"You can't make this stuff up" department

When the Democrats lose in November, they will not say they were beaten. They will roll out their hoary, perennial excuse: "We did not get our message out well enough."

Tthey are literally unable to imagine that they got beat because they got their message out very well, indeed.

Democrat Rep: We cannot trust voters

Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) has dismissed concerns the American public should have a say over the impeachment of President Trump, admitting she is “worried in general about 2020” and angrily declaring “if we wait for an election to settle this, then we will have waited too long." ...

Rep. Escobar is not the first Democratic member of Congress to express the view that American voters must not be allowed to re-elected President Trump in 2020.

In fact, Escobar seems to be taking her lead from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who angrily dismissed concerns during the impeachment inquiry that the American public should have a say over the impeachment of President Trump, angrily declaring “the voters are NOT going to decide.”

The rest at, "Democrat Rep: American Voters Must NOT Be Allowed To Decide If Trump Should Be POTUS."

Related: "The Danger of Making Ruthlessness Seem Reasonable"

These people are dangerous.

So when I hear Nancy Pelosi say, “Civilization as we know it today is at stake in the next election, and certainly, our planet,” I don’t laugh. When I hear Greta Thunberg say, “For way too long, the politicians and the people in power have gotten away with not doing anything to fight the climate crisis, but we will make sure that they will not get away with it any longer,” I don’t just roll my eyes. When I hear AOC say, “There’s no debate as to whether we should continue producing fossil fuels. There’s no debate,” I don’t wonder what she’s been smoking.

These people are dangerous. They make ruthlessness seem reasonable.

Why the electoral college? This.

Censure instead of impeachment?

Politico reports, "Small group of Democrats floats censure instead of impeachment."

A small group of vulnerable House Democrats is floating the longshot idea of censuring President Donald Trump instead of impeaching him, according to multiple lawmakers familiar with the conversations.

Those Democrats, all representing districts that Trump won in 2016, huddled on Monday afternoon in an 11th-hour bid to weigh additional — though unlikely — options to punish the president for his role in the Ukraine scandal as the House speeds toward an impeachment vote next week.

The group of about 10 Trump-district lawmakers included Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), Anthony Brindisi (D-N.Y.), and Ben McAdams (D-Utah.).

The Constitution specifically grants authority to the House and the Senate to impeach and remove from office a president. There is no mention of "censure" anywhere in the Constitution. The Senate and the House have used censure since the 1800s to call to account members of their own bodies, such power being granted by Article 1, Section 5, Clause 2, which says that “each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly behavior, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.”

Although "censure" is not there, the clause cannot be reasonably said to exclude it. However, it unambiguously limits each chamber's punitive authority and power to its own members, except for impeachment of a president or other member of the executive or legislative branches, authorized by Article 1, Sections 2 and 3 of the Constitution.

The Constitution Center reports of the first attempt to censure a president, done by the Senate in 1832 against President Andrew Jackson.

These facts weren’t lost on President Andrew Jackson in 1834 when he faced the first-ever censure motion against a sitting President. Jackson was locked in a fierce battle against Henry Clay and the Whigs over the Second Bank of the United States.

In 1832, Jackson vetoed a congressional move to re-charter the bank; the Whig-controlled Senate and Clay asked Jackson to supply notes from his Cabinet meeting about the veto decision and Jackson refused to supply the documents. Clay then led the censure motion, which passed by a 26-20 vote.

“Resolved, That the President, in the late Executive proceedings in relation to the public revenue, has assumed upon himself authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in derogation of both,” the motion read.

Jackson’s response was quite longer.

“I thus find myself charged on the records of the Senate, and in a form hitherto unknown in our history, with the high crime of violating the laws and Constitution of my country,” he wrote in a letter to the Senate.

“The resolution of the Senate is wholly unauthorized by the Constitution, and in derogation of its entire spirit. It assumes that a single branch of the legislative department may for the purposes of a public censure, and without any view to legislation or impeachment, take up, consider, and decide upon the official acts of the Executive. But in no part of the Constitution is the President subjected to any such responsibility, and in no part of that instrument is any such power conferred on either branch of the Legislature,” Jackson added.

If the House does try to censure President Trump, I hope he tells them to stuff it, that they can impeach him or just live with it. For the Constitution gives them no other power.

Robert Mueller hangs it up

Special Counsel Robert Mueller released the report of his two-year investigation this afternoon. According to a "senior DOJ official," there are no additional indictments recommended by the report. Both Senators McConnell and Schumer have called for the complete report to be released to the public. Developing story, obviously.

Update:

Read the whole thing of each:
‘Shame’: Victor Davis Hanson delivers scathing indictment of failed ‘coup’
The American Media Destroyed Themselves over the Mueller Investigation
Democrat Freak-Out: Reaction To Mueller Report Brings Tears And Jeers
Progressive Strategy for 2020: Change the Rules of Engagement
And a humor break; THE WEEK IN PICTURES: MUELLER TIME AT LAST!

Two thousand words of politics photos

The NFL lies down on its deathbed and forbids itself rise

It has been going around the internet that pp. A62-A63 of the NFL's rule book states this:

The problem is that the "league rulebook" (note the imprecision of the term) has zero to say about the anthem - if you are referring to the rule book governing game play. That rule book, available online, never mentions the national anthem and does not have any such pages as A62 or A63.

However, there is another NFL book called the Game Operations Manual, not available to the public, that does have those pages. And according to none other than The Washington Post (!), there is indeed such a rule:

Under the league rule, the failure to be on the field for the anthem may result in discipline such as a fine, suspension or loss of a draft pick. But a league official said the key phrase is “may” result, adding he won’t speculate on whether the Steelers would be disciplined.

The specific rule pertaining to the national anthem is found on pages A62-63 of the league’s game operations manual, according to a league source. 

The WaPo is firewalled (it's owned by Bezos after all), but Time magazine confirms it. At this point, though, I would say that the rule of the Game Operations Manual no longer matters.

Three teams on Sunday stayed inside their locker rooms rather than take the field sidelines for the anthem, the Steelers in Chicago, the Seahawks and Titans both playing in Nashville. Attendance at the Titan's home game yesterday was 69,127, only 16 short of every seat. I'll try to remember to post the next home game's attendance here, too. (I have abandoned the NFL so I do not even know when their next home game is.)

In Chicago, a lone Steeler, former US Army officer and Ranger Alejandro Villanueva, left the locker room and saluted the flag while the anthem was played. His reward was two-fold:

First, he was excoriated by that empty suit of freedom respectfulness, his own head coach, Mike Tomlin.

But the second reward is, well, a reward: Sales Of Alejandro Villanueva Jerseys Skyrocket After Being Only Steeler To Stand For National Anthem

I posted 23 days ago that The NFL continues its slow suicide, with both attendance and TV viewership having declined for a few years in  row now. With this weekend's demonstrations, the NFL has made full transition from an athletic organization to a political one. So what will attendance and viewership do now? Well, Sunday night's game  - after the full afternoon of televised abstentions and kneeling - was down eight percent from just last week and was the worst this year.

LA Times reporter Lindsey Thiry tweeted this shot of last Thursday night's game stadium at kickoff time - this was before the Trump-storm and fury:

Also, remember that the stock market is a futures market: "NFL Broadcasting Stocks Slump As Protests Rise And TV Ratings Fall."

During the past month the overall stock market is up more than 2% but shares of companies that broadcast NFL games--Comcast, Walt Disney, Fox, CBS--are all down between 1% to 8%. ...

Towards the end of last season some felt the NFL's ratings dip would be temporary and therefore would not ultimately hurt the networks by forcing them to reimburse advertisers. Instead, the opposite has happened.

Ratings for the the NFL have been worse this season and attendance for some games has also been disappointing. The networks will pay over $5 billion this season to televise the NFL and were already facing unflattering margins on advertising profits. An article in The Hollywood Reporter reckons the drop in NFL ratings could trim the broadcaster's earnings by $200 million. Disney's ESPN, meanwhile, also continues to get hammered by cord-cutting.

I commented elsewhere that one thing the protesting players have done is lead viewers to look at the game and the league with new eyes and a new perspective. Even before this season, millions of them already concluded that they don't miss watching the games after all. Now with political conventions by disgruntled multi-millionaires being held every Sunday when there used to be football games, how many more millions will decide to use that time for other things?

It might be worth pondering some demographics here. One is that Millennials are not watching the games in anywhere near the same numbers as their parents.

Some observers believe that American football is dying a slow and painful death. ...

The threat to American football is no illusion. In a recent study, four out of five millennials stated that they were less trusting of the NFL than basketball, baseball, hockey or NASCAR. Out of those surveyed in the study, 61% identified the NFL as a “sleazy” Organisation, while 54% saw it as being anti-gay.

In another study, teenage interest in the NFL was found to have fallen from 26% to 19% over the last two decades.

And that was written in February of last year. Another demographic supports the case that the NFL laid down on its death bed long before the kneelers started kneeling.

“Just four years ago, we had so many boys signing up for football, we had five teams at this fourth-grade level,” says John Herrera, a dad, software engineer and football coach of the Wheaton Rams in the Bill George Youth Football League in the western suburbs of Chicago.

“And from five teams of fourth-graders four years ago, what do we have now? One team. Just one.”

Out on the field, the Wheaton Rams and the Lyons Tigers were going at it, having fun. Parents and grandparents watching, sipping lattes, a few dads nervously pacing the sidelines as dads always do, willing prowess on their sons.

But what do the numbers from the hometown of the “Wheaton Ice Man,” the great Red Grange, tell us about football in America?

“If dropping from five teams of fourth-graders to one doesn’t tell you what’s happening, nothing will,” Herrera said. “Football is such a great game, it teaches great lessons to young men. But I’ve got a sense of dread for this game of football that I love.”

But take heart! There is hope that the NFL season may end well after all! Doomsday Rescheduled: ‘Researcher’ Moves End Of The World To October.

And not a moment too soon.

Update:

I do not listen to Rush Limbaugh but I think he nailed it here:

I did not watch the National Football League yesterday, and it was the first time in 45 years that I made an active decision not to watch, including my team, the Pittsburgh Steelers. It was not a decision made in anger. It was genuine sadness. I realized that I can no longer look at this game and watch this game and study this game and pretend, you know, fantasize, everything a fan does. This whole thing has removed for me the ingredients that are in the recipe that make up a fan.

The mystique is gone. That actually started vanishing a while ago. The larger-than-life aspect of it is gone. The belief, the wish, the desire that the people in the game were the best and brightest and special, and that’s why they were there, that’s gone.

Also Law Prof. William A. Jacobson: Dear NFL: I’m not “boycotting” you. I just don’t care anymore, about you.

I’m officially over the Cowboys, the Patriots and the NFL. You were once one of the loves of my life. But now we’re breaking up, and it’s you, not me.

I’m not “boycotting” you. I just don’t care anymore.

You tried to make me care, but now I don’t care at all, about you.

Pretty much, yeah.

Update: Thanks to Donald M. who emailed me to point out that the Steelers played at Chicago's Soldier Field, not Pittsburgh (correction made above). He added, "So effectively, on Gold Star Mother Sunday - a day set aside to honor the families of soldiers who died in battle - at Soldier Field - named such to honor soldiers who died in the field - the Steelers refused to honor the flag and the National Anthem."

Update: My followup is here: "The NFL and the Wizard of Oz humbug"

Update: Well, I have to admit that this never occurred to me:

Peak professional football was probably a dozen years ago. It was around then that white mothers, especially divorced middle-class mothers, started turning against youth football. They did not want their little baby being run over by black kids. That’s why the concussion hysteria gained traction. It’s a ready made excuse for pulling the white kids out of football, that lets white women pretend it is not racism driving their decision. After all, they loved Will Smith in the concussion movie!

It’s why the NFL’s decision to let their blacks kneel during the anthem is going to be a disaster for them. The owners signed off on it thinking it added drama and would therefore draw in girls, because girls and girly-men like drama. Instead, those kneeling black players are a stark reminder to white women that the sport of football is for violent black men, not nice suburban white boys. Youth participation in football is collapsing and this will only serve to accelerate it. The NFL has now made football anti-white and un-American.

Hmm.

CNN will apologize any century now

The American media have lost their minds

The American media have lost their minds. Dozens of media outlets are reporting that TRUMP LOOKED AT THE ECLIPSE WITHOUT GLASSES! The horror! The Horror! Time, Newsweek, People, NY Post, the list is endless. Just Google trump looks at eclipse without glasses and see the results.

Well, here is the video. Further deponent sayeth not. Nor needs to.



Funny thing:

They need to read this: "How To Know You’re In a Mass Hysteria Bubble."

Trump learns he has no friends

Ten days after promoting Anthony "Mooch" Scaramucci to White House communications director, President Trump has told him, "You're fired!" 

Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci last just 10 days.

The dismissal comes only days after Mooch launched an extremely profane tirade against the rest of the White House staff and after Mooch set about torpedoing the hapless Reince Priebus, who was then White House chief of staff. Priebus was fired last mid-week.

Could the last few days have been a time when Trump learned the most valuable lesson any new president can learn? It is simply this: A president must have no friends.

Every president entering the first term should study what President Dwight Eisenhower told President-Elect John F. Kennedy in 1960. Eisenhower spent many hours with him. One of the key lessons was this: "All the decisions you will make," said Eisenhower, "will be hard decisions."

Dwight went on to explain that the easy things will be tended to by cabinet secretaries and others of the administration with executive authority. But the tough ones will always be kicked to higher levels to be decided. At every level, the decisions become more and more difficult until, at last, the presidential inbox is filled with nothing but the most difficult items.

The most difficult items require the most hard-minded man (or woman, when that day comes). Former sentimental attachments are worthless and meaningless. Former personal bonds are valueless. There is the weight of the country bearing down upon the president's shoulders and no one else's in the administration. No one, including decades-long friends, associates, campaign loyalists, who is not helping to bear that weight, can be protected or retained just because s/he was once close or valuable.

I am hoping that President Trump has learned that lesson. I also have to think that this topic - and Anthony Scaramucci personally - was on the agenda when former DHS Secretary John Kelly, a retired Marine four-star general, discussed Kelly taking the chief of staff slot, which he did today.

John Kelly not long after being sword in as President Trump's second chief of staff.

Maybe retired Marines and retired Army officers think alike, but I commented elsewhere at the time that the first thing Kelly needed to do is take Scaramucci to the woodshed, hard. And it looks like he did:

Mr. Scaramucci had boasted about reporting directly to the president, not the chief of staff. But the decision to remove him came at Mr. Kelly’s request, the people said.

The notice to the staff went out shortly after Kelly took over.

He told aides gathered in early-morning staff meetings that he intended to impose a new sense of order and operational discipline that had been absent under his predecessor.

The real question, though, is whether Trump will allow Kelly to exercise oversight and have directive authority over persons named Ivanka, Jared or Junior. If not, well, he can probably start to prepare three envelopes.

Dear President Trump: The West has already surrendered

In Poland Thursday, President Trump gave a speech that was truly historic. It was a speech that was near-Churchillian in focus and tone and world view. And it basically renounced successive American administrations of either party going back to at least Reagan's.

President Donald Trump waves to the crowd in
Krasiński Square, Warsaw, Thursday.

Speaking to a huge crowd in Krasiński Square, Warsaw, the president spoke of Poland's many decades of war against tyranny and oppression, but mainly he spoke thematically about what made Western civilization strong to begin with and why it must recover and reinforce its roots to prevail against Islamist imperialism, but also to suppress the waxing bureaucratic statism that grips every European country today. An excerpt:

Finally, on both sides of the Atlantic, our citizens are confronted by yet another danger -- one firmly within our control.  This danger is invisible to some but familiar to the Poles:  the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people.  The West became great not because of paperwork and regulations but because people were allowed to chase their dreams and pursue their destinies.

We have to remember that our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will.  Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have.  The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.  Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?  Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders?  Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive. [Italics added]

Almost at the end, the president said,

 I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken.  Our values will prevail.  Our people will thrive.  And our civilization will triumph.  

Ah, how I want to like this speech. And at a very basic level, I do. A lot. But President Trump is sadly calling for ramparts to be manned that were abandoned decades ago and for which there are no human resources left to rebuild them. "Strong families" have disappeared from most of Europe, Mr. President, because families themselves are simply disappearing.

Put simply: Europe long ago broke itself. Its values will not prevail (they are barely hanging on now, and being weakened daily - by design and on purpose. See: Merkel, Angela).

And European civilization will not triumph. It is in full retreat now. Whether Western civilization can survive is still open to question, but if it does it will not be to Europe's credit and will almost certainly not survive there at all. Europe's future is distinctly non-European as history has known it and will be definitely non-Western.

Let's start with Poland. David Goldman posted on FB today,

There won't be a Poland in 100 years. At a total fertility rate of 1.29, Poland will have one retiree per working-age citizen by 2075. Poland in fact has one of the world's very lowest fertility rates, which means (in Mary Eberstadt's way of looking at the problem) that it is losing its religion. President Trump's speech was magnificent, but it brings to mind Schiller's dictum that history brought forth a great moment, but the moment encountered a mediocre people. Trump is doing the right thing, but we should remember that Europe is a case not for cure but for palliative care.

I have written a lot of demographic trends in the world, concentrating on Europe and the US. Nine years ago in, "What has NATO done for us?" In 2008, Russia was making military incursions into Georgia, on which Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin decided that NATO should bring Georgia into membership. I assessed not only why NATO is a strategic nullity but asked a pointed question concerning Europe's demographic death spiral:

There is another point that Mark Steyn touched on when discussing Sarah Palin's bright idea to bring Georgia into NATO. I can't find a link now, but Steyn pointed out is that Georgia's birth rate has tanked more than practically any other country in the world. In fact, by 2050 there will be only 100,000 Georgian women of childbearing age, if current trends continue. So, he said, if Georgians won't have children to grow up to defend Georgia, why should Americans have children to grow up to defend Georgia? I can't think of any good reason.

And the same question can be asked of every other European NATO member, except perhaps Britain and France. The birth rates of Germany, Spain, Italy and every other NATO country except Turkey are below the stable replacement rate of 2.1 average births per woman, most far below. Italy’s rate is 1.23 births per woman , for example, meaning that Italy’s population could shrink by one-third by mid-century. (Turkey’s birth rate is about twice as high as Italy's.)

Again the question for NATO’s countries: if you will not have enough children to preserve your country, why should American women bear children to make up your deficit?

Demographers agree that a minimum rate of 2.1 live births per woman is required to maintain a level population from one generation to the next. And what is the demographic trend across Europe?

When a culture decides not even to reproduce itself, then it had already surrendered. It had decided to go quietly into the night and fade away. That is what Europe is doing now. Despite the president's soaring rhetoric, there will be no recovery from this decision. There is far from enough time left to do so. Tens and tens of millions of women in Europe are not going to decide suddenly to start having and average of more than 2.1 children each. The Europeans economies cannot support such a change anyway. In fact, they cannot support their present, aging populations now, which is why so many Euro nations decided long ago to reply on "The Mohammed Retirement Plan" that will nail the continent's coffin shut.

Europe is not just millions of square miles of terrain. Our affiliation with Europe, and the reason our military shed so much blood on Europe's soil, was not to defend dirt. It was to defend and preserve a cultural heritage the was the wellspring of human flourishing of the modern era. That the Europeans themselves sometimes seemed hellbent on killing one another in carload lots did not negate the fundamental virtues of the Western heritage of faith and reason.

But those are the very virtues that most of Europe has abandoned. That is why I really want to like President Trump's Warsaw speech but cannot. It's at least 50 years behind the times and for all its rhetorical inspiration, there is almost no one left in Europe to hear it with understanding of what it really would have to mean, and I doubt that Trump himself knows, either.

Update: "... of the six founding members of what evolved into the European Union, five are now led by childless prime ministers or presidents." See more at Powerline.

Wishing for a coup moves mainstream

We are entering truly dangerous territory when this becomes a mainstream hope of the American Left:

When the Leftist, minor comedienne Sarah Silverman tweeted that she hoped the US military would mount a coup against President Trump, almost everyone else on the Left chuckled and said, "That Sarah! What a card!" What they didn't do is denounce the idea of a coup to take over the government of the United States.

Maybe they didn't because they knew that the hope for a coup was actually mainstream thinking on the Left and that Sarah merely said it aloud.

And hoping for a coup can now be said to be definitely mainstream on the Left. I give you a business journal of the American foreign affairs establishment, Foreign Policy. On Jan. 30 FP published, "3 Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020,"  by Rosa Brooks, "law professor at Georgetown University [who] served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy from 2009 to 2011."

Note the phrasing: "Get rid" of Trump, not oppose, foil, minimize.

To the point: Brooks proposes a military coup:

The fourth possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.

What would be the result of a coup? Civil War inside the United States, that's what. (Well, heck, we are already in an actual, not metaphorical, civil war now, so what's one more to the Left?) It would start inside the US military. Brooks seems to think that just because a handful of four-stars decide to make the Oval Office their own that the rest of the military's officer corps would just click their heels and respond, "Jawohl!"

On the contrary, troops hostile to the coup plotters would be armed and on the streets within an hour. Unless the coup generals had done very extensive planning and organizing for the coup and had convinced in advance enormous numbers of combat forces to support them, there is no hope, no chance of success. There are thousands of active, reserve and especially National Guard officers who would oppose such a coup by lethal force. Not to mention retired officers like myself who would do so, also. And if they did do such planning and organizing, they would be found out, because officers who would have to be included would refuse and make it public.

The cost to America in lives, treasure and political destruction of the Constitution would be deep, enduring, and probably permanent in the latter.

The Trump derangement of the American Left is now complete. Dangerously so.

This, by the way, is Rosa Brooks' portrait on her FP page. She apparently wants the Republic to fall. Minimally, she is comfortable with the idea. And she is not the only one.

Her email address is rosa.brooks@law.georgetown.edu.

Update: John Hinderaker at Powerline piles on: I'm so old I remember when liberals opposed military coups.

Sheer ineptitude? Yep.

David French nails it when discussing President Trump's executive order on entry visas and refugees. French makes five main points but saves the most penetrating for last:

Myth Five: It’s the ideas that matter — execution can always be fixed. The incompetence of the executive order’s rollout truly staggers the imagination. Indeed, it was so bad that one wonders if Steve Bannon was simply being malicious — if his alleged decision to shut the door on green-card holders was an effort to signal exactly who was large and in charge. Wrap your mind around this truth, Republicans: Terrible execution can completely discredit even the best of ideas.

During the campaign, Trump vowed that he’d surround himself with the best people. During the rollout of an executive order that he knew would likely be the most controversial act yet taken by his new administration, solid reporting from multiple sources indicates that he shut out his best people — men like Jim Mattis and John Kelly — in favor of his worst.

Do you want to discredit solid immigration reform for another decade? Put malicious, incompetent people in charge of its implementation. If you’re an American who wants Trump to govern wisely, it’s vital that you not circle the wagons reflexively around Trump and his team, in this case or any other. It is already clear that there are members of his inner circle who have to get better or get gone.

The first four are pretty good also:

Myth One: The executive order will “Make America Safe Again.” 

Myth Two: The executive order will make America more dangerous.

Myth Three: The goal of American foreign policy is to “help people.” 

Myth Four: Terrorism is our only concern when evaluating prospective immigrants from the Middle East.

Read the whole thing

Trump: Mine's the biggest!

White House spokesman Sean Spicer's first in-office media appearance was to accuse them of lying about how many people attended President Trump's inauguration. Yesterday, Spicer claimed the news media deliberately under-reported crowd size and insisted that the 2017 inauguration had "the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe."

One of the photos below is of the crowd just before Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration and the other just before Donald Trump's. Which is which?

It's not even close. The British newspaper The Guardian, which is very decidedly left of center but (being Brit) presumably has no dog in the hunt on crowd size, has an excellent analysis.

Personally, I don't care whether Trump drew one hundred or one million. What really puzzles me is why Trump and Spicer decided to use this matter to go bananas and insist so stoutly, "Trump's is bigger! Trump's is bigger!" What do you think, Dr. Freud?

Update: OTOH, "Trump inauguration ratings second biggest in 36 years," according to Nielsen, but "Nielsen ratings do not account for online viewing, which has grown sharply in recent years and is far more commonplace than even four years ago. CNN, for example, clocked 16.9 million streams on its website, tying with Election Day for the site’s top event."

Trump may yank Mattis nomination

Gen. James Mattis showing his "Don't cross me on this" face.

NEW YORK, N.Y., JAN 9 -- President-elect Donald Trump may cancel his nomination of retired US Marine General James Mattis to be secretary of defense, according to knowledgeable sources inside the Trump transition team.

"The president-elect still  has the highest respect and admiration for General Mattis," said a source in the transition team, speaking anonymously. "But certain conditions that the general has just announced out of nowhere seem unreasonable. I use 'condition' loosely, they are more demands."

Asked what those conditions are, the source responses, "Well, the general said that President-elect Trump must read a list of books before Mattis meets with him the first time once he is confirmed."

We contacted Gen. Mattis's office for clarification, where this demand was confirmed. Apparently, Gen. Mattis has sent Mr. Trump a list of 6,000 books that Mattis said was "the minimum number needed to be even barely conversant with national-security and military matters."

Among the titles included are

“No True Glory” by Bing West, “Battle Ready” by Tom Clancy, Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” ten of the most difficult books to read of all time, and The Bible.

The political transition staff, however, was assigned to complete only four coloring books.




Disclosure: I ripped off a piece on Duffelblog for this. 

How it will be done henceforth

Pinched from American Digest.