness"), but maybe these Republican friends of hers so inert that their consciousness is in question.



I know one might speak of levels of "consciousness" as in "consciousness raising." You can be conscious and yet gain a heightened awareness of something — a raised consciousness — especially with respect to something political.

But these GOP friends of Navarro's are not only conscious, they have heightened awareness, and it is of something political: their own political survival: "I can't survive politically if I am confronting the man every day."

Who'll be Trump's Supreme Court nominee? "I’d put my money on Judge Neil Gorsuch."

Writes David Lat.
First, Judge Gorsuch is a “winner” — brilliant, pedigreed, tall, handsome — and Trump likes winners.... Trump goes with privilege in the end. And Judge Gorsuch, the Ivy League- and Oxford-educated son of a former top government official — Anne Gorsuch, the first woman to lead the EPA — oozes privilege.

A second reason to predict Gorsuch: rumor has it that that the Denver-based judge is currently in, or on his way to, Washington, D.C....

Normalize, part 2.

Part 1, earlier this morning: "Trump steals their word: Normalize."

Now, I want to look at the history of the word "normalize." It makes me think of the sort of words that Strunk and White disapproved of:
-ize. Do not coin verbs by adding this tempting expression. [...] Never tack -ize onto a noun to create a verb. Usually you will discover that a useful verb already exists. Why say “moisturize” when there is the simple, unpretentious word moisten
They even single some -ize words out:
Finalize. A pompous, ambiguous verb....

Personalize. A pretentious word, often carrying bad advice. Do not personalize your prose; simply make it good and keep it clean.
Makes me feel like singing the Bob Dylan song:
I ain’t lookin’ to block you up
Shock or knock or lock you up
Analyze you, categorize you
Finalize you or advertise you
All I really want to do is, baby, normalize you. 

The OED traces normalize back to 1864,* to a New York Times article about the abuse of government power: "These attempts to normalize despotism display the impotency as well as the malignity of the Executive." Here's the article, "Prussian Politics."
Measures to confirm and legalize the most arbitrary acts of the recess have been prepared and introduced into both Houses. A new anti-press bill, which embodies some of the most oppressive and odious provisions of the ordinances, has been carried through the Herrenhaus; while a projet de loi, which will entitle the Minister to raise revenue and make disbursements as often as the Deputies decline to sanction his budget, is before the Second Chamber, and will form the first subject for debate after the holidays. These attempts to normalize despotism display the impotency as well as the malignity of the Executive, for, of course, neither one measure nor the other will ever become law.
Normalize there meant to pass laws that would support what the government was doing. It's a synonym of "legalize," which also appears in that paragraph. The word "legalize" is no neologism. It goes back to the 1600s.

And, by the way, "finalize" was a new-ish word when Strunk and White bitched about it. (The OED says 1919.) "Personalize" goes back to the 1700s, if the idea is to represent something as a person — e.g., "The Poets are fond of personalizing both physical and moral Qualities" — but the annoying meaning begins in advertising with this bit of crap from 1910:
The Calvert label in a garment..identifies the best there is in Clothing Woolens; the highest grade of modeling and making. They've got the snap and the style that personalizes them; they've got the intrinsic worth that substantializes them.
As for "substantialize" — which looks quite idiotic to my modern eyes — it goes back to the 1700s. ("A sedate yet fervent sense of gratitude towards God... substantialized in the practice of every Christian virtue.")

The OED has an entry on the "-ize" suffix. The earliest word seems to be "baptize." There's a set of words that came to English from the Greek, and perhaps words with this pedigree are more... normal:
characterize, crystallize, harmonize, idolize, monopolize, organize,  stigmatize, symbolize, systematize, tantalize, agonize, apologize, philosophize, sympathize, theorize....
Can't object to those great words! They're not pompous or pretentious. They're solid English words, words that make you glad English is your native tongue.

The OED make a separate category out of words that came to English from Latin:
actualize, authorize, brutalize, civilize, colonize, familiarize, fertilize, formalize, fossilize, humanize, immortalize, legalize, memorize, nationalize, naturalize, neutralize, patronize, pulverize, realize, satirize, scrutinize, solemnize, sterilize, terrorize, vocalize....
They start to look weird when you see them all together, but these are also great words.

But is there some rule against creativity here, something wrong with ize-izing beyond the Greek and Latin? What bugged Strunk/White so much? The OED lists words "from later sources":
bastardize, jeopardize, villanize, womanize....
And words based on ethnicities — Americanize, Anglicize — and names — Bowdlerize, galvanize, mesmerize — and substances — carbonize, oxidize — and some odd "recent uses" like "The troop of nakedized children rushed downstairs" (from 1885).

Now, I have to go get dressed. I've got places to go, appointments to keep.

Please keep up the conversation. Verbalize. Conversationalize. Scrutinize Donald Trump and help determinize whether he ought to be normalized or Hitlerized... if you can believe your own eyes.
______________________________

* There's one earlier medical use of the term from 1847, but I'm going to ignore that. If I was going to take a tangent here, it would be about the use of normalize in a couple of famous fairly recent novels:
Erica Jong "Fear of Flying" (1974): "You always insist on normalizing your life."

Bret Easton Ellis, "American Psycho" (1991): "One should use an alcohol-free antibacterial toner with a water-moistened cotton ball to normalize the skin."

I love when real lefties outflank the Hillary-Clinton-level lefties.

Here's Ted Rall bitching about the Women's March:
A good indication that the Women's March got coopted into a Democratic boo-hoo Hillary/Cory Booker-in-2020 pep rally was that the speakers were limited to celebrity millionaire liberal Democrats like Michael Moore, Ashley Judd and Gloria. Had this been a militant action (i.e., one that might frighten Trump and the GOP), or a coalition of liberals who welcomed and respected their leftist allies rather than merely wanting to vampirize their righteous anger and energy into midterm votes, the roster of speakers would have included people calling for revolutionary change and action outside of the existing system. There would also have been some radical activists you'd never of who do important work.

Celebrity liberalism and pleas to vote Democratic are where the Left goes to die....

"I think the Dems and their media pals have gone tantrum-tilt because Trump wants Steve Bannon to serve on the NSC."

"During the campaign Dems and the mainstream media committed themselves to the narrative that Bannon is Rasputin and Hitler and etc. Is he a political adviser? Yes. However, Bannon was also a naval officer. The UPI release mentions that George W. Bush barred Karl Rove from attending NSC meetings. OK. Rove was a political adviser but he never served in the military. Bush was a USAF reserve pilot. Bush combined political experience and military experience. Like Obama, Trump has no personal military experience. Bannon has political savvy and military experience. In this light Bannon very likely meets a need Trump perceives. So Trump hires him. Did Obama perceive a similar inadequacy in himself? Of course he didn’t. Obama, the purveyor of Smart Diplomacy, was always the smartest guy in the room. Obama’s national security record? Why, it’s dismal. Perhaps he could have used a Steve Bannon."

Writes Austin Bay. He also links to this, by Glenn Reynolds:
OUCH:
Susan Rice, policy wonk and former Dukakis & Clinton aide, who had no military experience whatsoever* before getting tapped as National Security Advisor by the Obama administration in 2013, blasts Trump’s decision to “remove military advice” from the National Security Council.

Conveniently not mentioned is that Rice was replaced as National Security Advisor by LTG Michael T. “Mike” Flynn, USA (Ret).

I swear, Susan, self awareness is so rare these days it should be considered a f$cking super power.
The troika made up of Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Hillary Clinton was perhaps the most disastrous foreign policy crew in American history. She’s got no room to talk.
Here's the Susan Rice tweet referenced above:
This is stone cold crazy. After a week of crazy. Who needs military advice or intell to make policy on ISIL, Syria, Afghanistan, DPRK?

"It seemed to me that they had a Québécois accent. They started to fire, and as they shot, they yelled, 'Allahu akbar!' The bullets hit people that were praying. People who were praying lost their lives. A bullet passed right over my head."

Said one witness at the shooting at the Centre Culturel Islamique de Québec, where 6 men died and 18 more were wounded.
Police refuse to reveal any information about the [two men who were arrested] other than the fact they are in their late 20s or early 30s.

Police also said it's too early to know the motive....
UPDATE: The news is that one man has been arrested, Alexandre Bissonnette, and that "people who monitor far-right groups in Quebec" are familiar with him from social media as someone who is anti-immigrant and anti-Islam.

Trump steals their word: Normalize.

"This will be the biggest such act that our country has ever seen. There will be regulation, there will be control, but it will be normalized control."

Said President Trump, signing an executive order to cut back federal regulations.

"Normalize" has been an anti-Trump word for quite some time. Don't normalize him!

Trump has cued up the new distraction.



ADDED: Last week he told us he'd make the announcement on Thursday. He moved it up 2 days.

AND: Can we talk about the Supreme Court nominee and immigration at the same time? I'm picturing anti-Trumpists thinking they can make the 2 things into one combo-topic. And I predict that will not work well at all.

As Scott Adams says: Outrage Dilution.

If you try to do multiple outrages, it will dilute. If you stick to one at a time, he can always dump a new one on top of the old one. Will you drop the old topic and play catch up? Or will you stick to the old topic and let him get away with doing this new thing? Or will you waste energy in confusion about what to do?

ADDED: John Henry asks "Was that a poll, Ann?," and I say "It's funny how this post is like the previous post: Can we do more than one thing at a time?" The previous post has a poll, so here's the poll for this one:

How should Trump opponents fight when they see one outrage after another?
 
pollcode.com free polls

"The massive Kausfiles Rebuild Project is in theory complete."

Writes Mickey Kaus:
The unheated Venice warehouse, once filled with surly millennial coders, lies silent, its floor littered with empty bottles of $12 juice. ….

The purpose of the rebuild is to (again) mix tweets with blog items, a rebellion against the disastrous early Word Press era in which blog posts became discrete, pompous hey-link-to-me declarations.
Maybe he doesn't want me to link. Except since he's not being pompous...
Ben Smith may think this was the golden age of blogging. To me it was the beginning of the end. …
If the end already happened, how can you go back? I guess it's: Make blogging great again. 
I’m sure I’ll screw things up for a while. There will still be many more tweets than blog items, though a) I’ll try to write more of the latter especially since b) it should now be possible to easily expand tweets into short (or long) blog entries.  Will escaping the 140 character limitation make them better or worse? I actually don’t know. Could be worse! It’s awfully easy to kill a tweet with improvements.
It's hard to blog and tweet. You either have blog mind or tweet mind. I know that blogging made me not want to write law review articles. You get a sense of where you want to be on the continuum from stark terseness to explain-it-all blabbery. If you're going to write a lot, you're probably going to find your place. But when Kaus blogged in the Golden Age of Blogging, he was in a pretty terse place on the continuum. Maybe he can jump back and forth.

But there are 2 ways to characterize blog/tweet jumping. One is what he's saying. Twitter predominates, and the blog is a place where you can expand on what you've already said in the tweet.

The other way is to blog first. Blog where you are free to say what you have to say and make the tweet second. The blog post is not an expansion of the tweet. The tweet is a condensation of the blog post. Kaus's Golden Age blog was always terse and tweet-like, but it was terse because of Kaus's own style, not because the format imposed terseness on him.

What's the best combination of blogging and tweeting?
 
pollcode.com free polls

"As far as rihanna (who isn’t a citizen, and can’t vote) and all the rest of the celebrities who are using their influence to stir the public, you lot really REALLY need to shut up and sit down."

"Stop chastising the president. It’s stupid and pathetic to watch. All of these confused people confuse other confused people. Hoping the president fails is like getting on an airplane and hoping the pilot crashes. What makes you think, the the USA is going to enter the Middle East destroy a bunch of shit and pull out without any real repercussions ????"

Celebrities pushing back celebrities. That's Azealia Banks.

We'll see how things work out for Banks. So far....
Apparently in response to Banks’ rant, [Rihanna] shared a black-and-white photo of herself with the caption, “the face you make when you a immigrant #stayawayfromthechickens #iheartnuggets #saveourhens.” The hashtags are likely in reference to Banks’ controversial video where she showed herself cleaning up what she claimed was blood from years of sacrificing chickens in her closet. She claimed the sacrifices were part of her practice as a witch.

Banks promptly shared a screenshot of the star’s post — which she curiously decided to “like” on Instagram — and said, “What rihanna meant was ….”
What's at that ellipsis is too ugly to put on this blog. I don't picture Banks winning this fight. 

"Whether the Russians did or did not hack the voting of tonight’s SAG Awards, I look out on the million, or probably even a million and a half people in this room..."

"... and I say, this award is legitimate, and I won! I’m the winner, the winner is me — landslide!"

Julia Louis-Dreyfus accepting a SAG Award, under pressure to go political and doing it pretty well.

"If you have always suspected that 'sex addict' is celebrity shorthand for 'what do I have to do to make this go away?'..."

"... behold your unlikely whistleblower: Ozzy Osbourne."
On Saturday, Ozzy, driven either through naive honesty or a charming disregard for the party line has broke ranks and explained his rationale for cheating to the Times of London as: “I’m in a fucking rock band, aren’t I?”

“There have always been groupies. I just got caught, didn’t I? It was a bump in the road. I bet your marriage has bumps in the road too an’ all. In any marriage you grow apart if you don’t spend enough time together, and that was part of the problem. I don’t think I’m a fucking sex addict.”
Back in August, the headline was: "Ozzy Osbourne Undergoing 'Intense Therapy' for Sex Addiction After Multiple Affairs."

It's a good day to think about Fred Korematsu.



Google reminds us — not because of fear-of-dangerous-outsiders doings over the weekend — but because the man was born 100 years ago today. I presume this Google doodle was in the works before the election and would have run today if Hillary Clinton had been elected and thrown open the doors to Middle Eastern refugees.

Or... wait. What would Hillary Clinton have done? Remember when Donald Trump said Hillary Clinton "would bring in 620,000 refugees in her first term, alone, with no effective way to screen or vet them"? That was on September 20th. I'm reading that quote at Politifact, which rates Trump's statement FALSE.

But Hillary Clinton didn't throw it in our face that she was going to block entry into the country and subject newcomers to extreme vetting. That's what Trump did. Hillary had the kind of nuanced position that allowed you to think — if you liked her — that she'd have a big heart toward the suffering and simultaneously protect us from terrorists or — if you didn't like her — that she had no plan and no nerve to stop the influx of masses of people, some of whom hate the American system and want to kill us.

Not enough people liked her, the system we love made Donald Trump our President, and now he is shocking the people who didn't like him by doing what he said in plain language he was going to do.

But many years ago, a President who is revered by the kind of people who like Hillary Clinton issued an Executive Order excluding all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast.



The Democratic Party's all-time favorite President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, decided to take action against all persons of Japanese descent because "the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage."

Fred Korematsu stayed where he was, in Oakland, California, where he was born. Soon enough, he got arrested:
Shortly after Korematsu's arrest, Ernest Besig, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union in northern California, asked him whether he would be willing to use his case to test the legality of the Japanese American internment. Korematsu agreed, and was assigned civil rights attorney Wayne M. Collins. The American Civil Liberties Union in fact argued for Ernest Besig not to fight Korematsu’s case, since many high-ranking members of the ACLU were close to Franklin Roosevelt, and the ACLU didn’t want to be perceived badly in time of war. Besig decided to take Korematsu's case in spite of this....
The ACLU — which is in the news today as it fights Trump's executive order — fought for Korematsu and ultimately lost in the Supreme Court. "Ultimately" is not the right word, because you could say that in later years academic and public opinion shifted strongly in his favor, and with enough distance from World War II, we looked with disgust at what FDR arrogation of power and the Supreme Court feeble response. Korematsu ultimately won. He's a hero of history, celebrated in a Google doodle on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

But that's not "ultimately" either. American history rolls on.

"When we found this house, it became, like, the clubhouse, where guys would go every day and hang out... like a street gang."

"And it was a place to go, like a workshop... And this had been a dream of mine: If we could only have the clubhouse, where we could go every day, and we could lock ourselves away from the world and create something that we are meant to do, that we are on a mission to do."

I'll leave that quote unattributed for while. I didn't transcribe it to make a guessing game, but apart from the context, it's some fascinating psychology, perhaps distinctly masculine.

ADDED: Meade read this post and, without reading any comments, immediately gave the right answer: "He's talking about Big Pink."

Earnest Prole, at 7:30 a.m., gives a wrong answer that I believe is a humorous way to reveal he knows the right answer:
Obviously you’re referring to Hell House, an old cabin with a tin roof located in the Florida woods where the band One Percent wrote and perfected their music in the blazing Southern heat. You may know One Percent as the band later called Lynyrd Skynyrd. Sadly, Hell House and Lynyrd Skynyrd took the night train to the big adios, as we all shortly will.
3 minutes later, perhaps taking Earnest Prole's comments as a prompt, Amadeus 48 spells out the correct answer:
Robbie Robertson talking about "The Band" and music from Big Pink?
Here's Robbie Robertson on the Marc Maron podcast that went up this morning.