Mistaken obedience for patriotism and vanity for legacy

I hope your Christmas was happy. I spent a pleasant afternoon with Sister and Niece. My Sunday movie was Hamnet. It is newly released and I actually went to a movie theater to see it. At the start of the movie we are told that in the records of the time the spellings “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” are used interchangeably. We meet Agnes, sometimes called Annis (at least I think so) and a guy who becomes infatuated with her. They soon fall in love. Only after we see the guy writing and saying the line, “And Juliet is the sun,” do we get any confirmation that the guy is William Shakespeare. The movie isn’t very good at saying the names of characters. I don’t think they ever said the name of their first child. So this story is similar to Shakespeare in Love in that it is a story about how The Bard came to write one of his plays. There is a big difference: That was a comedy and this is a drama about the creation of a drama. At this point I’d be tempted to say there are spoilers ahead, but one can look up the life of Shakespeare (as I did afterward with Wikipedia) and get the same details I would be tempted to call spoilers. Shakespeare biographies give his wife’s name as Anne, though some also give Agnes. They seem to be another set of interchangeable names. After the first child come twins Judith and Hamnet. When Will is not in London he is shown to be deeply in love with Agnes and the children and involved in raising them. Then, at age 11, Hamnet dies at a time when Will is away. When he does appear Agnes is furious at him for not being there. He soon leaves again for London. That is where he begins to deal with his grief and channel it into the play Hamlet. When Agnes learns of it she and her brother go to London for the premier. The main floor is for standing with the crowd up against the front of the stage. Agnes and her brother push through the crowd to the stage. It seems the actor playing Hamlet is the grown up version of her lost son. This is a great movie and I highly recommend it, especially if you’re a Shakespeare fan. All the major roles were finely acted, including the boy who played Hamnet. He did an amazing job. In the credits I got a glimpse on why Agnes would see Hamlet as the reincarnated Hamnet and in IMDb when I got home I got the confirmation. The boy Hamnet was played by Jacobi Jupe and the character Hamlet was played by older brother Noah Jupe. Before this film both had acting credits. Well. A second movie this week. I saw it in a movie theater on the big screen because it would leave before Christmas day. The movie was Merrily We Roll Along. I arrived slightly after the stated start time because at the start time for Hamnet I sat through 30 minutes of commercials and previews (previews are good, commercials not). But as I got there some sort of recorded jazz combo ended and the show began without opening credits (such as show title). This seemed like a show beginning, so I don’t think I missed anything important. I’m still puzzled why there were no previews. This is a Stephen Sondheim musical. It appeared on Broadway originally in 1981 and didn’t last long. There were a few more productions, including in London’s West End, over the years. In 2023 it was revived on Broadway and was quite a success. What I saw was a filming of the stage production. We even hear audience laughing and applause. There are announcements that Richard Linklater is working on a film adaptation. Since the story takes place over 20 years he is partway through filming it over 20 years, like he did for his movie Boyhood. The story is about song composer Frank (played by Jonathan Groff) and his long-term friends lyricist Charley (Daniel Radcliffe) and author and critic Mary (Lindsay Mendez). The story opens in 1976 as Frank is being praised at a party on the success of his new film. But all is not well in Tinseltown as Frank is also denounced for pursuing fame and money over friends and family. From there each scene goes back a few more years and explains how we got to the scene we just saw. In 1973 in a live TV interview Charley explains how he and Frank work, but that work relationship isn’t going well. It’s a fun little song but it ends the friendship. Other scenes show the success of Frank’s and Charley’s first hit in 1965. Their nightclub act in 1960 with Frank’s wife Beth (much to Mary’s annoyance), which a Broadway producer sees. And on back to 1957, when they’re barely 20 and when their friendship and partnership begin in youthful idealism. Along the way we see Frank’s messy relationships. Though being limited to the stage seems a bit confining, overall it works well. All of the major actors do a fine job – Groff and Radcliffe won Tony awards and Mendez was nominated. Groff and Mendez sing quite well and Radcliffe sings well enough. I enjoyed it and recommend it, especially to fans of theater. NPR airs a conversation from StoryCorps every Friday morning. This past week the conversation came from siblings Terri Van Keuren, Rick Shoup, and Pam Farrel discussing the famous thing their father Col. Harry Shoup is known for. Back in 1955, during the Cold War, the Colonel worked at the Continental Air Defense Command, now known as NORAD, and had on his desk the secret red hotline phone. An advertisement by Sears told children they could call a number and speak to Santa. But the number they listed was a misprint – it was the number for the secret hotline. At first Shoup thought it was a prank, but then realized he was talking to a child and had better play along. Soon he assigned a couple more airmen to handle the calls and pretend to be Santa. A few days later on Christmas Eve some airmen, as a joke, put Santa and his sleigh on their big airplane tracking map. Shoup called the local radio station with the “sighting.” And that’s how NORAD’s annual Santa Tracker got started. It was the thing Shoup was proudest of. One can still call (but not to the secret line) or go to a website and get an update on where Santa is. In Sunday’s pundit roundup for Daily Kos Chitown Kev quoted Adam Downer of The Daily Beast. My summary: Reps. Ro Khanna (D) and Thomas Massie (R) were the ones who worked the Epstein Transparency Act through the House. All of the Epstein materials were supposed to be released by Saturday – some were and many more were not. So Khanna and Massie are considering drafting a charge of inherent contempt and maybe even articles of impeachment against AG Pam Bondi. They say Bondi might be surprised at how many Republicans vote for either. Mitch Jackson, writing for his Uncensored Objection. Cross-examining political BS Substack, gave some explanation.

What do we do when the officials in charge of justice break the law? Do we throw up our hands and accept it? No. This is where we draw the line. I am a trial lawyer with more than three decades of litigation experience, and I have spent my career watching what happens when powerful people think rules do not apply to them. I have seen how accountability starts, how pressure builds, and how the legal system responds when the public refuses to move on. I know how to read a record, spot a stall, and map the next moves when someone tries to run out the clock. [...] Inherent Contempt: This is the most dramatic power Congress has, and it may be exactly what is needed. Inherent contempt means Congress has the ability to enforce its own orders by itself. Think of it as Congress acting as judge, jury, and enforcer when someone defies a lawful order (like a subpoena or, arguably, a statutory mandate). This power has been upheld by the Supreme Court and was used several times in the distant past. Here is how it works: Congress holds a vote to declare an official in contempt (separate from any court proceedings). After that vote, Congress’s Sergeant at Arms can literally go out and arrest the person. Yes, it sounds shocking. Under the Constitution, Congress has this authority. They could detain an official at the Capitol or another location until that official agrees to comply.

Drew DeSilver of Pew Research Center reported on how other democratic countries do redistricting, which affects gerrymandering. Some, like the US, have single-member districts where the candidate with the most votes wins all.

As a result, how single-member districts are drawn – whether they have reasonably equal populations, whether they include or exclude certain areas or discrete population groups, and so on – can dramatically affect election outcomes. Single-member districts also are especially vulnerable to gerrymandering, where boundaries are intentionally manipulated to favor one party or interest group over another. Multimember districts, by contrast, are typical of electoral systems that use proportional representation. In fact, of the 52 democracies that rely mainly on multimember districts, 42 elect all their lawmakers through some sort of proportional representation system.

Deep in the comments Karmadog posted a meme showing the nasty guy as a football coach saying, “Coach Biden lost this game!” The caption adds, “If you had just been hired as the new coach for a football team, and you blamed every loss on the previous coach, how long do you think you would last?” A meme posted by exlrrp shows how Obama decorated the Oval Office compared to how the nasty guy decorated it with gold. The captions say, “Obama: Here to serve the people. Trump: Here to serve the rich – including himself. Not complicated. Staring us right in the face.” Another meme posted by exlrrp:

I’m voting for the first Democratic presidential candidate who: 1. Promises to bulldoze Trump’s golden ballroom. 2. Vows to put Ghislaine Maxwell in a real prison. 3. Guarantees a criminal investigation into every member of the Trump cabinet.

A meme by Kerry Kennedy commenting on the nasty guy’s name on the side of the Kennedy Center.

Three years and one month from today, I’m going to grab a pickax and pull those letters off that building, but I’m going to need help holding the ladder. Are you in? Applying for my carpenter’s card today, so it’ll be a union job.

A cartoon by Dave Blazek shows Harry the halogen-nosed reindeer, blinding the elves. A cartoon posted by paulpro and I think created by Toruand Midon shows Santa at the window with two girls inside looking a bit afraid. The caption:

He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He’s already cut the phone lines. There’s really is no escape. Merry Christmas.

In the comments of Monday’s roundup paulpro posted a cartoon by Barry Deutsch titled “A concise history of black-white relations in the USA.” It shows a white guy reaching a high ledge on the back of a black guy in chains. As the white guy is able to get on the ledge the black guy has had enough and casts the chains off. The dialog after that:

White guy: I’m real sorry about being racist before. I know better now. Black guy: Swell give me a hand up, willya? White Guy: Of course not! That would be reverse racism. Look, if I got up here by myself, why can’t you?

Another cartoon posted by paulpro is by Monsell. Similar to A Christmas Carol the nasty guy is haunted by Abraham Lincoln. Kyle Bravo posted a cartoon showing the barn where Joseph and Mary are allowed to stay, yet Joseph is at the back door of the inn saying, “I’d like to speak to your manger manager.” In Tuesday’s roundup Kev quoted Howard French of Foreign Policy magazine discussing national security.

Make no mistake: The White House’s new strategy document is a blueprint to engineer the demise of the West—or at least, what the world has understood by that term since World War II, starting with a closely knit set of shared interests between Europe and the United States. The Trump scenario for this involves dark fantasies about the creeping takeover of nominally white societies by peoples of color—the Black, brown, and yellow hordes that haunted a bygone era’s genre of fevered white panic writing.

The implication is that Europe is being overrun by nonwhite people and because of that the nasty guy can no longer be an ally of Europe. Back to French:

Another way of saying this is that remaining committed to whiteness is a condition, in Trump’s eyes, of continuing to be worthy of that long ubiquitous and unquestioned sobriquet, “the West.” As disturbing as the U.S. government’s obsession with whiteness is, it would be wrong to imagine that the Trump administration’s policy is even remotely coherent. Trump’s warning that Europe risks losing its identity, principally due to the in-migration of nonwhite peoples, contains a logical flaw so glaring that it suggests that what is at stake isn’t entirely about race but, at bottom, something else that is arguably even more threatening.

Alas, that’s where the quote ends. In the comments a cartoon by Toonerman commenting on the many redactions in the Epstein files.

What the Hell! I don’t care whose names are under all the black in on the Epstein Files. I don’t care if it’s Democrats or a celebrity I like or even one of my sons. No one should be above the law. Not for POTUS’s, not current POTUS’s, Prince’s or Movie Moguls or Billionaires... Stop protecting pedophiles Republicons!

Mikemomo posted a cartoon by Bill Bramhall. Because of rising heating costs a family is delighted all the stockings are filled with coal. Kyle Bravo posted a cartoon by Harriet Burbeck showing an astronaut outside the Space Station, saying, “The problem with space is that no one here is impressed that I am an astronaut.” In Wednesday’s roundup Greg Dworkin quoted David Schuster of Blue Amp. He first lists the sycophants who make up the Kennedy Center board who approved adding his name to the building, then he wrote:

This is a lunatic Trump group that has long mistaken obedience for patriotism and vanity for legacy. Their logic is clear: if something exists, is admired, and does not already bear Trump’s name, then clearly an injustice has occurred. Correct it at once.

Liberal Jane posted a cartoon of two adults, one male (the shirt says “#1 Dad!”) and the other of indeterminate gender. That one is holding a child. Together they say, “Parenting has no gender.” Michael Potter posted a cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz showing two old men on a bench:

First: What are you getting for Christmas? Second: Older. First: Me too. I get the same thing every year. Second: I can tell. I hate the no-returns policy.

In the comments of today’s roundup Potter posted another cartoon by Alcaraz. It shows Mary and Jesus as Joseph accosts an approaching ICE agent, “Do you have a signed warrant??!!” The agent replies, “Come on. Let me in. I bring exotic spices like pepper spray and treasures like zip ties.” Alt National Park Service posted a cartoon by Stines. It shows Santa and Mrs. Clause at a very small North Pole ice floe and just across the water is a power plant belching smoke. Santa says, “Maybe I should’ve been giving all the naughty kids solar panels instead of coal.” Chris Williams posted a cartoon showing Mary and Joseph stopped by protesters with signs “No hotels for migrants. Stop the donkeys. We’re full.” Mary says, “What do they expect us to do? ... Sleep in a barn or something?”