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[ by Charles Cameron — strongs words on the significance of chyrons, honor and dishonor in the services, things within things and so on.. ]
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Ari Melber and Jon Meacham talk twitter-fights and chyrons:

This is a truly fascinating clip, containing not only Ari Melber’s nicely phrased “Bob Mueller brought a book to a Twitter fight” and Jon Meacham’s “The Mueller team has been out-gunned”, but also a discussion of chyrons — which as you know, I’ve been tracking in more than thirty recent posts:

Jon Meacham again:

Basically, Mueller is also fighting not only twitter but what I sometimes think of as Chyron Conservatives – you know, the chyrons are the captions at the bottom of the screen ..

The power of the chyron is a really interesting force right now in our public life ..

As you know, there are footnotes in the Mueller report, that have date stamped of certain TV chyrons that Donald Trump reacted to, to explore his mind as criminal evidence ..

Two other Ari Melber quotes of interest — this one a variant on what’s already been said: “trigger fingers turn into twitter fingers” .. — and this one a quasi-ouroboric formulation: “guns as a solution to guns” ..

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Shame and dishonor:

Whatever officials were involved in the attempt to obscure the name of John McCain from the gaze of Donald Trump on the ship bearing that name — on Memorial Day — dishonor an honorable service.

Navy acknowledges request was made to hide USS John S. McCain during Trump visit

“A request was made to the U.S. Navy to minimize the visibility of USS John S. McCain” during President Donald Trump’s recent state visit to Japan, the Navy said in a statement.

Also shameful, if not dishonorable: the scramble up Everest.

The mountain is so crowded by those who want to come home and say I climbed Everest that they’re stumbling over one another. This is the mountain Tibetans call “Chomolungma”– “Goddess Mother of the Snows” — sacred, it seems to me, by virtue of its beauty — and now polluted by our petty pride.

And honor:

I was going to post in honor of U.S. soldiers Captain Silas Soule and Lt. Joseph Cramer, who refused to participate in the Sand Creek Massacre of 200 or so Cheyenne and Arapaho, many of them women and children, until I realized the piece I was going to point to was from November 2017. Their names do not age, but the news oif the annual run from Sand Creek to Denver is now a year and a half stale. . SO I’ll render them honor with these words:

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Xi Jinping’s blind spot:

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Some time when you have an hour — Malcolm Nance‘s intelligence-oriented conversation at USC packs a wallop:

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And finally, things within things, so to speak:

If I recall correctly, the Mughal emperor Jahangir is depicted as preferring to speak first with a Sufi sant, then with a lesser king, then with King James I of England, pretty faithfully rendered btw, and finally on the bottom rung of the ladder, with the artist.

And let’s make that a DoubleQuote`:

[ by Charles Cameron — btw, it would make sense for language to be half the world topic, since it is — or we attempt to make it — half the world ]
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Danny Cevallos, a legal analyst for MSNBC:

What happens when Congress wants to hold someone in the Executive branch in criminal contempt? Well, a rift opens in the space-time continuum, because that same Executive branch you want to hold in criminal contempt is the Executive branch that has to prosecute that contempt. There’s no other way to do it.

A rift in the space-time continuum? Really? That’s the best instance***** of exaggeration I’ve seen so far, and yes, there’s an implicit ouroboros therein.

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And now I feel obliged to find a literary equivalent to that New Yorker header, to remove the taste of politics from our mouths with a pleasant DoubleQuote..

Here we go — TS Eliot, no less:

                                            Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

[ by Charles Cameron — this post has been lingering while I’ve been slowly adding elements, and with some Bach now firmly in place I think it’s past time to drop it into the slip-stream ]
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This one’s priceless in a Matrioshka, Through the Looking Glass kind of way:

Can the Actor Who Ruled Ukraine on TV Do It in Real Life?

File it under life imitates art?

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I’m tired of chasing chyrons. If I see stunners, I may bring them here, but I’ll be concentrating on other things.

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I was surprised to overhear the words “perfect sacrifice” in a baseball commentary my room-mate was attendinmg to, but apparently the phrase fits in the context of bunts – what those are, I still don’t know – as well as they do in the context of the Eucharistic liturgy, often considered, eg by Pope John Paul II , as a perfect sacrifice of praise..

What can I say? My ears perked up.

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Three levels of beauty for your illumination:

Lidia Ksiazkiewicz

Lidia Ksiazkiewicz at her instrument:

Lidia Ksiazkiewicz plays Bach’s Fantasia in G major, BWV 572, on the great organ of Laon cathedral in 2012:

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This one’s an almost ouroboros — Chris Matthews on Hardball:

The Democrats don’t know how to play hardball>>

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From the poets — Walt Whitman:

both in and out of the game, and watching

Life, the game, yes. And Shakespeare:

The southern wind
Doth play the trumpet to his purposes,
And by his hollow whistling in the leaves
Foretells a tempest and a blustering day.

Marvelous. Those unexpected words can break through the strands of conventional thought that spin their deadly shroud about us every day.

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“IT’S GOING TO BE A GUERRILLA WAR”: THE SANDERS LEFT OPENS FIRE ON BIDEN

Within a few hours of Joe Biden’s official presidential announcement, the Justice Democrats, the progressive group behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rise to power, brought out the flamethrower.

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So as you see, this is the sort of amount that would have made the first quarter of a chyrons series post a couple of weeks ago, and today it’s all I’ve collected in a week or so. I’m really cutting back on this game, and will be concentrating on other areas..

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Let’s close here with this trio:

That’s the rough number.

That’s just this last week.

And here’s the exact figure, if there’s no margin of error, which seems unlikely..

I’m leaving some terrorism screen-grabs for a later post.

[ by Charles Cameron — think of these screen-grabs as frames in a comic, okay? — delicious ]
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Rachel Maddow:

on having her first taste of mille feuille on her b’day —

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Rachel:

Apparently this is a whole category of dessert ..

It looks like a normal cake from the outside .. That is what this news story out of Florida is .. So it’s not s million layers of cake, it’s a million layers of weirdness, one on top of another, that culminate in tonight’s news story ..

Rachel:

At this point in the delicious layer cake, we’ve got the massage parlor owner selling Chinese nationals personal physical access to the President, his family and cabinet-level officials in the administration, while she is simultaneously hanging out at the President’s private club, taking pictures with him, and working with the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government in a number of murky organizations that seem to have no public-facing purpose.

Rachel:

Layer on top of that, the arrest on March 30th, of a new lady we had not heard of before ..

Undisclosed cash flowed at Trump inaugural ball with ties to China, embattled Saipan casino

and so forth…

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And here’s the icing (?) on the cake:

[ by Charles Cameron — it might be that “This is where politics becomes a blood sport” turns out to be my final entry in the sports metaphor stakes, or the title of a “best of” collection — anyhow, let’s get there ]
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Ari Melber:

Jason Johnson:

It’s good that they finally pulled out the sword of Damocles: if you don’t do this, we’re going to sn=end a subpoena ..

Hardball:

Some in Mueller’s Team See Report as More Damaging to Trump Than Barr Summary

Chris Matthews:

I can understand why Trump plays ball with Netanyahu ..

If that’s a game, Barr is going to be exposed ..

Mar-a-Lago:

CM:

Congressman, what do you make of this? Because I get the sense that Mar-a-Lago has become a highly priced kissing-booth. If you want to get to the President join this club, then you can get relations with this guy, you can meet him on the golf course, you can hang out with him at the first tee, the nineteenth hole, he can be your buddy just for the price of admission. It is a kissing-booth, =tell me the difference?

All In:

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Jane Coaston:

They can’t outrun whatever the facts are forever ..

Chris Hayes:

There’s also a strange expectations game that’s been played here ..

NYT, How Rupert Murdoch’s Empire of Influence Remade the World

NYT, 6 Takeaways From The Times’s Investigation Into Rupert Murdoch and His Family

Rachel Maddow:

Thin pickings yesterday, no doubt because I slept through much of my dialysis session..

And from today:

Stephanie Ruhle:

Adm. James Stavridis:

Craig Melvin:

Two more from my deaktop

O’Donnell 4/4/2019:

Kristan Peters-Hamlin:

There was a pass that was thrown to Congress by the Mueller team with adequate evidence for Congress to make the decision on obstruction, and there was an intercept by Bill Barr and he ran in the exact opposite direction ..

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And just a few from 4/5/2019:

Ari Melber:

If the agents did thoroughly go through those like 14 million files and Michael Cohen now finds a smoking gun or a gatling gun***** and those documents corroborate what Michael Cohen says, this could add rocket fuel to the investigations in DC, EDVA< & Southern District of New York. Possibly. Or it could be a nothingburger. All In Chris Hayes:

The thing that may be biting the most is the thing that brought us to the metaphor***** portion of the news .. and not the subtle kind ..

There’s this thing they do with him where he’s just a private citizen, he’s a taxpayer. It’s not like some metaphysical question about the private Trump and the public. He’s the President of the United States, and hoe doesn’t get to get out of that.

[ cf Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies ]

Jesse Eisinger:

Or as you said, Schrodinger’s Cat type of existence

The tax returns are not the Rosetta Stone that will let us know everything about every source of funding that he’s ever had. He’ll have overlapping LLCs and a Russian doll of corporate structures, no pun intended..

Barbara Boxer [re Joe Biden]:

Do we want the Mike Pence response where he’ll never go to lunch with a woman alone, and he won’t have a woman in his office without keeping a door open, I mean, is that where we’re headed?

Rachel Maddow:

This is a hill [Trump’s tax returns] and people will be willing to die on it ..

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I may have done enough of this metaphor chasing.. maybe do a “best of”.. maybe just taper off..

But this from someone on AM Joy, Sunday 4/7/2019 is too good***** to miss:

This is where politics becomes a blood sport ..