Althouse

"... guided by White House budget director Russell Vought, an architect of the controversial Project 2025 playbook for Trump’s second term. Federal funds expire when the fiscal year ends Tuesday night, and Congress appears deadlocked over a stopgap measure that would keep agencies online for seven weeks while long-term negotiations continue. Under the Vought plan, the only agencies that would remain operating apace are those that received money in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the $4.1 trillion tax and immigration package that Congress passed in July. The Defense and Homeland Security departments were the main beneficiaries.The result, both during and potentially after a shutdown, could be a federal government dramatically reoriented to defense, immigration and law enforcement — and not much else...."

I'm reading "Trump’s shutdown plans: Mass layoffs, deregulation, military deployments/The White House’s call for mass layoffs in a looming shutdown tracks with past administration efforts to defang much of the federal government" (WaPo)(gift link).Is this something like a return to DOGE? DOGE had "Musk’s high-visibility 'move fast and break things' ethos. But Vought, people in and around the administration say, has been quietly potent, drawing on four years out of government to surgically plan measures that overhaul the executive branch and Trump’s power."

"I stumbled into a strategy, that is. I thought I'd just put up a quote from this book I was reading — Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers — and the quote was about happiness, so I started casting about for happiness items. Happily, there was no end to bloggable things."

That's something I wrote on March 16, 2012 — Facebook just reminded me. I loved getting that prod, as I engage in a higher level of seclusion this morning...



There's so much anxiety mixed with boredom these days that I thought I'd take you back to that happiness day, 8 years ago:

1. "There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy" — the post title is a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson. Much more to that quote at the link. I'll just add: "[I]f a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept... and within practical limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of Morality."

2. "And... that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny" — a quote from The Director in "Brave New World."

3. "I have told myself a hundred times that I would be happy if I were as stupid as my neighbor, and yet I would want no part of that kind of happiness. But yet, upon reflection, it seems that to prefer reason to happiness is to be quite insane" — said "The Good Brahmin" in the story by Voltaire.

4. "I broke my theme. Something made me laugh"/"Then you didn't break your theme. Something made you laugh. Something made you happy. Something made you smile." A real-life colloquy. The first commenter didn't understand that post, and, funnily enough, I don't either now. Oh, I think it was maybe the next post: The headline, in Forbes, "Santorum Promises Broad War on Porn," which required me to blog about the double entendre ("broad war"). That was good for laughing, but not really about happiness.

5. "'5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't)'/You already know what they are going to be, don't you? It's interesting to be able to think something while simultaneously knowing the opposite."

6. "Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief. There are lots of things we believe but don’t know. Knowledge is not just up to you, it requires the cooperation of the world beyond you — you might be mistaken. Still, even if you’re mistaken, you believe what you believe. Pleasure is like belief that way. But happiness isn’t just up to you. It also requires the cooperation of the world beyond you. Happiness, like knowledge, and unlike belief and pleasure, is not a state of mind" — a quote from the David Sosa, whose field is philosophy.

7. "A large Gallup poll has found that by almost any measure, people get happier as they get older..." — a survey from 2008. We are all only ever getting older, but the phenomenon doesn't kick in until age 50. After that, it gets better and better.

8. "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.... By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men...."

9. "Romney's Religion of Happiness vs. Gingrich's Religion of Grievance" — a Sarah Posner headline at Religion Dispatches. I'm happy that I don't have to bother with the feelings of Romney and Gingrich anymore.

10. A post about my favorite Beatles song, "Happiness Is a Warm Gun."

11. I also don't have to think too much about Rick Santorum, but back then, he said: “This is the mantra of the left: I have a right to do what I want to do” and “We have a whole culture that is focused on immediate gratification and the pursuit of happiness ... and it is harming America.” He took the position that the Founders idea of "the pursuit of happiness" was “to do the morally right thing.”

12. "The Happiness Bank."

13. The acronym PERMA represents the 5 components of happiness.

14. "Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you’ve found very helpful?"
"Years ago, when I was researching an article on research into stress, one social scientist passed on a simple tip: 'At some point every day, you have to say, "No more work."' No matter how many tasks remain undone, you have to relax at some point and enjoy the evening."

15. "Happy people rarely correct their faults... they consider themselves vindicated, since fortune endorses their evil ways" — wrote Le Duc de La Rochefoucauld.

It had an awful whiff of the apocryphal when Trump told it yesterday:



Great story but so sentimental, so seemingly made-to-order for maudlin Americans. Did it really happen like that? I found an article in Newsmax and by Jackie Gingrich Cushman.* It's from last year — when Fidel Castro died — so it doesn't do much if anything to bolster the story. Cushman identifies the violinist, Luis Haza, as her friend. His father, a Cuban police official, was executed after Castro took power.

"My father thought the revolution was for democracy," Luis Haza told me. "Castro betrayed my father and the entire revolution."

By 1963 [at age 12], Luis Haza had become an accomplished violinist and was appointed an associate concertmaster of a professional orchestra in Cuba. According to Haza, "the power structure wanted to see if I could be 'integrated' into the system. If they integrate the son of an executed man, it would be a model for all the young people."

But Luis Haza had a different dream: "To come to the United States for freedom. We knew that in Cuba, eventually we would die, just like we had seen neighbors die, and so-and-so disappeared. It was a daily thing, a daily subject: American freedom, to go to the United States."

After Haza refused to play for the elder Castro, a military squad charged into a rehearsal and pointed machine guns at the pianist. "Boy! Play something!" they shouted.

He did. "I played the American national anthem, 'The Star Spangled Banner.' The entire thing! You could hear a pin drop. I finished playing, and nobody knew what to do."

Great story. Too great? Make stories great again? Do we want the truth or do we like the fake news that we like?

When I heard Trump telling this story — which I never heard before — I was talking back to the screen as Trump crept up on the big reveal — that the boy played "the Star-Spangled Banner." I was groaning: Oh, no, don't tell me.
___________________

* Yes, she's the daughter of Newt Gingrich. The mother was Jackie Battley, Newt's first wife, whom he met when he was a high school student and she was his geometry teacher. According to Newt's second wife, Marianne Ginther, Newt was only 16 when the relationship began. (We always hear about how cruel Newt was to Battley — divorcing her when she had cancer — but does anyone talk about what she did to him when he was a teenager?)

On Fox News Sunday this morning, first, there was Newt Gingrich:

CHRIS WALLACE: Speaker Gingrich, I want... to start with the - your tweet... "Republicans need to focus on closing down independent counsel because it clearly isn't independent." What's your reasoning and wouldn't that really look like an obstruction of justice?

NEWT GINGRICH: Well, first of all, look at what Comey said. Comey said, I deliberately leaked, through an intermediary, to create this counsel, who happens to be one of his closest friends. Then look at who Mueller's starting to hire. I mean these are people that, frankly, look - look to me like they're - they're setting up to go after Trump. They've - including people, by the way, who have been reprimanded for hiding from the defense information into major cases. I think this - this is going to be a witch hunt. I think that Comey himself, by his own testimony, tainted this particular process. You have a director of the FBI deliberately leaking in order to create a special counsel, who we're now supposed to believe is going to be this neutral figure. I think that's just nonsense....

Then, Karl Rove:

Said Newt Gingrich on "Fox News Sunday" today.

We just looked at each other with the same "Oh, great, now I'm picturing Newt Gingrich with a blow-up doll" expression on our face.

ADDED: If my link — to the transcript — doesn't work for you — it works for me — you can see the quote here (along with video of the interview).

"In fact, that will be possible only if we accept that he is legitimately the 45th President of the United States, and the time for protesting Trump's holding this office has passed. If you drown out any discussion of the specifics of his presidency with the familiar refrains that he's abnormal, racist, sexist, etc., you'll remove yourself from the realm of productive debates about the president."

Writes my son, John Althouse Cohen, urging us to get past the shock of Trump's election and start taking him seriously. Trump wasn't taken sufficiently seriously as he ran for President, but he achieved everything he said he would. We should assume he's going to do the specific things he's got in his first-100-days plan and focus on what we'd like and not like to see happen. As John puts it, none of Trump's proposals "involve turning America into a fascist dictatorship, forcibly removing citizens from the country, systematically violating due process, instituting apartheid, or squelching free speech." And some of the proposals are or might be good ideas that even Trump opponents might want to nudge him to focus on.

I remember a couple days before the election, when Newt Gingrich said: "[I]f Trump is elected, it will just be like Madison, Wisconsin with Scott Walker.... a Madison, Wisconsin kind of struggle if Trump wins." But the Wisconsin protests did not happen at the point of Scott Walker's election in 2010. They began in February 2011, after Scott Walker had taken office and the GOP legislature had presented a bill — Act 10 — with specific proposals people objected to. The anger and outrage was directed at legislation, not at the outcome of the election.

So the not-my-President protests against Trump are not like what happened in Wisconsin. Protesting an election — and election that is not contested or unclear — doesn't make much sense unless you're opposed to preserving our constitutional system of government. Perhaps some protesters fall into that category. Some may be a bit confused and think the electoral college ought to be changed, but that's not to say there's something illegitimate about the result of the election. Trump won clearly under the rules of the game everyone was playing. The protesters seem mostly to be afraid of what Trump will do, so they ought to address their protests to the specific proposals.

That's not only how the Wisconsin protests worked, that's how the Tea Party originated. It was not at the point of the election or the inauguration, but the following month, in February, when something particular was proposed. It happened to be — did you remember? — Obama's mortgage relief plan.

The Tea Party has had a lasting effect on American politics, and I don't think we'd have seen the same thing at all if it had begun as a freakout on seeing Barack Obama elected.

On "Meet the Press" this morning:

I think tragically, we have drifted into an environment where if Hillary is elected, the criminal investigations will be endless, and if Trump is elected, it will just be like Madison, Wisconsin with Scott Walker. The opposition of the government employee unions will be so hostile and so direct and so immediate, there will be a continuing fight over who controls the country. I think that we are in for a long, difficult couple of years, maybe a decade or more, because the gap between those of us who are deeply offended by the dishonesty and the corruption and the total lack of honesty in the Clinton Team. And on their side, their defense of unions, which they have to defend, I understand that. But that will lead to a Madison, Wisconsin kind of struggle if Trump wins.

I always love hearing the name of my city called out as the symbol of resisting the outcome of the election.

And maybe Newt Gingrich read my blog post from a couple weeks ago:

This is what Democrats actually did in Wisconsin when Scott Walker took office as governor in 2011.

I'm reading a NYT article that's teased on the front page with the headline "Some Trump Voters Warn of Revolution if Clinton Wins" and the quote "People are going to march on the capitols. They’re going to do whatever needs to be done to get her out of office, because she does not belong there." From the text of the article:

... but Rich Lowry thinks Pence won't be much good at defending Trump.

Lowry thinks Christie — "comfortable at defending anything" — and Newt — "one of the most glib politicians of the last 30 years" — would be much better at defending Trump, but conservatives aren't "excited by Christie" and "Newt is famously ill-disciplined."

I'd say the problem with Christie and Newt is that they don't help normalize Trump. They don't envelop him in conventional politics. That could be okay if Trump's idea is — to steal an old Austin, Texas slogan — KEEP TRUMP WEIRD.

Pence seems to have a boring normalness about him, but the media will do all it can to deprive him of that. The gift he could bestow — assuming Trump wants it (normalness) — could explode in Trump's face. I'm picturing endless talk about Pence's dealings with gay people. Pence won't look like the steady, substantial statesman Trump needs to get to palatable normalization.  Pence will supply a new element of bigotry to the media's Trump template.

Trump is tempted to appease those who think he's too weird, but whatever he chooses will be portrayed as a new dimension of weirdness. There's no getting to the illusion of normal. The trick, I think, is to be weird in the right way, the way that doesn't make us think: Why would we want a weird President?

Said Newt Gingrich (after the Dallas massacre).

"... not as final word, but as a first approximation of the new realities, filled with danger and promise, created by the accelerative thrust."

Wrote Alvin Toffler, quoted in his NYT obituary.

He wrote some big bestsellers that affected how many people felt about plunging into the future. "Future Shock" (1970). "The Third Wave" (1980).

The NYT is standoffish: "Critics were not sure what to make of Mr. Toffler’s literary style or scholarship. The mechanical engineering scholar and systems theorist Richard W. Longman wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Toffler 'sends flocks of facts and speculation whirling past like birds in a tornado.' In Time magazine, the reviewer R. Z. Sheppard wrote, 'Toffler’s redundant delivery and overheated prose turned kernels of truth into puffed generalities.' Mr. Toffler’s work nevertheless found an eager readership among the general public, on college campuses, in corporate suites and in national governments. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House, met the Tofflers in the 1970s and became close to them. He said 'The Third Wave' had immensely influenced his own thinking and was “one of the great seminal works of our time.' Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang of China convened conferences to discuss 'The Third Wave' in the early 1980s, and in 1985 the book was the No. 2 best seller in China. Only the speeches of the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping sold more copies."

IN THE COMMENTS: Eric the Fruit Bat said:

I think they might have made "Future Shock" into some kind of an educational film and we watched it when I was in 8th grade science class. All I remember is something about disposability and some little girl throwing her doll into the trash can.

Later on I read "Mega Trends," and whatever came after it, and I would go to the library to read some magazine that I think was called "The Futurist." Pretty dull, useless stuff, it turned out.

I really miss the feeling I got back when I was a little kid watching stuff like the 3M TV commercials during Jacques Cousteau. The future seemed like it was going to be wonderful.

But, you know, you can't go home again.

Oh? Maybe you can. Here:

A few days ago, NBC's Lester Holt confronted Donald Trump about his statement, in a speech, that during the Benghazi attack, Ambassador Chris Stevens "was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed."

Trump's response was: "Were you there? Were you there? Were you with her?" That is, he goes on the offensive. Instead of taking any responsibility for substantiating his charge, he acts like he can get away with saying anything that other people don't step up and disprove.

And Holt lets him get away with that ridiculous debate move. Accepting the defensive position, Holt says: "She has testified before the committee that she wasn't asleep, it happened during the daytime. There's no evidence."

Trump's response is scattershot, mixing the idea that she could have been literally asleep with the argument that "sleep" was really more of a metaphor:  "It happened all during the day and the story was going on for a long period of time...  and she was asleep at the wheel, whether she was sleeping or not, who knows if she was sleeping..."

My first reaction was: ridiculous! But then I heard something yesterday on "Fox News Sunday" and flipped into thinking that the very ridiculousness of it is a devious trick. Chris Wallace confronted Newt Gingrich about the "soundly slept in her bed" quote:

WALLACE: Now, Mr. Speaker, you can certainly argue about how Hillary Clinton handled Benghazi. But the fact is, the attack happened at 3:00 or 4:00 here in the afternoon in Washington. And she was working late into the night. As I say, there's plenty to attack her on. But why not stick to the facts?

GINGRICH: Well, first of all, I've had different people say different things about what she did that night and what her instructions were. Second --

WALLACE: She wasn't asleep is the point.

GINGRICH: OK. She certainly --

WALLACE: Maybe she should have been, but she wasn't.

The transcript notes "laughter" over Wallace's little joke. And Gingrich jumps past any controversy over whether Hillary was sleeping and sleeping soundly and in her bed. And here's where I want you to see what I saw, that "soundly slept in her bed" is a trap.

GINGRICH: OK. I think that on a lot of things people can argue about that Trump says and that Hillary says, but the objective fact is there were over 600 requests for security from Libya. Now, that number came from the chairman of the intelligence committee, not from Donald Trump. They were ignored. The fact is that in the end, there was no effective effort to respond. The fact is, she clearly lied about why it occurred. And again, you had families of the people who were killed who say she lied to them. So, I think this is a debate — they can get into details of picking a fight with Donald Trump. This is a debate I think they're not going to win, because on the larger framing of the debate, the country is overwhelming going to be with Trump....

That is, Hillary Clinton doesn't want to go into the subject of Benghazi. She'd like to close the door on it or view it from a distance as part of her vast collection of experience. But Trump is laying out a particular detail — that she soundly slept in her bed — a provocative lie that Hillary and her proxies will be tempted to try to correct. If they go there, then the specifics of Benghazi are getting talked about again, and it's not good for Hillary.

She and her supporters may think that it's worth it, because it's such a great opportunity to show people Trump's reckless disregard for the truth, but I think he thinks he's placing the winning bet, because: 1. Attention to Benghazi hurts her, 2. He seems to be okay with brazenly standing his ground, and 3. There's the path of retreat to metaphor: She was "asleep at the wheel," unaware and inept, even if awake.

As Chris Wallace's joke had it: What she did was worse than if she'd been sleeping. She should have been sleeping. Benghazi might have worked out better if she'd been out of the picture. That's where that conversation ends up going. So I'm speculating that he threw out a blatant fiction as an irresistible conversation starter.

Said Newt Gingrich, asked on "Fox News Sunday" if he'd accept an offer to serve as Trump's running mate.

If he can convince Callista and me that it's doable and that it’s serious and we would, in fact, contribute I think we would be very hard pressed not to say yes. 

Chris Wallace nudged him to do it because the Vice President residence "isn't bad."

Speaking of VP prospects on the Sunday shows, there was also Sherrod Brown on "State of the Union." He was hilariously blindsided. Jake Tapper played a clip from an ad he put out in his 2012  campaign for reelection to the Senate:

A reader sends a link to a post of mine from January 22, 2012 titled "Coming to terms with The Newt." My mental adjustment to presidential candidates is absurdly familiar:

Before going out on that dark night last night, I'd seen that [Newt Gingrich had] won the South Carolina primary. 

Oh! The schedule was a lot earlier then.

At intermission [at some classical music concert], I said to Meade: "I've come to terms with Newt." I didn't mean that I was prepared to vote for him. I still regard the idea of President Gingrich as bizarre. But I live in the moment. I embrace the now. It's fine the way things are. Newt has his role to play, and right now, I'm going to say it's a good one.

That sounds like something I'd say right now about Trump.

... [I]t's good that the Tea Party and other sorts of conservative factions contribute to the political mix in America. Newt — along with Santorum — has established that the Establishment can't dictate who the candidate will be. 

Trump, along with Cruz....

Whoever ultimately becomes the candidate — and I assume it will be Mitt — he won't achieve his place through the nods of insiders bypassing the people who have imperatives of their own. It's strange that Gingrich embodies their wants, but that's the way this strange campaign has evolved....

It's strange that Trump embodies anybody's wants but Trump's, but that's the way this strange campaign has evolved.

... Gingrich has achieved his position through the sheer force of putting ideas into words, words that people heard. There's something quite beautiful about that, quite American. And it's beautiful without the man being beautiful.... You'd think we'd be more influenced by the image of The Newt...



... but we're not. We're hearing the words, the speech, the ideas. I hear democracy maturing! Over The Newt! I think that's pretty cool.

Quite American... beautiful without the man being beautiful.... If I could just photoshop a Trumpion head of hair onto that little guy, that newt, I'd have this post done.

That's a statement from November 2007. The "he" is P.T. Barnum, the speaker, Maher, Executive Director of the Barnum Museum. It's near the beginning of this NYT video (which explains Barnum's techniques — showmanship, advertising, and building in Manhattan):



Yesterday, on "Meet the Press," Donald Trump was presented with a list of characters he'd been compared to: "some people are calling you the Music Man of this race. Kim Kardashian. Biff, from Back to the Future. George Costanza. P.T. Barnum. What's - any of those do you consider a compliment?" Trump immediately said "P.T. Barnum."

ADDED: Who has compared Trump to P.T. Barnum? I found this from way back in April 2011:

As GOP insiders and the conservative base warm to what party veterans see as a “joke candidate” ...

 Sometimes the joke is on you.

... likely GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich opted for a more theatrical approach....

"Well look I think that he is a little bit wild. A little bit... some have compared him to P.T. Barnum and the rise of the Barnum and Bailey Circus. He is one of the great showman of our lifetime. He is very clever at getting news media attention. And he’s in his “Apprentice” candidate phase. That’s fine. He brings a level of excitement and life — a lot more folks will talk about the Republican ticket in the next few weeks because of Donald Trump. I’m all for him being an active Republican, then at some point he’s got to settle down…But for the moment it’s a bit like watching American Idol. We have the newest guest star."

But here's something from the current election cycle, as people were getting a clue that they'd have to take Donald Trump something like seriously. This comes from Salon, last September, by Sean Trainor:

Donald J. Trump is not, as Matthew Pressman argues in the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan’s heir. Rather, he’s the heir of the 19th-century showman Phineas Taylor Barnum – disingenue extraordinaire and purveyor of humbug (that quaint, old-timey synonym for bullshit)....

"... throwing Congress into chaos as it tries to avert a government shutdown. Mr. Boehner made the announcement in an emotional meeting with his fellow Republicans on Friday morning...."

IN THE COMMENTS: David Begley said:

From altar boy and Jesuit college to meeting the Jesuit Pope in the House. Crying allowed. 

Yes, that was my first thought: The Pope made that happen.

AND: There I was yesterday mocking the so-called "breaking news" of the Pope's meeting with John Boehner as "the height of banality."

ADDED: I'm watching Newt Gingrich on FoxNews, asked why is this happening now: "John had been thinking about doing it... probably a month later. But I think the emotional impact of the Pope coming, John's a very devout Catholic, this is something he'd always wanted to see happen. Yesterday, in many ways, is the high point of his speakership, and in that sense, I think, it kind of makes sense to say: I want to go out with something that he will treasure the rest of his life."

ALSO IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said...

I thank him for his service -- it can't be an easy job -- and I thank him for leaving. I'm not sorry to see him go. It's too bad he was re-elected so many times.

I wonder what the real story is. He's ignored the Conservatives base for so long...what's different now? 

And Bobby said:

I'm wondering the same thing. A colleague (rating: B3) has suggested that Boehner and the conservatives cut a deal on the Planned Parenthood funding to avert the government shutdown -- i.e., the conservatives will let Boehner fund the government, and he will be forced out so they have their own victory to celebrate. Theory is the Planned Parenthood battle has gotten so large that the conservatives now need to get something tangible for losing that battle, and shooting Boehner out of the saddle is a very convenient win for them.

"Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich defends House Majority Whip Steve Scalise after it was reported that Scalise once spoke before a white supremacist group."

Attention #Crossfire fans: @newtgingrich & @vanjones68 host a fiery debate TONIGHT at 6:30pET. See you there! pic.twitter.com/WYyoS5zmbU
— Crossfire (@Crossfire) May 1, 2014

My post title alludes to the famous Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. line: "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic."

CNN is shouting fiery -fire in the hope of inciting a stampede toward the obviously tedious TV show. It's surely a false shout, but no one believes it. So there's no stampede toward the non-fire.

Here's the Wikipedia article "Shouting fire in a crowded theater." Excerpt:

People have indeed falsely shouted "Fire!" in crowded public venues and caused panics on numerous occasions, such as at the Royal Surrey Gardens Music Hall of London in 1856, in Harlem in 1884, and in the Italian Hall disaster of 1913, which left 73 dead.

And here's Christopher Hitchens on shouting fire in a crowded theater. 

The word "crossfire," of course, refers to gunfire, and it's interesting that CNN is reviving the old show title, given the hoopla over the use of a metaphorical target in something Sarah-Palin-related around the time of the Tucson massacre, after which we were all admonished to speak to one another with civility. But apparently, there are times when we must cast civility aside and snipe at one another, like when ratings are low.

And, by the way, just yesterday, Rush Limbaugh was going on about how mainstream news executives care more about being hip and cool than they care about ratings.  I don't know what CNN is doing with Van Jones and Newt Gingrich and the revival of "Crossfire." It's hardly hip, and it's not believable that anyone will watch. Maybe they think it will generate short clips that social media will pick up and share.

This came up during a conservative radio show that followed the sedate interview Todd did with the President the other day:

I actually think he would benefit from just simply doing some town halls and not White House-screened town halls with supporters, but doing, you know, going back, essentially letting some folks vent, letting some folks vent, handling the vent a little bit....

Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich did that joint town hall back in ’96, in ’97 in New Hampshire. It was a big, it was a good moment, frankly, for both of them. At the time, it ended up helping Clinton more than helping Newt, but it was sort of, that’s another way you could do this.

Todd says Clinton wasn't "afraid" to do that kind of "political theater," but Obama? "It’s not that President Obama is, it’s just not, well, I mean, if you went to law school with him, you know." Ha. Todd has trouble finding his way out of that sentence so he throws it over to the radio host, Carol Platt Liebau, who'd earlier mentioned that she "was on the Harvard Law Review with him, and when criticized, he really did used to bristle a bit." And this awkward little dialogue happens:

CPL: Yeah.
CT: I mean, that’s not what he, that’s not his…
CPL: Comfort zone.
CT: …comfort zone. He’d rather be in a lecture hall.

And CPL moves on to the next topic.

On "Meet the Press" today. Gingrich is especially good. Here's his answer to Gregory's question paraphrasing Denis McDonough's argument for the strike ("It's going to be limited. Don't worry. Very, very limited, very targeted. And by the way, if we don't act, Iran, the real enemy, is watching"):

No, look, I thought Denis was very effective, making a bad case. And I think that's their problem. If the strategy is inexplicable to a normal American, we're going to sort of punch you, but we're not going to punch you too hard, and we really would like you to leave, but we don't want you to leave enough to get rid of you, and we hope there's a political solution, although we haven't got a clue what it is. I mean, that's very hard to build momentum for. 

And Harman left a strong impression on me when she said:

But the notion of going to war or launching a limited strike, at least to me, to project American power in a way that deters really bad consequences in Iran and North Korea and so forth is by my rights, the right thing to do. And I think what's going on here, in my view, is all these folks in both parties, especially in the House, are worried about being primaried. The base in each party is against this. I'm sympathetic to that, the economy hasn't rebounded in most parts of the country. They're against it. So these folks think that the reelection, my view, matters more than perhaps taking a principled stand.

Video of the whole segment:

"This is a style... that is highly moralistic and personal, dividing people between who is good and who is bad."

That's David Brooks on October 19, 2006, paraphrasing Obama and encouraging him to run for President. It's a paraphrase of what Obama wrote in the then-just-out "Audacity of Hope" and something he'd said to Brooks in an interview.

Look at the contradiction even in those 2 sentences that Brooks put together to promote Obama. Obama would like to "move beyond" the politics that divides people into good and bad, even as he draws a line of division and portrays the Baby Boomers as bad.

I'm searching the text of "The Audacity of Hope" to see what Obama wrote about Baby Boomers. There are 2 mentions. First, at page 50: