[A]fter Musk decided to buy Twitter, Hillary Clinton called upon European countries to force social media companies to censor Americans. The European Union quickly responded by threatening Musk and other executives. Now, Technology and Science Secretary Michelle Donelan has announced plans to jail social media executivesif they fail to censor so-called “harmful” content on their websites. The government, of course, will determine what is deemed too harmful for citizens to see or hear....
The bill focuses on "'all forms of expression which spread, incite, promote or justify hatred' based on various progressive characteristics, including transgenderism."
Imagine: You buy tickets to a Broadway show... and what you actually wind up getting is a smelly, real-life mystery about human feces. This is apparently what happened to Hillary and Chelsea Clinton during a recent performance of Some Like It Hot at Shubert Theater... “Last week when Hillary and Chelsea Clinton were in the audience,” a source told [Page Six], “the lights came up for intermission and there were two human turds in the aisle just near the famous political duo.”...
One source said it was a "rather sad" occurrence involving "an elderly person." We're urged to think it had nothing to do with Hillary and Chelsea. Someone else is saying this is the 4th incident of its kind at that show. Maybe it's happening all the time at all sorts of shows and the only reason we're hearing about this one incident is that it happened near Hillary.
I thought the phrase "human turds" was funny. Is the turd human? Looking it up, I ran across an article from last year about fossilized excrement on display in a museum: "[T]he 20 cm long and five cm wide human turd dates back to the ninth century and is attributed to a Viking man in Jorvik which is now called York."
"It’s called lenticular fabric. It’s based on queer semiotics, specifically around cruising in bathrooms. The silhouette is modeled after a toilet seat."
Lots of wild photos at the link. Why Hillary Clinton is mixed in, I don't know... other than it's what tipped me into clicking. Chu and Clinton were not at the same party. Chu was at the Thierry Mugler party, and Clinton — who posed snuggling up to Nancy Pelosi — was at the National Portrait Gallery party. Hillary's got on a very roomy caftan. As for Chu's "lenticular" fabric, you don't really need to know. His quote stands on its own. Just a silly quote that's even sillier with Hillary on the same page.
"Lenticular" means "Having the form of a lens or of a lentil." Duckweed and red blood cells are lenticular. Is a toilet seat lenticular? Maybe he meant the toilet lid. Who knows? Who needs to know?
IN THE COMMENTS: Rabel says (correctly, I think):
I believe Mr. Chu may have been misquoted.
The "silhouette" refers to the stick figure characters. They are modeled on bathroom/toilet door male/female indicators, not toilet seats.
The lenticular fabric is, as noted above, a reflective material which reveals multiple images when viewed from different angles.
If you look closely at the photo you'll see that many of the figures are blurred as they are in mid-change when the photo was snapped.
Mr. Chu should demand a correction. This is important!
I read Chu's statement as absurd, but with Rabel's interpretation, it makes perfect sense. A detail of the photo at the Times:
It sounds like left-wing regulars already have a plan to "deny" the next presidential election, and they’re not making a secret of it.
I'm using their shibboleth "deny." I don't think challenging the results of an election is denying the election. At some point the results are sufficiently tested and so well proved that you're in denial if you don't accept the results, but even then you're not denying the election. You still believe in the election. You just don't think that the announced result represents the real election that took place.
Hillary is laying the groundwork for her side to do exactly that in the next election. The "denying" rhetoric and the "stealing" rhetoric are crossing paths right now and acting like they don't recognize each other.
If I understood correctly, this show consists of her and Chelsea getting together with some other celebrity mother and daughter — e.g., Goldie Hawn and Kate Hudson — and all 4 of them getting "out of their comfort zone" by doing something they hadn't done before. How far out of your comfort zone is a particular dance when you have danced or a particular soup when you have made soup?
They do move on to the serious topic of the documents seized in the Mar-a-Lago raid. Hillary is sharp and substantive, avoiding the display of animus toward Trump. Asked if she thinks he will be indicted, she says: "I don't want to judge. I've been prejudged — wrongly — enough."
She wants to know how it was possible that these documents could have been moved to Mar-a-Lago, when they were in a category that, when she was Secretary of State, she would read in a secured room, supervised by a person who carried the document in a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. I wrote "when they were" and not "if they were" only because that's how she spoke.
A fair-minded listener will contemplate making an inference that the documents at Mar-a-Lago were not documents in that category of secrecy. Perhaps Hillary herself was thinking that when she spoke of her own experience: "I don't want to judge. I've been prejudged — wrongly — enough."
Now, most people probably think she said that because she knows Trump's document problem is getting compared to her notorious email problem, and that's reason to distance herself. Let others jump into where-there's-smoke-there's-fire arguments. She got out the part that's most useful: Explaining the care taken with these documents. That's a basis for outrage against Trump.
But she left a ray of hope for him. She explained why it's just not possible that documents at that secrecy level traveled to Mar-a-Lago. Then, what happened? I won't prejudge, but just sketch out what could have happened: There really were no such documents found at Mar-a-Lago? Or: someone out to destroy Trump stuck these files in the boxes? As Hillary herself asked: Who packed these boxes?
She didn't add, but I'll add: Why wouldn't Trump, once asked, return the documents voluntarily out of concern for national security, a desire to look concerned for national security, and in order to fend off a swarm of FBI agents going through his entire home?
Don't miss the moment at 7:10 when she stares down the camera and sternly intones: "No one is above the law."
A bit after that, Chelsea gets her turn to speak. She's such a lackluster speaker that she got no applause when she said — answering a question about a threat of violence if Trump is indicted — "I'm very concerned that we are in a country now where we have more guns than people." She even underscores it with: "We have more than 400 million guns that we know of in the United States." Not even a spatter of applause.
She struggles forward, eventually getting to the phrase "the white nationalist insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th" — said emphatically with a choppy hand gesture. And they didn't even clap for that! Even the most hot-headed, daring accusations turn bland coming from Chelsea.
"I was interested to see that Hillary called Clarence Thomas a 'person of grievance.' That sounds like a phrase, whether newly minted or not, that Ann might be interested in discussing."
Is a "person of grievance" someone who overdoes their grievancing? as I think Hillary meant? More generally, aren't virtually ALL Hillary supporters "person of [some sort of] grievance"? I don't necessarily mean that in a condemnatory way. You could say, in a democracy, all political views are expressions of grievance.
Is this a new phrase I've missed?
Here's the video clip of Hillary:
"I went to law school with him. He’s been a person of grievance for as long as I’ve known him. Resentment, grievance, anger."
I agree with Norpois that "person of grievance" sounds like a deliberate phrasing. The similarity to "person of color" seems non-accidental. She doesn't call him an "angry person of grievance" — though The Hill gives us that "quote" in its title for the video — but she says "anger" right after calling him a "person of grievance," so that feels as though it's wafting the stereotype "angry black man."
Now, is Justice Thomas more of a "person of grievance" than the sort of person of color that Democrats expect to vote for Democrats? Perhaps what's bothering Hillary Clinton is that Thomas stands back from the ministrations that Democrats offer to aggrieved persons.
It makes me think of what Justice Thomas wrote at the beginning of his dissenting opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), which found that a subtle enough approach to affirmative action does not violate Equal Protection:
Frederick Douglass, speaking to a group of abolitionists almost 140 years ago, delivered a message lost on today’s majority:
“[I]n regard to the colored people, there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us… . I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! … And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! … [Y]our interference is doing him positive injury.”
What the Black Man Wants: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on 26 January 1865, reprinted in 4 The Frederick Douglass Papers 59, 68 (J. Blassingame & J. McKivigan eds. 1991) (emphasis in original).
Like Douglass, I believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators.
We all have grievances. But what do we do with them? Do we center our life on grievance? Do we align with a political party that offers to help us — perhaps in election after election — and then wait and see what form that help takes and whether it actually helps? Or do we become skeptical — like Douglass — and say "Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!"
Thomas has made his position clear. It's the argument for going right-wing. Is that grievance or a withdrawal from a life full of grievance?
Hillary Clinton — a Democratic Party politician — wants to impugn him: A "person of grievance" seems like someone quite unpleasant. If you knew him as a schoolmate, you'd do that schoolkid shunning. And as an adult — an elderly adult! — you still want that old mean-girl action.
He motioned for me to come in and then pointed towards the front of the room near the fireplace mantel and the TV, where I first noticed there was catsup dripping down the wall and there was a shattered porcelain plate on the floor.
The valet had articulated that the President was extremely angry at the Attorney General's AP interview and had thrown his lunch against the wall, which was causing him to have to clean up. So I grabbed a towel and started wiping the catsup off of the wall to help the valet out. And he said something to the effect of, he's really ticked off about this.
I would stay clear of him for right now. He's really, really ticked off about this right now..... There were — there were several times throughout my tenure with the Chief of Staff that I was aware of him either throwing dishes or flipping the tablecloth to let all the contents of the table go onto the floor and likely break or go everywhere.
Now that we know about the ketchup — "catsup" — what should we do? How off the norm is it to express anger in the White House by throwing an object?
“Washington dinner parties [in 1993] were buzzing with stories of Hillary throwing — take your pick — a lamp, a briefing book or a Bible at Bill.”... Fast-forward to 1998, just after President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was revealed — and a full five years after the buzz over Hillary throwing books and lamps had become established Beltway lore [and there's a story that a] White House maid discovered blood all over the president and first lady’s bed, and called in a residence staffer....
Blood! At least it wasn't ketchup.
The lore is that Hillary threw "the infamous edition of 'Leaves of Grass' that Bill Clinton eventually gave to Lewinsky and that the first lady had discovered the gift intended for her husband’s mistress."
“It’s not certain” that the book was the Lewinsky one, “but the staffer’s memories paint a picture of the tension.”
And then there’s the matter of lamp-tossing. [One book sources] the story to former florist Ronn Payne, who recalls hearing the Clintons fighting behind closed doors. He apparently heard Hillary call Bill a “goddamn bastard” and then the sound of a heavy object being thrown.
“The rumor among the staff,” [says the book], “was that she threw a lamp.”... During a televised White House tour in June 1993, interviewer Katie Couric jokingly asked the first lady to point out where she was when she tossed a lamp at her husband.
“Well, you know,” Clinton responded. “I’m looking for that spot, too.”
ADDED: Is this post unfair? Yes. That's deliberate. It's intended as a commentary on unfairness. The January 6th committee hearings are unfair.
