Never mind seniors and women.
Trump asked why the polls show him trailing: “I don’t know, I don’t understand it, I don’t believe them. I don’t believe the polls. Because we’ve never had this much support. They have a boat thing, they have 5,000 boats. They have thousands of trucks all over the country.”
She tries. But it makes no matter, the Gal Pal routinely botches sports lingo. In her honor I am creating a new award whose prestige I’m sure will only grow over time.
The ‘Gal Pal’ will be awarded annually to the person who makes the biggest mess of basic sports terminology. I will present the award myself to the recipient who will be put up in one of downtown Olympia’s nicest tents. All expenses paid.
The first recipient is Roger Whitney whose podcast I enjoy. Recently Rog was talking about the importance of trying new things in retirement. He went on say he wasn’t a very good golfer but he and his wife had started playing regularly. And while still not very good, “I’ve improved by about 10 points.”
No, no, no! I didn’t even have to get the Award Committee together before declaring RW the inaugural winner. He is on his way to Olympia as you read this.
For those scoring at home (baseball lingo), what Rog meant to say was something along the lines of, “I’ve shaved 10 strokes off my average score.”
For the love of Golf, always “fewer strokes” never “more points.” Go and sin no more.
In the President’s pantheon of lies.
“I feel better than I did 20 years ago!”
David Remnick, “The Coronavirus and the Threat Within the White House”.
“In terms of scale, the West Wing is less like the Kremlin or the Élysée Palace than like the cramped executive offices of a medium-sized insurance company. The hallways are tight. The chairs in the Cabinet Room sit close to one another. The Oval Office itself, where Presidents routinely hold working sessions with many aides, is smaller than you might expect. And yet numerous reports in the press have described how, owing to the President’s attitude, employees, reporters, and visitors to the West Wing are disdained or mocked if they wear a mask.”
In a “we’re worse off than we even think” kinda way.
How Mark Meadows Became the White House’s Unreliable Source.
Positive writing models are the most helpful, but sometimes negative examples of what not to do are so glaring they just can’t be ignored.
From a lefty on Twitter, “I don’t want to be alarmist, but a GOP source just told me this: “Trump’s condition is serious. He can go either way. . . . ”
Writing at its worst. What’s more alarmist than “He can go either way”?
Own your ideas. One could write, “At the risk of being alarmist, . . . “, but if you truly don’t want to be alarmist, delete it all. Silence is often a great option.
There are more cases of Covid in the White House than in all of New Zealand.
1. Nice. At 5’4″ Canadian Leylah Annie Fernandez is about to prove me wrong about women’s professional tennis.
3. What Blair Braverman’s sled dogs taught her about planning for the unknown. Dig the blingy booties.
A sore Achilles tendon means I’ve temporarily traded running in for walking. I enjoyed a particularly nice one this morning. Until getting here. Nothing prepared me for high tide. Well, except for the “Tides Near Me” app on my pocket computer.
Defiant, Now Infected: Trump Is a Morality Tale
“It is time, at long last, to learn. To be smarter. To be safer. To be more responsible, to others as well as to ourselves. We cannot erase the mistakes made in America’s response to the coronavirus but we can vow not to continue making them. The way to treat President Trump’s diagnosis is as a turning point and a new start. This is when we woke up.”
Stole that title from a Ben Mathis-Lilley piece on Slate titled, “Eight Things That Were Somehow Not Takeaways From the Debate Because Everything Else Was So Deranged”.
Who the hell believes that?
Mathis-Lilley:
“On the subject of protests and accompanying violence—a pet theme of the Trump reelection campaign—Wallace set out to press Biden on whether he was reluctant to call out the National Guard. When Biden argued that Trump’s federal interventions in Portland, Oregon, had made things worse, Trump jumped in to boast about his performance: “I sent in the U.S. Marshals to get the killer of a young man in the middle of the street, and they shot him. For three days, Portland didn’t do anything. I sent in the U.S. Marshals, they took care of business.” The “business” the president was referring to was the killing of Michael Forest Reinoehl, a suspect in the shooting of a far-right protester in Portland. After initial reports that Reinoehl had died in a gun battle with the authorities, one witness told reporters he was “clutching a cellphone and eating a gummy worm” when the marshals opened fire on him without warning.”
You probably don’t give a shit about Reinoehl. A petty criminal, he drag raced his 17 year old son on an Oregon road recklessly endangering other drivers. His family didn’t want anything to do with him. Then he was caught on film shooting someone at point blank in downtown Portland. A heinous crime for which he deserved a severe punishment.
The right used Reinoehl to say “See BLM stands for ‘bad liberals metastasizing'”. They certainly didn’t care that he was gunned down by Trump’s Marshalls.
What about the left? There was nothing redeeming about Reinoehl, but every U.S. citizen who doesn’t demand a full accounting of his death is contributing to an environment where a President can kill a citizen like Duterte killing a drug dealer. Maybe even in broad daylight, in some place like Lacey, Washington, about 7-8 miles from where I’m sitting.
PLEASE tell me some documentary film makers are going to build on Tim Elfrink’s Washington Post story about Reinoehl’s murder. Maybe you don’t give a shit. Maybe you prefer the way they do things in the Philippines. If no one cares about the details of Reinoehl’s final minutes, we will be the Philippines in short order.
Pressing Pause 