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.

Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda

At Amazon, Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics.

Leftists Destroy Everything (VIDEO)

Fantastic video!

Dennis Prager is a national treasure.

Watch: