President Joe Biden lights the National Christmas Tree for the 100th year!!! @wusa9 pic.twitter.com/YOtbk7gCkp
— Darren M. Haynes (@DarrenMHaynes) November 30, 2022
Thursday Morning Open Thread: Go, President Joe!Post + Comments (151)
This post is in: Civil Rights, Excellent Links, Open Threads, President Biden, Proud to Be A Democrat
President Joe Biden lights the National Christmas Tree for the 100th year!!! @wusa9 pic.twitter.com/YOtbk7gCkp
— Darren M. Haynes (@DarrenMHaynes) November 30, 2022
Thursday Morning Open Thread: Go, President Joe!Post + Comments (151)
by WaterGirl| 31 Comments
This post is in: French Basque Country, On The Road, Photo Blogging
These photographs are special for me in that they document a period and place and experiences that are more dear to me than any others and that profoundly changed my life. I grew up in a household of some affluence, although not opulent or without limits. School was easy for me through the second grade, at which point I transferred to a public school and classes became impersonal sources for assignments and evaluation. I got my first D in 4th grade, first F in 5th, and 3 F’s in 6th.
My parents sent me to an excellent prep school that lacked the social cachet of the schools where my friends and brother and sister went, but where my grades were ignored in favor of my score on the entrance test. After two years at this school I was thrown out, and my parents put me in a little international school on the outskirts of Lausanne, Switzerland, where I a year mostly focused on studying French, becoming fairly fluent in conversation and remaining largely illiterate in writing. The usual unwillingness to study but more than happy to talk to people from Switzerland, France, Germany, Holland, Finland, Italy, Greece, England, America, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Africa.
After one year I was back at the prep school for another year before flunking out one more time. I spent the balance of my high school studies at average schools where I did reasonably well thanks to the education I’d gotten from my three years at that prep school. Upon graduation I went to UC San Diego in the last class that permitted admission based on SATs and subject tests alone. A year of hanging out with my stoner friends ended with me at risk of Vietnam and beginning to worry about prospects. I’d dabbled in photography during high school, and now I became determined to go to Art Center College of Design for a BFA. Admission required repair of my GPA, which I did with a year at Los Angeles City College.
How does all of this relate to the Basque country in France? During my year at UCSD I developed a relationship with my conversational French teacher, who was a student teacher working on her master’s in American literature. She is Basque on her mother’s side, Bearnaise on her father’s side, and grew up just outside the Basque country in Oloron-Sainte-Marie. At the end of her year at UCSD, her student visa expired and she was required to return to France. I was devastated, and we began looking for ways that would allow her to return. My father’s Sunday tennis group sometimes included the headmaster of the top women’s high school in the city, and he responded to my father’s query about job openings for French teachers by saying that their very old French teacher was no longer effective. The spot was available to Anne-Marie, although the headmaster put my dad on notice that if the visa didn’t pan out, my dad was on the hook for teaching French. (He had spent a year at the same school in Switzerland that he sent me to). She joined the school with a student/teacher visa and continued teaching there for the next 40 years.
Anne-Marie and I began living together immediately after she returned from France. My mother insisted that we have separate apartments, so we rented a second apartment that was never used. At the end of the first year of her high school teaching we flew to France — my first return to Europe after the 1960-61 year in Switzerland. I was confident that my French would be brilliant from the moment I got off the plane in Paris. Wrong. French at the airport was like a wall of alien noise. It took me a couple of days to settle back in. My adventure with Anne-Marie’s family had begun.
I would remind everybody that these photographs were all shot on Kodachrome, which can be beautiful if handled carefully, but I was extremely casual. In daylight I used variations on f16 at 1/25 (f16 at 1 over the ASA); if there were clouds, I would open up a couple of stops. Kodachrome is unforgiving, and I’ve had to stylize a number of my photos to give them some semblance of artistic quality by making them look vaguely like paintings instead of badly clipped photos taken in high contrast conditions. I apologize. This is what I have.
On The Road – Steve from Mendocino – French Basque Country #1Post + Comments (31)
In France I almost always had a camera in my hand. This is me immediately after my exit from the mayor’s office where I’d just married Anne-Marie. I was chasing around photographing Anne-Marie’s family as they organized their transportation to the country restaurant hired for an afternoon of delicious food, lots of wine, and delightful and hilarious family celebration.
This post is in: Open Threads, Our Failed Media Experiment, Republican Venality, Republicans in Disarray!, Trumpery
This is always the theme, from executive orders in 2017 to Jan. 6: that staff is somehow failing Trump or to blame. Some staff tried stopping him from meeting with West. He wanted to do it.
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) November 29, 2022
I think we should just not talk about this damaging indictment of the de facto leader of my favored political party. No I don't have any ulterior motives why do you ask?? https://t.co/2ph647yKQN
— Jean-Michel Connard (@torriangray) November 28, 2022
I too thought, at first, that the publicity over Trump’s dinner with Ye / Fuentes was a too-clever-by-half Republican attempt to scapegoat Trump as an anomaly, a novelty figure whose removal would return the GOP to its former proud status as the Grand Old Party. But it seems like the Permanent Republican Party just isn’t that organized any more! It’s reduced itself to a bunch of random office drones and coatholders, individually scrambling to save what they can from the wreakage, while the petty grifters siphon off the shark’s vital bodily fluids.
Marc Caputo is second only to Maggie Haberman in the ‘Serious-Media Trump Court Sycophant’ field… and, like Avis, he tries harder:
Just two days before Thanksgiving, Donald Trump was planning to have a private, uneventful dinner with an old friend: Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West.
But Trump may have been walking into a trap in Mar-a-Lago’s gilded halls — one that leveraged his own penchant for spectacle and showmanship against him. Ye arrived with three guests, including white nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes…
The headline-grabbing attention on his guests — and therefore the subsequent fallout — were all but ensured by Trump before the dinner when he made a grand entrance at about 8 p.m. on Nov. 22 to meet his guests.
“We saw everybody in the dining room get up and start applauding, and then the president entered,” Fuentes told NBC News. “He greeted us, and he invited Ye into dinner and Ye said that he wanted to bring us with him to the table. So we walked in and Ye took some pictures with some of the guests in the dining room and then we sat down at the table.”
Trump made sure they sat at his specially reserved table on the patio, for all to see, according to Fuentes.
But the dinner wasn’t the happy photo-op the president had planned.
Ye criticized Trump for not doing enough to help pay the legal bills of those arrested in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots; and he also told Trump he might run for president against him and said Trump should instead be his running mate — all of which angered the former president, who attacked Ye’s ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, according to two dinner participants and Ye, who blasted out a “Mar-a-Lago debrief” video to his 32.2 million Twitter followers the next day…
Late Night Open Thread: TFG’s Dinner with AngrYePost + Comments (51)