Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit links to this piece on how to negotiate a “friends with benefits” relationship.
It seems to be addressed to women, and the gist of its main caution is to make sure you don’t care, and make sure you’re in control of the situation.
Sounds like so much fun! (Not.)
When I was growing up this wasn’t something that magazines for young women recommended. It’s not that such behavior was unheard of; I knew contemporaries who operated that way, even back then. But they were outliers, and not necessarily something to be emulated or envied.
What’s more, it seemed plausible that the act of sex and especially orgasm causes women to release a hormone that enhances bonding. When we college girls of yesteryear (we called ourselves “girls” back then, not women, because for the most part we pretty much were girls) talked into the wee hours of the morning about love and boys and what was quaintly known as “dating,” we agreed that we tended to fall in love with those guys with whom we had sex (or even sex short of intercourse), whether we wanted to fall in love with them or not.
I don’t think biology has changed very much, either, in the intervening years. But the messages given to women—and men—certainly have.
[NOTE: And yes, I know it’s political, and part of the left’s agenda.]
The incomparable Hanson points out the rise of what he calls “racial tribalism” on the part of a growing number of affluent and successful black people.
It’s not just identification with blacks as a group, either. It’s this:
Here is actor Jamie Foxx joking recently about his new movie role: “I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?” Reverse white and black in the relevant ways and even a comedian would hear national outrage. Instead, his hip “Saturday Night Live” audience even gave Foxx applause.
Race-obsessed comedian Chris Rock tweeted on the Fourth of July, “Happy white peoples (sic) independence day …”
Actor Samuel L. Jackson, in a recent interview, sounded about as unapologetically reactionary as you can get: “I voted for Barack because he was black. … I hope Obama gets scary in the next four years.”
No one in Hollywood used to be more admired than Morgan Freeman, who once lectured interviewers on the need to transcend race. Not now, in the new age of racial regression. Freeman has accused Obama critics and the Tea Party of being racists. He went on to editorialize on Obama’s racial bloodlines: “Barack had a mama, and she was white ”“ very white, American, Kansas, middle of America … America’s first black president hasn’t arisen yet.”
Freeman’s racial-purity obsessions were echoed on the CNN website, where an ad for the network’s recent special report on race included a crude quote from three teen poets: “Black enough to be a n—–. White enough to be a good one.”
…ESPN sports commentator Rob Parker blasted Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III last week for admirably stating that he did not wish to be defined by his race rather than by his character: “He’s black, he does his thing, but he’s not really down with the cause.” Parker added: “He’s not one of us. He’s kind of black, but he’s not really like the kind of guy you really want to hang out with.” (ESPN suspended Parker for his remarks.)
Unfortunately, the new racialist derangement is not confined to sports and entertainment. The Rev. Joseph Lowery — who gave the benediction at President Obama’s first inauguration — sounded as venomous as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a speech that Lowery delivered to a black congregation shortly before this year’s election: “I don’t know what kind of a n—– wouldn’t vote with a black man running.” Lowery reportedly preceded that rant by stating that when he was younger, he believed that all whites were going to hell, but now he merely believes that most of them are. And in his 2009 inauguration prayer, Lowery ended with his hopes for a future day when “white will embrace what is right.”
None of this should be any surprise. As Hanson also points out, Obama and his AG Holder have fostered some of it by various remarks (as has “put y’all back in chains” VP Biden). But I contend that, although they have all acted as releasers for these sorts of sentiments, the real culprits (as Hanson also points out) are those educators who have taught over and over in the last few decades that racism is only racism when practiced by white people, and that black people are eternally and forever their innocent victims.
One of the hopes of Barack Obama’s election as president was that there would be some sort of racial healing as a result. How’s that working out for ya? Not very well. And perhaps I’ve missed it, but has Obama ever denounced racist remarks uttered by a black person towards whites? The only time I can recall—and in this his hand was forced—was when he threw former mentor Reverend Wright under the bus in order to get elected in 2008.
“Meltdown” is really the meme du jour for House Republicans’ failure to coalesce around Boehner’s Plan B.
Great Speakers (and/or Majority Leaders) are not necessarily great statesmen (or stateswomen; let us not forget Nancy Pelosi). Perhaps that quality is even counter-indicated, and at any rate statesmanship seems rather rare these days in politics. But what great Speakers absolutely need to be is great herders of cats—that is, House members of their own Party.
They also need to be great strategists, although perhaps that’s the same thing.
And that means that, for starters, they shouldn’t open their big Speaker mouths to play this sort of game without knowing, absolutely knowing, they’ve got those cats in the bag.
Boehner didn’t—keep his mouth shut, that is, or absolutely know he had those votes lined up.
If you’re curious what actually happened, this piece by Robert Costa in National Review purports to describe the process. But short of saying, in a rather lengthy way, “many conservatives defected,” it doesn’t really tell us all that much.
Apparently some of those defectors were surprised and somewhat disappointed that Plan B didn’t go through despite their own failure to support it; perhaps they’d hoped that they could vote “no” as individuals and thus please their conservative base (and win re-election, of course; isn’t that what it’s all about?) while still allowing the bill to pass. In other words, they wanted to have their cake and eat it too. But sometimes that just doesn’t work out, and someone left this cake out in the rain.
DrewM at Ace’s counsels that it’s all not really such a big deal because the bill was never going to be law; Democrats in the Senate wouldn’t pass it and Obama wouldn’t sign it:
Passing it in the House alone was simply a public offer of good faith designed to have something to point to when Obama pushes the country over the cliff.
Yes, but the GOP desperately needed a “public offer of good faith” right now, in order to at least try not to have this thing pinned on them. Now they’ve lost even that, and look foolish in the process.
DrewM goes on:
We’re at this point because of the deal that Boehner and the GOP made in the summer of 2011 to avert hitting the debt ceiling. The $1.2 billion in cuts from sequestration everyone wants to avoid like the plague? That was our PRIZE.
But don’t forget that during the debt hike debate and shortly after, Boehner kept talking to Obama about a “grand bargain”. As part of that talk he put revenue on the table ($800 billion or so). Obama then demanded more revenue and the talks died.
And remember, the debt deal was supposed to be about SPENDING CUTS to more than offset the debt hike. Obama however pocketed Boehner’s willingness to include new revenue as a concession and gave nothing back in return.
So the deal was cut last year setting up the fiscal cliff (the tax extensions, the payroll tax holiday, the death tax cut, and of course the looming sequestration cuts once the “Super Committee” failed). The GOP was betting Mitt Romney or some other Republican would beat Obama. That was….unwise.
Now here we are.
As far as I can tell, Boehner has been one of the worst Speakers in history, at a time when we desperately need one of the best. This particular error—acting as though you have the votes when you don’t—is an unforced rookie error, something like a lawyer asking a question to which he/she doesn’t know the answer.
So, as Ezra Klein asks: will Boehner continue as Speaker when it comes to a vote on January 3? I don’t pretend to know any inside baseball about this—or about who his challenger would be, and whether that person would be better than Boehner, but it’s hard to believe he/she could be worse.
[NOTE: Also, this rift mirrors the larger rift in the Republican Party between the so-called “establishment” and the more conservative and/or Tea Party wing. Perhaps it’s even the reason that Romney lost the election—the failure of the Party to coalesce behind him, or as many conservatives and/or libertarians might put it the failure of the establishment to allow them to have a more conservative or libertarian candidate (although I’ve never understood exactly how they were stopped, when no attractive candidate of such ilk threw a hat into the ring, and nominees are selected through primaries). The Republican Party is not only weak right now but dangerously divided.
Or perhaps it’s weak because it’s dangerously divided. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, leaves whatever principles it has behind in order to win politically. Whatever Pelosi did to get those votes on HCR, she sure got em, didn’t she? And although the Party lost temporarily as a result in 2010, look how it’s bounced back.]
[ADDENDUM: Oh, and in case you want to know—and in case it’s not obvious from the foregoing—I think Boehner’s got to go, ASAP. Republicans desperately need someone new at the helm.]
Forgive me my regional boosterism, but it’s highly unusual for a girl from Rhode Island who goes to Boston University to win Miss USA, let alone Miss Universe. And yet Olivia Culpo has done both—and she’s a classical cellist as well.
I have to say I like Culpo’s red dress here. Note how the rest of the gowns look very pageant-y, but hers is more elegant, like something a classical musician or opera singer might wear for a solo concert.
Note also the very full skirt—the better to play the cello in (not that Culpo played cello in the pageant; there’s no talent competition in Miss Universe, unless you consider strutting your stuff in front of a gazillion people wearing a bikini and sky-high heels a talent, which I suppose it is).
Although I’m very curious, I could find no videos of Culpo sawing away at her cello. But there were three stills, which I present here in ascending (or descending?) order.
First we have the cellist next door:
Next, the Viva Las Vegas cellist:
And finally, sex and the single cellist (I’d never seen a white cello before this, especially one with what appear to be decals on it, but I can’t say I’ve kept up with cello fashion)::
So don’t say I never give you cheesecake. But I try to do it with a little culcha.
It’s a topic you hear a lot about these days, especially from the left: the growing gap in income inequality, and what it means for the country.
If you’re interested in reading a fascinating perspective on the concept from the conservative side, take a look at this piece by William Voegeli, in which he reviews two recent books on the subject, one by Timothy Noah and the other by Joseph E. Stiglitz.
And if you’re interested in a far greater rarity, a conversation between a conservative (Voegeli, who tore Noah’s book apart in his review) and a liberal (Noah) that’s respectful, content-based, and really quite illuminating, then read this as well.
If you’d like to read even more from Voegeli, here’s a book of his that sounds interesting: Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State.
Former federal judge Robert Bork has died today of heart disease.
His name was made into a verb, “to bork,” as in this:
Following Bork’s nomination to the [Supreme] Court [by Reagan in 1987], Sen. Ted Kennedy took to the Senate floor with a strong condemnation of Bork declaring:
“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is””and is often the only””protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy … President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.”
Bork responded, “There was not a line in that speech that was accurate.” In an obituary of Kennedy, The Economist remarked that Bork may well have been correct, “but it worked.” Bork also contended in his best-selling book, The Tempting of America, that the brief prepared for Sen. Joe Biden, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “so thoroughly misrepresented a plain record that it easily qualifies as world class in the category of scurrility.”
Alas, as the Economist said, “it worked.” And it still works, on and on and on, including the “work” of Joe Biden.
Bork was undoubtedly a legal scholar of the highest caliber. Only problem for the left—and it was a big one—was that he wasn’t their scholar.
There are several ironies in Bork’s life and death. One of them, pointed out today by Steven Hayward at Powerline, was that:
…[T]he serious [as opposed to scurrilous] criticism of Bork’s jurisprudence would come from the Right, rather than the Left (though it was not disqualifying for the Court, to be sure). Bork, like Scalia, was a strict textualist, and has little regard for the natural law tradition of the American founding, or its implication, for example, in the Ninth Amendment.
Hayward notes another irony:
…[H]ad Bork been confirmed to the Court, his passing today…would have opened up an appointment for President Obama to name a new Justice and tip the Court to the Left. Instead, the man Reagan put in the seat Bork would have filled, Anthony Kennedy, will carry on, determined, I am reliably told, to serve at least until Obama is gone in part because he was offended by Obama’s demagogic attack on the Citizens United decision that Kennedy wrote.
Perhaps the best known use of the verb to bork occurred in July 1991 at a conference of the National Organization for Women in New York City. Feminist Florynce Kennedy addressed the conference on the importance of defeating the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. She said, “We’re going to bork him. We’re going to kill him politically … This little creep, where did he come from?”
Thomas, of course, is still on the Court. And as for “where the little creep came from,” Ms. Kennedy (who died in 2000) lost the chance to read Thomas’s fine autobiography My Grandfather’s Son, but in the “up-from-poverty-and-terrible-hardship” sweepstakes, Thomas won hands-down over fellow black (and fellow-memoirist) Kennedy.
But back to Bork. Hayward writes of his confirmation hearings that they left the legacy of “a permanently warped judicial confirmation process that now reaches lower judicial appointments.” There are many watersheds in American history; Bork’s non-confirmation was one of them.
RIP.
[NOTE: I have a sneaking suspicion that one of the reasons “bork” became so popular as a verb is the way it sounds.]
There’s still plenty of time to order from Amazon!
And a great big “thank-you” to all who’ve done so through neo-neocon, and all who are about to do so.
A few more suggestions:
Out of ideas? Get an Amazon gift card.
And here are two books I can vouch for, because I own them and love them. They’re coffee-table type art books, but somewhat smaller and significantly less expensive. And yet the quality of the reproductions is excellent for the price, and the choice of paintings is varied (in painter, era, and mood), sometimes surprising, and always satisfying. A good gift for New England and/or Maine aficionados and/or dreamers, or just about anyone who loves beauty.
The second is The Art of Maine in Winter, compiled by the same authors. This one is especially well-suited for gift-giving at this time of year, I think, and some of the paintings are very mysterious and subtle.
I assume that the other books in the series are equally good, although I’ve not seen them. One is entitled Paintings of Maine.
Edward Hopper’s New England is more specialized, since it features a single artist, but if you have an Edward Hopper fan on your gift list, it could be perfect.
[NOTE: Don’t be concerned because only some of them are available from Amazon, and others come through Amazon but are from other sellers. It’s my impression that both categories still qualify under the program.]
[ADDENDUM: I want to call your attention to the fact that our very own commenter “Sgt Mom” is an author whose books are sold through Amazon (and also available there on Kindle). So if you want to benefit both neo-neocon and a member of the commenting community here—and yourself and/or your gift recipients, of course—take a look at Sgt. Mom’s Amazon page. In the comments section to this post she writes:
I have a number of volumes of historical fiction out there, all of them carefully researched, and which honor American values of decency, patriotism, hard work and a belief in the future: To Truckee’s Trail is about a pioneer wagon train party attempting to cross the High Sierras in winter, The Adelsverein Trilogy concerns the German settlements in Texas (Yes, there was a big venture in Germany in the 1840s to bring over farmers and craftsmen to fill up a huge land grant ”“ hardly anyone outside of Texas knows about this ) and Daughter of Texas/Deep in the heart is about the early days in Texas, through the eyes of a woman settler.
This is a good opportunity for me to recommend that you read this law review article from 1994 about “assault weapons” and “semi-automatic” ones and how they do and/or do not differ from other firearms. I’m no gun expert—au contraire—so the technicalities (and any errors or outdated facts) elude me, but it seems to be making some excellent, and usually poorly understood, points.
I also recommend this piece by John Hinderaker on the MSM’s abysmally inaccurate coverage of the Newtown shootings.
[NOTE: I had never heard of the author of the law review article, David Kopel, before, but when I Googled him I found he’s got an interesting list of publications.]
