President Trump delivering last year's State of the Union address. It was so pleasant and bipartisan that it put Paul Ryan to sleep.CNN

You have probably heard that President Trump plans to stress “unity” and “bipartisanship” in his State of the Union address tonight. I have no doubt that he will. He does this every year, after all.

Here’s how things work. When Trump is, say, speaking via Twitter, he’s speaking solely to his base and feels free to be as nasty and partisan (and untruthful) as he wants. Conversely, when he’s delivering the SOTU on national TV with a big audience, he likes to appear calm and statesmanlike. That way, the folks who only see him once a year get the impression of a serious man with serious proposals. They leave wondering why he gets so much bad press.

Trump has an instinctive ear for the media, and one of the most important lessons of dealing with the media is knowing your audience. Trump is very good at this. When he’s speaking at a rally in Biloxi, he gives them red meat. But when he’s speaking from the well of the House to an audience that expects presidential behavior, that’s what he gives them. I don’t expect he’ll get through his whole speech on nothing but sweetness and light, but he’ll get through most of it.

K.C. Alfred/San Diego Union-Tribune via ZUMA

Can President Trump override the will of Congress and declare an emergency on the southern border even though there isn’t one? Yes. Can he then use money from, say the Pentagon or disaster relief funds to build his wall? Yes again. So why doesn’t he?

Well, it turns out not to be so easy. Greg Sargent spoke with an expert on the National Emergencies Act, who says that Nancy Pelosi has a way to fight back:

Under the National Emergencies Act, or NEA, both chambers of Congress can pass a resolution terminating any presidentially declared national emergency. Elizabeth Goitein, who has researched this topic extensively for the Brennan Center for Justice, tells me that if Pelosi exercises this option, it will ultimately require the Senate to vote on it in some form as well. The NEA stipulates that if one chamber (Pelosi’s House) passes such a resolution, which it easily could do, the other (McConnell’s Senate) must act on it within a very short time period — forcing GOP senators to choose whether to support it.

Alternatively, Goitein notes, the Senate could vote not to consider that resolution or change its rules to avoid such a vote. But in those scenarios, the Senate would, in effect, be voting to greenlight Trump’s emergency declaration.

The NEA lays out a timetable for this process, and by Goitein’s reading, it would all take place within the protracted period of barely longer than a month. “In short, there could be 36 days between introduction of the resolution in the House and a vote on the Senate floor,” Goitein told me, “but that vote would have to happen,” and once it did, one way or the other, it would put senators “on record.”

So: Trump declares an emergency. The House votes to terminate it. The Senate is then forced to either vote on the House bill or support Trump by refusing to consider it.

Sargent reports that Republicans are terrified of this option, and I’m not surprised. There would almost certainly be some defections if the bill comes up for a vote in the Senate, and it might very well pass. Trump could still veto it, but then it just comes back again for yet another vote. This is the last thing Republicans want, since most of the country opposes the wall and a pretty fair number of Republican members of Congress oppose it too—especially if it takes money away from disaster relief or defense spending.

Then again, on the other side of all this is having to face the wrath of Trump. This also terrifies Republicans. So sad.

Is there anything related to Donald Trump that’s not under investigation these days? And note that unlike the Hillary Clinton jihad of 2014-16, these are real investigations, not partisan clown shows:

Escalating one of the investigations into President Trump’s inaugural committee, federal prosecutors ordered on Monday that its officials turn over documents about donors, finances and activities, according to two people familiar with the inquiry….People familiar with the subpoena said prosecutors are interested in potential money laundering as well as election fraud, though it is possible that the prosecutors do not suspect the inaugural committee of such violations. The prosecutors cited those crimes in the subpoena simply as justification for their demand for documents, the people said.

I am not a lawyer, so somebody help me out here. Prosecutors don’t “cite” random crimes to justify subpoenas, do they? That’s the kind of thing that makes judges upset. If prosecutors cited money laundering and election fraud in the subpoena, then those have to be actual offenses they have probable cause to suspect. Right?

In any case, I assume the election fraud charge is related to the possibility of foreign money being solicited. But money laundering? I wonder that’s all about?

Is this Northam yearbook picture thing still dragging out? Surely Northam must see by now that his situation is hopeless?

I was chatting with a friend in Virginia this morning and mentioned that I normally live by the 20/20 rule:¹ I can forgive most things you did before the age of 20 or more than 20 years ago. There are exceptions, of course, but that’s my rule of thumb.

However, there’s a caveat: You have to fess up completely and not have subsequent black marks on your record.² This was Brett Kavanaugh’s problem. Even though I believed nearly all the allegations of harassment against him, I was willing to forgive his teenage behavior because teenagers are idiots. What’s more, Kavanaugh seems to have led an unproblematic life since he left college. His problem, however, is that he panicked when this stuff first came up and he denied all of it. I’m quite sure that was a lie, and that makes it an immediate problem, not one three decades in the past.

Northam has the same problem, but possibly even worse. I mean, first he confesses and apologizes for the blackface photo; then takes it all back and says it’s not him in the picture; and finally offers up a weird story about a different occasion when he put on some shoe polish for a Michael Jackson show. But he still refuses to say how this picture ended up on his yearbook page or why his friends apparently called him “Coonman.” This is ridiculous. Every minute that goes by without a coherent explanation makes it more and more obvious that he’s desperately trying to avoid the truth and instead cobble together some kind of story that will hold up to scrutiny but not make him look like a horrible racist.

For that alone he has to go. I know this isn’t a popular view right now, but if Northam had a decent explanation that he’d offered immediately, along with the appropriate apologies, I could probably forgive him.³ But he didn’t and he doesn’t.

¹Don’t get too pedantic about this. Obviously something you did at age 19 matters if you’re currently age 21. This is just a rough guideline, nothing more.

²There’s a reason for this: we should encourage people to own up to their pasts honestly. The only way this will happen is if there’s an understanding that doing so is likely to lead to forgiveness. Again, there are exceptions for some behavior, but an honest acknowledgment of your past should generally earn you something. If, on the other hand, we adopt a zero tolerance rule of demanding the death penalty for everything, no matter how long ago and no matter how much you’ve changed since then, the only incentive anyone has is to lie, lie, and lie some more. That’s completely pointless.

³Since some people are always eager to take this the wrong way, let me add this: I’m not insisting that everyone could or should forgive him. Just that I probably would.

I was up in Lake Forest a few weeks ago to scout out some pictures of our local foothills, but that turned out to be a dud. However, I did get this picture of a cactus with the foothills in the background, which I kind of like. I should probably point out that in the original picture the sky was blue. I photoshopped into a rusty red because…I felt like it. No reason, really.

It turns out that Donald Trump’s election was good for business after all. Some businesses, anyway. A team of researchers reports that after Election Day lots of women suddenly decided they wanted long-acting birth control:

In 2015, the mean adjusted daily LARC [long-acting reversible contraception] insertion rate during the 30 business days before and inclusive of November 8 was 12.9 per 100 000 women vs 13.7 per 100 000 women during the subsequent 30 business days. The comparable mean adjusted daily LARC insertion rates before and after the 2016 presidential election were 13.4 per 100 000 women and 16.3 per 100 000 women, an increase of 21.6%.

The big question, of course, is why this happened. There are several possibilities:

• Many women decided they didn’t want to raise children in a country that could elect Donald Trump president.
• Women were afraid of a Handmaid’s Tale hellscape coming and wanted to prepare.
• Women were afraid Trump would kill off Obamacare, so they wanted to get their LARC inserted for free while they could.

Any other guesses?

Uh oh. Now we’ve pissed off the French intellectuals:

A celebration of the “Scène Young Adult” at the Salon du Livre in Paris next month has drawn the condemnation of dozens of French authors and intellectuals, who have described the adoption of English terminology as an “unbearable act of cultural delinquency”. The proliferation of English words on display at the book fair, where the “scène YA” was set to feature “Le Live”, a “Bookroom”, a “photobooth” and a “bookquizz”, spurred around 100 French writers into action, among them three winners of the country’s Goncourt prize — Lullaby author Leïla Slimani, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Marie NDiaye — and the bestselling writers Muriel Barbery and Catherine Millet. Together they have issued a scalding rebuke to organisers over their use of that “sub-English known as globish”.

….“For us, intellectuals, writers, teachers, journalists and lovers of this language from all walks of life, ‘young adult’ represents the straw that broke the camel’s back … This use of ‘young adult’, because it is referring to French literature, because it is deliberately addressing young French people looking for readings, is too much. It has become an aggression, an insult, an unbearable act of cultural delinquency.”

….Following publication of the letter, the Salon du Livre website has been updated, according to Le Monde. Although it still refers to the young adult scene, there are no longer any references to a photobooth, a bookquizz or a bookroom.

So I’ve got a question for any French natives who might be reading this. I know this is a longstanding grievance, and that France protects the French language with an unusual fervor. But haven’t any of these folks looked around and noticed what happens in other countries that don’t bother with this fanatical approach to language? What happens is…nothing. At least, as near as I can tell. German is still German, Italian is still Italian, and Russian is still Russian. They share words back and forth constantly and it doesn’t seem to have had any effect at all on the purity of their languages. So why keep up this fight? What am I missing?

Axios has obtained the presidential daily schedule for the past three months. Here’s a typical day for our commander-in-chief:

So that’s it. A 30-minute meeting with Mick Mulvaney and the rest of the day is spent just dicking around. I’m so old I can remember a time when a slot on the president’s schedule was so valuable that people talked about it in hushed tones. Today it’s a joke. The only question is whether Trump’s schedule is so empty because he doesn’t want to meet anyone or because no one wants to meet him. Here’s more from Axios:

The schedules, which cover nearly every working day since the midterms, show that Trump has spent around 60% of his scheduled time over the past 3 months in unstructured “Executive Time.”…What the schedules show: Trump, an early riser, usually spends the first 5 hours of the day in Executive Time. Each day’s schedule places Trump in “Location: Oval Office” from 8 to 11 a.m.

But Trump, who often wakes before 6 a.m., is never in the Oval during those hours, according to six sources with direct knowledge. Instead, he spends his mornings in the residence, watching TV, reading the papers, and responding to what he sees and reads by phoning aides, members of Congress, friends, administration officials and informal advisers.

This is your president at work, ladies and gentlemen.

Did you know that the NFL desegregated one year before Major League Baseball? I didn’t. Kenny Washington and Woodrow Strode, college football stars who had played at UCLA with Jackie Robinson, were signed by the LA Rams in 1946. Both were past their prime, but Washington nonetheless led the league in yards-per-carry during his first season.

But unlike Robinson, neither man is in the Hall of Fame. Neither has had his number retired. Neither one has statues put up in their honor. They are mostly forgotten.

Why? Pro football wasn’t a big sport in 1946, so that may be part of it. And the two don’t have a Branch Rickey-ish story behind them. The Rams brought them on board unwillingly under pressure from their new home:

They needed a home and wanted to play at the L.A. Coliseum. But the stadium was publicly funded — owned by taxpayers black and white alike — and black sportswriters in Los Angeles successfully hammered local officials into requiring the team to integrate if the Rams were to play there.

Come to think of it, that’s as good a story as the whole Branch Rickey thing. It might even be a better one, especially after Hollywood got its hands on it.

Remember back when we wondered just what it would take for the news media to call Donald Trump’s statements “lies”? Seems like decades ago, doesn’t it?

We’ve moved past that—way, way past that—but more recently there’s been a similar question: what does it take to get them to call something racist, as opposed to, say, insensitive or racially charged? Ladies and gentlemen, we have our answer: appearing in blackface in your medical school yearbook. These screen caps are all from Friday night.