Dueling virtuoso Don Q variations

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are two male ballet dancers performing the same variation from Don Quixote. Which do you prefer? I know which one I’d choose.

Barani—whom I’ve never seen dance in person, nor even heard of–is very impressive, very athletic, one of the few I’ve seen to rival the great Barishnikov in the technical sense. But Barani seems to be posing and showing off here—hamming, to be exact. His line is also exaggerated.

Now, this role calls for showing off, of course, but in a self-contolled way—if that doesn’t sound like too much of a contradiction. Spanish dancing always has that self-contained, leashed-but-peacocky fury. Barani is too over-the-top. Maybe it’s not fair to compare him to Baryshnikov (maybe it’s not fair to compare anyone to Baryshnikov, who may have been the greatest dancer who ever lived, although there are others I think might be contenders, at least). But I love having the videos at hand to do so.

I bring you Jorge Barani, courtesy of YouTube:

And here’s Baryshnikov doing the same variation, but with some variations on the theme. There are many clips on YouTube of Baryshnikov doing this Don Q pas de deux male solo, but I chose this particularly ancient grainy black-and-white one (which is not from “The Turning Point,” as its labeled) because it shows the early, eager, exuberant, Baryshnikov and is well-nigh perfect, a seamless whole with great and uninterrupted flow despite the bravura dancing. He shows the poses, the flair, and the flamboyance, but stops short of making it herky-jerky or contrived.

Enjoy:

Susan Rice and the unmasking

The New Neo Posted on by

The media is full of articles about Obama’s national security advisor Susan Rice’s role in “unmasking” the names of Trump transition officials in U.S. intelligence reports. See this, for example:

Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova.

“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.

“The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”

Scandals are in the eye of the beholders these days. This particular activity of Rice’s should surprise no one who’s been following politics for the last decade or two, and particularly during the Obama years (when, to my way of thinking, the MSM was “unmasked” as being fully engaged in the business of covering up for anything the Obama administration might do, just as they are now engaged in doing the opposite re Trump). One of the saddest things about this particular report is that I doubt anyone is shocked by it, nor are we shocked by the failure of most of the MSM to condemn it or in some cases to even report it.

I actually thought the IRS scandal was even worse, and look what happened there. Liberals and the left fell right in line.

Is it stupid and irrational for the Democrats to filibuster Gorsuch?

The New Neo Posted on by

Quite a few people on the right think so.

Marc Thiessen writes

Filibustering Gorsuch is not only transparently partisan but also strategically stupid.

Scott Johnson of Powerline appears to agree:

The Democrats’ filibuster is irrational from the perspective of the left. It belies their interests so long as a Republican administration remains in power by making it easier for Republicans to confirm the next justice, whose confirmation might alter the balance on the Court to the right…

[Schumer] is now a calculating man performing an irrational act. He knows it and he doesn’t like it. Yet Senator Schumer and his crowd ”” including, let it be noted, Minnesota’s own Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken ”” have become the willing instrument of a deranged base.

I understand what they’re saying and why they’re saying it. But I see it differently. There are several ways in which Schumer’s filibuster makes sense and is rational, even though it seems on the surface as though it doesn’t and it isn’t.

First, as Scott Johnson has written, it pleases their leftist base. That’s very important, because that base is worked up and angry, and needs some political theater to watch.

But aren’t the costs too high? Why risk the other side going nuclear for what seems like nothing but pleasing your base?

Democrats have no inherent love of the protection of the rights of minorities in the Senate, unless they themselves are the minority. It seems pretty clear at this point that they would not hesitate to jettison the filibuster themselves if they need to do so in the next Congress in which they’re in the majority, if they don’t have 60 votes to force cloture. They fully expect to get that majority some day—after all, the GOP advantage right now is quite thin—although it’s not clear when it will happen. But Democrats take the long view. So they will do it if and when they need to.

But back to the present, and the Gorsuch nomination. At the moment, if they don’t force the GOP’s hand in this manner, the GOP will get to confirm Gorsuch in an up-and-down vote without a fight, and the GOP will also be able to say, “And we did it while respecting the traditional Senate rules of the filibuster.” So the Democrats are well aware that—either way, filibuster or no—they will most likely be losing the Gorsuch battle and he will be seated on the Court.

But if they filibuster, they gain the following advantages:

(1) They call the GOP’s bluff. There’s always a chance the GOP won’t have the cojones—or the votes—to end the filibuster. There are some RINOs, some reach-across-the-aisle types—who might balk at such an extreme move, and all that would be needed would be a few. Not likely, but possible. If that occurs, then Gorsuch is blocked and that’s a big, big Democratic victory

(2) In the far more likely case that the GOP responds to the Democratic filibuster by going nuclear in order to confirm Gorsuch, Democrats can then blame the GOP. The can say, “See, they did it first for SCOTUS, not us!” The GOP would forever own the end of the filibuster for SCOTUS nominees. Democrats could also point to the fact that the Democrats didn’t go that far when they had control—didn’t extend the nuclear option to SCOTUS appointments—an assertion that ignores the fact that Democrats threw away the filibuster for other federal judges and not for SCOTUS because there were no SCOTUS openings at the time. In other words, the Democrats didn’t need to apply the nuclear option to SCOTUS nominees at the time, but is there any question that if they’d needed to they would have done it in a heartbeat? As for their attempt to replace Scalia with Garland when the need might have arisen, their hands were tied by then because they no longer held the majority in the Senate and had lost the ability to go for the nuclear option.

By filibustering Gorsuch now, the Democrats are trying to turn a lack of power—their near-certain inability to block Gorsuch’s being seated on the Supreme Court—into a propaganda point. I don’t know whether it will work, but I think that’s the not-so-very-stupid strategy behind this move by Schumer.

Rename the blog? Suggestions?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been thinking of renaming the blog.

There are a number of reasons. The first is that I’m not so “neo” anymore. After all, my political conversion was pretty much complete in 2003, and that’s almost a decade and a half ago.

The second is that “neocon” has long been a word people throw around without knowing its meaning, and certainly without knowing my definition of it in writing this blog (which I’ve explained in several posts under the “neocons” category). So it attracts a lot of trolls who have no idea what I’m about. Now, they say that any attention is good attention, but I don’t think the people who say that know much about trolls.

The problem with changing the name of the blog is the usual problem with change: I’m known by this name and a change can confuse people. Plus, it’s a real nuisance to do it. Another reason is that I can’t think of a good alternative.

So I thought I’d throw the question out to you folks. What do you think? Should I change the blog name? And if so, to what?

Meanwhile, there’s North Korea

The New Neo Posted on by

A top defector has a chilling warning:

A senior North Korean defector has told NBC News that the country’s “desperate” dictator is prepared to use nuclear weapons to strike the United States and its allies.

Thae Yong Ho is the most high profile North Korean defector in two decades, meaning he is able to give a rare insight into the secretive, authoritarian regime.

According to Thae, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is “desperate in maintaining his rule by relying on his [development of] nuclear weapons and ICBM.”

So far, several US presidents, both Democratic and Republican, have seemed unable to do a thing about the conundrum and threat posed by North Korea. Now it’s Trump’s turn.

Victim analogies, liberal style

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember the Miller Analogies Test? It was one of those “this is to this, as this is to which of these?” tests that supposedly tapped into a person’s logical reasoning ability as well as the person’s knowledge base. Analogies can’t be made properly without both:

The test aims to measure an individual’s logical and analytical reasoning through the use of partial analogies…the MAT’s analogies demand a broad knowledge of Western culture, testing subjects such as science, music, literature, philosophy, mathematics, art, and history. Thus, exemplary success on the MAT requires more than a nuanced and cultivated vocabulary.

I asked if readers remember the test, but apparently it’s still used for admission to graduate school, which I’m pretty sure was always the way it was used even back in my day.

I loved that test—loved it. It was short and didn’t require studying, it appealed to some orderly part of me, and for some reason I found it fairly easy back then.

Why am I bringing up this test now? I was thinking about certain liberal analogies and how poor they are in the logical sense but how effective they can be in the political sense, the sense the Miller Analogies Test doesn’t care about at all.

For example, did you know that illegal aliens are like runaway slaves, and sanctuary cities are like the Underground Railroad? No? Well, I didn’t either, but Newark Mayor Ras Baraka does:

Ras Baraka, mayor of Newark, NJ, said that in clamping down on sanctuary cities such as his, the Trump administration is “trying to intimidate us into being what I’ve called fugitive slave catchers.”

We all are familiar with other liberal victim analogies. Just as illegal aliens are equivalent to runaway slaves, Muslims seeking to leave Muslim countries are equivalent to Jews fleeing the Holocaust, and of course Jews in Israel are the Nazis and Palestinians the persecuted Jews.

These analogies need little logic, and logical arguments pointing out important dissimilarities are of no avail against them. Propagandists simply need to assert the analogies often enough and they become truth to a great many people on the left. Not that the left has a lock on all the false analogies in the world—the right uses them, too, but not ordinarily about victim groups and not as often, either.

False analogies rely on some combination of lack of logic, ignorance of history, and often a willing suspension of both. I experienced this sort of phenomenon for the first time when I was in college, while talking to a roommate about Vietnam. She and I seldom had spoken of politics, and anyway we were roughly on the same political page—the liberal, antiwar page. This time she happened to mention that the US was committing “genocide” in Vietnam. I was young enough and naive enough to think that perhaps her error was that she didn’t know exactly what the word meant and why it didn’t apply, so I informed her. But to my surprise, she didn’t thank me and acknowledge her error (yes, I was very young and naive). She argued and argued and argued her point, becoming more and more vehement as she became more illogical.

At the time I thought it an oddity of hers. But I filed it away for future reference, and later it became more significant and more understandable. The idea that the US was committing genocide in Vietnam appealed to her; she’s heard it somewhere (perhaps in a class?) and it was part of some other political belief system in her head, so she was loathe to abandon it. And she was not a stupid person in the academic sense, or even in terms of logic. In fact, she later became a very successful lawyer—and whatever you may think of lawyers, they are required to be able to think logically when necessary (and it’s often necessary).

I often think of that exchange about genocide when I hear these present-day analogies, and I think what’s operating here is the same thing that was operating with my friend. Usually you have a smart person (as she was) suspending judgement for the sake of presenting an argument that’s attractive to the left, and then you also have many people without analytical skills swallowing the argument whole.

As for Mayor Baraka of Newark, the name “Baraka” immediately rang a bell with me: wasn’t that the surname of the poet whose birth name was LeRoi Jones? And indeed it is (see, knowledge of poetry comes in handy sometimes). And it turns out that Ras Baraka is the elder Baraka’s son, as well as an educator and a poet himself:

A Newark native, Baraka is son of poet and activist Amiri Baraka and his wife Amina. Ras J. Baraka was educated in the Newark Public Schools and subsequently earned a BA in Political Science from Howard University in Washington, DC, and an MA in Education Supervision from St. Peter’s University in Jersey City. He was principal of Central High School from 2007 until 2013.

I’ve written about Ras Baraka and his father before, when Baraka was first elected mayor. Here are some excerpts:

The most recent [Newark] mayor, Cory A. Booker, used his position as a springing-off spot for his current office of US Senator, but Baraka won [the mayorship] by running as a Newark insider against the Booker administration, of which Jeffries was seen as a continuation. The article [in the NY Times] mentions Baraka’s family several times,saying that “Mr. Baraka relied on his family’s name” among other things, and that both candidates lived in Newark’s South Ward, “which has long been the Baraka family’s base of support.” In addition, we have this:

Mr. Baraka, 44, benefited from high name recognition. His father, Amiri Baraka, who died in January, was a leader of Newark’s cultural and political life after the riots of 1967.

So it appears that family, particularly Baraka’s father, and name recognition played a large part in Baraka’s victory. But in the entire 1000-word article, the Times somehow neglects to mention something I’d consider rather important about that family name, something that readers of a certain age (my age, to be exact) remember and that would enable newer readers to place Baraka’s father and understand who he was, and that’s his birth name, Leroi Jones, the name by which he first became famous as a “militant poet.”

The Times probably has good reason to leave this sort of thing out:

Within the African-American community, some compare [Amiri Baraka, aka Leroi Jones] to James Baldwin and call Baraka one of the most respected and most widely published Black writers of his generation. Others have said his work is an expression of violence, misogyny, homophobia and racism. Baraka’s brief tenure as Poet Laureate of New Jersey (2002”“03), involved controversy over a public reading of his poem “Somebody Blew Up America?” and accusations of anti-semitism, and some negative attention from critics, and politicians.

If you follow the link to the poem you’ll find those accusations are hardly made-up, and you’ll find other examples on Baraka’s Wiki page to show that he was an equal-opportunity hater of almost everyone except black people, with “his advocacy of rape and violence towards, at various times, women, gay people, white people, and Jews.”

And what does “militant poet” mean? In Amiri Baraka’s case, it meant something like this:

After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Baraka left his wife and their two children and moved to Harlem. Now a “black cultural nationalist,” he broke away from the predominantly white Beats and became very critical of the pacifist and integrationist Civil Rights movement. His revolutionary poetry now became more controversial. A poem such as “Black Art” (1965), according to academic Werner Sollors from Harvard University, expressed his need to commit the violence required to “establish a Black World.” “Black Art” quickly became the major poetic manifesto of the Black Arts Literary Movement and in it, Jones declaimed “we want poems that kill,” which coincided with the rise of armed self-defense and slogans such as “Arm yourself or harm yourself” that promoted confrontation with the white power structure. Rather than use poetry as an escapist mechanism, Baraka saw poetry as a weapon of action. His poetry demanded violence against those he felt were responsible for an unjust society.

Jones changed his name in 1970, when he was 36 years old and already very famous. He became a Marxist in the mid-70s (officially, that is), and in the 80s found a home in academia, settling into a professorship at Stonybrook.

I have no idea how far the Ras Baraka acorn falls from the parental tree, or how many of these views of the father the son shares today. But my guess is that dad had a pretty big influence on him.

You want jello? I’ll give you jello

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t done a jello post in many moons. But recently commenter “parker” requested one.

So—since my readers’ wishes are my commands—I went to YouTube to see the latest on jello. I discovered that the jello world has expanded tremendously, and that there are now several YouTubers who seem to specialize in zany (and fairly replusive, I might add) jello videos.

But I’m not in the mood to inflict that on you. So I found a kinder, gentler jello video genre that is far more esthetically pleasing. This is the (heretofore unknown to me) world of jello flowers, which appears to be a predominantly Asian craft. The results of these labors are completely edible, by the way. But I won’t be trying to make them any time soon—or ever, to be honest:

Here’s a brief introduction that explains what’s going on:

I can’t even imagine wanting to spend time learning to make such a thing, although the skill involved and results obtained are obviously impressive. But a lot of people seem to disagree with me about wanting to do it, because there are tons of videos about this.

And jello craft isn’t just about making flowers, either. I would have more of a chance of actually accomplishing something like the following, and it’s also seasonally appropriate). But I won’t fool myself; not gonna do it:

This next photo has nothing to do with jello. But it’s something that came up in relation to that last video because it’s an Easter craft. Apparently this is another Thing That a Lot of People Do: create Easter chick deviled eggs. I have enough problems making the plain ones:

Nunes and the leaks

The New Neo Posted on by

Every scandal that comes down the pike is given the “gate” suffix these days. But this one really deserves it, because it involves evidence of the Obama administration spying on political rivals and then leaking information obtained in that effort:

Mr. Nunes earlier this week got his own source to show him a treasure trove of documents at a secure facility. Here are the relevant details:

First, there were dozens of documents with information about Trump officials. Second, the information these documents contained was not related to Russia. Third, while many reports did “mask” identities (referring, for instance, to “U.S. Person 1 or 2”) they were written in ways that made clear which Trump officials were being discussed. Fourth, in at least one instance, a Trump official other than Mr. Flynn was outright unmasked. Finally, these documents were circulated at the highest levels of government.

To sum up, Team Obama was spying broadly on the incoming administration.

And yet the MSM seems oddly uninterested in this aspect of the story. What is the press interested in? The way in which Nunes received the information:

Meantime, few things match the ludicrous furor over Mr. Nunes’s source-meeting place, or his visit to brief Mr. Trump. Congress members must view most classified material on executive-branch grounds, since that’s the only way to access it physically. Having discovered the former administration’s surveillance of Trump officials, Mr. Nunes had a duty to let the White House know. (Imagine if he’d sat on it.) He could hardly let Democrats know first, since their only interest these days is in leaking and twisting stories. And the reason he held press briefings before and after his meeting with Mr. Trump was to be transparent about his purpose.

Hint to the press corps: If Mr. Nunes wanted to tip off the White House about his Russia probe, it’d be a lot easier to speed-dial Steve Bannon secretly from his office.

The left professes to care about government abuses of power. That’s only when the government is on the right.

Hawaii judge enjoins Trump from issuing executive orders

The New Neo Posted on by

District Judge Derrick Watson of Hawaii has been in the news quite a bit lately. You may recall that he was one of several judges who issued orders in separate but similar cases to block Trump’s revised EO regarding travel from six Muslim nations. Even more recently, Judge Watson extended the order:

At a hearing in Honolulu on Wednesday [March 29], federal lawyers asked Watson to either dismiss that order or narrow the restrictions to apply to fewer parts of the travel ban.

Instead, Watson said he would turn the order into a preliminary injunction, which has the effect of extending his order blocking the travel ban for a longer period.

Watson said he would keep intact the restrictions on the travel ban — a block of its 90-day moratorium on travel to the U.S. from nationals of six majority-Muslim countries and its 120-day pause on new refugee resettlement.

But that’s not all. Today, in an unprecedented Saturday session, a ruling was issued in another case that had been ridiculed when it first was announced, that of students Justin Hattersea and Monica Slater of the University of Hawaii, who had sued to enjoin President Trump from issuing executive orders of any kind. Many legal experts had declared this suit absurd, stating that there is absolutely no precedent for declaring that plaintiffs Hattersea and Slater have standing to sue. But, as happened in the previous cases, the idea of standing was expanded:

Rules on “standing” mean that not just anybody can waltz into federal court and challenge government actions. To maintain an action, you must demonstrate that you have suffered a violation of a recognized right. To use the lingo of the courts, you must show that your injuries are “concrete and particularized.”…

[The court] used the hurt feelings (yes, really) of American residents and the hypothetical economic harm to American states and local institutions [to grant plaintiffs standing]…

The court granted an individual citizen standing to sue in part because he was “deeply saddened by the message [the executive orders] convey.”

Those quotes from the judge in the previous, narrower case were reiterated and expanded on today in the ruling on the broader case, from which this excerpt is taken:

Plaintiffs Battersea and Slater, students at the University of Hawaii, were not only “deeply saddened” by every single one of Trump’s executive orders and the messages they convey, but they are extremely stressed by his presidency as a whole. This stress has had major economic consequences for them both. Battersea has been so shaken ever since Trump’s election in November that he is doing poorly in school and has gone on academic probation, and his graduation from college (and therefore his future job prospects) is threatened. Slater has suffered so much distress that she has been forced to get an official companion animal, the upkeep of which is fairly expensive. She has also developed Post-Trump Stress Disorder and gone into therapy, another huge expense.

There is no question that plaintiffs have suffered from the Trump presidency and in particular from his executive orders as a group, and he is thus enjoined from issuing them.

Legal experts on the right have howled at the reasoning here, as has the Trump administration. But Trump’s team of lawyers must wait for the appeal process to go forward, and in the meantime Trump’s hands are tied. Any appeal will be to the 9th District, the court that previously upheld the order halting Trump’s travel ban, so it is highly likely that this present ruling will be upheld as well, and the case might end up going to the Supreme Court.

Dark energy may not exist

The New Neo Posted on by

I try to follow the general outlines of the current theories of theoretical physics, but it goes without saying that I don’t understand the math, and that I miss a lot of the details. So although I’d never even heard of “dark energy” before (antimatter yes; dark matter yes—and I think I had lumped dark matter and dark energy together), I’m interested in a report that calls into question the existence of dark energy:

According to the new study from Eé¶tvé¶s Loré¡nd University in Hungary and the University of Hawaii, the discrepancy that dark energy was “invented” to fill might have arisen from the parts of the theory that were glossed over for the sake of simplicity. The researchers set up a computer simulation of how the universe formed, based on its large-scale structure. That structure apparently takes the form of “foam,” where galaxies are found on the thin walls of each bubble, but large pockets in the middle are mostly devoid of both normal and dark matter.

The team simulated how gravity would affect matter in this structure and found that, rather than the universe expanding in a smooth, uniform manner, different parts of it would expand at different rates. Importantly, though, the overall average rate of expansion is still consistent with observations, and points to accelerated expansion. The end result is what the team calls the Avera model.

“The theory of general relativity is fundamental in understanding the way the universe evolves,” says Dobos. “We do not question its validity; we question the validity of the approximate solutions. Our findings rely on a mathematical conjecture which permits the differential expansion of space, consistent with general relativity, and they show how the formation of complex structures of matter affects the expansion. These issues were previously swept under the rug but taking them into account can explain the acceleration without the need for dark energy.”

There’s so much we don’t know, and although it’s fascinating to speculate I doubt we will ever know enough to truly understand the universe’s formation in the scientific sense. As a very young child I was taken with such questions and even dared to dream that I might enter the field of cosmology myself. I was good at math and science, but not that surpassingly good, as I realized some time late in my high school or early in my college career. I am in awe of those who can do this at a high level, though, and follow their work as best I can.

As for dark matter and dark energy, I’ll leave it for now with a nod to the poets

Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There where the vines cling crimson on the wall,
And in the twilight wait for what will come.
The leaves will whisper there of her, and some,
Like flying words, will strike you as they fall;
But go, and if you listen she will call.
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal””
Luke Havergal.

No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies
To rift the fiery night that’s in your eyes;
But there, where western glooms are gathering,
The dark will end the dark, if anything:
God slays Himself with every leaf that flies,
And hell is more than half of paradise.
No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies””
In eastern skies…

Or:

The End Of The World

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly to top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing ”” nothing at all.

And the music makers:

Why did Trump threaten the Freedom Caucus?

The New Neo Posted on by

We all know the superficial answer to the question of why Trump threatened the Republican members of Congress known as the Freedom Caucus: because they thwarted him in the passage of the Obamacare reform bill (Ryancare, Trumpcare, GOPcare, whatever you want to call it). But his action—that of a new president publicly threatening to oppose and topple an important wing of his own party during the next election—is unusual enough (at least, in this country) to draw attention and questions.

Was it a temper tantrum from a juvenile president angry at not getting his way?

Was it a well-thought-out strategy designed to intimidate and control some members of Congress who were getting too big (and too contrary) for their britches?

Was it payback to the conservatives who failed to back him sufficiently during his campaign?

And will it have any effect at all (other than bringing joy to the hearts of liberals everywhere)? Will it actually intimidate the members of the Freedom Caucus?

I’ll take that last question first: no. For example:

“It didn’t take long for the swamp to drain @realDonaldTrump,” tweeted Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich. “No shame, Mr. President. Almost everyone succumbs to the D.C. Establishment.”…

As for a possible challenge in 2018, [Rep. Trent] Franks said: “If somebody can get to the right of me in the primaries God bless them.”

That response from Franks prompts the question of what sort of candidates would Trump try to replace the Freedom Caucus members with—moderates? Trump lackeys?:

Recruiting primary opponents to run against sitting House Republicans is easier said than done, said Jennifer Duffy, senior editor of The Cook Political Report.

For one thing, it will be hard to find challengers more conservative than many Freedom Caucus members, Duffy said. There also may not be many establishment Republicans willing to be considered “Trump’s candidate” in a tough primary race.

“I think he might believe he can recruit candidates,” she said, “because he’s never actually had to do it.”

There are a lot of things Trump has never done before that he thinks he will be able to do. It’s part of the confidence that reassured and heartened a lot of people who voted for him—that, and his business record. I was not one of those reassured and heartened people, and I’m still not. I’m happy with some of Trump’s moves, particularly the nomination of Gorsuch. And I’m happy, very happy, that Hillary Clinton isn’t president. But there are a lot of “buts.”

Nor am I surprised at these anti-Freedom Caucus tweets of Trump’s (which I feel are empty threats so far). Trump has a long record of attacking and threatening anyone who crosses him, and it goes back way before he entered politics. I agree with this analysis:

Matt Mackowiak, a Republican political consultant based in Texas, said there is “a natural contrast” between Trump and many GOP conservatives, one that may be deeper any side realizes.

“Donald Trump is all about deals and the Freedom Caucus is all about principles,” Mackowiak said. “I’m not sure it can be fixed on health care, and the more frustrated Trump gets, the more likely he will be to try to cut deals with Democrats.”

It’s hard to say how a split would affect the 2018 elections, Mackowiak said, though he added: “A narrower (Republican) majority in the next Congress would make Trump and Ryan’s job even harder than it is now.”

It is my impression that Trump wanted a bill passed, and he wanted to pass it quickly and then to move on to other things. On what points did Trump and the Freedom Caucus disagree? I couldn’t find too many articles on that, but here’s one. It appears to me to be a valid disagreement between the two sides on how reconciliation would work and what the bill would be allowed to cover, but it also seems to me that this was a disagreement that could have been ironed out as the answers to those questions were clarified with more time.

But Trump was determined to rush it:

Mick Mulvaney told Republicans behind the doors behind me, he said that the president wants a vote tomorrow, and is moving on after this vote regardless of what happens.”

A source from within the room told Bash that if the bill doesn’t pass, Trump said “he is moving on, and they will be stuck with Obamacare.”

Another threat that didn’t work. Of perhaps it did work, depending on Trump’s goal. A lot of people (me included) have pointed out that Trump is somewhat to the left on health care reform, and that he probably only added that campaign rhetoric about repealing Obamacare because he figured it would help him win, rather than out of any sense of outrage at Obamacare itself. Therefore his idea of a good system to replace it is not going to resemble the ideas of a conservative, because on this issue he isn’t conservative at all. So perhaps his goal all the time was to get a green light to work with Democrats to tweak Obamacare a bit but essentially leave it in place, and ignore and condemn the conservative wing of the GOP in the process.

However, I have little doubt that, if that’s the case, most of Trump’s more avid supporters will shrug and excuse it—and blame Congress instead.

How I got started as a blogger

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited repeat of a previous post.]

When blogger Andrew Sullivan bit the blogging dust and quit, I took special note of his departure for personal reasons, because you might actually say that it’s actually because of Sullivan that I became a blogger myself.

When I first began reading blogs around 2002 and was shy even about commenting on them, back when Sullivan actually seemed to have some reasonable things to say, his was one of the blogs I read daily. He used to feature a single email a day from a reader, one he thought particularly noteworthy and wanted to highlight. He didn’t have comments (I don’t think his blog ever featured comments, which I think was a failing), but he had huge traffic back then. So if your email to Sullivan was one of the lucky few published there, it was assured a very wide audience indeed.

I took to emailing him quite regularly with my own point of view, and Sullivan (or some aide or interne of his) seemed to like what I had to say, because my email was often the one featured. But after a year or two of this, one day when my son was visiting me he said, “Why are you working so hard for Andrew Sullivan?”

His point was that I was spending hours on these emails to Sullivan, which were really tantamount to blog posts, and why? “Why not start your own blog?” he added.

This was an idea that literally had never occurred to me before. I’m not at all sure that, without my son asking me that question, it ever would have occurred to me. As soon as he asked it I rejected the idea. “Never!” I said. “I’ll never do that!”

But my son went to Blogger and showed me how easy it was to set one up. “No!” I said. Not interested.

But in a spirit of fun, he asked me to choose a name for the blog, a color, a template, and he designed one for me. It took about five minutes, and there it was.

“I’ll never use it,” I assured him. “You’re wasting your time.”

“Well, it’ll be there anyway, just in case you change your mind.”

I didn’t change my mind, at least not right away. The first few posts I put up there a while later were just copies of emails I’d sent to Sullivan which had been published on his blog, and I published them on my own blog out of boredom and just to see how the whole process worked. I didn’t have a sitemeter, because there didn’t seem to be any traffic on the blog and I didn’t expect that there ever would be.

The election of 2004 came and went, and I hardly ever posted anything. But in February of 2005, for reasons I no longer recall (although I wish I did), I decided to post more often, although not yet every day, to see what would happen if I tried to do this blogging thing in a more serious way.

What had changed my mind? I don’t know; my recollection is that it was just an idea that came one day, an experiment: if I post nearly every day, and try to network with other bloggers and send them links, what would happen? I figured I’d try it for a month or two—and install a sitemeter, to monitor my progress—and if nothing changed I’d give it up. Things took off much more quickly than I’d thought they would, thanks in no small measure to helpful and simpatico bloggers such as the late Norm Geras, Dr. Sanity, and Gerard Vanderleun of American Digest. The rest, as they say, is history.