Did CBS end the debate early?

Politico said: "CBS ends Democratic debate with seven minutes to spare" ("CBS brought in the second Democratic debate seven minutes under time... The candidates began their closing statements with more than 10 minutes to go until the scheduled 11 p.m. conclusion"). And various more incendiary sites said things like "Democrat debate so boring CBS ended it seven minutes early."

But I think it was planned. Look at the transcript. The moderator, John Dickerson, was doing commercial breaks like clockwork throughout the 2 hours. He even said "We've got to take a break or the machine breaks down." After that, he set up the "final segment," which wasn't "closing statements" (as Politico put it), but a focused question that precluded a canned statement: "What crisis have you experienced in your life that suggests you've been tested and can face that inevitable challenge?" When that was done, Dickerson didn't say good-night or act as though they'd ended early. He said, "All right, back with some final thoughts in a moment."

What followed was very weird, but obviously planned. With the candidates still on stage but the debate now "in the books," Dickerson brought out Major Garrett to report on the CBS "partnership with Twitter," which made it possible to identify "the most-talked-about moments for each of the three candidates." What got the most tweets?

It was Hillary Clinton, "when she defended her integrity on campaign contributions and mentioned 60% of her donors are women." I imagine there were lots of tweets of the ooh-Hillary's-mad variety or "Ouch!" Bernie Sanders's moment was "I'm not a socialist compared to Eisenhower." And Martin O'Malley's height of tweetability was also taking a shot at someone not on the stage, the phrase "immigrant bashing carnival barker Donald Trump." The candidates stood there smiling as the Major delivered the results. O'Malley, who seemed boyish throughout the debate, smirked and gave a thumbs-up. Yeah, I'd like to see him cop that attitude when Trump is there to punch back.

For some reason, CBS decided it would be cool to do a partnership-with-Twitter dance and that Major Garrett was the guy to twirl with Twitter. The candidates didn't opt to leave the stage. They put up with the absurd theater of saying who won.

And by the way, when I heard Major Garrett say that Hillary "defended her integrity on campaign contributions," my immediate outburst was "Assumes a fact not in evidence!"

"A panhandler outside Grand Central Terminal says he rakes in up to $200 an hour from kind-hearted New Yorkers."

It might be the dog and it might be the location (Grand Central):

“People are more generous because I have a dog, 100 percent. They throw me a dollar and say, ‘That’s for the dog,’ ’’ Andersen said...

Another beggar, working the northeast corner of West 35th Street and Seventh Avenue near Penn Station, said that just like everything else in the city, it’s all about location for vagrants. “There are other spots where people get hundred-dollar bills. I could go over to Fifth Avenue and make $150 before lunch.... But I don’t want to deal with the hassle,’’ he said. “There’s people that bully you to get out of the good spots.’’

By the way, the headline uses the word "bum"...



... which we were just talking about in connection with Halloween costumes. I'd said that circa 1960 the go-to costumes were "bum and gypsy." I used the word "bum" (and "gypsy") because those were the words back then, not that I hadn't moved on to more respectful terminology. I got some (comic) pushback in the comments: "Hey, hey, hey, I'm gonna need a trigger warning if you're gonna use words like bum and gypsy."

The Post is using the word "bum" to rile readers, but I think "bum" is the wrong would for a person who is engaged in remunerative labor. You may disapprove of his money-making scheme, but he's not a bum. He's a beggar. But if you think "beggar" is too mean, I would call him a Provider of Charity Opportunities.

Or is "bum" the best word? The verb "to bum" can mean to beg, as in "He looked so immaculately frightful/As he bummed a cigarette/Then he went off sniffing drainpipes/And reciting the alphabet...."

George H.W. Bush, writing in his diary in 1988, called Michael Dukakis "midget nerd."

I'm looking for things in the the NYT article "Elder Bush Says His Son Was Served Badly by Aide" that you may not have already noticed.

After defeating the "midget nerd" in 1988, Bush wound up a one-term President, losing to Bill Clinton. I don't know what 2-word epithets he may have aimed at Clinton, but I see that, instead of going on to fight for the second term, he considered — over a year and a half before the election — announcing that he was not going to run for a second term:

He would “call a press conference in about November and just turn it loose,” he said in the audio diary. “You need someone in this job” who could give his “total last ounce of energy, and I’ve had” that “up until now, but now I don’t seem to have the drive.”

Energy. That's Trump's favorite buzzword, used most notably against Elder Bush's son Jeb.

More from the diary, making the job of President sound horrible:

“Maybe it’s the letdown after the day-to-day” 5 a.m. calls “to the Situation Room; conferences every single day with Defense and State; moving things, nudging things, worrying about things, phone calls to foreign leaders, trying to keep things moving forward, managing a massive project.... Now it’s different, sniping, carping, bitching, predictable editorial complaints.”

As for the criticism of Cheney and Rumsfeld, I'll briefly note Elder Bush's tendency to call everyone "iron-ass":

"[Dick Cheney] just became very hard-line.... Just iron-ass...."

“I’ve concluded that Lynne Cheney is a lot of the eminence grise here – iron-ass, tough as nails, driving,” he said...

“I think [Rumsfeld] served the president badly... I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president having his iron-ass view of everything...."

"Ariana Grande Is Not Here for Your Sexist Interview Questions."

I'm only posting about this because I already have an Ariana Grande tag. That tag only has one other post and it's a post that contains the phrase "I'm only posting because...."

The other post is "Thanks for licking the doughnut, Ariana Grande." She's the celebrity who licked a doughnut that was on a tray left unsupervised in a doughnut shop where anyone could just come up and lick it.

I appreciated her calling our attention to unattended doughnuts, and now she's applying her celebrity power to the problem of radio show hosts asking female celebrities questions like "If you had to choose between your phone and makeup, which would you give up?"

As for the doughnuts tag, which this post also gets, it's not languishing so unused I wish I'd never created it. It's rolling along. This is its 33rd appearance.

I wanted to illustrate this post with an image of a rolling doughnut. (Yeah, here's a good one.) But searching for "rolling doughnut" turned up "15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will," and one of them is: "Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?"

#1 on that list is "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'" I read that out loud to Meade without identifying the context and he thought I was reading something I'd written. His reaction was: "I think it's below your normal writing."

And that's it for the second Ariana Grande blog post.

"Having a prefabricated laugh at the expense of my own dear mother without provocation of cause is not my idea of gratitude for the interview..."

"... which took up 10 of more pages in your puerile smokescreen periodical masquerading as a songwriting litany! My mother is not a public figure to be satirized and ridiculed with silliness and malicious nonsense by some scurrilous little wretch with a hard-on for comedy!"

Wrote Bob Dylan in a letter — which he never sent — to Song Talk magazine.