Whitney Houston.

RIP.

She had the... perfect voice, and the perfect image: a gorgeous singer who had sex appeal but was never overtly sexual, who maintained perfect poise....

But by the end of her career, Houston became a stunning cautionary tale of the toll of drug use. Her album sales plummeted and the hits stopped coming; her once serene image was shattered by a wild demeanor and bizarre public appearances....

Very sad.

ADDED: The first video

In the Wisconsin Capitol today, 1 year after Scott Walker touched off the protests.

"Shameless pigs!"

ADDED: The second half of that short video is shot from behind the Veterans Memorial. It was just about a year ago — February 25th to be exact — that Meade and I tangled with protesters over the treatment of that memorial. Here's what it looked like that day.

"It's gonna sound horrible for me to say money is meaningless..."

"... but everyone's like: 'What are you gonna do now, now that you have all this money and freedom?'... I did everything I wanted to when I had nothing. Everyone's like: 'Well, what are you gonna do now?' and I'm like, I'm still gonna do whatever I want except more people are just gonna bother me now."

It was a year ago today that Scott Walker announced the budget reform...

... that touched off the massive protests.

We stopped by the Capitol today... but not during a planned demonstration between 12 and 2. I talked to a cop who said there had been a few people there. Here's how it looked to us:





Note the bride posing in the arch at the top of the second photo. That has nothing to do with Scott Walker. It's just the usual wedding photography that happens all the time in the Capitol.

Mitt Romney wins the Maine caucuses.

With 39%. Paul 36%. Santorum 18%. Gingrich 6%.

(Transcribed from the TV announcement.)

"There is nobody in this country who got sex on their own. Nobody. You got elected president out there - good for you."

"But I want to be clear. You floated your rubber ducks in bathtubs the rest of us paid for. You hired interns the rest of us paid to indoctrinate. You were safe in a swimming pool that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that Jackie would return home suddenly, and ruin everything... Now look. You built Camelot and it turned into something terrific. Great idea - God bless! Be a hunk in it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a few of those Cuban cigars and leave them in the Oval Office for the next kid who comes along."

Meade, commenting on the post about JFK and his 19-year-old intern.

ADDED: In case you don't recognize the source for this satire, it's this.

Did you hear about President JFK and the 19-year-old? They took lots of baths where they played with rubber duckies.

Mimi Alford tells her tale, and she didn't call it rape, even though some of her friends prompted her with that word. She says that even at the point when the President overwhelmed her and took her virginity on Jackie's bed, she felt "the thrill of being desired." After that first encounter he was "attentive.. gentlemanly ... [and sometimes] seductive." Their "sexual relationship was varied and fun, and we spent an inordinate amount of time taking baths together, turning his elegant bathroom into our own mini-spa."

The only discordant note was the yellow rubber ducks, which a friend had sent him. Every time the President saw those ducks, he’d become irresistibly playful.

We named them after his family members, made up stories about them, and often set them racing from one end of the tub to other. It was part of his charm that he was a serious, sophisticated man with extraordinary responsibilities, yet willing to be completely silly.

Sounds like they had a fine time together. She was sleeping over all night when Jackie was out of town:

I was so pleased with myself at being chosen by the President that I didn’t feel self-conscious at all about wearing the same clothes at work two days in a row.

If my office mates noticed, I didn’t care. I felt invulnerable, as if I were cloaked with the President’s power.

What a trip. A power trip. Too bad for those other women (and men) who were not chosen. Did Alford wait until these inconvenient women passed away to preen about her powerful chosen-one status?

It shames me to admit that I don’t recall feeling any guilt. In my 19-year-old mind, I wasn’t invading the Kennedys’ marriage; I was merely occupying the President’s time when his wife was away. If he wasn’t troubled, why should I be? It was hardly by chance that in the 18 months I knew him, I never once met his wife.

Isn't it funny that the "19-year-old mind" came up with exactly the same set of trite justifications that almost every lover of a married man/woman comes up with if they don't want to admit they know it's wrong?

As the summer wore on, I was pulled deeper into his personal orbit. But despite the increasing level of familiarity between us, I never rose above being the obedient partner in our relationship.

Even in our most intimate moments, I called him Mr President. To do otherwise would have seemed inappropriate.

Inappropriate... and way less sexy. And speaking of obedience, there's the dirtiest story, the one where she gives a blow job to Dave Powers, the President’s special assistant after JFK whispers to her "Mr Powers looks a little tense — would you take care of it?"

I don’t think the President thought I’d do it, but I’m ashamed to say that I did.... Perhaps I was carried away by a spirit of playfulness.

Later, she realized it was sordid, and JFK apologized, but nevertheless tried it again, asking her to "take care of my baby brother" — that is, Teddy.

Over at The New Republic, Timothy Noah, absorbing the blow-job incident, calls JFK a "monster."

What do you think?
	Noah's right, he was a monster to do those things.
	It's complex, and JFK isn't around to tell us what domination and submission games they played.
	She was an adult, she consented, and she was callous toward Jackie (and her coworkers).
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: "The rubber swan is mine" is a punchline from Vaughn Meader's "The First Family" album — a big hit comedy record at the time — in a segment in which Meader as JFK explains whose bath toys are whose. (Thanks to Hagar in the comments for the tip.) (I note that "schwanz" is slang for penis, so I wonder if Meader was in on the joke of JFK with his toys in the bath.)

The GOP race "is just a mess."

Jonah Goldberg finds "the prospect of any of them becoming the nominee worrisome and hard to imagine":

The lamentations of Team Romney count for little. They prattle about low turnout, as if the “front-runner’s” failure to excite the base is an asset....

Team Santorum understandably wants everyone to believe that this was a huge endorsement of their guy’s message and candidacy....

The single biggest factor in this campaign remains the fact that the base of the GOP is uncomfortable with Romney and refuses to believe that it can’t do better than the guy who invented Romneycare and talks to conservatives like he’s reading from a right-wing Berlitz phrasebook....

Santorum... is honestly and forthrightly committed to using government to realize his moral vision for America.... But... he is not the one the tea partiers have been waiting for.

Goldberg's reduced to dreaming of a brokered convention.

"More than a million petitions were submitted this month to force a recall election for Gov. Scott Walker."

So says the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in a sidebar to its article, published yesterday, about Scott Walker's "hero's reception" at the Conservative Political Action Conference last night.

First of all, the petitions were submitted last month, but more importantly, there's no way "more than a million petitions were submitted." There's a claim that the petitions contain more than a million signatures, but there are multiple signatures per petition, and the calculation that there are more than a million signatures is based on the assumption that there are an average of 6+ signatures per petition.

[A]ccording to the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board we do know 152,336 Scott Walker recall petition pages were turned in two weeks ago.

152,336 is a lot less than "more than a million." But even if the Journal Sentinel had said "signatures" instead of "petitions," it should not have flatly stated "more than a million petitions were submitted." We have yet to see an accurate count of the number of signatures. And that's quite apart from the question of duplicate/fake/ineligible signatures.

The number of claimed signatures is high presumably to make Walker supporters give up on trying to prove that there aren't enough signatures. Now, perhaps they should give up — not because it's hopeless, but because the Walker opponents don't have a good candidate to field. It's quite bizarre, all the work they've done campaigning for blank-to-be-filled-in-later. And if the candidate is Kathleen Falk, Walker's already showing us how effective he will be against her:

"She's basically saying she's bought and paid for by the unions. I mean even the other Democrats are hesitant to say that they're going to veto something," Walker said....

Read the article at that last link for background on the veto demand, the pledge, and the endorsement. But back to the first link, the "hero's welcome" article about Walker's CPAC speech:

"When we prevail [in the recall election], it will send a powerful message to every politician in America, that if you stand up and do the right thing, if you tackle the tough challenges, if you make the tough choices, there will be men and women in every state and every part of this country who will stand up shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm with you," he said....

"Collective bargaining is not a right. In the public sector, collective bargaining is an expensive entitlement."...

Introducing the governor, [National GOP chairman Reince Priebus] said of the Wisconsin fight: "The public union bosses are angry and refuse to go down without a fight. They're pulling out every trick in the book, because after all, hornets are always angriest when you try to destroy their nests."

(Mixed metaphor: Hornets don't have books.)

ADDED: Here's video of 2 and a half minutes of the speech.

"The bishops note that the Obama administration never even bothered to contact them to discover what their true objections are, and what would satisfy them."

"The White House simply presumed to know church business better than the bishops and offered an 'accommodation' that is anything but.  In fact, that sounds a lot like the process that produced this mandate in the first place."

Writes Ed Morrissey, flailing in the trap Obama set.

Note to conservatives: When you get people thinking about abortion, you may very well win. If the liberals drag you back over the line before conception — your when-life-begins line — and make the subject contraception, you'll probably lose.

"Obama Punks the GOP on Contraception."

That's the spin from Slate's Amanda Marcotte (and I think she may have it right!):

After two solid weeks of Republicans rapidly escalating attacks on contraception access under the banner of "religous [sic] freedom," Obama finally announced what the White House is proposing an accomodation [sic] of religiously affiliated employers who don't want to offer birth control coverage as part of their insurance plans. 

Yeah, rotten spelling/proofreading, but give her a chance. Normally, I can't stand Marcotte, but I think she's homing in on the truth:

In those situations, the insurance companies will have to reach out directly to employees and offer contraception coverage for free, without going through the employer. Insurance companies are down with the plan... contraception actually saves insurance companies money, since it's cheaper than abortion and far cheaper than childbirth. 

Remember the economies of the "blue pill" and the don't-call-them-death-panels for end-of-life human beings? There's lots of money to be saved at life's onset. Insurance companies (and the safety-net-providing government) stand to save lots of money through pregnancy — and child! — prevention. It makes economic sense to incentivize the use of birth control. A woman has a right to choose whether to have children or not, but the government may nudge the woman toward its preferred choice. It is good economic policy to push women to avoid having babies until they've got a stable relationship and a solid economic foundation, so clear the path to the relatively inexpensive pills and poisons and devices that keep the sperm and the egg from acquiring a will of their own.

Another point, which Marcotte doesn't make, is that many, many healthy individuals are about to be forced to spend thousands of dollars a year on health insurance, and there needs to be a decent flow of seemingly "free" things so that they don't get too upset about it. Birth control is perfect for this. It's something women use — continually — when they are perfectly healthy. Face it: Birth control is about preventing an important bodily function from working. Now, the birth control won't be free, because everyone paying into the insurance pool will be covering the cost, but the women who use the birth control will have the feeling that they're getting something. That's a special kind of palliative care that the designers of Obamacare are going to want to cover.

So did Obama "pull a fast one" on conservatives, as Marcotte surmises?

He drew this out for two weeks, letting Republicans work themselves into a frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty, and then created a compromise that addressed their purported concerns but without actually reducing women's access to contraception, which is what this has always been about....

Now, those who complained about the old rule have a choice whether to move on to some other traditional-values issue or to find a way to say that the problem is still there. If they do the latter — as Rush Limbaugh did a series of semi-coherent rants on his show yesterday — they're going to annoy/scare the millions of women who use contraception and the millions and millions of women and men who want other people to use contraception. (Don't forget the "Freakonomics" theory connecting the avoidance of unwanted pregnancy to a reduction in crime.)

Marcotte thinks the conservatives will give up on this issue and exults that "the damage has already been done."

[W]hat most people will remember is that Republicans picked a fight with Obama over contraception coverage and lost. This also gave Obama a chance to highlight this benefit and take full credit for it. Obama needs young female voters to turn out at the polls in November, and hijacking two weeks of the news cycle to send the message that he's going to get you your birth control for free is a big win for him in that department.

And let's not forget — Marcotte doesn't mention this — that the birth control fracas peaked precisely when a story was breaking that should have made the administration look weak on a women's rights issues: the decision limiting women in the military. As I noted yesterday, Michelle Obama was deployed on a nutrition-in-the-military mission on the very day that decision was announced. So there is good reason to think the Obama campaign is sharply focused on manipulating the minds of constituents who care about women's issues.

As Marcotte said: "It's all so perfect that I'm inclined to think this was Obama's plan all along."

So was I right all along or did the Santorum campaign read my blog...

... and see how to spin the "other emotions" remark about women in combat?

After Rick Santorum said that women should not serve in combat, citing “emotions,” critics were furious, saying he had insulted women by suggesting that they were too emotional to be depended upon in life-and-death situations.

But Mr. Santorum said Friday that he was actually referring to the emotions of men, not women, saying that men might be distracted from their mission by their “natural instinct” to protect women.

Yesterday, you may remember, WaPo's Jennifer Rubin said he'd get in trouble, and I said:

I'm guessing that Rubin is worried that he's stuck on some stereotype about women — they're too "emotional" — but I think he's referring to an argument about the way men feel — that is, an urge to protect women that would skew decisionmaking and performance.

ADDED: As Irene points out in the comments, Santorum made it apparent that he was talking about men's emotions on Friday's "Today" show, which was before my post.

If Obama loses he will have something which, if he wins, he will lose and never be able to recover.

An observation from a discussion, here at Meadhouse, about what the Obamas, Michelle and Barack, will do after he is out of office. What set off the discussion was this news story about Michelle Obama going on the TV show "Top Chef" and judging a competition about school lunches. She'll be around forever — won't she? — doing things about kids and health and food. Women's TV. Books for women. The traditional woman gig. (It's for liberals too.)

And Barack? He'll be fine. He'll do analysis. Distanced observation. Comfort and critique. I say. Meade says: "Not if he loses." At which point I said what I've got quoted there in the post title. You see what it is, of course.

At the Capitol Café...

... fill in the blanks.

"Women/Mens."

A door. Photographed in 2004. I was fooling with these old pics today, getting the coding right for this post and this one, after realizing — reading an article about the Goodman Community Center here in Madison — that it's the old Kupfer Ironworks building where they played "9 Beet Stretch" back in April 2004.

Severely hollow conservatism?

Romney at the at the Conservative Political Action Conference:

"I know conservatism because I have lived conservatism... I was a severely conservative Republican governor... I fought against long odds in a deep blue state....

"Leadership as a chief executive isn’t about getting a bill out of subcommittee or giving a speech. It’s about setting clear goals and overcoming constant adversity...."

Santorum says:

"We will no longer abandon and apologize for the principles that made this country great for a hollow victory in November....

"Why would an undecided voter vote for a moderate candidate who the party isn’t excited about?..."