Mary Tyler Moore has died at 80.

She had kept a very low profile in recent years. Diabetes (Moore was diagnosed at 33) can be a difficult taskmaster and exact a toll as time goes on.

Anyone of a certain age probably remembers Moore very well from her stints on TV, as Dick Van Dyke’s wife Laura and above all as the star of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Most remember her very fondly indeed; the show dominated the airwaves for years. Light comedy was her forte, charm her middle name, and she managed to do it all with more than enough grit to avoid any hint of cloying sweetness.

RIP.

Boy, am I sick of this bigness-of-the-inaugural-crowd business.

But commenter “Hangtown Bob” has called my attention to a photo I just can’t resist spotlighting. It’s interesting on many levels—not just because of how it impacts on the burning question of inaugural crowd size, but because the technology of photographing crowds is so advanced and so detailed. I know, I know; they can see a hair on your nose from outer space, so why not this?

I can’t reproduce the photo on this blog, so you’ll have to go to CNN and fiddle around there with zooms and stuff, particularly way back near the end of the mall.

And unless there’s something I’m not getting, it proves that the crowd really was YUGE.

[NOTE: Oh, and by the way—the public seems to have liked Trump’s inaugural speech, and in particular his “America first” message.]

…has been roaring through lately, hasn’t it?

Let’s see—Trump has been president for less than a week. But as promised, there have been a lot of executive orders, and more are contemplated very soon:

President Trump plans to sign executive orders Wednesday enabling construction of his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and targeting cities where local leaders refuse to hand over illegal immigrants for deportation, according to White House officials familiar with the decisions…

But discussions were ongoing Tuesday about just how far to go on some policies, in particular the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA. The 2012 initiative has given temporary protection from deportation to hundreds of thousands of people who arrived in the United States as children…

Trump will also potentially bar for 30 days the issuance of U.S. visas to people from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — all Muslim-majority countries — until new visa procedures are developed. Residents from many of these places are already rarely granted U.S. visas. Trump may ask DHS and the director of national intelligence to evaluate whether immigrants are being adequately screened for potential terrorist ties.

That’s faster activity than I can recall from incoming presidents. But then again, they didn’t have quite as many important executive orders to reverse.

Here’s a tidbit of news further down in the article: “Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto will visit the United States next week to meet with Trump.” I’d like to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.

I’ve noticed, also, that Trump is looking more tired than usual. More bags under the eyes. Anyone else see that?

Well worth reading.

You might consider sending it to some frightened liberals you know, if you want to bring up the subject at all.

[Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.]

Funny Trump parody from The Netherlands:

Settling a dispute among alternative facts.

Today Britain’s highest court issued a ruling:

Prime Minister Theresa May must give parliament a vote before she can formally start Britain’s exit from the European Union, the UK Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday, giving lawmakers who oppose her Brexit plans a shot at amending them.

A “straightforward” bill will now be rushed to parliament within days, the government said after the country’s highest judicial body decided May could not use executive powers known as “royal prerogative” to invoke Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty and begin two years of divorce talks.

However, the judges did remove one major potential obstacle for the government, saying May did not need the approval of Britain’s devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland before triggering Brexit…

May has said she intends to invoke Article 50 before the end of March but the ruling means the Brexit process is now open to scrutiny from lawmakers, the majority of whom had wanted to stay in the EU…

Those who campaigned for Britain to leave the EU said the vote on triggering Brexit should be a mere formality.

“Any attempt to delay the Brexit process … would be an unforgivable betrayal of the British people,” said Richard Tice, co-chairman of the Leave Means Leave campaign. “The Lords should also follow suit; any delay by them would ensure their abolition.”

It will be interesting to see whether this will happen quickly, or whether substantial roadblocks will be thrown up.

There’s been a ton of chatter and mockery about Kelly Conway’s use of the phrase “alternative facts” to describe Trump press secretary Sean Spicer’s initial statements about attendance at the Trump inauguration. Here’s a piece at The Hill by Jennifer Calfas that states:

George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” is surging in popularity in the days since President Trump’s inauguration.

The iconic book, published nearly 70 years ago, is the sixth best-selling book on Amazon as of Tuesday morning.

Top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway on Sunday defended the White House’s statements about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration by referring to it “alternative facts.”

She was referring to White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s insistence that Friday’s swearing-in was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” despite photos and videos showing that former President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration clearly had a bigger crowd on the National Mall.

Many on social media compared “alternative facts” to the use of “doublethink,” a type of rhetoric in “1984” by which the government presents two contradictory facts as both true.

I checked the dateline on the article, and it was 01/24/17 08:47 AM EST—in other words, this morning. This means that it was a half a day subsequent to Spicer’s clarification of exactly what he meant when he said that about the large audience:

QUESTION: And do you stand by your statement that was the most watched inaugural —

SPICER: I think —

QUESTION: — address of the —

SPICER: Sure, it was the most watched inaugural. When you look at — look, you look at just the one network alone got 16.9 million people online. Another couple of the networks there were tens of million people that watched that online. Never mind the audience that was here, the 31 million people watching it on television.

Combine that with the tens of million of people that watched it online, on a device. It’s unquestionable. I — I don’t — and I don’t see any numbers that — that dispute that when you add up attendance, viewership, total audience in terms(ph) of tablets, phones, on television. I’d love to see any information that proves that otherwise.

The WaPo transcript to which I linked is an interesting document. If you look at it, you’ll see two things. The first is that there were many other topics discussed at that press conference, mostly concerning what Trump has been doing in his first few days of office. But that’s not what social media is talking about. The second is that, as with Trump’s inaugural speech, the WaPo “helpfully” annotates the press conference, annotations that read like a continuation of an argument with Spicer rather than anything intended to elucidate. For example, in response to that quote of Spicer’s about adding up attendance—a quote that gives the lie to the meme that Spicer/Trump lied about this—the WaPo manages to grind out the following objection (this is the sum total of the commentary on the subject):

Spicer’s quote was that it was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”

He seems to be combining those two things, rather than saying it was also the biggest in-person crowd AND the biggest global crowd. If that’s what he meant initially, he probably should have said “combined” rather than “both.”

The WaPo’s objection is absurd. Yes indeed, “combined” probably would have been somewhat better and would have perhaps stopped the press from making its own reinterpretation of what he said, but to demand that level of precision in language is an obvious stretch, an attempt to avoid saying Spicer is making an excellent point. I think what he said and meant was fairly clear, as evidenced by his use of the word “witnessed” rather than “attended” (you’d use the latter for the live crowd), the word “audience” rather than “crowd,” as well as the phrase “both in person AND around the globe.”

Just call it a misunderstanding and move on. But the meme that Spicer was in the wrong is just too good to abandon.

And that Hill piece by Calfas is even worse, with its purposeful selection of which alternative facts to report and which to leave out. Calfas ignores Spicer’s elucidation entirely and pretends it didn’t happen. So will the real Orwellian please stand up?

And if sales of Orwell’s book have soared, perhaps it’s not just the left reading it in response to Conway. Maybe it’s the right in response to articles like Calfas’ and annotations in the WaPo.

So, what’s my own take on “alternative facts”? There are different sorts of facts. Two plus two equals four is a fact, and there is no alternative to it (although Orwell pointed out that if the Party wills it otherwise, some will believe it’s five).

But there are other kinds of facts. “How many people attended or watched the inauguration?” is a question. That question has an answer, but there are two problems with the answer. The first is possible confusion between the words “attended” and “watched,” because they mean two very different things and are measured in very different ways.

So the first problem is the definition of the question. The second is that there is no way to know the answer for sure. Crowd estimation is an art, and in the case of a crowd like that it’s based mostly on photos. Yesterday I quoted a crowd estimation expert (who was not from the Trump camp) who said that Trump didn’t have access to the photos that showed how relatively small the crowd was. So one could conclude that, although we don’t know the true size of the live crowd in DC, it was probably considerably smaller than at Obama’s inauguration, but that the Trump camp was using incomplete information about the live crowd.

That’s a case of alternative facts: using different photos to obtain your information. And of course it was compounded by a misinterpretation of his main point, in which the word “witness” did not mean “witness in person.”

“Alternative facts” are presented all the time, particularly in cases in which certainty is impossible. An excellent example is civilian deaths during a war (I wrote a lengthy post on the subject in 2007). Another is economic figures: income inequality and unemployment, just to name two favorites. How they are measured can make a world of difference.

Statistics can be used to prove almost anything, and they involve dueling “alternative facts.” This can be done maliciously and/or mendaciously, for propaganda purposes. Or—as Spicer rightly pointed out in his linked press conference—they can be the result of honest errors. They can also be the result of a bona fide disagreement on what is important and/or how to measure things.

To say that both sides don’t often choose among alternative facts is to deny reality. To pretend that alternative facts are Orwellian by definition is propaganda. They can be, but they often are not. But “alternative facts” was such a nifty phrase, so ripe for anti-Trump exploitation, that it could not be resisted.

[NOTE: This business of the WaPo annotating (supposedly fact-checking) the Spicer press conference got me to wondering whether this was done during the Obama administration. Of course, if it had been done, I highly doubt it was done in the same critical manner. But was it done at all, or is it an innovation just for Trump? Here’s Obama’s final press conference, back in mid-December—not annotated. However, shortly after the election Obama gave a press conference that was annotated.

But oh, what a difference in tone! Here’s a sample:

[OBAMA statement] We are indisputably in a stronger position today than we were when I came in eight years ago. Jobs have been growing for 73 straight months, incomes are rising, poverty is falling, the uninsured rate is at the lowest level on record, carbon emissions have come down without impinging on our growth, and so my instructions to my team are that we run through the tape, we make sure that we finish what we started, that we don’t let up in these last couple of months because my goal is on January 21, America’s in the strongest position possible and hopefully there’s an opportunity for the next president to build on that.

Number two, our work has also helped to stabilize the global economy and because there is one president at a time, I’ll spend this week reinforcing America’s support for the approaches that we’ve taken to promote economic growth and global security on a range of issues.

[WaPo annotation] Obama doesn’t want the whole Trump thing to overshadow his legacy too much.

Also, he seems to be making that case that he set Trump up to succeed – with an economy on relatively solid footing.

That’s the sum total of what the WaPo has to say on the matter. I read all the annotations and couldn’t find a single one even mildly critical of Obama.

This made me curious to learn at what point the WaPo began these annotations. And that in turn led me to read some things that began a whole train of thought about this new practice of annotating transcripts. That’s a large enough topic to require another post, and I’m saving it for another day.]

The press/Trump sniping made me think of the “Pick-a-Little” song from “The Music Man,” and so I thought you would enjoy seeing it.

Hey, I was raised on those musicals, so that’s the way my mind sometimes works. There’s a song for almost everything. And “The Music Man” was one of the first musicals my parents ever took me to see, with the original cast. I was transfixed by Robert Preston’s energy and charm. And being a bookish sort, I identified with Marian the librarian.

This is the movie version, and I think movies are almost always inferior to the original stage plays. But this one has the advantage of having Preston:

[UPDATE 3:57 PM: I was writing part of this post while Spicer’s latest press conference was going on, and so I missed this, which is quite relevant:

On Saturday, an angry Spicer said,” This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”

That statement was widely taken to mean that there were more people on the National Mall to witness the inauguration than any other.

On Monday, Spicer said he did not mean to suggest that it was the case.

“I’m not” saying that, Spicer said.

“I’m saying it was the total largest audience witnessed in person and around the globe,” the spokesman said.

Spicer said, “If you have up the network streaming numbers, Facebook, YouTube, all the various live streamings that we have information on so far, I don’t think there’s any question that it was the largest watched inauguration ever.”…

At Monday’s news conference, Spicer said “the information” about ridership “came from an outside agency that we reported on.”

“Knowing what we know now, we can tell a lot of those numbers are different,” Spicer said. “But we were trying to provide the numbers that we had been provided.”

“That wasn’t like we made them up out of thin air,” he said.

Spicer noted that “there are times when you guys tweet something out, or write a story, and you publish a correction.”

“That doesn’t mean that you were intentionally trying to deceive readers and the American people, does it?” Spicer asked. “I think we should be afforded the same opportunity.”

That’s the basically the point I was making in this post. Fat chance, though. Fat chance.]

Ever notice how Trump gets into a lot of arguments about the size of things?

Body parts, like hands and genitalia. And crowd size. “My crowds are bigger than yours!”

Now, I can’t vouch for the size of Trump’s genitalia (glad we got that out of the way). Nor even his hands, although I’ve seen photos. But from the photo evidence we have, it seems that Trump’s crowds at the inauguration, although large, were indeed nowhere near as large as Obama’s.

And why would they be? The weather was lousy. And while Trump is many things to many people, one thing he is not is the first black president.

The better question is: why do we care? (I certainly don’t.) Because we are told to, both by the MSM and by the Trump camp, who initially made a big deal of it by saying the MSM lied. That opened the door for the MSM to say that the Trump camp lied. I think that if anyone lied it was the latter (more about that in a moment), but we already know that Trump sometimes lies.

In fact, he’s even lied about crowds before (of a different kind), and it was one of his first lies during his campaign, but certainly not the most important or the last. Only thing is, Trump was running against another notorious liar, about things big and small. And they were preceded by President “you can keep your doctor.” And then there was Bill Clinton and “that woman,” as well as a certain blue dress.

So the media’s big huff about this is a bit misplaced, although I would have much rather seen Trump and his camp say “Hey, it rained. Our crowds were big. Let’s move on.”

But just to belabor the question, were all the facts known by the Trump people at the outset? I don’t know, but there’s a different between lies and errors (not that Trump’s camp isn’t sometimes guilty of lying; it certainly is). I found this, however [emphasis mine]:

[Crowd expert] Altenberg said: “We compared thousands of images from different sources. We followed seven live feeds just to get an idea of the spreading of the crowd and then we compared them, to look at the density.

“What’s interesting about this is they compared the view from the Capitol and this is a distorted image. We compared several angles, several images which they couldn’t see, actually, from this one perspective.”

That view was distorted, he said, because “I can’t see behind people. I can’t see if there’s room. But if we walk around the people as we did with our images we can see there’s nothing behind it.”

My interpretation of that statement from that crowd expert (who is clearly neither a Trump nor a Spicer fan) is that the Trump camp was honestly mistaken (at least initially) because it used only one somewhat-misleading image instead of seven.

And then there’s this from Politifact, not a friend of the right, either [emphasis mine]:

But the number of attendees at inaugurations has varied widely throughout the years.

Due to controversies over estimates, the National Park Service no longer releases official estimates for how many people attend events on the National Mall. It stopped after a dispute over the tally of the Million Man March in 1995.

The U.S. Armed Forces Joint Task Force-National Capital Region and the Joint Congressional Committee, which plan and support inaugural proceedings, will not be releasing estimates, either.

Part of the issue is that estimating crowds is not an exact science, and tallies can be inconsistent.

When does a disagreement over crowd size become a lie? When Donald Trump is one of the participants. When it’s the Million Man March, it’s just alternative facts* (said without irony) or disputes/disagreements, or an “inconsistent” tally.

As I was researching and writing this, I began to wonder why I was covering it at all. Well, it’s the talk of the country—you’d think nothing else was going on. I’ll tell you one thing, though—I don’t plan to cover every brouhaha between the press and Trump during the course of his presidency. We all have better things to do.

[* “Alternative facts” a la Kellyanne Conway is the meme du jour.]

[NOTE: Here’s some fact-checking of those Spicer’statements that everyone is up in arms about. Now, CNN is not a Trump-friendly venue, but I don’t see much more there in terms of lies than what’s normal at a presidential press coverage, or what has become normal in the last few decades. Some of it seems to be error or disputes about which figures to use, such as for subway ridership.]

It’s gotten so that I can hardly stand to look at the news.

Now, the regular readers here know my opinion of Donald Trump. Let’s just say I’m no sycophant. I criticized him harshly before the nomination (a nomination I thought he had a very good chance of winning), and continued to criticize him after his nomination and thought he was likely to lose the election (although again, I thought he at least had a chance of winning—one in three). And I never, never supported Hillary.

But beginning with the night of the election, when Trump stepped up to give his victory speech, I noticed a marked change for the better in him, a diminution (not elimination) of the frivolous and/or offensive, and a growth of what could roughly be called a statesman-like bearing and thoughtfulness.

That does not mean I’ve stopped being a critic. But it means I’m feeling cautiously optimistic. I like a great deal of what Trump’s done (not everything) in terms of appointments. And if his demeanor and tweets still leave a lot to be desired, they are much improved.

But what has really turned my off lately—and not from Trump—is the behavior of the MSM towards him. I’m not naive about the MSM, what it wants and what it does. But I’ve never, never ever ever, seen anything remotely like the unrelenting vitriol, the unfairness of much (again, not all) of the coverage, particularly so early in the game.

Honeymoon? This is war. And the MSM’s stance is “But he declared war on us, innocent us, and we’re only trying to tell the truth!” I am certain that a lot of people are buying that, particularly if they’re predisposed to detest Trump, and if they’ve declared war on him already, too (and think he’s about to send the storm troopers to get them).

And all of this after the media has had an eight-year (actually, nine, if you count the 2008 campaign) love affair with Obama.

The MSM is loving this war. They love playing the victims. And the guy has barely taken office! It’s a spasm of media self-congratulation, virtue signaling par excellence. Feels good, I’m sure.

And Trump, of course, is fighting back, as are his aides, sometimes unwisely, sometimes even stupidly. I think Trump should choose his battles, and in particular his tactics, more wisely. He’s not listening to me, of course, and why should he be? He has what he considers a winning formula. And a familiar one: punch back twice as hard.

I have to admit that I can hardly blame him at this point. And remember, I’m a person who traditionally has had no trouble whatsoever blaming Trump, so I think I have some bona fides on this. We’ve had GOP gentlemen before as presidents or nominees—G. W. Bush and Mitt Romney come immediately to mind—and it got them nowhere. George Bush in particular showed remarkable forbearance towards the hostile press during his term, maintaining a nearly Olympian stance. All that happened was that his enemies controlled the narrative.

So, this is the verbal equivalent of war. Traditionally, that’s a fight the press will win. After all, they control the airwaves and the print media. Maybe not as much as they used to, with Fox News (that’s the news outlet with which Obama went to war, although the left didn’t complain about that particular fight), the internet, and social media such as Twitter. Most Trump supporters (perhaps all?) distrust and even hate the MSM and discount it, cheering him on in his disregard for it and contempt for it. But the MSM has quite a few tricks up its sleeve, too.

You know what I’m going to say, don’t you? We’ll see.

Who was Astaire’s best partner?

Fred Astaire himself was unique, and as a solo performer in his genre he was unsurpassed. Period. It wasn’t just that he could choreograph routine after routine and bring freshness to each one. It wasn’t just that he could sing so well that, despite the thinness of his somewhat reedy voice, many stellar songwriters considered him the very best interpreter of their creations and competed to write songs especially for him.

It wasn’t just that he could do the steps. Oh, he could do them, all right. But every single movement had a purpose, a meaning, an emotion, an emphasis of phrasing that was very much his own; no empty tap tap tapping for him.

Astaire is remembered for his partnership with Ginger Rogers, but he danced with many other dancers (including his first partner, his sister Adele, who was supposed to have been fantastic but of whom only still photos like this one remain to let us know what we’re missing):

There were a lot of “better” dancers (technically) than Ginger who partnered with Fred. Some were balletic. Some were very strong tap dancers, such as Eleanor Powell. I know that a lot of people consider Powell the very best, technically unstoppable. But to me she’s of no particular interest at all. Her tapping is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing (a bit like Meryl Streep’s acting, I have to say). Here’s a video; you decide for yourself:

In the above clip, I can’t take my eyes off Fred. I see Powell too, and their side-by-side mirroring of the steps gives me a chance to see what he does that makes him so sublime, and what she fails to do that renders her a bore (to me, anyway; sorry Eleanor).

Now, maybe what I’m about to do isn’t fair. Because for comparison I’m going to put up one of the most beautiful numbers Astaire ever choreographed and danced with Ginger Rogers, and it’s of a very different nature than the fast and snappy Powell number above. It’s lushly romantic. But it’s not just that. It’s believably lushly romantic and somehow sexual as well, without even a hint of a salacious move. These two people are so closely aligned—emotionally and physically—without being in the least identical; so almost mystically attuned that you believe—in the mesmerizing power of dancing (see how he almost hypnotizes Rogers at the beginning) and the mesmerizing spell cast by love:

I’m throwing this next one in as an extra. It’s a solo by Astaire, one of his best. It’s a nice companion piece to “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” because both cast “dance” as a sort of character, an actor in a little drama. In the pas de deux above, Fred sings to Ginger that they should dance, must dance, and “face the music” together, and then the music tells them what to do. In this next solo, Fred insists that he won’t dance, he will resist the urge to dance with her lest it lead to romance, as he knows it might. And yet he’s pulled into a solo dance against his will, again by the power of the music (certainly those Russian-guard extras in leftover costumes from “The Wizard of Oz” have little power to force him or to stop him):

You of course already know my answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this post. It was Ginger, Ginger, Ginger all the way.