"Remember, Republicans, regardless of the Schumer Shutdown, the Democrats will terminate the Filibuster the first chance they get."

"They will Pack the Supreme Court, pick up two States, and add at least 8 Electoral Votes. Their two objectors are gone!!! Don’t be WEAK AND STUPID. FIGHT,FIGHT, FIGHT! WIN, WIN, WIN! We will immediately END the Extortionist Shutdown, get ALL of our agenda passed, and make life so good for Americans that these DERANGED DEMOCRAT politicians will never again have the chance to DESTROY AMERICA! Republicans, you will rue the day that you didn’t TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER!!! BE TOUGH, BE SMART, AND WIN!!! This is much bigger than the Shutdown, this is the survival of our Country!"

Writes Trump, at Truth Social.

1. What does "pick up two States" mean? I think it is a prediction that when Democrats next acquire a simple majority in both houses, they will vote for statehood for Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico.

2. What does "Their two objectors are gone!!!" mean? The "two objectors" must be Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski —[but see #8] — but they are not "gone"... if "gone" means no longer in the Senate. But I think it means they count as nothing now, because we have the votes without them. Or it's a Trumpian way to say: Let them go. They're already gone. 

You'll just have to eat their lunch all by yourself....

3. I think Trump is saying all hell will break out anyway, so best to be the first to unleash the hell, and maybe, just maybe, the GOP hell will make life so good for Americans that these DERANGED DEMOCRAT politicians will never again win a majority. Meanwhile, half of America will think the deranged Republicans are destroying America. In the Trumpian vision of life — it's about winning — the question is just which half of America gets to turn America into what the other half regards as Destroyed America. 

4. Or maybe Trump's outburst is just part of the art of the deal — the part where he scares you so badly you accepts the sensible offer you were resisting. Here, the Democrats need only vote to end the shutdown.

5. Another meaning of "gone" — which I don't think is in play here — is the beatnik's "gone." Sample usage, from Jack Kerouac's "Dharma Bums": "Among the people standing in the audience was Rosie Buchanan, a girl with a short haircut, red-haired, bony, handsome, a real gone chick and friend of everybody of any consequence on the Beach...." Lisa Murkowski is bony and handsome. Forget Rosie Buchanan, Lisa Murkowski is a real gone chick:

6. Since I've said something about feminine beauty, let me provide balance with something about masculine beauty. I watched that Eagles clip, from 1974, and was amazed to see that they'd all styled themselves in the manner of Napoleon Dynamite.

7. But who was Rosie Buchanan? They say it was Natalie Jackson.

8. "Poor Rosie—she had been absolutely certain that the world was real and fear was real and now what was real? 'At least,' I thought, 'she's in Heaven now, and she knows.'"

9. As commenters to this post are pointing out, "Their two objectors" makes much more sense as a reference to Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who really are gone from the Senate. They were theirs — the Democrats' — and they actually did object to the Democratic Senators' effort to vote away the filibuster to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act in 2022. 

"This week, the notion of Trump as the leader of a distinctively white movement became harder to defend...."

"Although exit-poll data can be unreliable... [his coalition is] unusually nonwhite.... For instance, Trump became the first Republican in more than a century to win Starr County, along the Mexican border in Texas, which is almost entirely Hispanic; he did similarly well throughout the state’s majority-Hispanic border counties.... Late in the campaign, during a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, one of his opening acts, the antagonistic comedian Tony Hinchcliffe... made a joke about Puerto Rico being a 'floating island of garbage,' which for a time became the campaign’s top story.... But... Osceola, a majority-Hispanic county in Florida with a large Puerto Rican population, swung from a fourteen-point Biden victory in 2020 to a narrow Trump victory this year.... [P]erhaps Trump’s coalition will help Americans rethink the assumption that 'white' and 'Hispanic' are mutually exclusive categories, and will boost a new version of the old white identity. But, as far as we can tell, Trump’s America is a place that is more polarized by education than it used to be and less polarized by whiteness and non-whiteness—by race, broadly understood...."

I'm reading "How Donald Trump, the Leader of White Grievance, Gained Among Hispanic Voters/In 2016, the idea that Trump was a cloaked white supremacist made him seem like a fringe character. What does it mean that his popularity has increased?" by Kelefa Sanneh, in The New Yorker.

I don't know how much postmortem I'm willing to read. If your perception and analysis are so good, why didn't you see this before the election? I guess that's another way of saying hindsight is 20/20. But I chose this little essay to quote because it's not purporting to understand what happened and it is pretty modestly conceding confusion. That's appropriate. I would like to see much stronger criticism of Democrats. They were boosted by mainstream media, which either pretended not to notice how awful they were or just didn't see.

By the way, is "antagonistic comedian" a standard term? I've heard "insult comedian."

Anyway, to escape from elite media for a moment — I mean for 3 hours — I listened to Joe Rogan and Dave Smith talking about Tony Hinchcliffe (go to 00:04:00):

"My mom was terrified that my dad, a police inspector in charge of Senate security, was not coming back on March 1, 1954, the day four Puerto Rican nationalists pulled out guns and sprayed bullets..."

"... from the spectators’ gallery above the House floor. Five representatives were wounded. My father ran over from the Senate and wrested a 38-caliber pistol from one of the shooters. My brother Kevin, then in second grade, was traumatized by my mom’s terror as she stood in the kitchen, frozen, before she got word that my dad was OK... I thought about this listening to Dominique Luzuriaga, Officer Rivera’s widow, give her eulogy through sobs... Officer Rivera and his 27-year-old partner, Wilbert Mora, died answering a 911 call from a mother in Harlem who said her son had verbally threatened her. They walked down a hall in the apartment and the son jumped out and opened fire, fatally wounding both officers... [Rivera] was the class clown, but he got a serious crush on Dominique in grade school. Teachers had to sit them apart so they could focus...  When she was called to Harlem Hospital, she said, 'Walking up those steps, seeing everybody staring at me, was the scariest moment I’ve experienced.' Standing by her dead husband, wrapped in sheets, she told him: 'Wake up, baby. I’m here.' In the eulogy, she often talked directly to her husband, as though he were standing at her side: 'The little bit of hope I had that you would come back to life just to say "Goodbye" or just to say "I love you" one more time had left. I was lost. I’m still lost.'"

From "Rhapsody for a Boy in Blue" by Maureen Dowd (NYT).

To read more about that March 1, 1954 incident, here's the Wikipedia article. Excerpt: "The assailants were arrested, tried and convicted in federal court, and given long sentences, amounting to life imprisonment. In 1978 and 1979, their sentences were commuted by President Jimmy Carter."

And from "Rafael Cancel Miranda, Gunman in ’54 Attack on Congress, Dies at 89/He and three others opened fire on a crowded House chamber in the cause of Puerto Rican independence. Some saw him as a terrorist, others as a hero" (NYT, March 3, 2020):

“Can you imagine us thinking we could overthrow the U.S. government with little pistols?” he told The Militant. “I wish I could!” 

He referred to the attack as “an armed demonstration.” 

“We knew that if we went with signs, we weren’t going to get attention,” he said.

"We’ve got a president who actually suggested selling Puerto Rico. Believe it or not, it could have been worse. He once asked our national security officials if he could nuke hurricanes."

"I mean, at least he didn’t do that. A nuclear hurricane seems like it would have been bad. I mean, it would be funny if it wasn’t. Look. Some of the rhetoric you’re hearing down here in South Florida, it’s just made up. It’s just nonsense. Listening to the Republicans, you’d think Joe was more Communist than the Castros. Don’t fall for that garbage, don’t fall for that okey-doke. Joe Biden is not a socialist. He was a senator from Delaware. He was my vice president. I think folks would know if he’s a secret socialist by now.... [The President] likes to act tough and talk tough. He thinks scowling and being mean is tough, and being rude is tough. But when 60 Minutes and Lesley Stahl are too tough for you, you ain’t all that tough. You got to walk out of a 60 Minutes interview, then you’re never going to stand up to a dictator. If you’re spending all your time complaining about how mean reporters are to you, you’re not going to stand up to Putin.... With Joe and Kamala at the helm, you won’t have to think about them every single day. There might be a whole day where they don’t be on TV. There might be a whole day where they don’t tweet some craziness. You won’t have to argue about them every day. It won’t be so exhausting. Just having a normal president.... We’re not going to have a president that goes out of his way to insult anybody who he doesn’t think is nice enough to him. We won’t have a president who threatens people with jail for just criticizing him. That’s not normal behavior, Florida. You wouldn’t tolerate it from a co-worker. You wouldn’t tolerate it from a high-school principal. You won’t tolerate it from a coach. You wouldn’t tolerate it from a family member. Florida Man wouldn’t even do this stuff."

Said Barack Obama at his Florida rally speech yesterday. Transcript.

If Trump nominates Barbara Lagoa to replace RBG, will Democrats make the "second Latina" argument? I see 2 big problems!

"An effort to install a second Latina on the high court would immediately raise the stakes of a nomination fight that quickly became a clash over principles of fairness and democratic legitimacy."

I just wanted to isolate that sentence, which appears in the middle of a Washington Post article by Isaac Stanley-Becker and Aaron C. Davis and called "Barbara Lagoa, Cuban American judge, rises on Trump’s Supreme Court list as allies emphasize Florida campaign edge."

First, I see that word "install," which I blogged about at length when we saw it in the text of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dying wish: "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

As I explained at the time, "install" was not the normal word to use in the context of a new American President taking office. I won't be surprised to see a sudden vogue for "install." I'll be watching.

But that's not my motivation for writing this post. I want to talk about "a second Latina." Is this the incipient attack on Lagoa? We already have a Latina on the Court, so Trump, in a ham-handed attempt to do diversity, has failed! He would grossly over-represent Latinas on the Court!

Is that the attack they'd use or that they're testing right now or pretending that they'd use in order to scare Trump away from what would, in fact, be an excellent choice?

There are 2 big problems with the "second Latina" argument.

1. The "first Latina" is Sonia Sotomayor, who was born in the Bronx to parents who were born in Puerto Rico. Barbara Lagoa was born in Miami to parents who fled Cuba. You can group them together under the word "Latina," but if you care about diversity, you shouldn't be arguing that the proposed "second Latina" is just a repeat of an ethnicity already represented on the Court.

2. The "second Latina" argument radically exposes the problem with choosing people because of their ethnicity. You're saying just get one and then you've covered that group and you don't need another. This idea limits opportunities for those in the groups that you've posed as caring about. You're saying: We've got our Latina, so we don't need another; we can get back to hiring the type of person we always preferred.

I don't know if Trump will pick Barbara Lagoa, but I'll be very interested to see if Democrats unleash the "second Latina" argument. It's dangerous, and it should go horribly wrong.

What kind of President...?

What kind of President, what kind of human, bashes Mayor of an American city bracing for a big storm? A disgusting, loathsome one, who’s raiding FEMA in midst of hurricane season so as to build his useless wall.

Puerto Rico, pls ignore este idiota.
We’re thinking about you.🇵🇷 https://t.co/HScVjJKe0G

— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) August 28, 2019

What did Ricardo A. Rosselló have in his texts that was so bad he had to step down as Governor of Puerto Rico?

I keep reading about them, for example, at NPR:

Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló announced his resignation amid a scandal over sexist, homophobic and otherwise offensive text messages he and his inner circle exchanged. The leaked texts set off mass demonstrations and widespread calls for his departure....

Protesters have flooded the streets since the July 13 publication of nearly 900 pages of profane messages on the messaging app Telegram showing Rosselló and his close aides insulting women, deriding gays and making fun of Maria victims. The scandal has come to be known as "Rickyleaks."...

I want to see the text of the texts. I don't trust characterizations anymore. People will call almost anything Trump says "racist," so I need the direct quotes these days, and that's partly because I want it on record what truly offensive stuff is, for comparison purposes.

There were no quotes at NPR, but here, I found some at Metro, "These are the Ricardo Rossello texts at the center of Puerto Rico's outrage":

In the texts, Rossello [calls] NYC Councilor Melissa Mark-Viverito... a "wh-re," and describes another female politician as "daughter of a b-tch." In one text thread about the management of Puerto Rico's financial crisis, Rossello wrote, "Dear oversight board, go f— yourself" followed by several of middle finger emojis....

In one particularly unsettling exchange, Rossello made fun of the victims of Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island in 2017, killing more than 3,000 people. Sobrino Vega, the former chief financial officer, made a joke about the number of bodies in the aftermath of Maria. Rossello responded, "Now that we are on the subject, don't we have some cadavers to feed our crows?"...

"Nothing says patriarchal oppression like Ricky Martin," he wrote."Ricky Martin is such a male chauvinist that he f—s men because women don't measure up. Pure patriarchy."

Big deal? In private texts? Obviously, if Trump had written such things, he would survive. He'd be trashed, but he would survive.

"You flew? Aren't you going to blog the experience? Did you have to go thru Security? Did you take your shoes off? They search your laptop and purse/wallet."

Asks Nice in the comments to last night's "Hello From New York City."

1. I finally had a flight experience in which I was not chosen to be felt up by a TSA official. I believe this is because I changed how I dressed. Instead of a long flowing skirt, I wore non-baggy pants.

2. I did have to take off my shoes, and I had to stand in that plastic cylinder with my feet apart and my hands raised over my head which I presume allowed somebody somewhere to look through my clothes.

3. I paid an extra $100 per flight to get first class on the kind of plane that has 3 seats per row in first class and 4 seats per row in coach. I had the middle seat, with a completely non-annoying person right next to me. Across the aisle, there was a man in shorts with very hairy legs, and the socks that he wore with his sneakers had images of lobsters on them.

4. I did not commit the intrusion of snapping a photograph of these socks, even though I did, later on in the day, as you can see in "The Imp Café," snap a picture of a woman in a tie-dye t-shirt that had an image of Donald Trump with the word "impeach" stamped on his face. I liked how the green bottle hid part of the word revealing the little-noticed component "imp." Usually the included word "peach" gets your attention and keeps you from seeing the option of putting the "p" with the "im" to release the little devil inside the word.

5. Some people think Trump is a full-scale devil but an "imp" is (according to the OED) "A little devil" or "A mischievous child (having a little of ‘the devil’ in him); a young urchin: often used playfully." Jonathan Swift used the word in "Gulliver's Travels": "I once caught a young Male [Yahoo] of three Years old,..but the little Imp fell a squalling, and scratching, and biting."

6. "Yahoo" is "A name invented by Swift in Gulliver's Travels for an imaginary race of brutes having the form of men; hence transferred and allusively, a human being of a degraded or bestial type... Frequently in modern use, a person lacking cultivation or sensibility, a philistine; a lout, a hooligan." And that sounds like the way people think of Trump too.

7. I'm here in NYC on my own, staying in a hotel that has a name that's interesting for a reason that I'll reveal after I've checked out.

8. I took a cab from LaGuardia to Manhattan, and you might think that because it was Sunday, the traffic would be easy, but the Puerto Rican Day Parade was going on. The cabbie informed me that the Puerto Rican Day Parade was the worst parade of the year. Second worst was St. Patrick's Day. Wanting to soothe any incipient ethnic animosity — the cabbie was maybe Filipino — I said, "Maybe because of drinking?" He seemed to confirm that theory, then expressed approval of the 2 ethnic groups associated with those parades because unlike other drinkers, they don't vomit in the cab. He didn't use the word "vomit," but I did, to make sure I had the story straight. He spoke of "messing up" the cab.

9. Remember the old episode of "Seinfeld," "The Puerto Rican Day Parade"?

"Allahu akbar. It’s Arabic for 'God is greatest.' Muslims, an eccentric tribe with over a billion members..."

"... say it several times in our five daily prayers. The phrase is also a convenient way to express just the right kind of gratitude in any situation. I say 'Allahu akbar' out loud more than 100 times a day.... A common, benign phrase used daily by Muslims, especially during prayer, is now understood as code for 'It was terrorism.' It’s easy to forget that language is often hijacked and weaponized by violent extremists. Some people yell 'Allahu akbar' and others chant 'heritage,' 'culture' and 'white pride.' The preferred slogans of a killer don’t make much difference to the people whose lives are lost or their loved ones, but they make all the difference in Americans’ collective understanding of a tragedy.... If only the hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico, leaving American citizens in desperate need of power, food or water, could have yelled, 'Allahu akbar,' triggering that kind of tough response. Perhaps our president would have been able to see the storm as evil. Perhaps he would have been energized by a 'them versus us' rage to insist on swift action to repair the damage."

From "I Want ‘Allahu Akbar’ Back," by playwright/lawyer Wajahat Alinov (NYT).

ADDED: If it were possible to fight a hurricane with a proactive military strike, we'd totally do that. And most of us don't particularly care about the enemy's ideology except as a way to figure out how and where it will attack so we can fight it better. We don't need to feel there is "evil." Understanding the religion behind Islamist terrorist attacks isn't that different from understanding the science of how a hurricane behaves. We want to protect our physical security. Most Americans — the vast majority, I think — prefer to let other people have their own religious beliefs. We're not about ferreting out heresy and blasphemy. The American values are freedom of religion, individual autonomy, and keeping government out of religion. Go enjoy your freedom and let us enjoy ours.

I'm absolutely not buying the argument that we care less about hurricanes than terrorist attacks and that the difference is some antipathy to Islam. We don't have a way to stop a hurricane. We can only clean up and make repairs after the disaster. The same is not true with terrorism, because human beings with minds that can be understood are plotting and planning and can be stopped before they strike. We don't just wait and then do an extra-good job of dealing with the destruction. There is evidence of what other people are thinking in part because they use words. It's sad that "Allahu akbar" is among the words that help us protect ourselves from attacks, and I'm glad Alinov cares enough to feel bad about the words he'd like only to feel good about.

There's a limit to how long Trump will put up with Puerto Rico leaning on the federal government.

Here's how he puts it on Twitter this morning:

"Puerto Rico survived the Hurricanes, now a financial crisis looms largely of their own making." says Sharyl Attkisson. A total lack of.....

...accountability say the Governor. Electric and all infrastructure was disaster before hurricanes. Congress to decide how much to spend....

We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. forever!

That gave Chuck Schumer the opening to play the race card:

"Why do you continue to treat Puerto Ricans differently than other Americans when it comes to natural disasters?"

Is it different? Doesn't matter. The question is enough. Trump is tweeting and Schumer is tweeting. Somebody ought to speak clearly and factually about where the line is between the preexisting financial crisis and the hurricane that landed on top of it and whether the 2 disasters should be merged or not. Is there some other natural disaster in recent American history that compares to this problem?

I'd like to see some serious analysis, not just back-and-forth Twitter slapping.

"It’s unprecedented language from me, but it’s unprecedented to have the president of the United States attack the victims of a natural disaster."

"I’ve never seen that before, so those were the only words I had to express my feelings on that. When have we ever seen that?... That was not an impulsive tweet. Those were the only words I had left, and I’m a guy who puts words together for a living. They’re all I had available to me to express my reaction to his attack on the people of Puerto Rico."

"Hamilton" playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda gives an explanation for why he tweeted "You're going straight to hell, @realDonaldTrump. No long lines for you. Someone will say, 'Right this way, sir.' They'll clear a path."

Is Miranda religious? I tend to think that if you really believe there's a hell and some people are going there you would not purport to speak for God and say who's going there. You would not risk offending God. Miranda's "You're going straight to hell" is particularly high-handed, even purporting to know the bureaucracy of Hell, that there are long lines for some and an express lane for others. That makes it comedy, and it's a kind of comedy made possible, I think, by the belief that there is no hell, and that's why we've got to give the evildoers hell in the here and now.

Speaking of comedy and hell, I was just reading David Grossman's "A Horse Walks into a Bar," which is a novel set in a stand-up comedy show. At one point, the comedian, the main character, says:

"Have you heard the one about the guys who die and get to the induction center in the sky, and they sort them into heaven or... hell? No, seriously, isn’t that the greatest fear—that in the end it’ll turn out the rabbis were right? That hell is a for-real place?... Listen, guys, I’m talking all-inclusive hell, the whole shebang, with fire, and devils with horns, and those little rakes, the pitchforks, and the wheel of torture and boiling tar and all those gadgets Satan gets to use…I haven’t slept a wink just thinking about it these past few months, I swear, and at night it’s the worst, the thoughts just eat me up and I totally get what you’re thinking now: Son of a bitch, why did I have to go and eat those shrimp on that trip to Paris? And the pitas from Abu Gosh on Passover? And why didn’t we all vote for Torah Judaism?” He lowers his voice and booms: “Too late, scumbags—to the tar!”

The effort to Katrina Trump with Marie continues apace.

I'm seeing things like this (which is at Daily Beast):



I know Trump fed his haters, yesterday morning on Twitter:

The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.

...Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They....

...want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.

That's aggravating, when people are suffering, but should it be called "demented" and "racist"? I can see why a Trump hater would jump at an opportunity to frame "They" as Puerto Ricans in general and, in addition, to see Puerto Ricans as a racial group being subjected to disrespect because of race. But that's a leap beyond Trump's text. And yet, if the text supports that leap, one might say Trump intended to cause his followers to make racist inferences.

By the way, what's with the "King Joffrey" epithet?

Later in the day on Twitter, Trump was accusing his critics of doing #FakeNews. Maybe he threw out the red meat in the morning, expecting his haters to trash him as a demented racist and intending all along to come back for a second round accusing them — because it was predictable that they'd go overboard — of doing #FakeNews.

But maybe he started out responding to his critics, because that's what he does. He hits back. Remember what he said at a "town hall" back in April 2016:

“Tone to me matters. Being presidential matters,” Trump told host Greta Van Susteren. “If somebody hits me, I have to hit them back. I have to. I’m not going to sit there and say, ‘I’m wonderful, I’m a president.’ I want to win. I will be so presidential you won’t believe it.”

He must hit back when attacked. Maybe that's all that happened yesterday. The Mayor of San Juan hit him, and he hit back. You saw where turning the other cheek got George W. Bush in the aftermath of Katrina. That's not how Donald Trump does things. It's possible that Trump makes one move at a time, sees how it plays, and then makes the best next move, which in this case will be to hit back at the haters who are calling him a demented racist.

Back in April 2016, Van Susteren pushed Trump to say what he means by "presidential" (because — who knows? — he could become President and then claim to be "presidential" in the sense of the word that he had in mind). At the time, Trump said:

“It means maybe not be so aggressive, maybe not get so personal. But when people get personal with me, they say, oh, they don’t like my hair, okay? If I ever said I don’t like their hair it would be a headline. They’re allowed to say whatever they want to about me. My hair is not that bad is it? And it is my hair. But you know what happens? What happens is they hit me and I hit them back harder and, usually in all cases, they do it first. But they hit me and I hit them back harder and they disappear. That’s what we want to lead the country. I will be so presidential, Greta, you will be so proud of me.”

See? Asked to elaborate on what being "presidential" meant to him, he went right back to the topic of hitting back. They hit me and I hit them back harder. And they disappear. And that's what we want. A fighter is a leader. That's the kind of "presidential" he's going to give us: a leader who fights and hits back.

Notice that his criticism of the Mayor of San Juan is that she is not a leader — such poor leadership.

I'll finish this post with a poll. (Or wait, first I need to figure out what "King Joffrey" means. The only Joffrey I know is the Joffrey Ballet. The article just the situation "trigger[ed] our Joffrey Baratheon into a rage." I'm forced to Google Joffrey Baratheon. Ugh! It's a "Game of Thrones" reference: "Joffrey is an amoral sadist who disguises his cruelty with a thin veneer of charm.")

What Trump said about the Mayor of San Juan was...

hitting back, as he always does. He'll balance that with praise for Puerto Ricans who work with him.

too cruel under the circumstances. He should concentrate on helping.

short-sighted, impulsive, and destructive. Typical of his meanness and ineptitude.

intentional racism, part of a pattern of genuine evil that we have seen in him.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Once we're able to go outside, we're going to find our island destroyed."

Said Puerto Rico's Emergency Management Director Abner Gómez Cortés, quoted in "All Power Out as Hurricane Maria’s Winds, Floods Crush Puerto Rico" (NBC).

"I never thought I'd say this, but we're going to be the New Jersey of the West."

"Oregon is going to be the next red state on the left coast."

Just now, as the roll call proceeds at the GOP convention.

UPDATE: "The 51st State"... Puerto Rico!

UPDATE 2: I recorded Governor Scott Walker announcing the Wisconsin vote:

"When I got the part, I thought, 'Dear God,' because she sings, 'island of tropic diseases'..."

"... and I thought, 'I can't say that about my beautiful little island'... island of tropic diseases? Whew!"

Rita Moreno won an Oscar for playing Anita in "West Side Story," but she felt bad about having to trash Puerto Rico — you ugly island.

There were other issues, too. Co-directors Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins wanted a big contrast between the warring gangs, the Sharks and the Jets.

"So the white kids had to have their hair bleached and have extra-pale makeup," Moreno recalls, "and we had to wear all one-color makeup, almost the color of mud — and it felt like it. We all had to have accents — many of us who were Hispanic did not have them. I asked the makeup artist, 'Why do we have to be one color? Because Hispanics are many different colors.'"....

During the filming of West Side Story, she created her own Puerto Rican character with an amusing, exaggerated accent: Googie Gomez. "One day I hiccupped her," Moreno says, before singing, a la Googie: "'I had a drean, a drean about chu, bebe.'"

Here that is on YouTube, from "The Ritz," which as a Broadway show won Rita Moreno a Tony. Of course, Moreno had to fight off the accusations that she herself, with this Googie Gomez character, was trading in offensive ethnic stereotypes. Her answer seems to be: No, because it was so funny and because it was an exaggeration of a particular type of person that people recognize. Make sure you understand how to distinguish and an actual offensive ethnic stereotypes.

Do we know what Sotomayor thinks about abortion rights?

Some people assume Obama wouldn't have picked her if she doesn't support abortion rights, but is that really the case? White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, has said that Obama “did not ask... specifically” about her position. It may be politically useful that her opinion isn't known, and yet that may mean that she'll turn out to be a surprise (as Souter, the man she's replacing was in his time).

None of the cases in Judge Sotomayor’s record dealt directly with the legal theory underlying Roe v. Wade — that the Constitution contains an unwritten right to privacy in reproductive decisions as a matter of so-called substantive due process.

Of course, a Court of Appeals judge is bound to Supreme Court precedent, which includes that theory, but a case applying it might reveal how enthusiastic a judge is about it.

In a 2002 case, she wrote an opinion upholding the Bush administration policy of withholding aid from international groups that provide or promote abortion services overseas.

“The Supreme Court has made clear that the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position,” she wrote, “and can do so with public funds.”

That says nothing beyond the simple fact that she was bound by precedent and powerless to overrule it.

In a 2007 case, she strongly criticized colleagues on the court who said that only women, and not their husbands, could seek asylum based on China’s abortion policy. “The termination of a wanted pregnancy under a coercive population control program can only be devastating to any couple, akin, no doubt, to the killing of a child,” she wrote, also taking note of “the unique biological nature of pregnancy and special reverence every civilization has accorded to child-rearing and parenthood in marriage.”

That is pretty consistent with both the pro-life and the abortion rights position. (In fact, it's a good illustration of why we shouldn't say that those who favor abortion rights are "pro-abortion.") Someone supporting abortion rights might object to valuing the father's interests equally with the mother's, and someone who is pro-life might object to seeing abortion from the perspective of the parents and not the unborn child. Still, she's mostly using pro-choice language: she calls the unborn child a "pregnancy," and she equates it with "a child" (i.e., a born child) when it is "wanted." But then again, this is the language of the law embodied in the Supreme Court decisions that bind her.

[I]n a 2008 case, she wrote an opinion vacating a deportation order for a woman who had worked in an abortion clinic in China. Although Judge Sotomayor’s decision turned on a technicality, her opinion described in detail the woman’s account of how she would be persecuted in China because she had once permitted the escape of a woman who was seven months pregnant and scheduled for a forced abortion. In China, to allow such an escape was a crime, the woman said.

All you "empathy" opponents — think about that.

Then there's the fact that Sotomayor was raised as a Roman Catholic. (Indeed, she will be the 6th Catholic on the Court.)

... Hispanics include a higher percentage of abortion opponents than many other parts of the Democratic Party’s coalition. Judge Sotomayor’s parents moved from Puerto Rico.

“At the very least, she grew up in a culture that didn’t hold the pro-life position in contempt,” [said teven Waldman, the editor in chief of BeliefNet.com].

David Savage and Peter Nicholas note:

Sotomayor... has listed herself as a member of Childbirth Connection, a group that helps young mothers prepare for caring for a baby.

Two years ago -- in a case of concern to women's groups -- she joined an appeals court ruling that upheld a school district's policy requiring teachers to notify a parent if they saw that a girl was pregnant. The court said that the teachers had no legal basis for objecting to the policy....

If Obama was seeking to avoid an abortion battle during the confirmation process, Sotomayor would seem a logical choice because of her lack of record on the issue. Another finalist to replace Souter, Judge Diane P. Wood from Chicago, had a strong public record of supporting abortion rights. Wood dissented a decade ago when the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Wisconsin's and Illinois' bans on what opponents call "partial birth abortion."

The polls just closed in Puerto Rico.

CNN projects that Hillary Clinton will win "by a wide margin."

UPDATE: Hillary, looking radiant in electric blue, speaks: "We are winning the popular vote. The people have spoken and now there can be no doubt."

AND: Obama has a "slight lead" in the pledged delegates, so the question comes down to: Who is in the best position to win in November. She's pressing her case.

Bill Clinton says: "Celebrate!"

Are you — assuming you're a Democrat — fretting about the chaos in the Democratic presidential race? Bill Clinton says relax and enjoy it:

"The voters get to decide. I think we should just celebrate this. If we just chill out here and let all the voters have their say, my gut is it's gonna come out all right."...

"I expect a spirited election in the fall, no matter what happens. But we should just let the Dems decide. This is a tough choice for them. They got two candidates, they basically like them both, and they have different strengths. And they have to decide which skilll set is more important, number one, for the country's welfare in the long run, and which one is more likely to be elected. And you know I have my strong convictions, but I might be wrong."...

"The fundamental fact is most voters like them both. They're trying to decide who will make the best president. And I think we just ought to let every state and Puerto Rico vote, let them all vote, and see where we are, and I think it will become clearer than we know, what to do."

Yes, why can't you Democrats celebrate? If you're having trouble feeling festive, why not listen to the Rush Limbaugh show? He's been celebrating this for weeks.

Let them all vote... see where we are...

You've got to give old Bill credit for his sheer nerve and political savvy. Count all the votes! There's a theme with deep resonance or Democrats. Why would you want to stop the vote counting before it's reached its full conclusion? That's not something Democrats like.

It will become clearer than we know, what to do...

Bill's found a mellowly presidential new place for himself. The wise old man will is asking for calmness, a fair conclusion to the orderly proceedings. He's asking for optimism: be happy that that there are two good candidates and trust that in the end there will be clarity.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, he's furiously devising new ways to blear our view of Barack Obama.

Cockfighting and the First Amendment.

There's a federal court lawsuit claiming a First Amendment right not to put on a cockfight, but to show it on the internet when the fight itself takes place in Puerto Rico where it is legal.

“We believe firmly that broadcasting and selling legal cockfighting over the Internet is not a crime,” said David O. Markus, a lawyer for the company, Advanced Consulting and Marketing, which runs the site www.toughsportslive.com. “As bullfighting is part of Spanish culture and as violent human fighting is part of our culture, cockfighting is part of Puerto Rican culture.”...

The [federal] law, enacted in 1999 and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, makes it a crime to sell depictions of animal cruelty for commercial gain. There is an exception for works of “serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical or artistic value.”

The plaintiffs do well to play the ethnic diversity card. Congress did not come up with this law to squelch Puerto Ricans, however. What Congress wanted to crush was crush video -- which had women "talking to the animals in a kind of dominatrix patter” and crushing them under her bare or high-heeled foot. (Remember the 90s?)

The law says nothing about whether the underlying conduct is illegal, but makes it illegal to sell depictions of cruelty to animals in places where that conduct would be illegal.

President Clinton issued a statement when he signed the bill, saying he would instruct the Justice Department to construe the law narrowly, limiting it to “wanton cruelty to animals designed to appeal to a prurient interest in sex.”

Ooh! A signing statement! I love when a Bush era bugaboo comes up in an non-Bush context. And I note the humor in the way the plaintiffs would take advantage of Clinton's limiting construction by saying that the interest in cocks is not about sex.

Anyway, the government has prosecuted individuals for selling videos of dog fights, so Clinton's effort to maintain the focus on prurient sex is a nonstarter.

The linked article quotes Eugene Volokh, saying the law is unconstitutional because it restricts speech and does not "fall into any existing First Amendment exception.” On the government's side, the argument is that it's like "laws prohibiting obscenity, child pornography, incitement and fighting words." The idea is to create a new category of speech that is "low value," a new First Amendment exception. I hate seeing the courts move in that direction.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh writes:

The real question is whether the child pornography exception -- the one exception that allows restriction of the distribution of speech because of the manner in which the speech was created -- should be extended to cover the distribution of material the making of which involved harm to animals, rather than just harm to children. The argument would be that, as with child pornography,

1. production of cruelty videos can be done in secret, but the distribution has to be relatively public;
2. a ban on production will thus be very hard to enforce;
3. so long as there's money to be made in distributing cruelty videos, there'll always be someone willing to produce them; and thus,
4. to prevent the harm that takes place when the videos are made (injury to animals), one also needs to stop their distribution.

The argument against extending the child pornography exception would be:

1. The statute might end up suppressing a lot of valuable speech, such as the film of the bullfight and the like, and clause (b) is an inadequate safe harbor because it's much too vague.
2. The statute will in fact suppress more valuable speech than child pornography law does, because depictions of animal cruelty are more likely to be relevant to political debates or to legitimate art than depictions of sex (or of lewd exhibition of genitals) involving children.
3. The harm that the distribution of this speech causes -- indirectly furthering animal cruelty -- is much less severe than the harm of indirectly furthering sexual exploitation of children.