Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, LIsa Haliday, Asymmetry: A Novel.

Joe Biden Dogged by His Handling of Anita Hill's Allegations When He Was Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee During the Clarence Thomas Confirmation Hearings (VIDEO)

Joe Biden launched his White House bid today, and as I'm just getting online, I can't quite tell how well it's going just yet. That said, it looks like the Anita Hill fiasco of 1991, when Biden chaired the hearings for Clarence Thomas, could doom his candidacy.

At the New York Times, via Memeorandum, "Joe Biden Expresses Regret to Anita Hill, but She Says 'I'm Sorry' Is Not Enough."

And at the Los Angeles Times, from last week, "Joe Biden’s handling of Anita Hill’s harassment allegations clouds his presidential prospects":

As he moves toward formally entering the Democratic presidential race, Joe Biden has repeatedly expressed regret for how he handled one of the most consequential challenges of his career in the Senate — the 1991 hearings into Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

But he has not put the decades-old issue to rest.

Biden, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, has rankled rather than reassured many critics by portraying himself as powerless to have conducted the hearing differently.

“To this day I regret I couldn’t come up with a way to get her the kind of hearing she deserved, given the courage she showed by reaching out to us,” Biden said, speaking of Hill at a charity event in New York in late March. “I wish I could’ve done something.”

His critics call that excuse flimsy, saying Biden has downplayed his considerable authority as the committee chairman.

“He could have done more,” said Kimberlé Crenshaw, a UCLA law professor who assisted Hill’s legal team in 1991. “That’s not an apology. An apology starts with a full acknowledgement of the wrong you have committed. If he wants the women’s vote, he’s got to do something more than symbolic stuff.”

A review of the record of the hearings 28 years ago shows how much Biden was a creature of a Senate that was clubby and male-dominated for much of his early career. The Hill-Thomas hearing was so long ago that the committee received one of the most volatile political documents of the decade — Hill’s affidavit outlining her claims — over a fax machine.

Biden’s handling of the hearings go beyond being just a single data point in his 36-year Senate voting record. The incident became a test of leadership in a climactic political event as Hill’s allegations blew up what were already high-stakes confirmation hearings. Thomas, a young black conservative, had been picked by President George H.W. Bush to replace Thurgood Marshall, the legendary civil rights lawyer and the court’s first African American justice.

Hill, then a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, alleged that Thomas harassed her by talking in sordid detail about sex and pornography while she she was an employee of his at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Thomas flatly denied the allegations.

The Senate was singularly ill equipped to deal with the subject at the time. It had no black and only two female members. The Judiciary Committee had none of either.

The hearings turned a spotlight on that glaring lack of diversity. The image of a young black woman sitting alone behind a witness table, telling an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee a lurid tale was televised across the country and the world. Never before had sexual harassment been discussed so explicitly on Capitol Hill.

“There was a real and perceived problem the committee faced,” Biden said at the March charity event. “They were a bunch of white guys.”

Biden had never shown much appetite for pressing nominees on issues related to their personal lives. Another committee leader, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, had been involved earlier in the year in a drunken Florida beach scene with a nephew who was accused of rape.

For about two weeks before the nomination came to a vote, Biden and a few staff members knew of the allegations but kept them out of public view because Hill requested anonymity.

Biden did not deem the allegations important enough to postpone the committee’s scheduled vote on Thomas’s nomination. When he announced his opposition to Thomas in a floor speech he said, “My view on this matter has nothing to do with Judge Thomas’ character. For he is a man of character.”

News of the allegations and Hill’s identity leaked only after the committee voted. At that point, Biden came under enormous pressure to investigate. Several House Democratic women — including Rep. Patricia Schroeder of Colorado — marched to the Senate to demand the hearings be reopened.

Schroeder said in an interview that, when she complained to Biden that the process was being rushed, his response was a window to the ways of the Senate. Biden told her, she said, that he had given his word to Sen. John Danforth (R-Mo.), Thomas’s sponsor, while they were in the Senate’s all-male gym that it would be a “quick hearing.”

“Is that where the deals are all cut? Really?” said Schroeder. “That stuck in my craw. It was a boys club and the boys were not really wanting to yield.” Danforth, asked about Schroeder’s account, said he did not remember such a conversation with Biden.

More at that top link.

John Lydon on Venice Beach (VIDEO)

I don't live in Venice, but Robin Abcarian does and she's not going with Johnny Rotten's analysis:

The Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten laments on the condition of Venice Beach due to "tent cities and "heroin spikes." https://t.co/izPjaFD6FB Watch Johnny's full interview with Newsweek here: https://t.co/SDFHzKOcQK pic.twitter.com/6fgl9NK9nn

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) April 21, 2019

He’s completely out of his mind.

— Robin Abcarian (@AbcarianLAT) April 22, 2019

Margaret Leslie Davis, The Lost Gutenberg

This looks fascinating!

At Amazon, Margaret Leslie Davis, The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey.

Playboy Model Kate Great

At Egotastic!, "Kate Great Lives Up to Her Name with an Exquisite Nude Body."

And at Playboy Plus, "International models, Kate Great and Zhenya Beyala enjoy the fresh, crisp air in their seductive Playboy Girlfriends feature, "Tender Moments."

How Trump Can Win Reelection

It's Larry Sabato, who got pretty much everything wrong in 2016, at least concerning the presidential race, so caveat emptor.

At the Washington Post, "It’s easy to see how Trump can win reelection":

It's Easy To See How Trump Could Win Reelection -- from @LarrySabato and me in @PostOpinions https://t.co/DCt6aCewAr

— Kyle Kondik (@kkondik) April 24, 2019

President Trump thrives on chaos, much of it his own creation. But it would be a mistake to assume that the reelection campaign of this most untraditional president will mirror the tumult of his 2016 effort. It’s too early to handicap 2020, but Trump may try to capitalize on some of the same factors that helped three modern Republican presidents, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, win reelection.

The reelections of all three men were not always certain. Around this time in the 1972 election cycle, Nixon held only a modest lead over the early Democratic front-runner, Edmund Muskie, who in 1968 had been the vice-presidential running mate of Hubert Humphrey. In late January 1983, pollster Lou Harris found former vice president Walter Mondale leading Reagan 53 percent to 44 percent. John Kerry’s challenge to Bush was nip-and-tuck throughout 2004. Fast-forward to 2019, and Trump often trails some Democrats in presidential trial heats, but with his large, solid base and a continuing good economy, it isn’t hard to see how Trump could win again.

That is not to suggest that Trump is destined to win, much less that he would rebound to a gigantic victory like Nixon’s and Reagan’s. For one thing, the landslides that one finds at regular intervals throughout much of the 20th century don’t even seem possible in this highly partisan, polarized era. America is in a stretch of eight consecutive presidential elections where neither side has won the popular vote by double digits, the longest such streak of close, competitive elections in U.S. history.

Another caveat: Trump’s approval rating has been upside down for essentially his entire presidency, and he has shown no inclination to broaden his base of support by changing his policies or softening his sharp rhetoric. From that perspective, even matching Bush’s 50.7 percent in 2004 seems like a major reach. Yet Trump could again win the presidency without winning the popular vote because of the strength of his coalition in the crucial Midwest battlegrounds.

Trump is in the process of jumping one major hurdle: He lacks a major primary challenger. (Bill Weld, the 2016 Libertarian vice-presidential candidate who recently declared a GOP primary challenge, does not count as “major.”) With approval ratings among Republicans usually exceeding 80 percent, and with his allies firmly in control of the party apparatus almost everywhere, Trump has thus far boxed out major intraparty opposition. The last three reelected GOP presidents all waltzed to renomination.

Trump is also going to be in a much better financial position than he was in 2016, when Hillary Clinton vastly outspent him. Trump already has $40 million in the bank for his reelection bid, and he should be able to raise hundreds of millions more now that his party is more completely behind him than in 2016. Money is not everything, as Trump himself showed in 2016, but any campaign would prefer having more, not less.

The Internet will be a campaign wild card again. Trump will probably reprise his 2016 digital advertising strategy to dissuade specific demographic groups, such as African Americans and young women, from voting for the Democratic candidate. His army of domestic online trolls no doubt will also turn out in force, and foreign actors, particularly Russians tied to the Kremlin, will almost certainly try to influence the election. Don’t expect the Trump administration to devote a lot of energy to frustrating those efforts.

The Democratic Party may inadvertently boost Trump if it gets carried away with an impeachment frenzy that prompts a voter backlash. Opposition to Trump will help unify the Democrats and fund the eventual nominee after a standard-bearer emerges from what is a giant and growing field of about 20 candidates. But one or more factions of the Democratic Party may emerge from the primary season disappointed and angry. Trump’s well-funded digital strategy will work to widen these fissures.

Ultimately, Trump may turn out to be at the mercy of conventional factors...

More.

Islamic Jihad is World's Greatest Threat

Spectacular piece, from David Harsanyi, at the Federalist.

Read it all at the click-through:

Islamic Terrorism Remains The World's Greatest Threat To Peace https://t.co/8FCz4pbPDM

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) April 23, 2019

Miley Cyrus as a Lion

At Taxi Driver, "Miley Cyrus Topless as a Lion."

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Women Smoking for National Weed Appreciation Day

At Drunken Stepfather, "GIRLS SMOKING WEED FOR HEMPER CUZ IT’S 420 WEEKEND OF THE DAY."

Rebuilding Notre Dame (VIDEO)

At the Los Angeles Times, "Notre Dame may take decades to fix. The first concerns are water and soot":

Two holes gape where Notre Dame’s vaulted stone ceiling has collapsed. The cathedral’s 19th century timber spire is gone, as is most of its roof. Portions of the interior walls were blackened by the intense heat of Paris’ most consequential fire in centuries.

As the world absorbs the magnitude of devastation wrought by Notre Dame’s inferno, architects and engineers anticipate a decades-long restoration process replete with unprecedented challenges. Designers will need to navigate complicated structural issues and delicate preservation debates to satisfy an array of stakeholders.

They will all be asking the same question: How do you revive an 850-year-old icon?

"The whole world is watching, and everybody has something to say about it,” said Marc Walton, director of Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts at Northwestern University. “It has to be built for the next 1,000 years. It’s going to be a different structure as a result, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

The first order of business is to dry the cathedral out, said John Fidler, who served as conservation director of English Heritage, a government agency that maintains England’s national monuments.

“There are millions of gallons of water poured into the structure that will seep down to the crypt, the basement,” Fidler said. Pumping out that water could take months, and years may pass before the entire building is completely dry.

“It’s easy to make the surface dry because there are large pores on the surface, but deeper in the stone, the pores grow narrower and it’s more difficult to suck that water out,” he said. “When the walls remain damp, you get mildew and mold and fungus and salt crystallization, which can rupture the pores in stone and cause it to deteriorate on the surface.”

Soot is also a particular concern because it’s so oily, said Rosa Lowinger, a conservator of buildings and sculpture based in Los Angeles.

“People’s first instinct is they want to wash it, but that’s the last thing you should do,” she said. The building’s limestone is porous, so soap and water would drive the soot into its pores. Instead, soot must be removed while dry. “The earliest decisions here — the protocols taken — will define how successful a project like this is.”

While conservators tackle those problems, other teams will get started on the greatest engineering challenge of the entire project: the assessment of the cathedral’s structural condition.

Most analysis methods are tailored toward modern buildings, not stone structures, so engineers may struggle to determine the stability of the damaged cathedral, said Matthew DeJong, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley who has worked on historic buildings in Europe.

But Notre Dame is surely damaged, said Frank Escher, an architect and preservationist with Escher GuneWardena Architecture in Los Angeles.

“A fire of this nature can weaken a stone structure. It’s too early to say whether it’s safe or not,” said Escher, who is currently restoring the century-old Church of the Epiphany, the oldest Episcopal church in L.A...

More.

Delilah Belle Hamlin Out Walking

At Taxi Driver:

Delilah Belle Hamlin Braless Pokies While Out Walking - https://t.co/E3X058V2W7 - pic.twitter.com/YCZFzyO4Kf

— Taxi Driver (@TaxiDriverMovie) April 17, 2019

Plus, "Delilah Belle Hamlin Goes Topless in Purple Vinyl Gloves for Racy Instagram Post."

Alissa Quart, Squeezed

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Alissa Quart, Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America.

French Cuisine in the California Desert

I've been out to Yucca Valley over the past few weekends, as my mom took a turn for the worst and died last Thursday from lung cancer at the age of 82. It wasn't a surprise, but of course it's devastating to lose a parent. We're having an intimate service on April 26th and a celebration of my mom's life, with about a hundred people invited, sometime in June.

Meanwhile, my older sister mentioned this restaurant a couple of times when I've been out there visiting, and here's an interesting write-up at the New York Times, "An Oasis for Brunch Thrives in the California Desert":

YUCCA VALLEY, Calif. — The first time I drove east from Los Angeles to Flamingo Heights, I came to a stop behind a truck with a fairly blunt sticker on its sliding rear window: “Go Back to L.A.”

It was a reminder that this rural town, just north of Joshua Tree National Park, has an uneasy relationship with outsiders, who drop in by the hundreds to camp, or rent luxuriously renovated homes posted on Airbnb, take guided sound baths and hike with Nubian goats. After rainfall, when the pale desert dandelions and purple pincushions stagger into bloom, tourists come to geotag the flowers and take selfies in the shifting, mystifyingly beautiful desert light. And then? They’re gone.

Nikki Hill, a chef, and Claire Wadsworth, a musician, were married and living in Los Angeles in 2015 when they visited for the weekend and spotted a double rainbow. But instead of going back to the city, they bought an old diner on Highway 247 for about $30,000, turning it into an afternoon-only restaurant that adds a new dimension to the region’s culinary identity.

It’s a balancing act, but La Copine manages to serve the kind of seasonal, reassuringly confident food that appeals to both brunching families and retreat-seekers on a cleanse, in an inclusive dining room run with joy and exuberance. Though from a distance, the restaurant still looks like a diner on a dusty stretch of road — a little pit stop with a big lawless parking lot — the two women have turned it into a hub for the community and its flux of visitors.

There is no doubt when spring has come to the high desert. La Copine’s tables are piled with crisp haricots verts dressed in tahini, and creamy new potatoes tasting of rosemary and duck fat, dressed with aioli so that the softest parts of the potato become smushed and almost indistinguishable from the sauce.

All of the salads at La Copine, and there are usually two or three on the menu, are hunks — burly and satisfying, full of delicious secrets. You might find, under crisp, generously dressed leaves, a smattering of fried capers or a treasure of syrupy sherry-soaked dates.

The fried chicken thighs, dredged with potato flour, have a delicately crisp lace around the skin, which is sweet with hot honey. And the stack of layered eggplant, baked with a mellow tomato sauce until it’s meltingly soft and tender, doesn’t announce that it’s vegan. It is.

Though at first, Ms. Hill shopped at supermarkets and drove to the lower desert to find produce, she now gets her fruits and vegetables from farms in California, including ones in nearby Pipes Canyon, Bakersfield and Chino.

The menu is concise; even with the wine list and desserts, it fits on a single page. Seating is first-come, first-served, and regulars know to look for the scribbled list attached to a clipboard by the bar outside, so they can put their names down as they arrive.

Most dishes are composed with speed and efficiency, rather than prettiness in mind — no wasted movements in the kitchen, no superfluous components on the plate. Ms. Hill, who cooked at Scopa and Huckleberry in Los Angeles, takes a sincere, straightforward approach to cooking, building dishes that tend to underpromise and overdeliver.

Opening a restaurant in Los Angeles, or any major city, would have required bigger loans and a much larger investment, but after putting another $30,000 or so into furniture and repairs — fixing the leaky roof and replacing the walk-in compressor, repairing the appliances on the line and sanding the walls — the couple was ready for business...

Still more.

Far-Left 'Niche' Issues Define the Democrat 2020 Presidential Field

They're really not "niche" issues, but rather core issues designed to rig the system so Democrats win elections. Trump hatred has turned Democrats into the party of desperation and deceit. The front-page of the Los Angeles Times defined this as turn toward previously unmentioned specialty items for the party. Not anymore, sheesh.

From Mark Barabak, "It’s the electoral college, stupid. And the Supreme Court. And the filibuster ...":

How do you stand out in a crowd of nearly 20 Democratic presidential hopefuls? Talk about something different.https://t.co/ynCAtYsybh

— Mark Z. Barabak (@markzbarabak) April 15, 2019

In 1992, Bill Clinton won the White House focused on a message so elegantly simple the slogan became campaign legend: It’s the economy, stupid.

In this presidential race, it’s a lot of things.

Abolishing the electoral college. Ending the Senate filibuster. Refashioning the Supreme Court. Paying reparations for slavery.

A whole raft of issues that were little noted, if not wholly overlooked, in previous presidential campaigns have assumed a significant role in this early phase of the Democratic nominating contest, reflecting the party’s leftward shift, the power of social media and, perhaps above all, a field of contenders the size of a small platoon.

“The pressure on all the candidates to figure out how to differentiate themselves from the other candidates is intense,” said Anna Greenberg, a pollster working for former Colorado governor and presidential hopeful John Hickenlooper, one of more than 20 Democrats running or deciding whether to do so.

Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., launched his upstart campaign with a push to eliminate the electoral college and was one of the first to propose expanding the Supreme Court from nine to 15 justices. He suggests five members appointed by a Democratic president, five by a Republican president and the remainder coming from the appellate bench, subject to unanimous consent from the 10 other justices.

Other Democratic hopefuls, including Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, have said they are open to both ideas.

“Every vote matters, and the way we can make that happen is … get rid of the electoral college,” Warren said, amplifying the issue by pitching it during a recent CNN town hall.

Harris and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker have discussed the issue of reparations, which has largely been consigned to academic and theoretical debate, in the context of their broader proposals to help the poor. Several rival candidates, including Buttigieg, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, have said they too support ways of compensating victims of systemic racism.

“It doesn’t have to be a direct pay for each person, but what we can do is invest in those communities, acknowledge what’s happened,” Klobuchar said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

To a great extent, the Democratic candidates are moving in the direction of left-leaning voters and activists, who have the power on social media to organize around issues and elevate concerns, rather than what has typically been the other way around.

Healthcare, education and the economy are still matters of great interest and routinely come up wherever White House contestants appear. But underlying those issues is a broader frustration — particularly among those on the left — with the political system and its institutions, which, in their view, have thwarted the political will of most Americans.

The Democratic nominee has won the popular vote in all but one of the last seven presidential elections, yet twice in the last two decades it was a Republican — George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 — who claimed the White House by receiving the most electoral college votes.

In the Senate, Republicans refused to even consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, waiting out the 2016 election in hopes of filling a vacant seat, and have wielded the filibuster in such a way it now requires a super-majority to pass any significant legislation.

The Supreme Court, meantime, has moved decidedly rightward under President Trump, who benefited from the Senate’s delaying tactics and filled two vacancies...

Emma Cline, The Girls

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Emma Cline, The Girls: A Novel.

'Beast of Burden'

From Tuesday morning's drive-time, at 93.1 Jack FM Los Angeles, the Rolling Stones, "Beast of Burden."

Dancing With Myself
Billy Idol
6:49am

Beast Of Burden
Rolling Stones
6:45am

By the way
Red Hot Chili Peppers
6:41am

Hungry Like The Wolf
Duran Duran
6:38am

Wanted Dead Or Alive
Bon Jovi
6:33am

What I Got
Sublime
6:23am

You Make Lovin' Fun
Fleetwood Mac
6:19am

It's The End of the World As We Know It
R.E.M.
6:15am

Feel Good Inc.
Gorillaz
6:12am

Crazy Train
Ozzy Osbourne
6:07am

Everybody Wants To Rule The World
Tears For Fears
6:03am

Better Man
Pearl Jam
5:53am

Anything Anything
Dramarama
5:50am

Somebody To Love
Queen
5:46am

Sara Jean Underwood Smoking Weed

That's a big blunt --- and that's not the only big thing there, dang!

See, "Sara Jean Underwood Topless and Smoking Weed."

Bernie Sanders Raised $18 Million in First 6 Weeks of His Campaign

At the Washington Examiner, at Memeorandum, "Let's face it: Bernie Sanders could be the next president."

I highly doubt it, but the dude is raising phenomenal amounts of cash.

At Politico, "Sanders raises $18 million in first quarter of presidential campaign":

The online fundraising powerhouse took in about 900,000 contributions from 525,000 individual donors, Sanders' campaign said.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has raised more than $18 million since launching his second bid for the White House, his campaign announced Tuesday.

The fundraising haul, which surpasses the other two 2020 presidential candidates who have announced their cash totals so far, demonstrates how Sanders' enormous online following will power his campaign, while some of his rivals jockey for support from large donors who can give several thousand dollars at a time.

Aides said the Vermont senator’s average donation in February and March was $20, and 88 percent of the money raised came from people who gave $200 or less. Sanders’ team said he received almost 900,000 individual contributions after setting a goal of 1 million in the first quarter of the year.

The campaign has $28 million cash on hand after beginning with $14 million in the bank from Sanders' other federal campaign accounts, it said — another big advantage over Sanders' rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination. Sanders has put about 100 people on his campaign staff so far, fueled by the high fundraising totals.

On Monday, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said she raised $12 million in her first quarter. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., said he brought in more than $7 million. Buttigieg tweeted Monday that he raised 64 percent of his haul from people who gave less than $200, while Harris did not specify the share of her total that came from small-dollar donors, as Democrats hone in on grassroots fundraising as a key metric of support in the campaign.

No other presidential candidates have disclosed how much money they’ve amassed, including former Rep. Beto O'Rourke, who proved to be a small-dollar fundraising sensation in his unsuccessful 2018 bid for Senate in Texas. On the first day of his presidential campaign, O'Rourke said he raised $6.1 million — slightly more than the $5.9 million reaped by Sanders in his first 24 hours.

Campaigns must file reports with the Federal Election Commission by April 15. In 2016, Sanders raised about $15 million in the first fundraising quarter of his campaign, while eventual Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton raised $46 million in primary funds in her first quarter in the race.

Sanders' senior staffers argued that his skill for raising money through small-dollar donations — while not holding fundraising events — make him the best Democratic candidate to run against President Donald Trump.

Trump has "put the ultra-rich in charge of the government," said Faiz Shakir, Sanders' campaign manager. "How are you going to take that on? Are you going to say that we're 55 percent different than him? Are you going to say you're 100 percent different than him?"

Sanders' aides also said the money he raised will enable him to compete in all states in the primary.

"While we had to in 2016 make choices about where we could compete, I'm certain that in this race some of our opponents will also have to make similar difficult choices," said Jeff Weaver, a senior adviser to Sanders. "This campaign will have the resources and the volunteer grassroots strength to compete in every single state in the primary."

The Sanders team revealed other statistics about their donors: They said a majority of his contributors are younger than 39 years old, and that 99.6 percent of the money collected in the first quarter was raised online...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a 'Moron' (VIDEO)

It's Tucker Carlson, who's a regular laugh riot, heh.

AOC does have a point about the economy and income inequality, he points out. The problem is the 29-year-old wants us to give her all the power.



BONUS: At AoSHQ, "Tucker Carlson: Soyboy Beta Bottom Chris Hayes Is What Every "Man" Would Be if Feminists Could Impose Their Weird Asexual Political Agenda on the World."

Questions of Violence Linger After Murder of Rapper Nipsey Hustle

They nabbed a suspect, but questions of violence and the star's dream linger.

At the Los Angeles Times:

Authorities arrest man matching description of suspect in Nipsey Hussle killing https://t.co/a1QKBKShAT

— Hailey Branson-Potts (@haileybranson) April 2, 2019

The mourning transcended family and friends and became a citywide conversation. https://t.co/UHyFRsn2ET

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) April 2, 2019

The killing was like many others in this city — a young man gunned down on a street in South Los Angeles.

The questions were familiar too. Was it gang related? A personal dispute?

But because the victim was renowned rapper Nipsey Hussle, the mourning transcended family and friends and became a citywide conversation.

Hussle's coming of age as a member of the Rollin' 60s Crips who made it big in the music industry was on Angelenos' minds. The conversation included broader narratives about the persistent violence in South L.A. and Hussle's efforts to help young people harness their creativity through avenues such as the tech industry that have not traditionally been rooted in black and brown neighborhoods.

Hussle's choice to put his money in the community he came from as the owner of many small businesses, including the clothing store where he was fatally shot Sunday, is part of what many see as his legacy. He viewed entrepreneurship as a way to find success beyond the long-shot occupations of sports and music.

But the choice to stay close to home also put him in the line of fire as a wealthy and influential person in a place where disputes among acquaintances and rivals are sometimes settled violently.

"Being quick to the gun — the resolving of problems with a gun is going to always end up bad," said Ben "Taco" Owens, who works to prevent gang violence in South L.A.

The dichotomy was on display late Monday when several people were injured at a vigil for Hussle that turned violent when the crowd stampeded after reports of gunfire. Police said no shots were fired, but paramedics transported more than a dozen people, including two in critical condition, to the hospital. Most of the injuries were related to people being trampled.

On Monday, as radio DJs devoted their programs to Hussle and online tributes continued to pour in, LAPD sources said they had identified the suspect as Eric Holder, 29, of Los Angeles, and said they are searching for him.

Holder was last seen in a white, four-door 2016 Chevy Cruze, with the California license plate number 7RJD742. The vehicle was driven by an unidentified woman, according to the LAPD.

Authorities had previously said the shooter was someone in Hussle's orbit and they believed the motive was likely personal, not a gang feud.

According to initial reports, a young man opened fire on Hussle at close range before scrambling to a getaway car. The L.A. County coroner said Monday that Hussle, 33, whose legal name was Ermias Joseph Asghedom, died of gunshot wounds to the head and torso. He was pronounced dead at a hospital at 3:55 p.m. Two others were wounded in the shooting.

The investigation encompasses witness interviews, social media posts and security camera footage of the strip mall that houses The Marathon Clothing, the rapper's store at the corner of Slauson Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard, a source said.

The LAPD scheduled a press conference for Tuesday morning to provide updates.

"The saddest part of the story is that he represented a new path that gang members can create for themselves as entrepreneurs," said Alex Alonso, a gang expert and adjunct professor at Cal State Long Beach.

RELATED: Nipsey Hussle's dreams were bigger than hip-hop »

LAPD Chief Michel Moore put Hussle's killing in the context of a recent uptick in violence, noting that there have been 26 shootings and 10 homicides in the city since the previous Sunday.

"That's 36 families left picking up the pieces," Moore tweeted. "We will work aggressively with our community to quell this senseless loss of life."

Hussle was set to meet with Moore and Police Commission President Steve Soboroff on Monday to talk about solutions to gang violence.

"Throughout the years, as he fostered success in his music career, he chose ... to reinvest and try to address the various underpinnings that fostered this environment. It's just terrible," Moore said Monday.

As his music career took shape over the last decade and a half, Hussle carefully considered how he would use his platform to influence the violent culture he came from.

He sang about gang life because that was what he knew, he said in a 2009 interview on Alonso's website, streetgangs.com. But he predicted that as his life changed, so would his themes...

More.

Romee Strijd on the Beach

At Drunken Stepfather, "ROMEE STRIJD NAKED OF THE DAY."

And at Taxi Driver, "Romee Strijd Naked on the Beach Photo Shoot."

Second Woman Comes Forward with Allegations of Improper Touching by 'Gropin' Joe' Biden

Man, feminists are working feverishly to torpedo "Gropin' Joe's" campaign --- and the creepy uncle hasn't even made it official yet, lol.

Previously, "'Gropin' Joe' Biden Gets Dragged for His Decades of Perverted Sexual Harassment."

At the Hartford Courant, "Connecticut woman says then-Vice President Joe Biden touched her inappropriately at a Greenwich fundraiser in 2009":

A Connecticut woman says Joe Biden touched her inappropriately and rubbed noses with her during a 2009 political fundraiser in Greenwich when he was vice president, drawing further scrutiny to the Democrat and his history of unwanted contact with women as he ponders a presidential run

"It wasn't sexual, but he did grab me by the head," Amy Lappos told The Courant Monday. "He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth."

Lappos posted about the alleged incident on the Facebook page of Connecticut Women in Politics Sunday in response to a similar account by former Nevada legislator Lucy Flores, which comes as Biden is considering a 2020 run for president. Flores accused Biden of kissing her on the back of her head in 2014, when she was a candidate for lieutenant governor.

Lappos, 43, who is now a freelance worker with nonprofit agencies, said she felt extremely uncomfortable when Biden approached her at the 2009 fundraiser for U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4th, where she was volunteering. At the time, Lappos was a congressional aide to Himes, who she said was not in the room when the incident took place.

"I never filed a complaint, to be honest, because he was the vice president. I was a nobody," Lappos said. "There's absolutely a line of decency. There's a line of respect. Crossing that line is not grandfatherly. It's not cultural. It's not affection. It's sexism or misogyny."

A spokeswoman for Biden declined to respond to the allegations by Lappos and instead offered a statement that Biden issued Sunday about the Flores controversy...

More.

And at the front-page of the New York Times today, "Joe Biden Scrambles to Stem Crisis After Lucy Flores's Allegation."

And at Memeorandum, "Everyone Already Knows How They Feel About Joe Biden Touching Women."

DC McAllister Update

I don't even know this woman, and don't care about her one way or the other.

Mostly, it's just a thing on Twitter. She got fired. Okay. Life goes on.

Previously, "DC McAllister Fired."

And Bethany Mandel has been tweeting about this all day. Read the full thread:

Denise McAllister's public meltdown was indefensible and homophobic https://t.co/BtfvcsMrqx

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) April 1, 2019

A few thoughts on Denise and what happened this weekend: First of all, I am conservative and I was one of the many people who took issue with her original tweet (which did not applaud masculinity, but instead an incredibly subservience nobody should expect of a woman).

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) April 1, 2019

Her behavior in public and on the listserv for Federalist writers made it clear she was not mentally stable. She expressed some really not okay viewpoints that I was increasingly uncomfortable associating myself with. Her attack on my husband was a final straw.

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) April 1, 2019

Someone that unbalanced, that hateful, should not have a platform. To be clear, this is something everyone familiar with her work and her tweets have known for A LONG TIME. She attempted to doxx @beyondreasdoubt & her attacks on @BridgetPhetasy were the cruelest I have ever seen.

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) April 1, 2019

Just want to clarify myself a tiny bit: She should not have a platform among mainstream conservative websites. She can and should keep tweeting if that's what she wants. But nobody is entitled to publish whatever they want wherever they want. That's up to those sites and editors.

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) April 1, 2019

J.Lo Looks Phenomenal

Not sure about those tits (fake?), but those abs are da bomb, dang!

On Instagram, "I’m a hustler baby."

And at London's Daily Mail, "Jennifer Lopez, 49, looks phenomenal in a neon pink bikini on the set of her stripper film Hustlers... as her fiance Alex Rodriquez goes crazy for the snap."

Jennifer Lopez looks phenomenal in a neon pink bikini on the set of her stripper film Hustlers https://t.co/pAldQB41mb

— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) March 31, 2019

Kendall Jenner See-Through

I haven't posted Ms. Kendall lately.

At Taxi Driver:

Kendall Jenner Braless in See-Through White T-Shirt - https://t.co/gkURcgyLPM - pic.twitter.com/txdUJbl1BC

— Taxi Driver (@TaxiDriverMovie) April 1, 2019

Alexis Ren Erotica

At Drunken Stepfather, "ALEXIS REN EROTICA OF THE DAY."

And on Twitter:

Sometimes I think I crave cities the way I crave the ocean and mountains. Each one has a different vibration, beating to its own drum. pic.twitter.com/uCdNvZBvvn

— Alexis Ren (@AlexisRenG) April 1, 2019

Battle Looms Over Gray Wolf Protection

This is interesting.

I don't support hunting wildlife simply for bragging rights and Instagram/ Twitter selfies. At one point there were millions of gray wolves covering every corner of the United States. Now, there's about 6,000. They're on the federal Endangered Species List. I don't have an opinion on whether federal protection is better or not, but it's worth considering. Conservatism is about conservation, and smart use of our natural resources is conservative.

In any case, at the Los Angles Times, "Plan to remove gray wolves from Endangered Species Act sparks battle":

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and environmentalists are at war over the agency’s latest plan to strip gray wolves of their federal protections and turn management of the often-reviled predators over to states and tribes. https://t.co/xgg8fQastb

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) March 28, 2019

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and environmentalists are at war over the agency’s latest plan to strip gray wolves of their federal protections and turn management of the often-reviled predators over to states and tribes.

“If the agency’s proposal gets finalized, we will see them in court,” Michael Robinson, a spokesman for the Center for Biological Diversity said on Wednesday. “Delisting is simply out of the question.”

Surprisingly, however, in the latest chapter of a long-running battle to keep an estimated 6,000 gray wolves safe from trophy hunters and trappers, the center and the Humane Society of the United States are suggesting a compromise.

“We are proposing an alternate path forward — downlisting the gray wolf from federally endangered to threatened status,” said Brett Hartl, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. That action, he said, “would maintain federal protections the animal needs to survive in certain areas, while allowing states to share management oversight.”

His organization doesn’t oppose state management of wolves, but it does oppose hunting wolves for sport, he said. “Free-for-all hunting of wolves is not management, it’s slaughter.”

Similarly, Nick Arrivo, an attorney with the Humane Society of the United States, said, “We don’t oppose the idea of state management. The problem is that certain states like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan have shown that they are not inclined to maintain healthy populations of gray wolves.”

Federal wildlife authorities removed protections from gray wolves in the Great Lakes region in 2011, allowing thousands of gray wolves in those three states to be hunted or trapped. The protections were restored by federal court decisions in 2014.

The prospect of removing wolf protections aroused rage yet again earlier this month when the Fish and Wildlife Service touted the species' recovery as "one of the greatest comebacks for an animal in U.S. conservation history,” a characterization that some conservation groups called misguided and premature.

David Bernhardt, acting secretary of the Department of Interior, said the plan to delist the species “puts us one step closer to transitioning the extraordinary effort that we have invested in gray wolf recovery to other species who actually need the protections of the Endangered Species Act, leaving the states to carry on the legacy of wolf conservation.”

However, the Humane Society, in a statement, warned that the plan catered “to a narrow group of special interests: the trophy hunters and trappers who want to kill wolves for bragging rights, social media opportunities and to increase deer and elk populations.”

It pointed out, for instance, that in November, “Americans were heartbroken” by the killing of the famous Yellowstone black wolf, Spitfire, by a trophy hunter in Montana.

It also argued that gray wolves are worth millions of dollars to the economies of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, studies show, because of the visitors they attract to national parks in the northern Rocky Mountains...

Keep reading.

Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History

At Amazon, Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great.

Ann Coulter, Godless

At Amazon, Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism.

DC McAllister Fired

From the Federalist, a website I rarely, if ever, read.

She was a little too unflitered, it turns out, especially when going after Meghan McCain, whose husband, Ben Domenech, a known plagiarist, is a co-founder.

At the Washington Examiner:

The Federalist has parted ways with conservative writer @McAllisterDen after a bevy of complaints surrounding her attacks on Twitter of @yashar over his sexuality.https://t.co/Ni1hB0H2Kw

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) March 31, 2019

Just followed @McAllisterDen because anybody denounced as a "hater" by Meghan McCain must be good people.

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) March 31, 2019

What the Hell Happened to Rachel Maddow?

She was hardest hit by Trump's exoneration.

At Slate:

Rachel Maddow’s show this week has been a reminder that partisan paranoia has bipartisan appeal. https://t.co/Rmtuvyq53s via @slate

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) March 30, 2019

Sophie Mudd Red Bikini

At Drunken Stepfather, "SOPHIE MUDD BIG TITS OF THE DAY."

Previous Sophie Mudd blogging here.

No Dead Horses at Santa Anita on First Day Track Reopens (VIDEO)

Horses have been getting hurt and getting put down at Santa Anita. A lot of horses. It's become an animal rights issue.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Santa Anita breathes a sigh of relief after no horses die on first day back":

Seven horses draped in brightly colored silks thunder across the shadow of the splendid San Gabriel Mountains in a breathtaking combination of beauty and speed.

The small crowd is silent.

“I’m holding my breath,’’ says race-goer B.J. Ravitz.

It’s the first race at Santa Anita Park in nearly a month, a close contest, powerful animals dueling down the stretch, dirt flying, jockeys bobbing, high drama.

There are few cheers in a sea of stares.

“Everyone is worried about the horses,’’ said Abe Ravitz, the husband of B.J. “All I’m thinking is, if anything untoward happens today …”

The race ends clean, all seven horses crossing the finish line, and only then is there audible applause from the crowd, a reaction seemingly generated by the one outcome that everyone here is betting on.

No horse died.

“OK,” said racegoer Frank Reynoso, taking a deep breath. “That’s one.’’

It was that kind of a tightrope afternoon Friday as Santa Anita opened its doors for the first time since March 5, after 22 horses died in a little more than two months of its winter/spring meet, a 214% increase from the same span the year before.

The Stronach Group, owners of the track, has since made minor modifications to a track that was badly compromised with the unseasonably rainy winter weather. They also have revised medication policies and proposed prohibiting jockeys from using the whip unless for safety reasons.

But because there was no clear reason for the deaths, there could be no clear answers. That’s why so many people showed up at the track Friday with nerves jangling and fingers crossed.

For now, there is relief. In eight races, there were no fatalities, which brought a giant collective sigh. But everyone agrees that the healing of what’s arguably Southern California’s most picturesque sporting venue is just beginning.

“This is going to take a while,’’ said horse owner Samantha Siegel, sitting in a near-empty terrace section. “The public is probably a little shell-shocked at what’s going on. We’ve gotten a lot of bad exposure from everywhere. We’re going to need to go a long time without having something horrible happen.’’

The crowd was reminded of the trouble before even entering the track, as several dozen protesters stood on a grassy area outside the front gate waving signs and chanting.

“You say the track was safe to use but nothing’s changed, you bet, they lose,’’ they sang.

One of the signs read, “Stop Killing Horses.’’ One of the protesters was dressed in a horse’s head, and the message was clear.

“Horse racing needs to be abolished’’ said Heather Hamza, leading what she called a group of concerned citizens backed by the group known as Horseracing Wrongs. ‘’The world is watching this track. Every horse that is killed here will make big headlines. We need to be part of those headlines because we’re telling them to stop it.”

Hamza and her group urged the race-goers to look beyond the beauty of the sport.

‘’When you’re watching a horse race, it’s magnificent, it’s beautiful, it’s breathtaking,’’ she said. “But that doesn’t mean there’s not a dark, dirty, gritty underbelly behind it.’’

Once inside, fans were met with the usual promising announcements — “Welcome to Santa Anita Park! The track is fast and the turf course is firm!” — and folks cheered the return of ailing trumpeter Jay Cohen. But it wasn’t the same.

While the typically loud racetrack cheering returned in later races, there was a pall over the place as everyone tried to adjust...

Mackenzie Maynard's Sunday Forecast

At ABC News 10 San Diego:

Candice Swanepoel on Vacation in Tulum

At Drunken Stepfather, "CANDICE SWANEPOEL FLASH OF THE DAY."

Added: At Taxi Driver, "Candice Swanepoel Caught Topless on a Photo Shoot."

Rolling Stones Concert Tour Canceled on Doctor's Orders

Mick Jagger is suffering from an unspecified illness, and the band expect to return to touring upon his recovery.

At TMZ (via Terri Peters):

Rolling Stones Concert Tour Canceled Because of Mick Jagger's Illness https://t.co/G83XPDVSbo

— TMZ (@TMZ) March 30, 2019

Albert Camus, The Rebel

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt.

And the old paperback Vintage copy is available here.

A Long, Strange Trip for the Volkswagen Bus

I had a V.W. bug in high school, and one of my best buddies had a bus.

It was just the culture back then, and we didn't think that much more of it besides being in the moment and being cool.

At the Los Angeles Times, "The Volkswagen Bus’ long, strange trip from hippie van to hot collectible":

Vintage Volkswagen Buses have become hot collectors' items, fetching record prices. But some California fans fear the cars may lose their free-spirit mystique, writes @gustavoarellano. https://t.co/AKRaQKSb6Y

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) March 28, 2019

“You see? You see? You see?” Enrique Aragon shouts over the loud purr of his 1966 Volkswagen 21-Window Deluxe Bus as he gestures toward gawkers yet again.

For the last hour, the 42-year-old electrician and member of the Boyle Heights-based Volksstyle Car Club has cruised Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena in his dominguero. And all along the ride, people won’t let him be.

AAA tow-truck drivers pull up and mouth, “Beautiful car!” Middle-aged couples in Ohio State sweatshirts wave from a bar. Bearded hipsters offer the thumbs-up. Children flash a peace sign.

Nearly everyone else just stares.

Aragon is used to it. His ’66 is a glimmering shrine to Southern California car culture. He spent three years and $45,000 to restore it from a shell with no wheels or seats to its current, showroom-ready state. It has a two-tone brown paint job that tapers into a V in the vehicle’s flat front. A ragtop that rolls up like a carpet to reveal a sunroof. A windshield that pops open into two sides. Porsche hubcaps. Pleather interior. Chrome all around.

And the Bus’ namesake piece de resistance: 21 windows that wrap around the sides, the roof and the back so that a ride inside feels like putting wheels on the Crystal Cathedral.

“People point all the time,” he says. “Everyone trips out because they don’t know they’re still around.”

In fact, the Volkswagen Bus never went away, although at times it has fallen sharply out of fashion. And it’s back like never before.

From 1950 to 1979, the German automaker churned out over 4.7 million of them under different names and models —Westfalia, Samba, Kombi, Transporter — to create one of the most beloved lines of cars worldwide. Its basic frame — a raised, boxy body, a weak engine in the back, bench seats on the inside, a plethora of windows — attracted a devoted worldwide following. Aficionados turned them into everything from surf wagons and homes to taxis and work trucks. Even movable beer gardens.

“It’s the most easily recognized van or commercial vehicle on the planet,” says Brian Moody, executive editor for Autotrader.com. “Low operating cost, low purchase cost when Volkswagen made them. Globally, you can talk to a Brazilian who has great VW Bus memories. A Mexican. A European. An Indian. Not everyone had a Mustang convertible.”

But over the last decade, this once-humble workhorse has become something it’s never been: one of the hottest gets in the vintage auto world.

The Instagram generation has popularized them through the hashtag #vanlife, in which you can scroll through over 4 million photos of people posing in gorgeous locations with immaculately staged Buses. Meanwhile, baby boomers with nostalgia in their hearts and retirement savings in their pockets have pushed prices to record-breaking levels — the current record holder is a ’65 auctioned off in 2017 for $302,500 — with no cooling in sight, leaving longtime fans like Aragon both amazed and upset.

“All these high prices happened because of the internet,” he says. “It killed it. People used to have to work for Buses. You had to go out and look. You had to wait. Now, people just throw money.”

Nowhere is the current Bus-collecting frenzy more pronounced than in Southern California — Orange County in particular — where an alternative Bus universe first blossomed in the 1960s. There, the vehicle became a part of the social fabric, thanks to the region’s surfer and Kustom Kulture scenes. The area’s temperate weather ensured that the Bus, which has a tendency to rust quickly, had a far longer life than in the Snow Belt...

Devin Brugman Morning

On Twitter:

Aloha 🐆🐆🐆 @MONDAYSWIMWEAR pic.twitter.com/valiPSZdf9

— Devin Brugman (@devinbrugman) February 27, 2019

Morning ✨ pic.twitter.com/fPbUNE5w2K

— Devin Brugman (@devinbrugman) March 12, 2019

The magic hour ✨ New @MONDAYSWIMWEAR coming soon pic.twitter.com/DKFKjv5Pwv

— Devin Brugman (@devinbrugman) March 14, 2019

Jennifer Delacruz's Weekend Forecast

Calm, cool weather, which I love.

Here's the fabulous Ms. Jennifer, for ABC News 10 San Diego:

'Gropin' Joe' Biden Gets Dragged for His Decades of Perverted Sexual Harassment

From the lead at Memeorandum yesterday, "An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden."

Added: At the Other McCain, "‘Creepy Uncle Joe’ Gets Busted by #MeToo (Hint: She’s a Bernie Supporter)."

And from perhaps the best feminist writer working today, Rebecca Traister, "Joe Biden Isn’t the Answer":

I decided to take a break from writing "Newman!" jokes on Twitter & instead write a real piece about Biden, & how he embodies so many of the wrong choices made by a Democratic party in retreat for the past 50 years. "Newman!" jokes will recommence shortly: https://t.co/SD8cURvDL0

— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) March 29, 2019

It’s still three months before the first Democratic debate, nearly a year before Super Tuesday, and he hasn’t even declared yet, but poll after presidential poll continues to show 76-year-old former vice-president Joe Biden leading an enormous, diverse, and talented Democratic field.

It’s almost poetically appropriate. Biden carries himself with the confidence of a winner, despite not having won, or even come close to winning, either of the previous presidential primaries he’s entered. He is the guy whose self-assured conviction that his authority will protect him from rebuke has always preceded him into any room, whose confident sense of his own entitlement repels potential objection like Gore-Tex repels rain. He is the gaffe-master, the affable fuck-up, and also, oddly, the politician who’s supposed to make us feel safe. He is the amiable, easygoing, handsy-but-harmless guy who’s never going to give you a hard time about your own handsiness or prejudice, who’s gonna make a folksy argument about enacting fundamentally restrictive policies.

For his whole career, Biden’s role has been to comfort the lost, prized, and most fondly imagined Democratic voter, the one who’s like him: that guy in the diner, that guy in Ohio, that guy who’s white and so put off by the changed terms of gendered and racial power in this country that decades ago he fled for the party that was working to roll back the social advancements that had robbed him of his easy hold on power. That guy who believed that the system worked best when it worked for him.

Biden is the Democrats’ answer to the hunger to “make America great again,” dressed up in liberal clothes. The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie has in fact argued that Biden’s racial politics have offered a form of Trumpism on the left, a “liberal cover to white backlash.” To that I would add, he has provided liberal cover to anti-feminist backlash, the kind of old-fashioned paternalism of powerful men who don’t take women’s claims to their reproductive, professional, or political autonomy particularly seriously, who walk through the world with a casual assurance that men’s access to and authority over women’s bodies is natural. In an attempt to win back That Guy, Joe Biden has himself, so very often, been That Guy.

Now it seems, That Guy is widely viewed as the best and safest candidate to get us out of this perilous and scary political period. But the irony is that so much of what is terrifying and dangerous about this time — the Trump administration, the ever more aggressive erosion of voting and reproductive rights, the crisis in criminal justice and yawning economic chasm between the rich and everyone else — are in fact problems that can in part be laid at the feet of Joe Biden himself, and the guys we’ve regularly been assured are Democrats’ only answer.

Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, 18 years after Brown v. Board of Education, less than a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and just three years after the Supreme Court case Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education would actually force many schools to fulfill the promise of integration put forth by Brown. Biden took office less than three weeks before Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court and a couple of years before the term “sexual harassment” would be coined by Lin Farley.

It was a period of intense partisan realignment, in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and early ’70s, in which the American left was nervously coalescing around the interests and increased liberties of racial minorities and women, the populations who were forming what would be the most reliable part of its base.

The right, meanwhile, was sucking strength from a backlash against disruptive social movements, growing fat and drunk on the language of piety and family values that would undergird its ultraconservative defense of the old power structures, self-righteously fueling up for the Reagan era. Republicans had, for the foreseeable future, won white men — America’s original citizens, the ones around whom our narratives and priorities are calibrated.

Rather than lean into an energetic defense of the values of liberty, equality, and inclusion that might define their role against the racist and anti-feminist backlash of the era, the Democratic Party appeared anxious to distance itself from being the feminized “mommy party,” and shunt to the side — rather than vigorously advocate for — the priorities of women, especially poor women, and people of color.

The party continued to be represented and led by mostly white men. And while officially Democrats remained on the progressive side, supporting reproductive rights, civil rights, and affirmative action, a contingent of Those Guys, Joe Biden notable among them, made folksy rationalizations for abrogating, rather than expanding and more fiercely protecting, new rights and protections. Those Guys soothed; Those Guys were familiar; Those Guys enjoyed their own power and wanted to reassure everyone that it wasn’t really going to be so dramatically reapportioned.

A young Joe Biden was reliably anti-abortion, claiming that Roe v. Wade “went too far” and that he did not believe that “a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” He voted consistently for the Hyde Amendment, the 1976 legislative rider which forbid government-funded insurance programs from paying for abortion, making abortion all but inaccessible to poor people. In 1981, he proposed the “Biden Amendment,” prohibiting foreign aid to be used in any biomedical research related to abortion. The next year, he supported Jesse Helms’s amendment barring foreign NGOs receiving United States aid from using that aid to perform abortion. Biden was one of two Democrats on the Senate Judiciary to vote for the 1982 Hatch Amendment, which would have effectively nullified Roe by turning abortion rights back to federal and state legislatures. At the time, he expressed concern about whether he had “a right to impose” his anti-abortion views on the nation. Then he went ahead and imposed those views anyway.

Over the decades, Biden has evolved on the issue, yet into the 1990s and 2000s, he voted for the so-called “Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.” And he regularly declined to fully support the Freedom of Choice Act, which would have banned the wide variety of oppressive state restrictions on abortion.

Biden’s stances against women’s full reproductive freedom have been key to how he has proudly presented himself to the public. Even in the years since he has officially become pro-choice, he’s retained the sensibility first reflected in his comments about how women shouldn’t be wholly in charge of their own decisions, writing in his 2007 memoir that even though he’d vote against a constitutional amendment barring abortion, “I still vote against partial birth abortion and federal funding, and I’d like to make it easier for scared young mothers to choose not to have an abortion.” His is the language of restrictive authority dressed up as avuncular protectionism.

Biden wasn’t simply a comforter of patriarchal impulses toward controlling women’s bodies. Though he campaigned in 1972 as a strong supporter of civil rights, and initially voted in favor of school busing legislation intended to integrate schools in both the North and South, Biden changed his tune a couple of years into his Senate tenure. Faced with angry pressure from white constituents rearing back from integration measures that would mean busing white children into black neighborhoods, Biden previewed his anti-abortion agreement with Republican Jesse Helms by siding with him on anti-busing measures, calling the approach to school integration “a bankrupt concept” and “asinine policy.” Biden’s anti-busing stance offered an out for his Democratic colleagues, several of whom also turned on busing, helping to defeat the legislation.

In later decades, Biden’s legislative efforts reinforced other kinds of racial disparities...

Keep reading.

Hailey Clauson Stops Traffic (VIDEO)

Sports Illustrated pushed back the date of its swimsuit edition until May, supposed timed for the warmer summer season. So, still a couple of months away.

Meanwhile, here's the lovely Ms. Hailey:

Woman in Nike T-Shirt Takes it Off

Nice honkers.

Too big? #boobs #tits @ChetsAnAsshole pic.twitter.com/q8e1GPxnuL

— Big Breast Pics (@BigBreastPics) March 29, 2019

Go-Go's Guitarist Jane Wiedlin in her Birthday Suit

At Taxi Driver, "Jane Wiedlin from the Go-Go's in her Birthday Suit."

Albert Camus: Unfashionable Anti-Totalitarian

A great piece, at Quillette:

“Camus’s rejection of Marxism, and his doubts about the likely outcome of post-colonial revolutionary movements, were unpopular, principled, and lonely positions.” https://t.co/SKo3RWEecv

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) March 27, 2019

Today, it is not unusual to see Albert Camus celebrated as the debonair existentialist — the handsome hero of the French Resistance, a great novelist, and a fine philosopher. But this reputation was only recently acquired. For much of his life, and in the years since his untimely death in 1960 aged just 46, Camus was deeply unfashionable among France’s leading intellectuals. In many quarters, he remains so.

Camus came to widespread attention in 1942 with his publication of his novella The Stranger and a philosophical essay entitled “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The Stranger portrays a solitary passionless man wandering through a world without pattern or purpose. “The Myth of Sisyphus” grapples with the question, “Why not commit suicide?” Camus argued that we should not, but he finds little evidence of a justified purpose for human beings. If we cannot prove that some choices are better than others, he concludes, we can at least dedicate ourselves to the pursuit of experience. The austerity and boldness of these two works struck Camus’s contemporaries as remarkable and, within a short time, he became known as “the philosopher of the absurd,” and befriended France’s leading intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre.

Camus did not take up arms in the struggle against the Nazi occupation, but during the war he was the editor of the underground newspaper of the Resistance, Combat. This job involved great personal risk and he would almost certainly have been imprisoned and shot, either by the Nazis or their French collaborators, had his role been uncovered. When the war ended, Camus gazed at the devastation of Europe and reflected. Over the subsequent years, his writing would change significantly as humanism and anti-totalitarianism became increasingly central to his thinking. His 1947 allegorical novel The Plague depicts not a solitary, alienated man, but a group of people struggling together against a plague in a small Algerian city. Here, human beings are willing to confront the absurdity of the universe, but they remain compassionate nonetheless, and strive to be kind and to care for each other. Then, in 1951, Camus published The Man in Revolt (later published in translation as The Rebel). Horrified by the crimes of Stalin and by the apologetics for his regime published by some of the Western Left’s most influential intellectuals, Camus sought to understand the justification of mass murder. It is a rich book, and not easily summarized, but two of Camus’s arguments proved particularly antagonizing to his peers.

First, Camus argued that commitment to a single, distant purpose endangers us all. The struggle for a perfect society in the future leads to as ruthless consequentialism that allows us to sacrifice countless people in the present. This fear is what led him to describe Marx as “the prophet of justice without mercy who lies, by mistake, in the unbeliever’s plot at Highgate Cemetery.” The faith of the Marxist in the promise of utopia, he observed, is every bit as powerful and irrational as that of the religious fanatic.

Second, Camus defended the proposition, explicitly denied by Marxists and Existentialists, that there exists a universal “human nature”—traits shared by all people, from which we can infer what is better or worse for all people and common ground upon which to form social bonds. Sartre, on the other hand, argued that we are the product of our choices and nothing more. Simone de Beauvoir summarized the Marxist view as her peers understood it: “There is no authentic human essence to be realized, no harmonious unity to be returned to, no unalienated humanity obscured by false mediations, no organized wholeness to be achieved. What we are and what we can become are open-ended projects to be constructed in the course of time.”

From his universalist humanism and skepticism about utopian ideologies, Camus developed an ethics in Man in Revolt that rejected revolution. Instead, Camus argued that moral progress arises from a rejection of injustice by people united in their recognition of that injustice. This kind of “revolt” is more restrained than the revolutionary impulse and shows mesure—it recognizes and respects human nature, attempts to improve things now, and accepts no limits on free speech and expression. When revolt is combined with the misguided belief that history has some unifying purpose and that human beings can be reshaped in the manner of wet clay, it declines into revolution. Revolution is unrestrained, it is démesure, and it leads inevitably to violence and cruelty.

Sartre and Beauvoir edited the leading French intellectual journal of their day, Les Temps Moderne, and they invited the activist and philosopher Francis Jeanson to review The Man in Revolt. The result was scathing. Jeanson’s article was mostly a series of ad hominem attacks which made no attempt to interpret Camus’s text charitably. Camus’s sins were clear: he had attacked Marxism, he had attacked revolution, and he had attacked the idea that human beings were infinitely malleable. For this, he was denounced as a counter-revolutionary.

Sartre then published an open letter addressed to Camus, that began, “Our friendship was not easy, but I will miss it.” Most of Sartre’s letter ignores the arguments in The Man in Revolt, and concentrates instead on itemizing Camus’s alleged personal failings, including the accusation that he was bourgeois. Camus did not respond to this criticism, because he did not see it as important. After all, it was the Marxists, not him, who believed that class determines what one may say. But it was a petty and laughable accusation even so: Sartre grew up in privilege, and he let other people manage his domestic matters all his life. Camus grew up in Algeria in poverty, where as a child he lived in a two-room apartment with his brother, uncle, grandmother, and deaf widowed mother who worked as a cleaning woman to support all of them.

Beauvoir’s attack on Camus was perhaps the most vicious of all...

Still more.

David Horowitz, Dark Agenda

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, David Horowitz, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Åsne Seierstad, Two Sisters

Available April 3rd, at Amazon, Åsne Seierstad, Two Sisters: A Father, His Daughters, and Their Journey into the Syrian Jihad.