At the Photograph Me Café...

... you can take a picture. It lasts longer.

"Where is the transparency?"

"Silence is consent."



"No law should have more words than the U.S. Constitution":



Signs at the Tax Day rally at the Wisconsin Capitol today.

The Hilary Rosen flap shows the way to a new bipartisanship premised on the value of single-earner households.

Yes, Hilary Rosen disrespected Ann Romney, who, she said, had "actually not worked a day in her life." Fine. Everybody learned that the American people think it's important to acknowledge the work that women do when they choose to forgo careers and stay home with the children.

But now that this door is open, let's walk through it. There is much more here, and I'm only going to begin to talk about it in this post. I have already talked about the less-noticed issue of respecting men's choices. It shouldn't be simply a matter of women getting to choose to stay home. This is a household economics decision. Traditionally, it's been the woman who stays home in the single-earner family, but in modern America, each family has the power to decide who will bring in the money, and it may be preferable for the man to be the one to contribute to the family in the non-monetary ways. This is something I will talk about much more in future posts.

What I want to concentrate on in this first post, initiating my "single-earner household" tag, is the way it's not just for traditionalists. I want to challenge liberals, left-wingers, feminists, progressives — all those folks — to see why they should want to actively promote the single-earner household.

Single-earner households benefit the environment. You believe in global warming? Prove it! A 2-earner household has a much larger carbon footprint. 2 adults travel to work each day, they buy extra consumer goods (such as work clothes), they rely on fast-food, they take their children to day care. They need to do these things to get along. Yes, they pull in more income, but with more income, they buy more things, and these things must be manufactured, which emits carbon into the atmosphere. A single-earner family sticks with that smaller income and buys less. The stay-at-home spouse works hard to stretch and conserve that income, so that the family's needs are met. In fact, these needs can be better met, as the home spouse cooks meals from scratch, teaches and plays with young children, and so forth.

Here's "The Tightwad Gazette." It's all about using ingenuity to make it possible for a family to live on a single income. Why should we all have to join what they used to call the "rat race"? Is life about having a job? Some people need jobs, but why have we come to believe that every adult must have a job?

Let's form single-earner households. We talk about economics all the time, but why don't we economize — at the personal level?

I've concentrated on environmentalism here, but there is so much more to talk about. For example, unemployment. If the single-earner household movement were to flourish, we wouldn't need so many jobs, and we wouldn't need to drive ourselves so hard. Then there are taxes. If you're living alone, filing as an unmarried person, you've probably noticed how much less you would pay if you added a spouse. And what about feminism? If the woman stays home, maybe the man will leave her some day — leave her for a younger woman! — and then what will she do, not having developed her career? The women's movement made a big deal out of warning us about that danger, but something I want to examine — not here, but in later posts — is the way this women's movement came along just when we Baby Boomers in the 1960s were inspired by the hippie movement, which tipped us off that life might be about freedom and not about taking one's place in the conventional workworld. Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if it turned out feminism served, above all, the interests of commerce and not individual liberation?

I'll end this post now, but I'm beginning a conversation. I want to reject the idea — which Obama himself propounded — that the single-earner household is a luxury available only to a few lucky people. Let's consider the possibility that it is available to most people and what we need is to understand when it works and how to make it work.

Faces at the Tax Day rally — today in Madison, Wisconsin.

What it looked like today at the Tax Day rally at the Wisconsin Capitol.

I was there:



And Meade took some of the pictures, like this one of the big crowd:



See the Hans Christian Heg statue in the back?

"Walker fixed it/Let's not Falk it up/Wisconsin Can't Barrett" (references to the upcoming recall primary and election):



"Why do I have to work 'till I die so you can retire at 55?"

A year ago, Breitbart was here.



The other side of the "He's got nads!" shirt refers to Scott Walker, but it could just as well have referred to Andrew Breitbart, who was here today in spirit:

Roger Ailes answers critics who say the women he puts on Fox News are mostly blonde.

"When women get into television, they dye their hair blonde."

Something about TV and blondness, apparently. But what?

When I was a teenager in the 1960s, and there were no women newsreaders on TV or radio, a high school teacher explained to the class that women could not be hired for these positions because their high-pitched voices simply did not work properly in broadcasting. A male voice was — to use a contemporary employment law term — a bona fide occupational qualification. He said it with utmost seriousness and authority, like it was science, and though it made me feel angry and rebellious, I believed him. Something about the technical equipment, which is another thing only the males can handle.

"Palin has not confirmed a return to Madison this year, but has not declined their invitation either."

Yes, it's the Tax Day rally at the Wisconsin Capitol today.

It was a crazy scene last year. It snowed, Sarah proclaimed that "these are the front lines in the battle for the future of our country," Andrew Breitbart raged, and the tea partiers were way outnumbered by the anti-Walkerites who booed and banged on things in the hope of making the bad people go away.



That's from last year's Tax Day protest and counterprotest. Today it's a sunny day and 60°. We'll see what kind of scene there is on what might still be the "front lines," as the Scott Walker recall election looms. It's April 14th, and we e-filed our taxes last night. TurboTax informed me that I paid over $9,000 less this year than last year. I don't know who made that happen — Scott Walker? Obama? Bush? I'm not sure I really noticed. I guess we were supposed to feel stimulated and buy some extra stuff, but we did not.

"You're disarming yourself in an important struggle if you can't produce a fucking sonnet."

Asserted Christopher Hitchens in an interview in 2010, which I'm reading a propos of a discussion we're having about the value of the childish humor that comes in the form of substituting one word for another. Hitchens and his friends — intelligent adults — cracked each other up over the years by redoing book titles, changing "man" to "cunt" or "love" to "fuck," which is endlessly productive of laughter if you give yourself permission to do it. But I drifted into the part of the interview that's about the importance — the sexual importance — of reciting poetry. Hitchens continues:

"What if I had to try on my own merits? You've got to have some sort of reserve arsenal." He looks incredulous when the photographer, a very beautiful young woman, expresses doubt about the efficacy of this seduction technique.

"Oh no, not if it's done right," he says knowingly. Go on then, I say. Give us a demonstration. "Maybe at lunch?" he suggests, cheering up immediately. "Let's have lunch, and make a day of it." And so, inevitably, we adjourn to the pub....

"The other day I gave her mash and fishfingers for dinner — something quite boring — and her response was 'That’s impressive,' so she has a sense of humor, too."

An English dad describes the experience of living with a 4-year-old genius. 

ADDED: Confession: I had to Google to make sure "mash" referred to potatoes. The process of doing blog tags confronted me with the part of my brain — of whatever size IQ, I don't know — that has been dealing with English food. Long ago, "mash" got mushed with "mushy peas," and I'd never had the push to straighten that out until just now. But, thanks to Wikipedia, I've set my head straight. "Mash" is just mashed potatoes. And "bangers and mash" — which sounds dirty — is just sausages and mashed potatoes, which I think are "impressive."

The term "bangers" is attributed to the fact that sausages, particularly the kind made during World War II under rationing, were made with water so they were more likely to explode under high heat if not cooked carefully; modern sausages do not have this attribute.

Wikipedia kindly includes some pop culture references, including Peter Sellers singing to Sophia Loren, about how he's unsatisfied with her "macaroni" and would like her to "give us a bash at the bangers and mash me mother used to make," which you can listen to on one of those YouTube videos where all you look at is the record spinning. Sellers and Loren do their best to exclude any double entendre that those lyrics may seem to convey in writing.

There's also a Radiohead number called "Bangers + Mash," which has lyrics that begin "You bit me, bit me, bit me, ow," which is something Peter Sellers never sang to Sophia Loren.

Times change, which reminds me of my favorite "banger" song: "Lieutenant Custard & His Banger of Time," which involves a time-travel sausage. Please be careful with this!

Wisconsin can go to hell.

As far as Abe Sauer is concerned.

Obama is reeelected, Scott Walker survives the recall, and the Supreme Court strikes down Obamacare.

Things that are just about exactly likely, according to the insights of Intrade. (Currently, 60.8, 61.0, 63.3, respectively.)

"If you are a child of the seventies and were raised on 'The Joy of Sex,' you are not likely to have forgotten the illustrations."

"The woman depicted in these drawings is lovely, and, even nearly forty years later, quite chic," writes Ariel Levy in The New Yorker. "Her gentleman friend, however, looks like a werewolf with a hangover. He is heavily bearded; his hair is long, and, it always seemed, a little greasy. His eyelids are usually at half-mast, adding to his feral appearance."

It isn’t easy watching beauty get pawed by the beast, and our narrator does not help matters. “At a certain level and for all men,” Comfort informs us, “girls, and parts of girls, are at this stimulus level unpeople.” In “The Joy of Sex,” a male is a man, a female is a girl, and a vagina is, to “males generally, slightly scarey: it looks like a castrating wound and bleeds regularly, it swallows the penis and regurgitates it limp, it can probably bite and so on.”... Under the heading “Women (by her for him),” Comfort writes of male genitalia, “It’s less the size than the personality, unpredictable movements, and moods which make up the turn-on (which is why rubber dummies are so sickening).”

"Indian Man Single-Handedly Plants a 1,360 Acre Forest."

"It was painful, but I did it. There was nobody to help me. Nobody was interested."

"Consumerism Leads to Depression, Study Finds."

"We found that irrespective of personality, in situations that activate a consumer mindset, people show the same sorts of problematic patterns in wellbeing, including negative affect and social disengagement."

"If a patient is conscious during surgery but doesn’t remember any of it, is that good enough?"

Wait! How can you even ask that question! Obviously, not!

It’s a bit like the tree falling in the forest with nobody to hear it. 

What?! No, it's not.

An anesthesiologist’s koan. If even the patient has no recollection of surgery, was he aware?

And how could we possibly know?

Maybe we don't want to know.

"The prosecutor has most likely deliberately overcharged, hoping to intimidate Zimmerman into agreeing to a plea bargain."

"If this case goes to trial, Zimmerman will almost definitely be found 'not guilty' on the charge of second-degree murder," opines John R. Lott Jr.

Some extremely relevant information from the police report is completely excluded [from affidavit of probable cause]: There is no mention of the grass and wetness found on the back of Zimmerman’s shirt, the gashes on the back of his head, the bloody nose, or the other witnesses who saw Martin on top of Zimmerman, beating him, before the shot was fired. There is not even an attempt to say that the police report was in error; instead the affidavit just disregards it.