Now, I am getting email from the Democratic Party soliciting donations based on Brett Kavanaugh.

Yesterday morning, I blogged about getting an email solicitation from the party, under the name of Cory Booker, that didn't mention Kavanaugh. I speculated about what that might mean. But yesterday evening, I got this email, from the party, with the subject line "Brett Kavanaugh" (signed by Seema Nanda, the CEO of the Democratic National Committee). Since I blogged about the Kavanaugh-free email. I've got to share the text of this:

After watching Republican senators' shameful performance in this week's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, I'm more certain than ever that it is a moral imperative for Democrats to take back control of Congress this November and the White House in 2020.

Shameful? What was shameful?

Chuck Grassley shouldn't be chairing a congressional committee. People like Lindsey Graham shouldn't be Senators.

People like Lindsey Graham? What does that even mean?! There's a heavy moralistic tone here, but it's so conclusory that I see they're only trying to reach me if I happen to have already taken umbrage and am up for conclusory statements and slurs.

People like Donald Trump shouldn't be appointing anyone to a lifetime term on our nation's highest court., Lindsey Graham and their Republican colleagues...

That's how it looks in the original. Something got cut. I don't know why the DNC is centralizing Graham (other than that he made the most fiery statement during the hearing).

... have shown that they have no interest in seriously investigating the sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh -- and Donald Trump has demonstrated time and again that he lacks the temperament and judgment to make an appointment to our highest court.

I thought Trump was making very sober choices, deferring to the experts on the conservative judiciary. I can't think of anything he's done wrong in picking Supreme Court nominees (other than that he's picking conservatives).

My promise to you as CEO of the Democratic National Committee is that I will do every last thing in my power in the next 39 days to fight back against these Republicans. Right now, I'd like to ask for your help.

"Every last thing"?

This Sunday is the final end-of-quarter deadline before Election Day, and every contribution made before Sunday at midnight will help Democrats take back Congress this November. If we do that, we can exert some real checks on this president and stop him from pushing through more extreme Supreme Court nominees.

And that's the problem, distinctly admitted. The Democrats oppose conservative Supreme Court nominees, and they need to win in the midterms to block them, and they're ready to do anything they can toward that goal.

ADDED:  I used the word "umbrage" and felt motivated to look it up in the OED. I'm using it correctly. It has meant "Displeasure, annoyance, offence, resentment" since the 1600s. One of the examples in the OED comes from George Washington:

1796 G. Washington Let. in Writings (1892) XIII. 263 Unless my pacific disposition was displeasing, nothing else could have given umbrage by the most rigid construction of the letter.

But the older meaning is shade or shadow, and it's still not obsolete to use it to mean, specifically, the shade created by a tree:

1849 C. Brontë Shirley II. ii. 34 She would spend a sunny afternoon in lying stirless on the turf, at the foot of some tree of friendly umbrage.

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The University of Wisconsin won a big patent case against Apple in 2015, but it has now lost in the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals.

"We hold that no reasonable juror could have found literal infringement in this case" said the unanimous court, reported in U.S. News.

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Extreme Heat = Less Greenery

There have been a number of maps which have attempted to visualize the extreme weather that much of the world has experienced in 2018. In Mapping One Hot Summer Maps Mania explored weather visualizations from the Berliner Morgenpost, the BBC and the Washington Post. Another stark effect of the extreme heat in Europe this summer is the sharp drop in the continent's green vegetation.


The EU NDVI

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Elena Kagan won't talk about the Kavanaugh controversy, but she will talk about how the Court functions with only 8 Justices.

Kagan was speaking at UCLA law school on Thursday night, and she spoke with experience about the problem of an 8-Justice Court's vulnerability to 4-4 splits, since that is the situation her Court confronted for the year that passed between the death of Antonin Scalia and the swearing-in of Neil Gorsuch.

"None of us wanted to look as if the court couldn’t do its job," she said. "I think we all felt as though the country needed to feel that the court was a functioning institution no matter what was happening outside."...

She said justices engaged in lengthier discussions at the time and even worked on finding agreement on smaller points when they couldn’t settle the larger issues at stake.... Even with a full court, Kagan said consensus-building, “especially perhaps in a time of acrimony and partisanship in the country at large, makes a lot of sense.”

“The court’s strength as an institution in American governance depends on people believe in it having a certain legitimacy ... that it is not simply an extension of politics,” she said.

I read that to mean that it's more important to sustain belief in a myth than to see the actual truth. The myth is that the Supreme Court is "not simply an extension of politics." I note that she phrases the myth at a more easily credible level than what some people would like us to believe — such as the Court is completely above all politics. That is, after all, the myth that prevails at confirmation hearings, where the nominees all say that they will do nothing but decide cases according to the law and no political leanings will come into play and distort their entirely legal reasoning. Kagan only says that the Court decides cases in a way that is "not simply an extension of politics."

Not "simply," but how about complexly? Not merely "an extension" of the politics, but isn't it, as it operates independently, doing something that a sophisticated person will understand to be political?

It's strange to be talking about the importance of useful beliefs over truth in the context of the controversy Kagan ostensibly seeks to avoid. What are the other institutions whose strength depends on our believing that they have a certain legitimacy?

The Senate. Should we believe in its legitimacy to keep it strong? That's not the Kagan idea. To transplant her idea to the Senate: The Senate itself should do what it can to inspire our belief it is performing its advise-and-consent role grounded in good procedure and principle. It is struggling to do that, and the struggle is much easier to see than the inner workings of the Supreme Court.

The patriarchy. Is it good for us to believe that it is legitimate? Just calling it — what is it?! — "the patriarchy" makes it sound illegitimate. I bet you — some of you — want to say it doesn't even exist. But if it does exist in America, it wants us to believe in it as something with a different name — perhaps meritocracy or individual choice. Believe in that, and you'll keep it strong.

The #MeToo movement. Its strength as an institution depends on people believing in it as having quite a lot of legitimacy. It's fragile. Overuse it and it will collapse. Won't it? If not, we should be afraid of its strength. But unlike the Supreme Court, it's not a small group of people who can consult and reach consensus about how far to extend its power and how to perform its power in public. There are millions of people who can tap the power of the movement. There's the relatively careful release of the Christine Blasey Ford allegations, and there's the follow on enthusiasm of Michael Avenatti and who knows who might suddenly speak up on social media?

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Ambiguity of the day (from GQ): "If your friend says she wants to cut off every dick in a five mile radius, let her!"

The article, by Marian Bull, is "How to Talk to the Women in Your Life Right Now," and by "right now," she means:



There's quite possibly a lot of good advice there. But what made me select this — out of everything — to blog was the absurd, grisly second meaning of "If your friend says she wants to cut off every dick in a five mile radius, let her!"

ADDED: I'm reminded of a poster I saw in Amsterdam back in 1993. I made a drawing — previously, blogged here — in my "Amsterdam Notebooks":

"PUBLIC CASTRATION IS A GOOD IDEA/VICTIMS OF RAPE DEMAND JUSTICE."

What called that to mind was my discussion with Meade as he was writing this comment:

"If your friend says she wants to cut off every dick in a five mile radius, let her!"

And then tell her: Only five miles? "No artificial limits as to time or [distance] should be imposed on this [mass amputation]."

And then run, old man. Run like hell.

I had suggested that Meade could avoid attracting language/anatomy pedants by using the word "amputation" instead of "castration."

I'm also reminded of the Ernest Hemingway story, "God Rest You Merry Gentlemen" (1925). Summary:

Two physicians sit in the Emergency Room of a Kansas City hospital on Christmas Day.... The doctors are telling the narrator of their most interesting encounter of this holiday season: a distraught adolescent, in a religious frenzy, had come in requesting castration for his "awful lust." The two docs managed to blunder the encounter so sufficiently that the boy left, only to return a few hours later bleeding dangerously from his penile self-amputation. The self-centered conversation returns to verbal ego-play between the two physicians, without a hint that either has considered the magnitude of the medical malfeasance against the boy.

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Belgium Air Pollution

20,000 Belgiums have taken part in a citizen science project to measure air pollution in Flanders (the northern region of the country). For the project volunteers installed air quality sensors on a street facing window of their homes. These sensors measured NO2 levels during all of May 2018.

You can view the results of the project on the Curieuze Neuzen Vlaanderen interactive map. The map uses

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Walking in the corn today...

At the Pope Farm Conservancy, where there are no sunflowers this year.

Talk about anything in the comments. This is intended as an open thread, even though I'm not saying "café." "Corn Café"... that would sound stupid.

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Effectual Flake!

I called him "ineffectual," but no! He was effectual. He was efflaketual.

"Senate GOP agrees to one-week delay on Kavanaugh confirmation to allow for FBI probe."

Nice graphic depiction by Drudge. It's got a great-masters-oil-painting feeling to it. I'm thinking of Caravaggio...



... and Rembrandt...

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"But for her decision to come out about Brett Kavanaugh and to remake herself as a California surfing mom, [Christine Blasey Ford] is the archetypal Republican voter..."

"A wealthy, white suburban woman, married, with children. Her parents are Republicans. Her father plays golf with Brett Kavanaugh’s dad at Burning Tree. Her parents have been noticeably silent — stonily so, with no letter of support, only the most begrudging words. It chilled me to read what her father, Ralph Blasey, wrung from himself to offer the Washington Post, in the conditional tense: 'I think all of the Blasey family would support her. I think her record stands for itself. Her schooling, her jobs, and so on.' Then he hung up. A second call yielded this hypothetical: 'I think any father would have love for his daughter.'"

From "Christine Blasey Ford Is a Class Traitor/That's why she scares Republicans" by Irin Carmon (NY Magazine).

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"I reported the Bloomberg article to Facebook as 'False News.'"

Writes John at Facebook, linking to a Bloomberg article with the headline, "Kavanaugh Wrongly Claims He Could Legally Drink in Maryland."

From the hearing transcript:

My friends and I sometimes got together and had parties on weekends. The drinking age was 18 in Maryland for most of my time in high school, and was 18 in D.C. for all of my time in high school. I drank beer with my friends. Almost everyone did. Sometimes I had too many beers. Sometimes others did. I liked beer. I still like beer..

That does suggest he drank beer when he was underage, but I don't see him claiming that it was legal.

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