On Picnic Point...

... near sunset, with lovely foliage.



You can write about anything you want in the comments.

Opinions voiced about voices — the shouting woman (Hillary) and the quiet man (Ben Carson).

On "State of the Nation" this morning, Jake Tapper, interviewing Bernie Sanders, played a video clip of Hillary Clinton getting off a great feminist sound bite: "I've been told to stop, and I quote, 'shouting about gun violence.' Well, first of all, I'm not shouting. It's just when women talk some people think we're shouting."

TAPPER: She's basically calling you a sexist... You're the one she's quoting, Senator Sanders. She is suggesting in public that you have a problem with women speaking out.

SANDERS: Well, you know, all that I can say is I am very proud of my record on women's issues. I certainly do not have a problem with women speaking out. And I think what the secretary is doing there is taking words and misapplying them. What I was saying is if we are going make some progress on dealing with these horrific massacres that we're seeing, is that people have got to stop all over this country talking to each other. It's not Hillary Clinton. You have some people who are shouting at other people all across this country. You know that. This nation is divided on this issue. ...What I was talking about, clearly, across this country you've got people shouting at each other. 

On "Meet the Press" this morning, Chuck Todd, interviewing Ben Carson, played a video clip of Donald Trump mocking: "We have a breaking story: Donald Trump has fallen to second place behind Ben Carson. We informed Ben, but he was sleeping." Asked to respond, Carson said:

DR. BEN CARSON: You know, everybody has their own personality. And if he'd like to do that, that's fine. That's not who I am. And I don't get into the mud pit. And I'm not going to be talking about people. I will tell you in terms of energy I'm not sure that there's anybody else running who's spent 18 or 20 hours intently operating on somebody.

CHUCK TODD: Do you think that people mistaken your soft-spokenness with a lack of energy?

DR. BEN CARSON: I think so. I have plenty of energy. But, you know, I am soft-spoken. I do have a tendency to be relaxed. I wasn't always like that. There was a time when I was, you know, very volatile.... As a teenager, I would go after people with rocks, and bricks, and baseball bats, and hammers. And, of course, many people know the story when I was 14 and I tried to stab someone. And, you know, fortunately, you know, my life has been changed. And I'm a very different person now.

Donald Trump says super PACs are "a big, fat scam."

On "State of the Union" this morning:

TAPPER: You issued a statement this week disavowing all super PACs that are out there in your name, requesting that they return all of the donations and calling on all presidential candidates to do the same. Why?

TRUMP: It's a scam. It's a big, fat scam. These super PACs are a disaster. I have -- I think they said nine or 10 super PACs were set up in my name. I don't even know who these people are. You have all these people raising money, I guess in the name of Trump, that we love Trump. And some of them, I'm sure, do, and probably some of them don't. And I have no idea what they are going to do with the money they are raising. But they are raising all of this money, and they're going to spend it on the campaign. And we have -- you know, the candidates are not supposed to be involved and all this stuff, but they have all this money going. Nobody even knows who the people are. Nobody knows where they are. Nobody knows what they're doing with the money. It's a whole big scam. If you look at Ben Carson, Ben Carson is spending money from super PACs all over the place. Now I hear his super PACs are going to merge. I have heard that his super PACs are essentially running his campaign in Iowa, where they are actually running his campaign, where they are doing all of the ground work and everything. That's not what the purpose of a super PAC was supposed to be. And, by the way, Jeb Bush, the same thing -- he's got one of his best friends that heads up his super PAC. And I'm calling on all candidates to disavow their super PACs. It's a scam. They know it. It's a joke. I mean, it's a joke. They're all laughing about it. I laugh about it. 

It sounds as though Trump, not needing money the way the other candidates do, would like to undercut the power of super PACs to raise money. It's the other candidates who need that money flow.

"But the question people keep asking... is why that consolidation [behind Rubio] isn’t happening already."

"If Rubio is actually the front-runner" — once you look beyond the not-really-real Trump and Carson — "shouldn’t a few more big donors be drifting from Jeb’s camp into his? Shouldn’t a few more debate-watching voters be saying to themselves, and then to pollsters: The Donald is fun and I admire Carson, but let’s get real: I’m going to vote Rubio? I think they will. I predict they will."

Writes Ross Douthat, saying something close to what I've been blogging (here and here) and then ending his column with something I haven't blogged but have been saying around the house: "But in the event they don’t, I’m guessing that Mitt Romney is still ready to serve."

"Amal must go rest her neck now. It hurts from looking down on all of us."/"She is effing loving her new Hollywood lifestyle..."

"... She looks like she knew the paps were coming. He looks like he knows she called them from the restaurant."/"I want this bitch's life, and I'm not alone. She knows it."/"Sure, why not, right?"

Comments at a Tom & Lorenzo post showing paparazzi photos of George Clooney and Amal Clooney emerging from a Beverly Hills restaurant. Tom & Lorenzo call attention to what appears to be deliberate posing for the purpose of displaying a handbag (which, once you think about it, makes the 4th photo ludicrous (in case you want something to think about other than how insanely good-looking these people are)).

Donald Trump activates the anti-Seventh-Day-Adventist prejudice against Ben Carson.

Here's how he slipped in the dagger:

I love Iowa. And, look, I don't have to say it, I'm Presbyterian. Can you believe it? Nobody believes I'm Presbyterian. I'm Presbyterian. I'm Presbyterian. I'm Presbyterian. Boy, that's down the middle of the road folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don't know about. I just don't know about.

Religious prejudice is wrong... we all, most of us, know that, don't we? Or do we? We know it some or most of the time, except when we need to set it aside, such as when we choose a President, and it's got to be somebody we can trust with the nuclear button and everything else. It can't be a weirdo. We'll leave you alone as you pursue you metaphysical whimsy and even treat you with care and kindness. But for a President? Trump knows what the "folks" need: right down the middle of the road.

"I'm Presbyterian. I'm Presbyterian. I'm Presbyterian. I'm Presbyterian." 4 times he had to say it. Because "Nobody believes I'm Presbyterian."

Nobody believes.

"One, fairly large and twisted brown leaf landed on my shoulder. I tried to brush it off but it just sat there, trembling in the wind."

"I flicked it again. It landed lower on my sleeve. And then the leaf started to climb up my arm. I looked, still not believing. Could it be? No, this is just a piece of withered plant. But it was, finally, a ghost mantis."

Corporations are censors too.

In September Lego refused Ai Weiwei Studio's request for a bulk order of Legos to create artwork to be shown at the National Gallery of Victoria as "they cannot approve the use of Legos for political works." On Oct 21, a British firm formally announced that it will open a new Legoland in Shanghai as one of the many deals of the U.K.-China "Golden Era."

A photo posted by Ai Weiwei (@aiww) on Oct 23, 2015 at 6:04am PDT

"When I made the 'Hope' poster, I did it as a grassroots endeavor. I thought, 'I’m a street artist who’s been very critical frequently of government policy.'"

"There’s no way that Obama’s campaign will think that I’m anything but toxic.'... I’m really happy that the ‘Hope’ poster has become a reference point, and I have very complex feelings about Obama as president, about how my art is sometimes reinterpreted.... But it’s a net-positive because I think what I did, coming from very few resources and from an outsider perspective, demonstrates that grassroots art can make a difference."

Said Shepard Fairey, who's got a new huge mural of a wave in Jersey City.

"But more and more research reveals that though the thought of a smart woman is appealing to men..."

"... a real, live smart woman standing in front of them is actually a turnoff."

Abstractions are more appealing than particularities. It's easy to think of "smart" as a positive characteristic, but any given smart person is likely to have used that smartness to arrive at other characteristics that are going to complicate the good. But the study in question never confronts the men with women who actually are smart, so my theory wasn't tested. The men were just told that the women had done better on a test, so the study only looked at the abstraction and what effect it had on the minds of men when they were not confronted with meeting a woman and when they were. In real life, you meet people and you don't know how smart they are. You become aware as you get to know the person as an individual, with all their characteristics, and if they are smart, you only figure that out as you're also seeing what they do with their intelligence, whether they show off, condescend, and seek advantage or whether they're modest, ethical, and interested in other people.

"What they are saying is that because I don’t think surgery will turn a man into a woman I should not be allowed to speak anywhere."

Said Germaine Greer.

Addressing claims that she had been hurtful towards transgender women, Greer added: “People are being hurtful to me all the time. Try being an old woman. For goodness sake, people get hurt all the time. I’m not about to walk on eggshells.”...

Asked about the petition [to stop her from speaking at Cardiff University, she said]: “I don’t really know what I think of it. It strikes me as a bit of a put-up job really because I am not even going to talk about the issue that they are on about."

The link goes to The Guardian, where the article is illustrated by a photo of Greer, in fully wrinkled old-lady form, next to a photo of Caitlyn Jenner that's been photoshopped beyond recognition to the point of looking like a 30-year-old. 

More here: "I don’t expect people to agree with me. On the other hand, I don’t expect them to throw things at me.... I just don’t think that surgery turns a man into a woman. A perfectly permissable view. I mean, an un-man is not necessarily a woman. We don’t really know what women are and I think that a lot of women are female impersonators, because our notion of who we are is not authentic, and so I am not surprised men are better at impersonating women than women are. Not a surprise, but it’s not something I welcome."

I'm especially interested in the propositions: 1. "We don’t really know what women are," and 2. "a lot of women are female impersonators." And, by the way, once you have this level of skepticism, the opinion about transgender people becomes almost meaningless. Greer doesn't seem ready to concede even that women are women.

AND: Elsewhere in The Guardian today, there's "From Twiggy to Germaine Greer: eight classic images of powerful women/The Design Museum’s new exhibition, Women Fashion Power, about the way influential women wear clothes opens on Wednesday. Here, from Twiggy in a trouser suit to the high-shine shoulderpads of Dynasty, eight women write about the most eye-catching looks in the show." The photo of Greer shows her at the age of about 36. The text is fully celebratory:

"Gov. Scott Walker on Friday signed legislation that prohibits prosecutors from using secret John Doe investigations to review allegations of political corruption and misconduct of public officials."

"The bill, which passed the Senate and the Assembly along party lines this week, comes after two John Doe probes of Walker, his campaign and his aides. Walker was never charged."

ALSO: "The lead prosecutor in the halted John Doe probe into Gov. Scott Walker’s recall campaign had doubts about his legal theory in November 2013, a month after issuing nearly three dozen subpoenas and search warrants, according to documents filed Thursday in a related lawsuit...."

"Maureen O’Hara... was called the Queen of Technicolor..."

"... because when that film process first came into use, nothing seemed to show off its splendor better than her rich red hair, bright green eyes and flawless peaches-and-cream complexion."



O'Hara died today in Boise, Idaho, at the age of 95.

"Lysistrata" — the ancient Greek play about women withholding sex to stop a war — made the news twice this week.

1. Withdrawing from the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in the setting of the Democratic National Committee's Women's Leadership Forum, Lincoln Chafee said: "Since today is all about women’s leadership it reminds me of one of my favorite Greek plays; Lysistrata, a comedy from about 400 BCE by Aristophanes. In that play, a group of women, fed up with the war mongering of their husbands, agree to withhold their favors until peace returns. And it worked!"

2. Spike Lee is squabbling with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The subject is Lee's new movie, "Chi-Raq," which, Hollywood Reporter tells us, "is an update of the classical Greek play Lysistrata and stars Teyonah Parris as a woman who protests the city's black-on-black gun violence."

Here's the full text of the play at Project Gutenberg, which flaunts this jaunty frontispiece:



ADDED: Here's a full set of the Aubrey Beardsley illustrations for "Lysistrata." They're even jauntier. NSFW.

Rachel Maddow pushed Hillary to explain Bill Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy and the Defense of Marriage Act.

Hillary said:

On Defense of Marriage, I think what my husband believed – and there was certainly evidence to support it – is that there was enough political momentum to amend the Constitution of the United States of America, and that there had to be some way to stop that. And there wasn’t any rational argument – because I was in on some of those discussions, on both “don’t ask, don’t tell” and on – on DOMA, where both the president, his advisers and occasionally I would – you know, chime in and talk about, “you can’t be serious.  You can’t be serious.” But they were.  And so, in – in a lot of ways, DOMA was a line that was drawn that was to prevent going further.  

Maddow offers a paraphrase: "It was a defensive action?" Hillary adopts the phrase:

It was a defensive action.  The culture rapidly changed so that now what was totally anathema to political forces – they have ceded.  They no longer are fighting, except on a local level and a rear-guard action.  And with the U.S. Supreme Court decision, it’s settled. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is something that – you know, Bill promised during the ‘92 campaign to let gays serve openly in the military.  And it’s what he intended to do... And then... it was the most astonishing overreaction... by the military, by the Congress.  I – I remember being – you know, on the edge of one of those conversations, and – and so “don’t ask, don’t tell,” again, became a defensive line.  So I’m not in any way excusing them.  I’m explaining them... And I think that sometimes, as a leader in a democracy, you are confronted with two bad choices.  And it is not an easy position to be in, and you have to try to think, OK, what is the least bad choice and how do I try to cabin this off from having worse consequences?

Well defended. 

"They’re like Grumpycat... It’s like the Twilight Zone..."

Obama attacks Republicans with pop-culture references.