Let's watch the Democratic debate!

Say what you think and I'll weigh in if I think anything.

UPDATE: I guess I had no thoughts. I almost blogged O'Malley saying "L'etat c'est moi," but decided to wait for the transcript. And Sanders asked Clinton if she'd ever heard of Bill Clinton. Then Hillary said "May the force be with you," which made everyone forget everything else anyone said.

ADDED: I found the O'Malley line in the transcript: "I was the only -- one of only seven states that had a AAA bond rating."

At the Winter Bird Café...

... snuggle up. Talk about what you like. I know there's a debate on at 7 CT. I set the DVR and may get around to it. 3 hours! That's nuts. But settle in, nutty Americans. Feel the Bern. Climb the Hill.

And if you've got to shop, please use The Althouse Amazon Portal.

"Just one other thing — I gotta get this off my chest — Donald Trump is a jerk."

Said the man who also said: "You cannot insult your way to the presidency."

"To choose to live without gossip is to scorn storytelling. And to scorn storytelling is to join the anthill, where there are no secrets to pry open."

Writes the novelist Cynthia Ozick in a NYT column titled "The Novel’s Evil Tongue."

Everything essential to storytelling is explicitly forbidden: Keep your tongue from speaking evil, no bearing false witness, no going up and down as a talebearer among your people.... Under the influence of the evil tongue, 10,000 stories and novels, before and since, have insinuated themselves into our sin-seeking world.... They are made by go-betweens, by whisperers and tattletales, by ironists and miscreants, by jesters and mourners, and always by the fevered bearers of false witness.

Yet even Solomon’s Proverbs, that ancient well of prudence, in one of its seemingly admonitory homilies, reveals — against its intent — a fierce intuition for the shattering force of storytelling: “The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down to a man’s innermost parts.”

A man’s innermost parts! A woman’s innermost parts! Interpret this as you will, it all comes down to the self-conscious and vulnerable organ that humanity once dared (defiantly, subversively) to call Soul — where gossip longs to tread.

The end of the Octopus.

The end of a Madison era.

Here's a picture I took of the great pop-culture character back in 2006:

How the puffy coat — on or off — can kill your kid.

The straps in the car seat are not secure enough if the child is wearing a "puffy" coat — crash test dummies fly out of their seats — but if you take the coat off before strapping him in, you could get in a car accident that puts you in a position where you don't help him, and no one else comes along soon enough, and he freezes to death.

Bernie Sanders immediately filed a lawsuit and that shock-and-awe approach worked.

Interesting!

The presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont filed a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee on Friday, arguing that the party had unfairly suspended the campaign’s access to key voter information. After several tense hours, both sides announced a deal had been reached.

You might have thought you should try to work things out before filing the lawsuit — just let the lawsuit loom in the future as the incentive to settle. Sanders filed immediately, and he got what he wanted, even though it looks as though his campaign had done something quite wrong. The DNC didn't want the heat, and Sanders provided instant, severe heat.

Sanders’s campaign said the DNC had “capitulated” and that Sanders would soon regain access to the data.... Without a quick resolution, the messy public brawl threatened to overshadow Saturday’s third Democratic presidential debate and cast doubt on the DNC’s ability to manage the sophisticated data tools necessary for the party to win the White House next year. And it sparked significant suspicions among Sanders supporters that the party was conspiring to give a boost to Clinton.

DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz rejected that allegation Friday, alleging that Sanders staffers had exploited a software error to essentially “steal” data from Clinton’s campaign....

That may be true, but it didn't mean the DNC could do anything it wanted to punish the Sanders campaign for its bad actions. The suit (in federal court) was based on a contract, and the contract (I'm reading at The Washington Post) required formal notice if one side thinks there's a violation and 10 days to address the claim of violation, so cutting off Sanders's access to the system was also a violation of the contract.

There's a debate tonight, and I wonder if Sanders/Hillary will figure out a way to use this incident.

Sanders, in the last debate, said he was tired of hearing about HC's email, but I wonder if he can't connect the new incident to her old email problem. She maintained a system that was vulnerable and the DNC's system was vulnerable. His people just wandered into the insecure, supposedly private part DNC system, and enemies of the U.S. would have actively tried to hack into her email system. She's not tech-savvy and security-minded enough.

Hillary's argument is that Sanders is dishonest, sneaky, underhanded... and litigious.

The artist Sarah Sole calls her artistic take on Hillary Clinton "libidinal," distinguishing it from "all of the man-love for Obama" — such as Shepard Fairey's HOPE poster.

Rolling Stone explains.

People like Fairey "would project the most sublime, personable, personal aspirations [onto Obama]. He was pure, he was wonderful, and so of course they're going to be disappointed," Sole says. "I don't do that with Hillary. I like Hillary's impurities."...

Sole explains that the painting, "Red Gun," is a play on a photograph of Natalie Wood that ran in Life magazine in the Fifties. "The gun is the phallic power, it's sexual, but it's not eroticizing violence — it's eroticizing the idea of women with power, phallic power," she says.

To Sole, it's sexy. The sexiness of Hillary Clinton was what drew her in. "I just like her swagger. She's got something very butch about her that I like. Part of the delight of Hillary was that I was attracted to her, physically," she says. "And it was fun playing with that, even if I didn't paint well enough to make her into a beautiful woman."

You can see some of the paintings at the link and lots more of them here. You might like them, even if you're laughing at (or with) her "I didn't paint well enough to make her into a beautiful woman."

Here's what I think is the source material alongside "Red Gun":



I like this idea of taking a photograph of one person and redoing it with another person. There's commentary in the difference between the two.

What did the artist mean by "I didn't paint well enough to make her into a beautiful woman"?

HC is beautiful and I didn't do her justice.

To me, HC has an aura of beauty that I can't figure out how to depict visually.

Only a genius could turn that subject matter into a beautiful woman.

I'm also an artist of the verbal realm, intriguing you with all those variations of meaning.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: I think Sole is trying to do something like what Drew Friedman has done so brilliantly. Look at "Warts and All" (and the other Friedman books you'll see at that link). He worked from photographs of celebrities and he sure didn't try to make them beautiful. He leaned into surreal ugliness. Friedman's work appeared in Spy Magazine from 1986 to 1992. When I thought about that I had an a-ha moment:

30% or Republicans and 19% of Democrats said they supported the bombing of Agrabah — which is the fictional place in the cartoon movie "Aladdin."

A new Public Policy Poll revealed.

This isn't a basis for saying Republicans are stupider, except to the extent that it's stupid to be enthusiastic about bombing the enemy and trust that polling firms are asking questions about what they seem to be asking.

Now, the smart answer is to decline to answer either yes or no. You don't need to know the name is from a fictional movie. It's enough to recognize that you don't know Agrabah. The yes + no total for Democrats is 55. For Republicans it's 43.

"I started the Arab Spring. Now death is everywhere, and extremism blooming."

Faida Hamdy, the inspector who confiscated the stall of the vegetable vendor who set himself on fire....

"[W]e must recognize that the world of radical Islam is not just death and destruction. It also encompasses fashion, music, poetry, dream interpretation."

"[J]ihadism offers its adherents a rich cultural universe in which they can immerse themselves," writes Thomas Hegghammer — director of terrorism research at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment — in this column in the NYT, "Militant Jihad’s Softer Side."

When jihadis aren’t fighting... they enjoy storytelling and watching films, cooking and swimming. The social atmosphere... is egalitarian, affectionate and even playful. Jihadi life is emotionally intense, filled with the thrill of combat, the sorrow of loss, the joy of camaraderie and the elation of religious experience....

The Islamic State’s most famous poet is a Syrian woman in her 20s who goes by the name Ahlam al-Nas.... Her most famous collection... contains lines such as “Shake the throne of the cross, and Extinguish the fire of the Zoroastrians / Strike down every adversity, and go reap those heads.”...

In Europe, radicals sometimes wear a combination of sneakers, a Middle Eastern or Pakistani gown and a combat jacket on top... The men often follow Salafi etiquette, for example by carrying a tooth-cleaning twig known as a miswak, wearing nonalcoholic perfume, and avoiding gold jewelry....

"Rahm Emanuel Must Resign/From Laquan McDonald to Homan Square, Rahm has tacitly endorsed police violence."

By the Editors of The Nation.

If he goes, who will fix it? He has the strongest motivation and capacity of anyone. Is symbolism worth more, or do you just not trust him?

"It's like: you and the Tyrannosaurus rex."

What I said when Meade read item #4 on "10 things not to buy in 2016": "Selfie sticks." I was all: "Yeah, if your arm's not long enough...."

"Koenig hypnotically weaves together the accounts of a trusted journalist and her own source inside the Taliban."

"The picture that emerges is a sort of counterweight to Bergdahl’s self-spun capture story: He was found inside or near a nomad tent. Nomads informed the Taliban that a foreigner was in the area. When the Taliban arrived to check it out, they told Bergdahl that they were the police, and he immediately jumped behind their motorcycles, as if seeking protection from them. They called Bergdahl a 'ready-made loaf,' a gift that had fallen into their hands without their having to work for it. Bergdahl fought a little at first, but he was pretty easily subdued. Here we hit our first real point of departure from Bergdahl’s own story. Our first muddying of the narrative...."

"What you get when a piano maker designs a car."

This.

Me, at slide 6: "Whoa! Do you really want that thing between your legs?!"

"Middle-class and higher-income parents see their children as projects in need of careful cultivation..."

"They try to develop their skills through close supervision and organized activities, and teach children to question authority figures and navigate elite institutions. Working-class parents, meanwhile, believe their children will naturally thrive, and give them far greater independence and time for free play. They are taught to be compliant and deferential to adults. There are benefits to both approaches. Working-class children are happier, more independent, whine less and are closer with family members.... Higher-income children are more likely to declare boredom and expect their parents to solve their problems. Yet later on, the more affluent children end up in college and en route to the middle class, while working-class children tend to struggle...."

From "Class Differences in Child-Rearing Are on the Rise" by Claire Cain Miller (in the NYT).

That made me remember "I Don't Care Where My Children Go To College," by Catherine Pearlman, which I read the other day. Pearlman seems to be a middle-class/higher-income person with class envy. She seems to want to adopt the life styles of the working class... though not quite:

I am not going to steal my son and daughter's childhoods so they may wind up at Yale instead of Westchester Community College. I am not going to force them to be who I say they should be by signing them up for every class and making them stick with it. Instead, I am going to sit back and watch them find their own path. I am going to expose them to life and do it as a family. I am going on month-long family vacations in foreign lands and I am not going to worry about how it will look to the football coach or the college counselor. I am going to discuss issues of the day over slow family dinners. And I am going to teach my children that they can be successful doing whatever they want if they follow their dreams and work hard. Going to the best college won't make that happen for them. Giving them the freedom to flourish in their own way in their own time will.

I had to laugh at "I am going on month-long family vacations in foreign lands...."