"I don't have any bad habits, actually" — I said a month ago.

I'm not sure why the subject came up, but someone asked me in the comments if I ever smoked, and I said, "No. I don't have any bad habits, actually."

Does that seem like an arrogant, conceited statement? Someone remembered and brought it up today, deep in the comments to "Does it smell funny in here?," the post about the accusation against Brett Kavanaugh, where I provoked some people by saying — point #4 on a 5-point list — "Why should we Americans accept this man's power over us? He's been portrayed as a super-human paragon, and I don't think that can be the standard for who can be on the Supreme Court. It's dangerous to go looking for paragons. Maybe they've got a hard-to-detect dark side that has driven them to a life of saintly good works."

I don't want the judiciary limited to bizarrely squeakily clean, ultra virtuous people. Too many good candidates won't make the cut. Kavanaugh has seemed wonderfully virtuous, but I don't think all of that is necessary or even desirable in qualifying to be a judge. I want a real person, who can understand real people and make good judgments about human activities, which are full of bad behavior that a goody-2-shoes might assess priggishly. And, as that last sentence — "Maybe they've got a hard-to-detect dark side..." — is meant to say, an overachiever might be overcompensating. I certainly didn't say Brett Kavanaugh looks so virtuous that I assume he's got a dark side. I have no idea about him specifically. I'm just not enthralled by seeming saints. We're all human.

Anyway, this comes from a commenter who calls himself Чикелит (which my translator said is "Chikelit")(scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on "newer" to get to page 2 of the comments and see this):

Ann Althouse said... “Maybe they've got a hard-to-detect dark side that has driven them to a life of saintly good works.”

Althouse recently stated that she has NO bad habits. Perhaps this is a lie. Perhaps she too has a dark side which has driven her to a life of saintly good blogging. For example, I’ve long suspected that there is something terribly racist in her family’s past which drives her acts of white guilt.

I get the joke. Fine. (By the way, the most racist thing in my family that I know is that my paternal grandmother, back in the 1950s, used to say to me, if I wasn't nice about appreciating something, that she "knew a little colored girl" who would like it.)

But the reason I'm blogging this is to delve into the question of habits and how easy it is to say that you have no bad habits.

By definition, a habit it something that you do compulsively/automatically and often, like every day. You don't have to look hard to see your habits. You do them all the time. It's easy to review your typical day and see what your habits are. Then, ask yourself: Are any of these things bad? I look at my day and identify the habits: getting up early, drinking coffee, blogging, eating some food, showing some affection to my husband, and going to bed early. That's about it. None of those things are bad, therefore I have no bad habits. I'm not bragging that I never do anything bad. I'm just talking about habits.

"Readers Accuse Us of Normalizing a Nazi Sympathizer; We Respond."

The NYT has a third article about that one Nazi/"Nazi" it found in Dayton, Ohio. We're already talking about the first 2 articles, the first one, which didn't make much sense, and the second one, in which the author said the editors challenged him to make some sense, but he couldn't. I said:

But why was he important enough to drag into the spotlight in the first place?.... The answer must be that he serves a purpose for you and the NYT. You could put some effort into self-examination: Why are you using him?

In the comments, Matthew Sablan — anticipating the subject matter of the third NYT article — said:

I don't understand. The NYT takes someone everyone thinks is an extremist and does everything they can to make him seem evil and wrong, and people STILL think the NYT is trying to make him look like a regular Joe? They go out of their way to try and downplay his every day Joe-ness, even burying the fact he wasn't even AT Charlottesville.* Anyone who thinks the NYT is defending or promoting Nazis needs to re-read the piece and figure out how they misread it so epicly bad.

So the readers over at the NYT — according to the third article —  found the story offensive:

“How to normalize Nazis 101!” one reader wrote on Twitter. “I’m both shocked and disgusted by this article,” wrote another. “Attempting to ‘normalize’ white supremacist groups – should Never have been printed!”...

But far more were outraged by the article. “You know who had nice manners?” Bess Kalb, a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live, said on Twitter. “The Nazi who shaved my uncle Willie’s head before escorting him into a cement chamber where he locked eyes with children as their lungs filled with poison and they suffocated to death in agony. Too much? Exactly. That’s how you write about Nazis.”

One reader characterized the profile of Hovater as "glowing." Why didn't the NYT pick a more obviously evil American Nazi to profile? It says it didn't intend to "normalize" Hovater but to show how "hate and extremism have become more normal" than we want to think. That is, the NYT claims to be showing what is, and the readers are saying Don't do that. You're helping them. You must keep them as monsters, make them toxic.

The NYT says the idea of the article was to figure out "Who were those people" who marched in Charlottesville last August:

Grabbing some Pussy Riot in Madison, Wisconsin.

Pussy Riot performed not a concert but a Q&A at the Wisconsin Union last night. The Progressive covered it:

Imagine if the colorful, costumed marchers protesting in the streets of Madison against Scott Walker in 2011 were rounded up and shipped off to a penal colony. Putin’s crackdown on dissent in Russia—after an outpouring of post-Soviet free expression—was just as much of a shock. When they started to make pointed critiques of the Putin regime, Pussy Riot caught the brunt of Putin’s backlash....

For my daughters and their friends, who took part in demonstrations against Walker, hearing from these radical young women who went to prison for their beliefs was eye-opening—especially in the wake of the election of Donald Trump....

Pussy Riot members Masha Alyokhina and Basha Bogina talked about standing up against Putin’s repression, why they felt a particular kinship with Wisconsinites during the uprising against Walker, and how they continued rebelling even in prison.

Their music, when they do play, is punk rock, but that didn't stop them from participating, the next day, at the Solidarity Sing Along at the State Capitol in some anti-Scott-Walker folksinging:



One of the Solidarity Singers quotes one of the Pussy Rioters: "She said last night that we have a good culture of rioting."

There are various old posts on this blog about the Solidarity Singers. From April 2013, there's "Solidarity Singers seek recognition as 'Longest continuously running singing political protest.'" There's this video I made of them singing in the Rotunda during the protests of 2011 (with me offering real-time commentary):



Then there was the time I got into what the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called an "altercation": "'Capitol altercation involves Solidarity Singers, political blogger" — i.e. Althouse": " I was standing filming a man who was ranting about how Jesus would be on the anti-Scott Walker side. This man blows a vuvuzela right in my face more than once. He's yelling at a man who is a Christian minister, but was never given much of a chance to say anything. Then a very angry guy comes up and violently snatches my camera, but can't get it out of my hand. He tries a second time, and he also hits me. My son detached the man's hand from mine. Anyway, I have this on video... here."

IN THE COMMENTS: chickelit said: "Pussy Riot made a ridiculous anti-Trump propaganda video...."



I guess they're not the "trigger warning" type of feminist. That video is full of the graphic depiction of sexualized violence against women. I'm sure many people will find it sexually titillating in the old-fashioned way.

"5 stages of GOP grief: Coming to terms with Trump."

The "5 stages of grief" meme is so trite, but this is done well enough to overcome my instinctive aversion to encouraging the old cliché, which, after all, has some real truth to it. Good illustrations, like this, from the "denial" stage:



Remember that, from last summer? Speaking of denial, there was a point when I was refusing to write Trump's name in posts that referred to his potential candidacy. Hard to find those old posts with the key word missing! But by August, I'd moved to open anguish (not really "anger," the official second stage):

I calmly consumed the entire [Trump speech], fell asleep early, and woke up anguished. This man is spending his own money, and he can easily blow a billion dollars on this fabulous ego trip. Who can match him? The others are fading and withering away.

Bargaining, depression, acceptance — those are the next 3 stages. Have I gone through all that? I do tend to get very quickly to acceptance when I believe something is really happening. The thing about the 5 stages is that they were originally about death, and you know you are going to die. You don't know that Donald Trump is going to be President. Why go through all the stages? I'm more about remaining calm most of the time, maintaining perspective, and intermittently getting activated over specific things that I can read, write, and talk about.

IN THE COMMENTS: chickelit somehow remembered that my old posts, refusing to write Trump's name, had the tag "nothing": "Here's the first one which you published as an 'Annagram'":

AND: The next one refers to classic advice from my mother:

"For some reason, I'm dedicating my pre-6-a.m. writing to arguing with chickelit."

I write, just now, deep in the comments thread for "What if the only people who took advantage of an unlimited leave policy were women?"

1. "'2 Thessalonians 3:10-13 is as good a retort as any to the "question" posited by Althouse.'" [Link to St. Paul's epistle added.] "Surely, Paul considered taking care of the household and the children within it as work! You think the reference to 'work' means holding down an income-producing job in the modern sense? That would be a nutty thing to believe."

2. "'Ritmo goes full Titus.'" [Reacting to this.] "No, Titus in his fullness would break free of whatever political obsession had its grip on the thread and give us real relief. You need a wild sense of fun and abandon to begin to replicate Titus."

What happened to that Democrats-regret-their-gender-politics article that topped the NYT page earlier this morning?

Drudge had it at the top of his page last night even before it was available on the NYT page, and it's still at the top of Drudge's left-hand column, with the teaser "NYT PAGE ONE: Dems second-guessing strategy of focusing on women's issues over economy... "

But try to find it on page 1 now. I had to do a word search on the page to find it in fine print under "more news," with the title "Democrats Count on Edge With Women to Limit Losses," which sounds like the opposite of what Drudge saw in the article.

Let's look at the article — which is by Jackie Calmes — and see what's actually in it.

Democrats are nervously counting on an enduring edge among female voters....

So that's the idea in the NYT headline.

Yet... some are second-guessing the party’s strategy of focusing more on issues like abortion and birth control than on jobs and the economy.

And that's the part Drudge extracted.

We get the opinions of a couple Democratic Party pollsters. Geoff Garin says: "If Democrats weren’t running on [issues like abortion and birth control], the situation would be much worse." And Anna Greenberg says: "It’s certainly true that we’d be doing better if we were doing better with women, but I do not see a disproportionate drop with women relative to men." That seems to mean Democrats are losing men at a faster pace than they are losing women. But Greenberg's comment, unlike Garin's, doesn't purport to know whether, overall, emphasis on the female body is a net benefit to Democrats.

All the way down in the second-to-last paragraph, Greenberg is quoted again. She's complaining that Republicans were "deliberately misconstruing" the Democrats' gender politics. She says the term "war on women" is a Republican term for what the Democrats are saying about Republicans.

Yet [Greenberg] and other Democratic strategists complain their party has not effectively espoused a broader economic agenda, when women tell pollsters their top concern is jobs and the economy.

And there's the Drudge take on the meaning of the article, buried at the bottom of the article, with no direct quotes and no names for the "other Democratic strategists" who, apparently, "complain."

IN THE COMMENTS: After Jake asked "Since when is 'War on Women' a Republican term?," chickelit "What does the venerable Althouse archive say? When did Althouse first pick up the term and in what context?" Back in 2012, I traced the present-day use of the term to a February 2011 NYT editorial, "The War on Women":

These are treacherous times for women’s reproductive rights and access to essential health care. House Republicans mistakenly believe they have a mandate to drastically scale back both even as abortion warfare is accelerating in the states. To stop them, President Obama’s firm leadership will be crucial. So will the rising voices of alarmed Americans.

UPDATE: The "Democrats Count on Edge" story now — at 4 Eastern Time, November 1 — has no link on the front page at all, and when I got to the page of links on "U.S. Politics," I have to scroll down the space of 2 screens before I see the story. 

"Those H's and O's would love to get together and quench, making water, leaving the naked nitrogens to couple..."

"... making N2 which is essentially air. The chemical structure of ammonium nitrate is a depiction of air separating water. We never hear about spontaneous explosions of ammonium nitrate. Why is that?"

Answering that question and explaining why fertilizer bombs work ("because they do make air and water from ammonium nitrate").

"Things I Learned in My Twenty-Four Hour Althouse Comment Withdrawal."

From betamax3000 (at 12 midnight):

• the Shakes -- they Get Real Bad;

• Twenty-Four Hours is A Long Period of Time When You Deny Yourself;

• the Baby Spiders are Real;

• I Love the Commenters: Read All the Posts, All Day, Tongue Bound, and Realized in Retrospect that -- Perhaps -- I Occasionally Suck Too Much Oxygen From the Room;

• Still Don't Quite Get Central Time;

• the Scientology "No Fear' Paradigm Crosses Neuropaths with Cruel Neutrality: when I get it Down to Four Paragraphs I Will Thrust it Sideways Into a Thread about Gabe Kaplan;

• it -- Technically -- is Not a Burning Sensation.

I do not discount the role of  El Pollo Raylan's summoning: "Beta come back!" — which took us to another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.

Lem sighed relief:

I think I can say tonight that we are in Betamax debt. From now on it will be possible to risk loosing wifi knowing that it is a survivable non-event thanks to the courage and determination of one man. and his name is Betamax.

And:

Still Don't Quite Get Central Time;

Its like Althouse politics, I think.

That's exactly right. And then betamax3000 said:

At the Metaphorical Althouse Denny's I want More hash Browns and Non-Dairy Creamer: I am building a Mountain.

And I say: This means something. This is important.



Loose the WiFi!

"Tiny mites crawling unnoticed over Our Skin. Small nibbles, less then the slightest pinprick..."

"... Baby Spiders while you Sleep. Bowels full of half-digested Cheerios. Microscopic Creatures swarming In the Bathroom, Always, and You With your Pants Down. Sweat pressed into the Bed Sheets in which you will Cover Yourself Again. Drool on the Pillow. Cat Drool on the Pillow. Wash your Hands with the Same Bar of Soap That Someone has Used to Clean Horrible Things from Their Hands. Toothbrush unprotected in the same Room with the Toilet. The Plunger in the Corner, with Memories of What Has Been Plunged. Dry off from the Shower with the Towel from the Day Before, tiny flakes of Skin now Damp and Reapplied. Washcloth. Public restaurant with Sneezed Microbes Hanging in the Air, Settling on your Dinner Plate. Don't Even Think about the Horrors hiding in the Food on That Plate. A Solitary Hair from the Cook's Beard, the Second-Hand Steroids in the Beef. Not Every Employee Washes their Hands. The Guy in the Kitchen washing the Silverware in a Sink of oily brackish water, perhaps with the Faint Residue of the Drain Cleaner used to clear the Reoccurring Clogs. Band-Aid on the Finger loosening in Same Water. Table considered clean by a Quick Wipe with a Dish-Towel Wet From the Tables Wiped Before. Air Ducts lined with Dust and Daddy-Long Legs. More baby Spiders."

A comments contribution — from betamax3000 — in yesterday's "Healthing" post (which was about the delusional spraying of disinfectant all over the house).

El Pollo Raylan offers the Rod Serling reading here.

"I love when you talk dirty!"

A dialogue between 2 men in last night's open thread "At the Saturday Peony Café":

Palladian: A few years ago, "peony" was a very popular note in perfumery. Many perfumes used this note, which was generally done as a big, fluorescent, loud, fruity-flower odor of no particular interest. Givaudan makes 2-cyclohexylidene-2-phenylacetonitrile, an aroma chemical they call Peonile, which I always find hilarious. Say it: Peonile.

El Pollo Raylan: The name is apt. I see lots of structural rigidity in the linear nitrile portion which has a nitrogenous lone pair at one end. Then there's the cyclohexylidene portion which is quasi-floppy, but made stiffer by attachment to the olefinic core. The phenyl is of course rigid except for its rotational degree of freedom.

Palladian: I love when you talk dirty!

Also in the comments, a dialogue between 2 women:

Freeman Hunt: We had some new tile installed in our kitchen this week. One afternoon the installers washed their tools outside and left without coming back in. Because they did not come back in, they forgot to turn off their radio. The radio was across the newly laid tile that we were forbidden to walk upon. So we listened to popular, contemporary country music all that evening and for three hours the next morning. Heh. (That story is much funnier to people who know me in real life. I don't listen to anything in the background. Ever. No television. No music. Nothing. I only turn something on if I want to listen to it actively.)

Synova: I don't listen to "background" anything either. I can see you standing at the edge of the tile... yearning.

Freeman Hunt: "yearning"... Perfect word.

Intruding on this perfectly female dialogue was the aforequoted Palladian: "That's what a handgun and good aim are for."

Also in the vicinity was another man, Lem. Unlike Palladian, he wasn't commenting on the music and yearning, at least not directly. He just told his own story — "We went to see a new friend perform at a local establishment and I took a picture of a sign near the entrance" — and showed us this:

"[P]eople who are infatuated with government... have no realistic idea of what an awful husband the government really is."

I said at the end of that post about how the government should pay people to stay home and cook "wholesome, healthy meals" in a program funded with a tax on "harmful foods." I'm starting a new post to highlight some of the great comments.

BDNYC said:

If your wife doesn't fuck you enough, there should be a government program, financed by taxing prostitutes and pronographers, which encourages marital sex by paying wives to have sex on a nightly basis. It will make marriages happier, which will help the economy. There will be a multiplier effect. Or something.

Mogget said:

How do you tell the government you have a headache when it wants to fuck you?

El Pollo Raylan said:

Government is a terrible husband because:

(a) He's a polygamist: e pluribus unions are the norm: he's not looking out for you but your neighbor as well.

(b) He's a terrible lover: his IRS has an anal fetish.

(c) He's a pedophile--unabashedly interested in your kids at ever earlier ages.

(d) He can't control his own urges which means that another government will ultimately have to control him.

(e) He is a gun nut, buying and hoarding ammunition like it's going out of style.

ADDED: betamax3000 has a series of comments about "Government Husband." Here are a few:

Government Husband says you Look Sexy Tonight: let's make Sweet, Sweet Taxes.

Government Husband will Tell you What you are Making For Dinner tonight.

Government Husband looks like Harry Reid, Naked. Give Government Husband a Little Sugar.

Government Husband didn't Mean It, baby. He just gets Angry at the Middle East.

On occasion Government Husband likes to have Anonymous Sex with Foreign Governments in the Public Restrooms at Parks. Do Not question Government Husband's Needs.

Government Husband thinks it is Cute when you and your little friends play 'Democracy.'

Insincere "Jesus."

A topic this morning at Meadhouse is the insincere use of "Jesus" in pop songs circa 1970.

1. "Jesus Is Just Alright."

The song's title makes use of the American slang term "all-right," which during the 1960s was used to describe something that was considered 'cool' or very good. The song has been covered by a number of bands and artists over the years, including The Byrds, Underground Sunshine, The Doobie Brothers, Alexis Korner, The Ventures, DC Talk, Shelagh McDonald, and Robert Randolph (featuring Eric Clapton).

2. "Spirit in the Sky."

[Norman] Greenbaum... was inspired to write the song after watching Porter Wagoner on TV singing a gospel song. Greenbaum later said : "I thought, 'Yeah, I could do that,' knowing nothing about gospel music, so I sat down and wrote my own gospel song. It came easy. I wrote the words in 15 minutes." "Spirit in the Sky" contains lyrics about the afterlife, making several references to Jesus, although Greenbaum himself is Jewish.

3. "One Toke Over the Line." ("One toke over the line, sweet Jesus...")

The catchy single, "One Toke Over the Line," peaked at #10 (#5 in Canada), garnering notice from Spiro Agnew for what he saw as its subversiveness. Ironically, the song was performed (by Gail Farrell and Dick Dale) on The Lawrence Welk Show, which billed it a "modern spiritual."[2] The song is notably mentioned in the opening of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and was notably "sung" by Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) in the film of the same name. "

Any more examples? Help me out here. The topic is: Insincere (or arguably insincere) references to Jesus in popular songs in the days before Christian rock was a thing.

I know there's also "The Christian Life" on the Byrds album "Sweetheart of the Rodeo," — which came out a year before the album with "Jesus Is Just Alright" — but I'm not putting it on the list, because I don't think it was played on the radio. The Byrds suddenly switched from psychedelic rock to country music, which was a strange thing to do at the time and it didn't feel like a bid for another hit record.

"'Christian Life' was performed tongue-in-cheek," said [Chris] Hillman. "After Roger [McGuinn] sang it, he admitted to going overboard with the accent. Roger was from Chicago and here he is, doing this heavy, syrupy country twang."

My buddies shun me since I turned to Jesus
They say I'm missing a whole world of fun
I live without them and walk in the light
I like the Christian life

MORE: Maybe it all started with the Paul Newman movie "Cool Hand Luke" — "I don't care if it rains or freezes/Long as I have my plastic Jesus/Riding on the dashboard of my car...":



IN THE COMMENTS: Fr. Denis Lemieux cites "Suzanne," by Leonard Cohen:

"Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water, and he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower, and when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him, he said all men shall be sailors then, until the sea shall free them...'

Not exactly insincere... more a use of Jesus outside of orthodox Christian theology, I guess. I find this a fascinating topic, though - intersection of faith and culture.

I agree that this is not insincere. It is mysterious/mystical... and that is religious. Suzanne herself explains:

BBC's Kate Saunders: Could you describe one of the typical evenings that you spent with Leonard Cohen at the time the song was written?

Suzanne: Oh yes. I would always light a candle and serve tea and it would be quiet for several minutes, then we would speak. And I would speak about life and poetry and we’d share ideas.

Saunders: So it really was the tea and oranges that are in the song?

Suzanne: Very definitely, very definitely, and the candle, who I named Anastasia, the flame of the candle was Anastasia to me. Don’t ask me why. It just was a spiritual moment that I had with the lightening of the candle. And I may or may not have spoken to Leonard about, you know I did pray to Christ, to Jesus Christ and to St. Joan at the time, and still do.

Saunders: And that was something you shared, both of you?

Suzanne: Yes, and I guess he retained that.

And El Pollo Real prompts me to include Bob Dylan on this list, but I refuse, because I don't think Dylan was insincere about Jesus — not on "Slow Train Coming" and not on earlier references: "Even Jesus would never forgive what you do" ("Masters of War" on "Freewheelin'"), "Jesus Christ was betrayed by a kiss" ("With God On Our Side," on "The Times They Are A-Changin'"), "You know they refused Jesus, too" ("Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," on "Bringing It All Back Home").

"Climate changes and/or overgrazing around 8000 BC began to desiccate the pastoral lands of Egypt, forming the Sahara."

"Early tribal peoples migrated to the Nile River where they developed a settled agricultural economy and more centralized society."

What would have happened in Egypt — today's "History of" country — and in the rest of the history of the world, if those early people had controlled their greedy grazing and not anthropogenerated the Sahara Desert?



IN THE COMMENTS: chickelit said:

Grass guzzlers caused the Sahara. Got it.

Michelle Obama does not know how to kiss up to people in Wisconsin.

Yesterday in Racine, she began with: "For the next 16 days, coming here to Racine is the closest thing I'm going to get to being at home in Chicago, so you know I'm happy."

People in Wisconsin tend to exhibit antagonism toward Illinois, and I don't think they enjoy hearing that what's nice about Wisconsin is that it's close to Chicago. There's a word for it: FIB.

By the way, what is Michelle wearing? It looks like something designed by Dmitry of "Project Runway."

IN THE COMMENTS: chickelit said:

She pronounced "Racine" as "RAY-seen." I grew up pronouncing it "RUH-seen"

I said:

Remember when John Kerry came to Wisconsin and mispronounced "brat."

From a Straight Dope forum on the topic of how to say "Racine":

Wisconsinite born and raised; I pronounce it "Ruh-seen." My Chicago-suburban born-and-raised husband, who spent a lot of time in Wisconsin, calls it "Ray-seen."

This guide to Wisconsin pronunciation has "Ruh-seen." on the audio but also: "Locals argue between RAY-seen and ruh-SEEN." Miscellaneous Racine information:

In 1887, malted milk was invented by William Horlick in Racine. The garbage disposal was invented in 1927 by architect John Hammes of Racine.

Also at the Straight Dope forum: "I thought this was the playwright Racine, so I voted the second..." The French influence! Well, Racine was, in fact, settled by the French:

On October 10, 1699, a fleet of eight canoes bearing a party of French explorers entered the mouth of Root River. These were the first Europeans known to visit what is now Racine County. Led by Jonathan Paradise, they founded a trading post in the area that eventually became a small settlement on Lake Michigan near where the Root River empties into Lake Michigan. "Racine" is French for "root."

Both of the argued-for pronunciations are wrong if you want to go with the French. The first syllable "a" should be more like the "a" in "cat" (and not "brat"!).

AND: Commenter Mr. D said:

She said "Ray-seen" because that's how Chicagoans pronounce the name of Racine Avenue in Chicago. They used to call the Chicago Cardinals football team the Ray-seen Cardinals because their field was on Racine Avenue.

Ah-ha!

Art heist in Rotterdam.

Stolen: Pablo Picasso’s 1971 “Harlequin Head”; Claude Monet’s 1901 “Waterloo Bridge, London” and “Charing Cross Bridge, London”; Henri Matisse’s 1919 “Reading Girl in White and Yellow”; Paul Gauguin’s 1898 “Girl in Front of Open Window”; Meyer de Haan’s “Self-Portrait,” around 1890, and Lucian Freud’s 2002 work “Woman with Eyes Closed.”

Marinello said the thieves have limited options available, such as seeking a ransom from the owners, the museum or the insurers. They could conceivably sell the paintings in the criminal market too, though any sale would likely be a small fraction of their potential auction value.

The problem selling these things is obviously not protection enough to keep thieves from bothering.



IN THE COMMENTS: chickelit said:

From the link: the idea that an unscrupulous private investor might have commissioned the works’ theft was far-fetched. 'That’s something that comes from Hollywood movies,' he said.

Should they blame a Hollywood video or lax security?

UPDATE: Confession of destruction.

"I'd like to finish the week without Scott's dick in my ear, but until captain douche-nozzle is recalled..."

"I'll drink and stew and become more resolute in my hate directed at this prick."

A sample of the discourse over in the Isthmus forum, where Madisonians bemoan the newly signed Wisconsin law that repealed the 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act.

MEANWHILE: In the comments section of last night's post "The Democrats' War on Women," a couple commenters engage in sexist wordplay about Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch (who, like Walker, faces recall). A commenter referred to "Walker and his 'minions'" and chickenlittle quipped "What about all the filly minions like Kleefisch? Do you want to filet them too?" and leslyn said "How do you filet a filly??" This portrayal of a woman as meat called to mind the infamous Hustler magazine cover (showing a woman's body fed through a meat grinder). I said:

"How do you filet a filly??"

Said, about Rebecca Kleefisch, by a female commenter who probably regards herself as a feminist. That image is one of sexual violence.

You compare an adult woman to a juvenile animal. You refer to slicing into her dead (animal) body, prepping her for cooking.

But the woman you revile is conservative, so maybe you didn't notice.

If you think you are a feminist, you are a fake one, really a lefty or a Democrat, and your partisan politics comes first.

Go stand over there will Bill Clinton.

Leslyn defended herself this way:

Oh for goodness sake, Althouse, "how do you filet a filly" was A PLAY ON WORDS on CHICKENLITTLE'S comment. Which you'd have recognized were you not humorless.

And get off the "feminist" rant already. To use a METAPHOR, you jump both sides of the fence.

My response:

I saw the joke. That is was a joke is irrelevant to my point.

Would you like me to Google "sexist jokes" for you?

Try making racist jokes out in public and see how far "it was humor" gets you.

Picture a filleted young horse. Picture a woman in a similar condition. Picture a particular named woman in that condition.

Now, is that funny?

Remember when Rush Limbaugh portrayed Sandra Fluke as a prostitute and said we should have sex tapes of her on the internet?

How funny was that?

Now... go on with your explanations about why you are really not a hypocrite.

Alternatively, concede. It might be the better option.

Being a feminist is hard. You have to be consistent. Take the challenge.

Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan.

At the town hall meeting in Middleton, Wisconsin this evening, there was a big crowd:



With an overflow room:



I was surprised how short Romney is. On line, I see his height listed as 6'2". In person, he looked about 5'9".

Anyway... the team of Romney and Ryan was excellent. They answered questions from people as equal partners — some deference to Romney, but basically equals. Ryan is a terrific speaker, and he got more applause than Romney a couple times. Hearing them answer the same question, one after the other, I kept thinking Ryan is the stronger of the 2. And that's not to say Romney was unappealing, just less intense.

Surely, Romney will pick Ryan as his VP. Right?

I had the feeling there were 2 future Presidents in the room.

IN THE COMMENTS: chickenlittle says "Head size is an ongoing theme at Althouse" and links to this old post where I quote Tina Brown:

The heads of world-class celebrities literally seem to enlarge. Hillary Clinton's, for instance, has grown enormously since she was the mere wife of the governor of Arkansas. It nods when she talks to you like a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. The years of limelight so inflated the circumference of Jackie O's cranium, it seemed her real face must be concealed by an oversized Halloween mask. If you looked into her eyes, you could see her in there somewhere, screaming.

Absurd hyperventilating about Romney's not completely quick journey toward the GOP nomination.

I'm talking about stuff like this:

A Super Tuesday Nailbiter Puts Romney on His Heels

With a shockingly thin margin in Ohio, Mitt Romney has a shaky Super Tuesday and Rick Santorum claims a moral victory.

But then... that's the one I linked to. You can see why they do it. Sensationalism. It's embarrassing, but it's a way of life in the media.

IN THE COMMENTS: chickenlittle said:

I don't quite fathom the "put on his heels" idiom. Does it mean like making a dog heel? Does mean put on woman's heels? Or it is a "round heels" reference?

Romney said he wasn't going to set his hair on fire, and I don't think he's going to don stilettos. "Round heels" is an old-fashioned expression signifying women who are easy to tip over. Rush Limbaugh resurrected it in one of his Sandra Fluke rants last week. ("OK, so, she’s not a slut. She’s round-heeled.")

I don't think Romney is cooling his heels or taking to his heels or showing a clean pair of heels. He's certainly not hairy at the heel. ("The Colonel delivered himself of the opinion that Godfrey Burrows was slightly hairy at the heel, a pronouncement which baffled Poirot completely.")

And it's got nothing to do with that Marvin Gaye song "Sexual Heeling." (Arf!)

I think the relevant idiom the headline writer intended to approximate is: rock back on one's heels. I'm visualizing a comics version of Mitt Romney, dramatically angled backwards. Aw! In my mind's eye, he looks just like Dagwood. And Ann is Blondie. 

ADDED: For Dylan fans:

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship
My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip
My toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin’
 
Seen you turn the corner, seen your boot heels spark
Seen you in the daylight, and watched you in the dark

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you
And then he kneels
He crosses himself
And then he clicks his high heels

You have slayed me, you have made me
I got to laugh halfways off my heels
I got to know, babe, will you surround me?
So I can tell if I’m really real

WaPo's Carter Eskew says that last night Romney called Newt “an instrument of the left.”

He puts that in quotes, like Romney said those words. But we have listened and relistened to Romney's speech, and I have Googled and searched in the news of the last day, and the only place I can find that "instrument of the left" business is in Eskew's own blog post, which begins...

Pinch me. I think I’m having a rare and racy Democratic dream... The most beatable Republican has just made it a race.

Okay. You're having a wet dream, but you're writing in the Washington Post. Wake up and get your quotes straight.

This is Mitt Romney’s moment of truth... He will need to adapt and re-tool, and he will need to do better than tonight when he called Newt, “an instrument of the left.”

Maybe Eskew was taking notes during Romney's speech and paraphrased something that he later believed was a direct quote. But it's not even a good paraphrase of anything in the speech. It bears some resemblance to this from Romney:

"Our president has divided the nation, engaged in class warfare and attacked the free-enterprise system that has made America the economic envy of the world. We cannot defeat that president with a candidate who has joined in that very assault on free enterprise."

Romney doesn't name Gingrich there, but let's assume Gingrich is the "candidate." And you might say that the material about class warfare and the attack/assault on free enterprise equates with "the left." You still can't find anything that accuses Gingrich of becoming "an instrument of the left." Romney only says he's "joined" them in their assault, not that he's become their tool.

I don't know whether Romney should intensify his attack on Gingrich that way. (Should he?) But it irks me to see the Washington Post throwing out a bogus quote (assuming that's what it is). I hate the idea of crap like that going viral. Meade detected the first signs of viral infection over in the Isthmus forum. He pointed out the problem, and the response there was basically: Hey, it's in the Washington Post. If it were wrong, they'd correct it.

Would they?

ADDED: "Carter Eskew... was the chief strategist for the Gore 2000 presidential campaign...."

IN THE COMMENTS: chickenlittle said:

Eskew is askew. Eschew Eskew.

"It's not a protest without Ben."

Thinking about Ben Masel, the Madison activist who died yesterday, I looked back at his old comments on this blog. The first one, in July 2006, was on a post about the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin. Ben said:

Advice for the 1st time user of psilocybin or other psychedelics...

Go to the woods with one or more folks you like and trust. Ideally, deep enough into the National Forest that no-one will care if you take your clothes off.

At least one of the group should not consume. Only this individual should carry a cell phone.

Start with 1/4 of the suggested dose, wait to see your reaction, then, if favorable, take the rest.

Just because your first trip was wonderful, do not repeat the experience inmmediately. Space by at least a month.

I found another drug-related one. (Drug legalization was a big issue for Ben.) I'd blogged about accepting Ben's invitation to join the Facebook group "I'm proud to say that LSD-25 has contributed positively to my life," and he said:

Kudos on the courage to accept the invite. As yet, none of the "A list' lefty bloggers I simultaneously invited have signed on.

That's some high-level, drug-related kudos. Note, as I noted then, that you don't have to have taken LSD to have benefited from it. I loved the psychedelic music and art and many aspects of the hippie culture that had something to do with LSD.

Then there were the more clearly political things. In February 2007, I was saying what I thought about presidential candidates hiring bloggers, and Ben said: "I'm not hiring any house bloggers for my 2012 Senate campaign, as I prefer to be lambasted for my own scurillous posts." He really would have run too.

In August 2008, I put up a photograph of the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda and commented on its visual beauty. Ben commented:

Besides the look, there's the acoustics. The building went up just before electric amplification, and there's patterns on the floor directing speakers to the sweet spots.

I once heckled a Tommy speech, much louder than he was with amplification. Whoever placed the now permanently installed speakers had no idea.

Those acoustics played a huge part in the protests that took place in the rotunda this year. When I saw Ben a few weeks ago, he was extolling those magnificent acoustics, which make free speech in the rotunda uniquely valuable. It's not enough to say there's somewhere else where you can protest. This is the place. (Tommy, of course, is Tommy Thompson.)

March 19, 2007, I blogged a couple long, funny videos by Uncle Jimbo, who was covering some Madison anti-war rally, and Ben said: "I'll accept jimbo's piece as goodnatured fun, and appreciate he gave me the last word, but making the same wisecrack about me twice shows a deficiency of creativity."

Here: I've pinpointed the wisecrack:



Risking a deficiency of creativity, let me repeat that wisecrack, once more, with feeling: "It's not a protest without Ben."

***

Yesterday, we were talking about Ben, and chickelit said:

Masel was convicted in 1976, of assault, for spitting on U.S. Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson.

I think one had to live in Madison then to appreciate how outrageous that was even then.

And Harry Phartz said:

I did live in Madison then and pardon me for telling this great story one more time, but...

Masel got arrested for the famous spittle deposition on Scoop Jackson and managed to get released on bail fast enough that on primary Tuesday he was out and on the streets making noise. I was walking to class along Lake Street that morning, ready to turn up the Library Mall to the campus when I see on the NE corner of Lake and State, Ben Masel in a sandwich board sign urging people to write him in as candidate for President. He was right there in front of what was then Rennebohm's Drugstore as I passed and he exorted the passersby "A vote for me is a spit on all candidates!"