This will be quick, because I am behind. (Watch this now become a 3,000 word, two-hour post.) It was a lovely day, foggy this morning, but then the low clouds turned into mist and it all rolled out just before noon. The mercury got to 81, found that this was an appropriate effort for mid-September, and stared there. It was all delightful.

Two news items piqued my interest today. If you get two a day, you’re probably working too hard at it. If you get more than two a day, you’re probably living in a decade-long election cycle and you should put down the phone, close the computer, and walk away. So I stopped at two.

This first one, simply because I came up with a slogan that should appeal to two opposed elements of modern society, Republicans who think their pets are at risk from their neighbors, and anyone else that would like to not catch an illness from a sick neighbor in denial.

NJ Republican governor candidate introduces bill to outlaw wearing masks in public

A Republican candidate for New Jersey governor introduced new legislation Thursday that would prohibit people from wearing masks in public, just weeks after a similar bill was passed in Nassau County on Long Island.

The bill would prohibit masks in certain circumstances, but even its sponsor, Sen. Jon Bramnick, acknowledged that it is a long way from passing.

[…]

According to Bramnick, there are people using masks to disguise themselves and commit crimes, and that’s who he wants this bill to target.

He believes that ultimately it would be an additional charge when a crime is being committed and that “legitimate mask wearers have nothing to fear.”

The bill would make it a petty disorderly persons offense for people to congregate in public while wearing masks or obscuring their faces in some way to conceal their identity.

Legitimate mask wearers. Police will know the difference.

Look, politicians who need to demonstrate their tough-on-crime bona fides push these sort of proposals, without a single care about putting high risk and immunocompromised people in greater danger, all in the hope of squashing protests and heightening surveillance. That’s all we’re talking about here.

But here’s my idea. And it works as a slogan or bumper sticker.

You can’t eat the dogs or eat the cats if you are wearing a mask.

The newsroom’s editorial board calls this what it is.

Start with this basic question: What if a troublemaker simply decides to disguise his face with large sunglasses and a hat, instead? Are we going to criminalize sunglasses and hats, too? Where will it end?

Not to mention all the enforcement and constitutional problems that this bill presents. Even with an exception for people who wear masks for medical reasons, it’s a threat to personal freedoms, because it leaves it up to the cops to decide whether someone has a legitimate medical reason for wearing a mask at a public gathering.

How will they know that? It’s subjective. And based on past experience, we know what that means: Police will disproportionately stop and question Black and brown people, who have also been the most likely to continue wearing masks to protect against COVID-19.

And, as Jim Sullivan of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey adds, this “overbroad and vague” bill “also gives law enforcement the ability to target people based on their political beliefs.”

This think piece … from Dan Froomkin, curiously enough, is just about the most frustrating thing you’ll find today.

Trump’s mental capacity is now topic one

The Donald Trump who melted down on the debate stage Tuesday night is not a well man.

He sounded like a lunatic. He expressed his belief in things that simply aren’t true. (Think: “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.”) He was easily distracted. He repeated himself. He lied egregiously.

Is he competent to be president?

That’s a question journalists should be asking, prominently and relentlessly, until Election Day.

[…]

Concerns about Trump’s mental state are hardly new. They’ve been raised for years on social media, in opinion columns, and on cable TV. But they’ve generally been avoided by traditional news reporters.

The good news is that this is officially no longer a story that’s too hot for reporters to touch. A permission structure has been established — by the New York Times’s star political reporter Peter Baker no less.

PERMISSION?!? I yelled to no one at all. PERMISSION? NOW YOU HAVE PERMISSION?!?

I said Froomkin, curiously enough, because he started Press Watch for a particular reason.

Press Watch is an independent non-profit organization devoted to encouraging political journalists to fulfill their essential mission of creating an informed electorate and holding the powerful accountable. It is funded by donations from readers and the philanthropic community.

The Trump era, like never before, has exposed the weakness of the elite media’s refusal to be seen as “taking sides” in matters of public interest — even when it comes to verification of facts and democracy. As a result, corporate political journalism ends up spreading lies instead of shouting the truth. It engages in false equivalence that normalizes outrageous political extremism.

[…]

This website is intended to agitate for change. It encourages reporters to fight disinformation more enthusiastically and effectively, especially when our democracy and people’s lives are at stake. It identifies best practices that others can emulate. It urges the reality-based parts of the industry to explicitly condemn Fox News and other far-right propaganda outlets as disinformation operations.

People who love journalism are deeply troubled by the media’s loss of credibility with the public. Press Watch’s view is that we lose credibility by not fighting more assertively for the truth.

Permission. You don’t need permission. Or political cover. You need the support of your publisher and to inform your audience. A person, any person, running for high office is always under the microscope. Or should be. I can’t image how the news business has lost it’s credibility.

Permission.

It was a lovely afternoon for a swim, so I swam. My arms and feet took me one mile, but I ended up at the same place I started from. And that’s laps, to me. I say my feet, but it was mostly my arms. I am not a good swim kicker.

I keep forgetting to kick. Then I remember, and I kick. For about 15 yards, maybe less, and then I stop again. And a lap or so later I’ll remember, Kick! And so I kick. Maybe 10-15 years, and then I forget again. And I did this today for 1,720 yards. It was nice.

Back outside for the nightly chores, the view above was peaceful.

You can hear kids playing, and a few adults chatting up the street. It’s a perfect, mild THursday, and why wouldn’t they be outside doing those things until deep into the evening?

Let’s dip our toes back into the Re-Listening project. I’m playing all of my old CDs in my car, in the order in which I acquired them. So, I figured, why not write about them here, too? Pad the site! Content is king! And there’s nothing better than 20-year-old content!

Or so I told myself before I sat down to write about 2003’s “Long Time Coming,” Johnny Lang’s fourth studio album. I picked this up in 2006 or so. And, for me, it’s a record I’d listen to once in a long while. It doesn’t find a lot of extended play or repeats. Lang was a gifted performer — sadly, he’s had some health issues that took him away from music — and it’s important to remember here that he was 22(!!!) when he released his fourth album. But, with the exception of a few moments this one doesn’t really stand out as his earlier efforts did. It made it to #17 on the Billboard 200, which was his best placement yet, and great for mere mortals. His live record at the Ryman, in 2009, would climb to the second spot on the blues charts. And that makes sense, the guy was a seriously talented live perform.

This record, though, it wasn’t highly received, and while it hasn’t aged poorly, it isn’t a fine wine. And the Re-Listening project isn’t meant to be a review. I’m just posting music and occasionally trying to summon up a memory to go with a song. But I don’t have any here, because it just didn’t get that many spins. Right from the first track, you can feel the genre fusion beginning. There’s a bit of a lot of things on this album, and maybe that’s part of the issue. And, again, the guy’s 22 years old.

I’ve always thought this song should be on infinite rotation in produce sections across this great land of ours.

Tell me that you wouldn’t happily puzzle over the ripeness of that pineapple during that chorus.

If blue-eyed soul and blues had an exemplar … well, there are many … this would be one, too.

And that’s sort of the difficulty here. Lang had been blowing away critics and fans since he was 15 or so. Here, it just felt a little workmanlike.

As we realize, over and over, music is a strange business.

And there we go. Fifteen-hundred plus words. As I said, I’m behind.