I try not to march in lockstep with any movement, and I split with mainstream feminism over Barbie. The complaint about how her “impossible body proportions” made little girls feel bad about their own just struck me as silly. I guess you could find one or two women out there who could trace their body dysmorphia to a foot-tall plastic doll they played with as children, but it’s my experience that pretty much every woman alive has something about her body that she doesn’t like, whether they played with Barbies or not. So there.

I had a Barbie. And I had a Francie, who I always thought was Barbie’s friend but Barbie fan sites tell me I’m mistaken: She was Barbie’s “modern cousin” and wore “mod-style clothing.” Whatever. I liked her because she had long blonde hair I could brush, whereas my Barbie was the one with the brunette bubble cut, i.e. the one that terrified Sally Draper in “Mad Men.”

Anyway, I can’t say exactly when they arrived in my toy collection, but my guess is, I was around 8 or 9. I wasn’t thinking about body proportions then. My mother was a talented seamstress, and made her several outfits in addition to the striped swimsuit she came dressed in. Francie’s proportions were the same, so they shared the same clothes. And that is pretty much that, recollection-wise. The massive Barbie brand build-out seemed to trail my interest in the doll, which is to say, by the time the Dream House came onto the market, I had moved on. I had a carrying case that held the two dolls, with space in between for the clothes. The outfits were the splurge.

By the time Kate was born, the thing about Barbie that had changed most was the age period — she came into the house when Kate was very young, maybe 4? Also, the thing wasn’t to get one Barbie and a lot of outfits, but to get a ton of Barbies, period. They were cheap, and there were so many of them, you can see how the collecting mania began. (My neighbor’s in-laws were both deaf, and they all used ASL when they got together. Her mother-in-law gave her granddaughter ASL Barbie, which she was thrilled to have, but immediately told her — in ASL, presumably — that she could never take it out of the box, because it would ruin its value. My neighbor went out the next day and bought another one that the girl could actually play with. In-laws. What are you gonna do?)

Kate’s most memorable was Olympic Swimming Barbie, who came dressed in a swimsuit with a medal around her neck. You wound up a knob on her back and her arms windmilled wildly; she was a bathtub toy. She didn’t age well, and retired from swimming in a film of soap scum. There were others.

Olympic Swimming Barbie wasn’t in Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” which the three of us saw the other night. I…loved it. It was zany and funny and heartfelt and spot-on and just felt totally original. I read somewhere that Mattel has something like 18 more movies in the pipeline, based on their best-selling toys. I think they should shut it down now, because it’s all downhill from here. I feel especially bad for Lena Dunham, who’s said to be developing the Polly Pocket movie, which I wouldn’t see at gunpoint. Who cares about Polly Pocket? No one.

But Barbie could become “Barbie” because of all the cultural weight resting on her slender plastic shoulders, and Gerwig and her writing/life partner, Noah Brumbaugh Baumbach, put it all together like Tetris. When I saw Kate McKinnon’s name in the credits, I couldn’t imagine where they’d squeeze her in, but they figured out a way. (She’s Weird Barbie. She smells like basement.) By the time Barbie rolls out of Barbieland in her pink Corvette, singing the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine,” I was utterly under the spell. My only quibble might be Dan Savage’s, who wanted a scene acknowledging all the gay boys who secretly played with Barbie, and didn’t get one. A trans woman plays Doctor Barbie, and that seemed to be the only queer shoutout in the film, unless you count Michael Cera as Allan, Ken’s friend in that stupid striped beach coat. I didn’t.

Yes, there were moments late in the second act that dragged a bit, but who cares? It was a perfect, bubblegum-pink summer movie, and that’s all I want at this point. We were all charmed.

Francie wasn’t in it, though. Midge and Skipper were. I have no memory of breast-growing Skipper at all. Does anyone else?

Anyway, I had to wait a whole week to see this movie, scrolling quickly past think pieces, etc. Why does the “spoiler alert” window close after, what, 36 hours? Not everyone can see something on opening weekend. Which is my way of saying I won’t say any more. Just enjoy it.

And have a good week.

I was at a friend’s house Saturday, and as we paddled around in her backyard pool — been doing a lot of swimming this summer — she confessed that she’d mostly given up social media. She’s already someone who pays only glancing attention to the news, and said Instagram was eating her alive, so she just…gave it up. (Mostly.)

I’m starting to see the utility of that. The more Elon Musk screws up Twitter, which could be infuriating but was still mostly entertaining, the easier it seems. I’m not ready to go all the way yet, but hell, maybe I’ll do a few tests fasts or diets or something. See if I can find the good in my fellow man again.

Who am I kidding. There is no good in these dipshits.

That’s the WashPost (gift link), on its millionth Cletus safari of the modern era, circulates through the crowds at an Iowa county fair and learns — YET AGAIN — that nope, they’re still down with the clown:

During a hot, sunny weekend at the Boone County Fair — where hundreds of Iowans came together to eat funnel cakes and corn dogs and to watch their children and grandchildren show off animals from their family farms — the range of Republican voters’ views on Trump, the undisputed front-runner in state and national polls, was on full display. Interviews with GOP voters in the rural county, which Trump carried by double-digit percentage points in 2016 and 2020, show that Trump continues to have a tight grip on the party, even among those who have grown weary of his rhetoric and legal troubles.

…(Vickie) Farmer has been a Trump supporter from the start, but in the years since Biden came into office, her support for the former president has only grown. She said she’s most worried about the economy, because she sees her adult children living paycheck to paycheck and at times struggling to juggle food and gas costs.

“I was very happy with the way things were going. I don’t think he is guilty of nearly all of the things they’re accusing him of,” she said, sitting next to a table she set up with her husband to sell scented wax melts and other home goods. “I think there’s a smear campaign to try to keep him from getting into office.”

Oh, fuck off, Vickie. If you’re dumb enough to believe that returning a psychopathic felon to office will free your children from wage slavery, you’re really too dumb to vote at all.

The point of this story is that in this vast crowd of Iowans, there were a few who confessed to being “sick of the drama,” but will probably vote for him if he’s the nominee, and to these good Germans I say fuck off as well.

In other oh-eff-off news today, there’s this:

Joy Alonzo, a respected opioid expert, was in a panic.

The Texas A&M University professor had just returned home from giving a routine lecture on the opioid crisis at the University of Texas Medical Branch in March when she learned a student had accused her of disparaging Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick during the talk.

In the few hours it took to drive from Galveston, the complaint had made its way to her supervisors, and Alonzo’s job was suddenly at risk.

Don’t you just hate left-wing political correctness? Oh, wait, this isn’t it?

And the thing is, no one can even say what it is she said that was “disparaging” of the lieutenant governor. Other students can’t remember anything. But one little informant in the crowd disapproved and called her mommy.

For free speech advocates, health experts and students, Texas A&M’s investigation of Alonzo was a shocking demonstration of how quickly university leaders allow politicians to interfere in classroom discussions on topics in which they are not experts — and another example of increasing political involvement from state leaders in how Texas universities are managed.

You don’t say. And this overheated hellhole is where Americans are flocking? No thanks.

Other than that? It hasn’t been a terrible week so far. Nice swim this morning, not too punishingly hot in the afternoon. But I’m crawling to that hump, and will be very happy to see the weekend, when Kate and I will see “Barbie.”

How about you?

I just looked at the weather forecast for the week ahead, and it is…grim. Starting to climb tomorrow, then topping 90 at midweek. It’s our turn in the barrel, which I realize may fall on unsympathetic ears for you guys in the southwest, but trust me, it’s pretty miserable. Although it’s also…summer weather, so you can’t complain too much. That said, I will. Complain, that is. It’s my right as an American, and as a senior citizen.

But a good weekend, all things considered. Made some time for friend relationships, and got in an otter swim with Bill. A freighter went by as we were getting dressed to leave.

The St. Clair River was bracing (70 degrees), but left me feeling a little…filmed, if you know what I mean. A shower took care of it, but you gotta wonder what the hell was doing that. There have been some gully washers lately, and those tend to scour the grosser parts of an urban infrastructure. Whatever. I showered, and that was that.

Speaking of showers, I felt like I needed one after reading this thread, by a young reporter who left the biz earlier this year.

Ok here goes it: During my time as a Capitol reporter in Lansing, I faced burnout, anxiety, and depression, as well as relentless harassment. Despite this, I kept it all to myself, feeling like it would make me seem self-centered or incapable. I finally broke down in Jan. (1/x) https://t.co/ts2IveJJVe

— Allison R. Donahue (@donahual) July 23, 2023

The precipitating incident she obliquely refers to is this, when a state senator made a crude remark to a 22-year-old reporter. She wrote about it, and the usual happened: Other women, including his colleagues, had similar stories. As it turned out, it was a nothingburger, consequence-wise — he lost his committee assignments, but he was term-limited, so he played out his string and ran for Macomb County prosecutor. Which he won.

The 22-year-old, however, didn’t do so well. The usual happened to her, too: Rape threats, FaceTime calls where the caller was masturbating, and — this is particularly galling — “a woman on a livestream making a call out to get people to send me porn,” and there’s a special place in hell for that one, eh? That’s a lot for a 22-year-old to handle. God, what a hideous movement.

And with that, I’m commencing a busy week. I hope yours is cooler and less so.

Alan spent several hours today replacing the battery in my iPad mini, and right now he’s making sure the adhesive adheres. It occurs to me you could get a pretty good sense of us from this random selection of heavy books from a nearby shelf:

Dunno if Italy will happen this fall. We have a wedding in St. Louis on September 30, and we lost our dog sitter when Kate announced she’s going on tour during October and into November, not as a musician, but as the sound tech for a Canadian band. They’ll tour western Canada and the same part of the U.S. So maybe it’ll be spring before we get there, but we’ll get there. I kinda wish I was hitting western Canada with her, frankly. I’ve never been to Vancouver.

Anyway, that leaves us in Michigan for one of the prettiest months of the year, so I can’t complain. We’ll do some weekends here and there. It’ll be fun. I hope.

Meanwhile, news is breaking here. The state attorney general just announced charges against the 16 fake Trump electors from 2020, a group that includes the former vice-chair of the state GOP, and a national GOP state committeewoman. I remember watching live video of them marching to the Capitol on December 14, when the real electors were meeting inside. A state police officer refused to let them in. Later stories would emerge that they’d discussed secretly sleeping in a sympathetic legislator’s office overnight, so they could say they met “in” the Capitol, as the law requires.

One final note: The youngest fake elector is 55, the oldest, 82. There’s your MAGA demographic, right there.

News is breaking elsewhere, too. This story, from the Israeli paper Haaretz, may be paywalled, although I was able to read it this morning, when I nearly woke Alan chuckling over it. The gist: In 2019, the Israeli government loaned some rare antiquities to the White House, lamps made from clay, as part of a Hanukkah celebration. The loan was intended to be short-term, but then the pandemic started, everything shut down, but no fear for the artifacts. After all, they were in the most secure building in the world.

Well, guess where they are now? You get one guess, and it’s located in Palm Beach.

This guy. I mean, this fucking guy.

Here’s another guy, a local billionaire building his dream house. The details are galling, but what did you expect, a log cabin?

I didn’t expect a log cabin. But I probably didn’t expect a trampoline park.

OK, outta here. Into the midweek we go.

Well, this isn’t alarming at all, is it:

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

That’s a gift link, and I encourage you to read it. It details, with receipts, exactly what the velociraptor wing of American politics plans to do with their puppet king. It’s grim.

And you know what? I hate to keep sounding the alarm on this, I really do. I absolutely despise having this stuff in my head, and I despise even more knowing that it’s not limited to Trump. If he strokes out taking his morning dump tomorrow, this will apply to whoever steps into his lifted shoes. I’d much rather be musing about summer movies – Team Barbie here – than this, but like they’re always braying at us, freedom isn’t free. I only wish we had a deeper bench, and a younger quarterback.

What a way to start the week.

Oh, and if you’re a lurking Trump fan, here’s your guy:

Trump is asked by a supporter in Iowa what he would do to save farmland from CO2 pipelines. He seems to have no idea what she is talking about but claims that he “has a plan.” pic.twitter.com/qlp4PsESof

— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) July 7, 2023

What would it have taken to say, “I’m sorry, but I haven’t been briefed on that. Give my staff some time, and I’ll have a better answer soon.” Character, that’s what. But this guy is such a natural-born liar that he just can’t stop himself.

Meanwhile, RFK Jr., that croaking fucker:

“COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately … COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese … We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”

…I’ve seen a number of Kennedy fans, a few of them Jewish, defending these remarks because, they argue, he doesn’t specifically claim that someone deliberately engineered COVID to spare Jews. He just says that there’s “an argument” that it was targeted. But, who knows? Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Again, many people are saying …

…Kennedy also makes the general remark that China and the U.S. are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on “ethnically targeted bioweapons,” as though this is a given, even if his other claims about sparing the Jews may be surprising to some people. I can’t claim to know just what the U.S. or China are or are not doing in what are presumably secret programs. But I’ve been around DC and the national security chatosphere long enough to know bullshit at a distance. Again, I can’t know. Great Powers likely study or consider all sorts of crazy stuff at some hypothetical level. But this kind of talk is generally the fantasy or agitprop of warmongers and xenophobes. I mentioned earlier the factitious nature of Kennedy’s speech. He routinely peppers his comments with “there are papers” or “I could show you papers.” But these papers either don’t exist or don’t show anything remotely like what he claims. In this case he mentions a paper which supposedly backed all this up but which actually notes broadly that some viruses could have differential presentations in different ethnic groups.

Grrr. Monday! I ask you!

So there was a domestic-violence incident in Oakland County the other day, which probably wouldn’t have made the papers were it not for one of the parties involved (a high-ranking Ford exec) and the weirdness of the accusation: He threatened to set two of her handbags on fire. The brand(s) were not named, but the wife reported each had a value of $10,000, which suggests Hermés, and that’s the last time I’m going to put the diacritic over the E, so sorry about that, Académie Française member readers.

My purse-expert friend further speculates they were probably Kelly bags, because a Birkin would have cost far, far more. However, a possible complicating factor would be whether it was purchased used (“pre-loved”) or not. But never mind that.

The wife issued a statement yesterday that confirmed what police know about domestic-violence incidents, i.e., that they suck:

The wife of a Ford Motor Co. executive who allegedly assaulted her over the weekend is defending her spouse, saying she loves and supports him, and that he’s never acted violently in the past.

Soo Louis-Victor issued a statement through her an attorney, Paul Stablein, about a weekend incident involving her husband, Franck Louis-Victor. In it, she called him a “loving partner and father.”

Of course. And yes, they were indeed Hermes:

According to a preliminary investigation and a criminal complaint, the victim told officers that she and Louis-Victor were in an argument when he threatened to burn two of her Hermes purses, each valued at about $10,000, with a butane torch. She told police after she took the purses from him, he turned the torch toward her and said he would harm her if he couldn’t damage the handbags, police said.

Later during the fight, he allegedly slapped her, headbutted her and struck her with a Google Nest Hub device, cutting her under the left eye. She sought treatment at a hospital.

I know domestic violence is a complex issue, that alcohol complicates everything, but this is not the way a loving partner and father behaves during an argument. The Google Nest Hub device did make me shake my head. Get out of the way, frying pans and rolling pins — flying Alexas are the new in-home weapon.

Whatever the reason, I think she’s going to have to pawn those bags before this is all over. A shame.

OK, then: The only other thing in the papers this morning that caught my eye was probably Michigan-specific, i.e., this piece about Gov. Whitmer’s plan to overhaul education in the state. Briefly, she wants to transform the traditional state-level department into a broader one focused on preschool-to-career, the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement and Potential, i.e. MiLEAP:

The new department will work toward “improving outcomes from preschool through postsecondary,” read a Wednesday announcement scant on details about how that might be accomplished. Governors don’t govern the state education department. It’s controlled by an elected state board and a state superintendent hired by that board, a source of frustration for governors of both parties. The new department will partner with, not replace, the state Board and Department of Education, Whitmer’s office said.

I like the idea, but I’ve been away from Lansing too long to immediately figure the what’s-it-about/what’s-it-really-about situation here. These grafs lower down are the meat of it:

Whitmer’s tactic could, possibly, move education to a new dynamic, one focused on accomplishment. Whitmer’s move could shift school policy more directly and quickly while focusing it more intently. It may give schools and teachers more flexibility to actually teach, and inspire kids to actually learn.

Possibly.

What happens with the still-existing Department of Education? Will the Republicans who backed Bollin’s proposal [who proposed eliminating that department entirely] fight Whitmer’s? Does this actually open schools to more political wrangling, or protests, or parental resistance? How will funding issues be resolved? And could all Whitmer’s efforts be overturned when conservative government inevitably returns to power in Lansing? Are these questions Whitmer considered? If so, does she care about those worries, or is she focusing instead on the chance of great reward?

Good ones to think about, no matter where you live, as the weekend draws near. Have a good one.

I see Dexter mentioned the Michigan Ball-Kicking Incident in the last thread. I haven’t checked the comments to see if it’s caught anyone’s fancy, but it certainly caught mine, so here goes the summation from ground-level Michigan: 

The state GOP is fighting. They’ve been fighting for a while, but now the rebels are fighting amongst themselves, a real People’s Front of Judea vs. the Judean People’s Front type of situation, only stupider and not funny, unless you’re a Democrat. Earlier this year, the state party chairmanship was seized by the crazier of two crazy candidates, on the basis of this argument: Crazy person #1 ran for and lost the attorney general’s seat in 2022, and crazy person #2 ran for and lost the secretary of state’s race (by a bigger margin than the AG candidate), but! The AG wannabe, Matt DePerno, conceded his race on election night, and the SoS wannabe, Kristina Karamo, did not. Why should I concede I lost a race in a corrupt system? she asked the crowd at the state convention, and that did the trick. She won on the last ballot, as the cleaning crew was poised to kick everyone out because they ran way over their allotted time in the convention hall. That’s because they had to hand-count the ballots, because tabulators = EVIL. 

So even before this started, these were the folks in charge: The nuts. 

Then, the nuts began fighting amongst themselves. Karamo’s own vice-chair was splitting with her over financial issues. The party is flat-ass broke, the big donors have closed their checkbooks, and somehow the expected tsunami of small-dollar contributions isn’t filling the gap. There was some hiring and firing and this and that, and then this Saturday happened. The story’s paywalled, but here’s the gist:

As Michigan Republicans have been openly feuding over the party’s direction and the leadership approach of new Chairwoman Kristina Karamo, some were frustrated that the beginning of Saturday’s special meeting at the Doherty Hotel was limited to only members of the state committee.

In an interview, James Chapman, a Republican from Wayne County, said he traveled to Clare for the meeting but was forced to listen to it through a locked door.

Chapman said he and others said the Pledge of Allegiance together in the lobby outside the meeting and acknowledged he wiggled the knob of one door leading to the meeting room.

And then? And thennnnn?

Eventually, Mark DeYoung, chairman of the Clare County Republican Party, heard the wiggling and walked over to the door, where he saw someone flip him off through a small window.

DeYoung opened the door.

“He kicked me in my balls as soon as I opened the door,” DeYoung said.

Not only that, Chapman then bum-rushed DeYoung across the room and slammed him into a chair, or something. (Allegedly.) DeYoung ended up in the ER with a cracked rib and presumably an ice pack on his business, and Chapman was suspended from his local GOP committee. MLive dug up a detail I hadn’t known, that snapped a lot into place for me: He was the guy who showed up at a 2020 Lansing protest of the governor’s Covid restrictions carrying a fishing rod with a nude, brunette Barbie-type doll dangling from the end, clearly meant to be Gretchen Whitmer. (Photo at the link.) The kidnapping story hadn’t broken yet, but this was too much even for the MAGA crowd, and he was asked to stash it. He’s got a criminal record, too. A real model citizen.

Bottom line: The crazies are still in charge, the checkbooks are staying closed, and I doubt we’ll see a Republican win the open U.S. Senate seat next year. 

The other major news of the week? The best possible suspect for Chicago’s Tylenol murders of 1982, James Lewis, is dead, apparently of natural causes. He never served a day for the murders themselves, although he drew a 12-year federal-prison term for trying to extort $1 million from Johnson & Johnson, in exchange for “stopping the killings,” which he never admitted to. I remember those, as should everyone who was alive and paying attention then. For those of you who weren’t, they are the reason we now have to break through multiple levels of packaging to get at an over-the-counter medicine today. The Sun-Times is “free,” but it can be a pain in the ass to get to. If you have an account, this column by a retired editor who was a reporter then is worth your time. Tom McNamee interviewed Lewis in prison: 

I felt a physical chill when, in the tone of a man who thinks he’s clever, Lewis offered to explain to me how any mope — though certainly not himself — could have safely and efficiently filled Tylenol capsules with deadly cyanide.

It was simply a matter of drilling holes in a breadboard, Lewis explained, and inserting half a Tylenol capsule shell into each hole. Then, he said, the mope — certainly not him — would brush the powdered cyanide across the board with a table knife, letting it fall into the capsules.

But you didn’t do it, James?

“No,” he said. With a smile.

Neil Steinberg detailed how the killings went on his blog today, too, in an excerpt from his book. 

And that’s about all I have for the day, which is slipping by. Better get some real work done.

A former colleague of mine from Fort Wayne, Leo Morris, died Friday. He was an editorial writer, later the ed-page editor of the News-Sentinel, where I was a columnist; we had another friend in common, so he was one of the first people I got to know when I moved to Indiana, and things went on from there.

We were strictly work friends. We didn’t go to lunch, or out for drinks, but every day I’d mosey down to his glassed-in office and we’d have a chat/download, sometimes when he was eating a disgusting “breakfast” from the downstairs vending machines, or putting peanuts into an RC Cola, a snack he’d grown fond of in his Kentucky childhood. I was fond of the solitaire game on his PC, and I’d play it, or leaf through the many political publications the department subscribed to, while he read page proofs. The editorial page was overstaffed and overpaid when I started, with an editor, two writers and a secretary, a holdover from those days when newspapers enjoyed enormous profit margins. The N-S wasn’t as overstaffed as The Columbus Dispatch, but there was always time for solitaire and talking through column and editorial ideas. Also, Leo kept a candy dish in his office, and I like candy, especially those sour cherry balls and Hershey’s Miniatures.

We shared a foundational belief: That we didn’t know what we really thought about anything until we’d written about it. He liked bluegrass music more than I did, but we both loved Warren Zevon. He was a nice guy, even a sweetheart.

Politically, he was conservative, although he called himself a libertarian. In time, I would come to understand libertarians and their philosophy as…well, you know. We’ve all known a few, and it suited Leo, who’d grown up a bookish boy who liked to hold things at arm’s length, and then write about them. It ensures you’ll never have to be disappointed in your side, because your side is ridiculous and never wins elections. I used to tease him that “Being a libertarian means never having to say ‘so help me God,'” i.e. take an oath of office. Only two issues aroused real passion in him:  SCOTUS’ Kelo decision, which he seemed to consider equivalent to genocide as a moral crime, and the fact Jane Fonda wasn’t doing a life sentence for treason, treason I say. (He was a Vietnam vet. He never, ever, ever forgave her.)

I was long gone from the paper by the time Trump was elected, and the last time I’d talked to Leo was after the Goeglein affair, but if I’d have been there, I’d have teased him that he was cheated out of a Washington Post contributor’s spot. As you recall, the WP’s embarrassing Gary Abernathy, the bard of Hillsboro, Ohio, was picked to be the paper’s ed-page Reasonable MAGA voice, the Buckeye Salena Zito, after the paper he edited was one of two or three in the country to endorse Trump for president. But the N-S endorsed him, too, and Leo wrote the editorial. I know he did because he was the only one left in the department, and I recognized his arm’s-length style in the argument: They – as in, the editorial We, intoning as one – didn’t like Trump very much, but they hated Hillary and Trump would probably get bored and resign or leave office early, and then Mike Pence would be president, and they liked him very much. Maybe that was too weird for the WashPost, but whatever.

I don’t know when I soured on even being work friends with Leo; maybe it was after my year in Ann Arbor, when I was toiling on the copy desk. In my absence, Leo had started a blog on the paper’s website, which was unmistakably modeled on Glenn Reynolds’, whom you people who remember the ol’ blogosphere know as Instapundit. Fresh from nine months of vigorous intellectual discussions with smart people, I’d lost my patience with Iraq-war boosterism, and ironic conservative detachment. But the paper was circling the drain at that point, so if his heart really wasn’t in it anymore, neither was anyone else’s.

Then we moved to Michigan, the paper folded and Leo started writing for the Indiana Policy Review, a “think tank” that does no thinking, but is instead a welfare program funded by a couple of rich right-wing Hoosier families for the benefit of one man, Leo’s old boss at the N-S, Craig Ladwig. It was part of a Heritage Foundation seed-the-hinterlands project when it launched around 1990, and never did much, although Mike Pence was on the board of directors, and it was there that he wrote the pieces that gained him a fair amount of ridicule in the 2016 election, especially the one where he claimed smoking doesn’t kill. Jane Mayer found the receipts for The New Yorker:

In a 2008 speech, Pence described himself as “part of what we called the seed corn Heritage Foundation was spreading around the country in the state think-tank movement.” It isn’t fully clear whose money was behind the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, because think tanks, as nonprofits, don’t have to disclose their donors. But the early funders of the Heritage Foundation included some Fortune 500 companies, in fields such as oil, chemicals, and tobacco, that opposed health, safety, and environmental regulations.

Cecil Bohanon, one of two adjunct scholars at Pence’s think tank, had a history of financial ties to tobacco-company front groups, and in 2000 Pence echoed industry talking points in an essay that argued, “Smoking doesn’t kill. In fact, two out of every three smokers doesn’t die from a smoking-related illness.” A greater “scourge” than cigarettes, he argued, was “big government disguised as do-gooder, healthcare rhetoric.” Bohanon, who still writes for the think tank’s publication, also has ties to the Kochs. Last year, John Hardin, the head of university relations for the Charles Koch Foundation, told an Indiana newspaper that the Kochs had been funding Bohanon’s work as a professor of free-market economics at Ball State University “for years.”

Guess what killed Leo, a lifelong smoker? I guess he was the unlucky one out of three.

Leo’s weekly column, offered free to Hoosier newspapers, was picked up by the smaller ones, so he still had a readership. I would hit the IPR site for a little self-induced exasperation, but I always figured that if somehow we were still under the same office roof, we could shoot the shit and share some Hershey’s Miniatures, but then I read this and thought, sadly, that nope, that could never happen:

President Trump did not, in point of fact, ask Vice President Mike Pence to reject the electoral votes resulting from the November balloting, therefore Banks and the other Trump-supporting nominee (Jim Jordan of Ohio) were not supporting efforts to “overturn the election.”

The Constitution gives states the authority over the selection of electoral votes, based on state legislatures’ duly authorized procedures. In several states, notably ones Trump lost by dubious margins or under suspicious circumstances, governors or election officials ignored those procedures and made up new rules on the fly.

Legislators from some of the states asked – formally, in letters – for more time so they could determine whether the illegal conduct was enough reason to toss the existing certification of electors and submit new slates more accurately reflecting the states’ votes.

There is not a consensus among constitutional scholars over what powers the vice president might or might not have over electoral disputes, so we can have a legitimate and (we can only hope) respectful debate over the issue. But to be clear: He was being asked to give those legislatures more time. He wasn’t being asked to overturn anything.

JFC, even Mike Pence didn’t believe that. And note that leap from “suspicious circumstances” to “illegal conduct,” and how close margins in swing states are now “dubious.”

So there you go: Another relationship sundered by MAGA.

When I heard earlier this week that Leo was ill, I sent him a note wishing him well. I wasn’t aware how sick he was, and I’m sure he didn’t get to read it. But I meant every word. We all have to die sometime, but gasping for breath is a terrible way to go. This Indiana Policy Review’s appreciation of him is OK, but in the unmistakable voice of Craig, who drops eye-popping lines like “It can be said that Morris was the last real journalist left in Indiana” and uh, whu-?

Oh well. They won’t be around much longer, either. None of us will, in the earth’s time. Which reminds me that Leo was a climate-change denier, too, and I just smile sadly. You tell your young friends, though, that working at home has its advantages, but you’ll never have the unique relationships of work friends, who are some of the most memorable people I’ve known in my life, and I treasure them. Even the ones who are wrong.

End of the week, and I’m bound an determined to get a third blog done before the weekend. Fortunately, I have a couple things to recommend, and recommend enthusiastically.

First is “Casa Susanna,” the latest PBS “American Experience” thing, which Alan watched late one night after I’d gone to bed, and liked so much he watched again, so I could, too. Here’s the link. It’s about a long-gone Catskills retreat for transgender women, and to make it clearer, specifically heterosexual men who had no other outlet to present as women. It’s absolutely fascinating, both for the level of detail, empathy and understanding it brings, without being sentimental or cringey or any of the rest of it.

It’s also an answer to those who talk about gender dysphoria as though it’s some weird, baroque mental illness. These men/women were highly functional, accomplished individuals whose main problem was that they were living in the wrong bodies. But you watch. You’ll like it.

I mention this other thing mainly because I find myself in the extremely rare situation of agreeing with David French, in the NYT. He’s writing about why the MAGA movement is so hard for people like me to fully understand. By George, I think he’s got it:

Why do none of your arguments against Trump penetrate this mind-set? The Trumpists have an easy answer: You’re horrible, and no one should listen to horrible people. Why were Trumpists so vulnerable to insane stolen-election theories? Because they know that you’re horrible and that horrible people are capable of anything, including stealing an election.

At the same time, their own joy and camaraderie insulate them against external critiques that focus on their anger and cruelty. Such charges ring hollow to Trump supporters, who can see firsthand the internal friendliness and good cheer that they experience when they get together with one another. They don’t feel angry — at least not most of the time. They are good, likable people who’ve just been provoked by a distant and alien “left” that many of them have never meaningfully encountered firsthand.

Indeed, while countless gallons of ink have been spilled analyzing the MAGA movement’s rage, far too little has been spilled discussing its joy.

He talks about the boar boat parades, too.

Believe me, I was as surprised as you to find myself nodding along.

OK, it’s nearly the weekend. Enjoy yours.

Attachment parenting was getting a lot of attention when I was mother to a young child. This is the school of thought that includes carrying the kid at all times in a complicated sling, extended breast-feeding and the family bed.

It wasn’t my thing, but it did get me thinking, on walks and bench-sits on the playground, about the idea of attachment. A child grows inside you, is born, and you hold it close for a few weeks, then put it down (but still hold it a lot). Then they start walking, you hold their hands, etc., until one day you realize you’re a TOTAL EMBARRASSMENT and your child would appreciate it if you’d just get lost for the next five years or so, and then eventually they come back to you as adults.

It’s the adolescence that most challenges you, because it’s then that you most clearly realize that in the act of creating a new human life, you’ve done just that — create a new life, separate from your own. You and your partner each threw 23 pairs of chromosomes on the table and let them fight it out, and something entirely different emerged. Your child may look like your mini-me, but they have their own mind, and what’s more, they’re growing up in a different era from you, so even if they’re good kids who respect their parents and never put a foot wrong, they’re reflections of their own time and generational peers, at least to some degree.

And this is a good thing. The world needs to change, and it needs young people to change it. You may not like every change, but you’re not on the committee, no one’s going to ask your permission. Sorry about that.

Now someone, please tell this to the Moms for Liberty.

They’ve been getting a bit of PR lately, for their surprisingly successful attempts to gain spots on school boards. Our own was overtaken by a conservative majority last fall, and while they’ve mainly been concerned with budget matters, a number of them stressed “parental rights” in their campaigns, and the M4L has a chapter here. (Although not sure how active/influential they are. They seem to do better in the farther-out hinterlands.)

It’s a little frustrating for a person who knows how education works, or is supposed to work. Teaching is hard, hard work, and one thing you can grant your child’s teachers is the grace to let them do the work they were trained to do. They cannot consult with every parent on every book on the English reading list or in the library, or whether the Civil War should be taught this way or that way. You have to trust educators to educate. It’s part of the letting-go process for parents: Your kid will not learn exactly what you did, because they are not you. If you have a problem with that, prepare to homeschool.

Here’s another thing that struck me as the mother of an infant: You give birth to this tiny, perfect individual. Their skin is nearly transparent, their digestive system little more than a tube. And if you’re lucky, you breastfeed exclusively for however many months, and it’s all fine. Breast milk is the perfect food for junior. The diapers may be copious, but weirdly, they don’t smell bad.

Then you introduce solids, and hoo-boy, hold on to your hat for that diaper, because it’s going to burn your eyebrows off. It seemed like a metaphor. I told Alan at the time, “Now begins the world’s corruption of our perfect child.” Soon she’d be watching more television than I was comfortable with, eating foods with too much sugar, all that. I made many, many mistakes raising her, like everyone does. But she turned out all right. Almost everyone does, if their parents aren’t abusive and they don’t roll bad genetic dice.

You never stop worrying. You never stop thinking, what could I have done differently? But if you’re lucky, you should be able to start letting go at some point. You have to. If you’re religious, you say they belong to God, and it’s out of your hands. If you’re more like me, you might tell yourself you can’t control teenagers, not really. Weren’t you a teenager once? Didn’t you do all kinds of stupid shit? I had a curfew, and in later life I was very happy my parents set that boundary, because the kids who didn’t — hoo boy, you can’t believe what they got up to. Some of my friends had something called the GOOTH Club. GOOTH stood for Get Out Of The House, which they’d do once their parents fell asleep, sometimes by climbing out windows, after which someone would take a car from the garage and they’d spend all night — all night! — driving around. Once they drove to Cincinnati and back. Then they’d go to school the next day. They were not good students.

I’m rambling. But I was thinking about all this after reading this New York Times piece (gift link) on the new battleground of the, get ready, school play. Of course the recent production in Fort Wayne was mentioned, but also:

For decades student productions have faced scrutiny over whether they are age-appropriate, and more recently left-leaning students and parents have pushed back against many shows over how they portray women and people of color. The latest wave of objections is coming largely from right-leaning parents and school officials.

You don’t say.

Drama teachers around the country say they are facing growing scrutiny of their show selections, and that titles that were acceptable just a few years ago can no longer be staged in some districts. The Educational Theater Association released a survey of teachers last month that found that 67 percent say censorship concerns are influencing their selections for the upcoming school year.

In emails and phone calls over the last several weeks, teachers and parents cited a litany of examples. From the right there have been objections to homosexuality in the musical “The Prom” and the play “Almost, Maine” and other oft-staged shows; from the left there have been concerns about depictions of race in “South Pacific” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and gender in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Grease.” And at individual schools there have been any number of unexpected complaints, about the presence of bullying in “Mean Girls” and the absence of white characters in “Fences,” about the words “damn” (in “Oklahoma”) and “bastards” (in “Newsies”) and “God” (in “The Little Mermaid”).

Check out this story from Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, where the board rejected “The Addams Family,” literally the most-performed high school musical in the country, over its “dark themes,” which the school-board president described thusly: “The fundamental thematic theme, for me that I could see, was moving towards darkness, embracing death, embracing despair, embracing the pain.” Jesus Harold Christ, you idiot, IT’S A JOKE. Imagine growing up in that house. I bet their kids are charter members of the GOOTH Club.

I know some parents who might more closely align with my beliefs have raised hell over things like racial slurs in Mark Twain and the plays mentioned above, but man, I am done with that shit. (I never was one of them, anyway.) Read Huckleberry Finn. Yes, the text has the N-word. Talk about it. Discuss why Twain used it, why it’s OK to use it between black friends, but not if it comes from others. Talk about the era in which Twain wrote. Ask why it’s OK that art is disturbing. Move on. Find another book that makes another group uncomfortable. Dive in, get dirty, learn something. You can’t keep children cosseted forever, and it’s a sin, it’s wrong, to even try.

Oh, well. It’s still Independence Day, and it’s nice to have a midsummer holiday in which we are expected to do little other than enjoy the day, eat some hot dogs, light some sparklers. We went sailing. It was very nice.

Speaking of Jesus Harold Christ:

This guy. I mean.

Also, as Abraham Lincoln once said: Don’t trust everything you read on the internet. The story of a lefty provocateur who wasn’t even real.

Enjoy the fireworks! Happy Fourth!