Social Lives of the Rich and Famous

Somebody photoshop Scalia's face in there for me, please.

This is really dumb to begin with, but everybody needs entertainment, and I've been learning too much about the subject not to share it, concerning the possibility that Ivanka Trump has temporarily abandoned the hubby and kids (one four months old) and the presidential campaign for a vacation with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin's girlfriend, if it's true that Putin's girlfriend is none other than Wendi Deng Murdoch, said to have been dating Vladimir Vladimirovich on the rebound from the (also rumored) affair with Tony Blair that may, if it took place, have brought on the breakup of her marriage with the then 82-year-old ex-Australian news magnate Rupert Murdoch, who is now 85 and married to Mick Jagger's old squeeze and baby mama Jerry Hall.

As far as I know Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson don't come into the story but don't bet on it. I don't, for the record, think much of the Putin angle. If you believe the kinds of publications that have reported it (there's a fresh rundown at Snopes), then you need to believe Angelina Jolie has gotten pregnant 14 or 15 times in the last couple of years (by my back-of-the-envelope calculation based on my view of tabloid front pages in subway stations) and divorced nearly as often, which is not even possible, given that you really can't have more divorces in one individual life than you have marriages.

A lively terror

Prime Minister David Cameron and President Barack Obama inspecting the Jacob Epstein bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office (not the identical one loaned by the British Embassy to George W. Bush, which was returned to the embassy after Bush left the White House), July 2010, photo by Pete De Souza. Via ABC News. 

Speaking as an old Boomer who yields to none in my loathing for that bloodsucker and intellectual mediocrity Henry Kissinger, I was not sorry to hear Bernie Sanders last night calling Hillary Clinton out for her friendliness with the criminal advocate of mass murder in Cambodia, Chile, East Timor, and who knows where else, but taken aback, by the same token, when he was nominating two leaders, one domestic and one foreign, who would "influence his foreign policy decisions", in answer to Judy Woodruff's question.

He started off by naming Franklin Roosevelt, not a bad choice at all, but failed to mention any of FDR's foreign policy ideas or moves in his explanation, which made him sound a little like Marco Rubio playing pin the sound bite on the donkey, if you know what I mean, and then his other choice was none other than Sir Winston Churchill, defended in terms that weren't too different, logically, from Clinton's defense of Kissinger (she may "disagree" with him "on a number of things" but he went to China) earlier in the debate:

Annals of derp: Kissinger arithmetic

The old vampire Professor Kissinger was on the NPR this morning sharing his fascinating views. He seems to be a little challenged with respect to the arithmetic thing.

Dr. Henry Kissinger:

I think we would find, if you study the conduct of [the military], that the Obama administration has hit more targets on a broader scale than the Nixon administration ever did. And, of course, B-52s have a different bombing pattern.

On the other hand, drones are far more deadly because they are much more accurate. And I think the principle is essentially the same. You attack locations where you believe people operate who are killing you. You do it in the most limited way possible. And I bet if one did an honest account, there were fewer civilian casualties in Cambodia than there have been from American drone attacks.