Robert Graboyes is a reliable interesting read. His current substack article rejiggers his presidential rankings, but this is what I really found amusing:
The week before winning a second term, Donald Trump held a massive rally at Madison Square Garden. In his speech, broadcast across the nation, he defiantly railed against the nefarious forces opposing him:
“We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
Thousands of zealous attendees responded with deafening cheers and jeers to this pampered rich kid-turned-raging populist. With his narcissism in high gear, accentuated by his thick New York accent, Trump offered endless praise of his own first term, accused his adversaries of harming working-class families and economic recovery, and promised that he had “just begun to fight.” He wanted people to look back on his first term as a time when “the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match” and his second term as a time when those same forces “met their master.” The ominous tones of the speech alarmed his opponents and worried some of his own supporters—particularly those in the business community. Trump had an Ivy League degree with a focus on economics but, many grumbled, he had been an indifferent and undistinguished student—and those shortcomings still showed.
OOPS! … Every word above is accurate—except that the president involved was Franklin Roosevelt, not Donald Trump, and the Madison Square Garden event October 31, 1936, not October 28, 2024. Of course, FDR’s New York accent was that of Manhattan patricians, whereas Trump’s is a plebeian Outer Borough cadence.
Graboyes recommends Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man for a warts-and-all-but-mostly-warts view of FDR. I would toss in The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights for an additional angle.
And another excerpt. First, noting the NYT's ranking of Biden as the 14th-best president of all:
Justin Vaughn and Brandon Rottinghaus, the survey’s authors wrote:
“Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall.”
As goes a popular meme, “It's a bold strategy, Cotton! Let's see if it pays off for ‘em.” In hindsight, Biden’s signature accomplishment was turbocharging Trump, extending his grip by four years, and retroactively defining Biden’s presidency as an impotent interregnum with an erasable policy footprint.
I guess the NYT will have to adjust its rankings too.
Also of note:
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I can count the number of times I've watched "Morning Joe" on the fingers of one hand. Even if all the fingers on that hand had been amputated. But nevertheless, Eric Wemple of the WaPo lists: Five reasons Democrats should turn off ‘Morning Joe’.
And (spoiler alert), they all are: "You’re better off reading a newspaper."
Yes, that's more than a little self-serving for a newspaper columnist. But he almost makes a good point down at item number three:
Special counsel Robert K. Hur in February released a report outlining his conclusions that charges were not warranted in the classified documents case involving President Joe Biden. Among other claims, Hur found that Biden was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Scarborough exploded. “So bizarre,” railed the host on “Morning Joe.” “So many people immediately heard these random conclusions, irrelevant conclusions, politically charged, Trump-like ramblings. Why in the world would he put that in a report? His neurological assessment of Joe Biden and secondly why Merrick Garland would release garbage like that in the Justice Department.”
Stalwart behavior of that sort was no surprise, considering that Biden has been a devotee of the program and Scarborough has served as a sounding board for the president in private calls. That’s not to suggest that a cable-news host would allow proximity to power to cloud his news judgment in any way on any occasion.
Missing is any indication that you would have been "better off reading a newspaper". Yeah, maybe if that newspaper was the Wall Street Journal. Still it took them months after the Hur report was publicized to publish their article Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.
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(paid link) Speaking of bad presidents… George Will reviews a recent book: At last, Woodrow Wilson’s reputation gets the dismantling it richly deserves.
In “Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn,” [author Christopher] Cox, former congressman and former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, demonstrates that the 28th president was the nation’s nastiest. Without belaboring the point, Cox presents an Everest of evidence that Wilson’s progressivism smoothly melded with his authoritarianism and oceanic capacity for contempt.
His books featured ostentatious initials: “Woodrow Wilson Ph.D., LL.D.” But he wrote no doctoral dissertation for his 18-month PhD. He dropped out of law school; his doctorate of law was honorary. But because of those initials, and because he vaulted in three years from Princeton University’s presidency to New Jersey’s governorship to the U.S. presidency, and because he authored books, he is remembered as a scholar in politics. Actually, he was an intellectual manqué using academia as a springboard into politics.
Good news: Portsmouth Public Library has a copy of Cox's book on order, and I didn't even have to request it. (Amazon link, if you'd like, on your right.)
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Uncle Stupid tries to make my life worse. I am an enthusiastic user of Google's browser, search engine, mail service, maps, calendar, cloud storage,… and maybe some other stuff that doesn't come to mind right now. And it's all free to me.
So I'm dismayed at the recent legal attacks from the Department of Justice. At Reason, Jack Nicastro is also peeved: Forcing Google to Sell Chrome and Android Won't Make its Search Engine Less Popular.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is trying to force Google to sell Chrome after a federal judge ruled that the tech giant had monopolized the search market. Making Google divest itself from Chrome and Android won't significantly reduce Google's share of the market for general search services, it will just harm consumers.
Oh yeah: my phone's OS is Android. I probably pay something for that, indirectly.
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Why are we here? I recently read a book titled Why?, which drew grand conclusions from the so-called "fine turning" of physical constants that seemed to only give a vanishingly small probability for a universe that might support life.
But now comes a sorta-rebuttal to that argument, as described at Ars Technica: Our Universe is not fine-tuned for life, but it’s still kind of OK.
Physicists including Robert H. Dickle and Fred Hoyle have argued that we are living in a universe that is perfectly fine-tuned for life. Following the anthropic principle, they claimed that the only reason fundamental physical constants have the values we measure is because we wouldn’t exist if those values were any different. There would simply have been no one to measure them.
But now a team of British and Swiss astrophysicists have put that idea to test. “The short answer is no, we are not in the most likely of the universes,” said Daniele Sorini, an astrophysicist at Durham University. “And we are not in the most life-friendly universe, either.” Sorini led a study aimed at establishing how different amounts of the dark energy present in a universe would affect its ability to produce stars. Stars, he assumed, are a necessary condition for intelligent life to appear.
I'm kind of relieved. That book was … pretty out there.
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Tired of all the abolition? Sorry, I've got a lot more for you. Today's is from Reason's C.J. Ciaramella who says we should Abolish FOIA.
Over the past decade I've submitted hundreds of records requests to federal agencies through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). I've written extensively about the law, taught college students how to file requests, and evangelized the importance of having a statutory right to inspect public records.
I love FOIA. And I hate it. The federal FOIA law is broken and should be replaced with something better.
FOIA requests can take years to fulfill, unless you can afford to hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit. Agency FOIA officers routinely abuse exemptions to hide records. The process is difficult even for experienced reporters to use for newsgathering.
Don't worry: Ciaramella advocates for a more open and automatic process to replace FOIA.
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