"Great News! Dog Ownership is Optional!"

"When you’re a young and otherwise unencumbered adult and you adopt a dog, a huge chunk of your freedom is gone. Instantly, just like that. Suddenly you have a very short leash pulling you back to your house. Your new friend needs to be fed and walked. Did you meet somebody special and want to spend a few days with them? Need to fly somewhere to visit family or take a vacation? Sorry, you’re already out past your curfew and the dog is lonely at home. For people who tend towards loneliness or introversion and who prefer to be at home most of the time anyway, this could be perfect. But for those with other time-consuming aspirations, it is worth considering what you are giving up to get this nice dog time. After all, every activity is a tradeoff that forces you to give up some other option. You enjoy caring for the dog. But is there something that brings even more happiness through personal growth that you would enjoy if only you had more time?"

"It’s this notion of this growing equality between husbands and wives having this paradoxical effect of growing inequality across households."

Said University of Wisconsin sociology professor Christine Schwartz, quoted in a NYT article titled "Marriage Equality Grows, and So Does Class Divide."

The headline confused me at first, because I'm used to the term "marriage equality" referring to same-sex marriage. Here, it means that men these days tend to marry women who work at jobs that are at an equivalent economic level. It's not so much the executive marrying the secretary and the doctor marrying the nurse anymore. Executives marry executives and doctors marry doctors — in opposite-sex marriages (and in same-sex marriages too, I suppose, but that's not what the article is about).

The "class divide" in the headline is prompting us to feel bad about male-female equality in marriage, because it means that in one couple 2 high salaries are added together and the next family is stuck pooling 2 low salaries. In the old system, you could have made 2 middling economic units out of these 4 individuals, and now you've got one rich-getting-richer couple and one poor-getting-poor couple. Whatever happened to the olden days when a man being rich was like a girl being pretty? The rich man found the most beautiful woman and the family income averaged down, more like that next family.

Now, we've got "assortative mating," in which "people marry others they enjoy spending time with, and that tends to be people like themselves."

The top-rated comment is:

Let's stop relying on "non-assortative" mating as a protection against inequality, and start encouraging women and men to seek financial independence instead. This means things like fair wage laws, better support of workers, reasonable childcare policies, parental leave for women and men, and even earlier down the road, more emphasis on education and employable skills. The days of Marriage as Career Path are declining fast and in my humble opinion, that's a very good thing.

I still see potential for resurrecting the old division-of-labor model in which one spouse earns a good income and the other contributes in kind, unpaid, saving many expenses and keeping the couple's tax-bracket low. If 2 individuals marry because they are a lot alike and enjoy spending time together, should they not maximize their time? All this frenetic 2-career activity, complicated by children who must be shuttled about to childcare, with evenings soaked up in housework — why are we living like that?

Here, please read this: "The Scold/Mr. Money Mustache’s retirement (sort of) plan." Why not put all your effort into making what you need and preserving it, with frugality, and reveling in the time of your life?

Mr. Money Mustache is the alias of a forty-one-year-old Canadian expatriate named Peter Adeney, who made or, more to the point, saved enough money in his twenties, working as a software engineer, to retire at age thirty. We’re not talking millions. More like tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, which he and his wife diligently salted away at a time of life when most people are piling on debt and living beyond their means. He calculated a way to make these early paychecks last using a strategy of sensible investment and a rigorous, idiosyncratic, but relatively agreeable frugality.

He is, by his own reckoning, a wealthy man, without want, but he and his wife, who have one child, spend an average of just twenty-four thousand dollars a year. Adeney is a kind of human optimization machine, the quintessence of that urge, which is stronger in some of us than in others, to elevate principle over appetite, and to seek out better, cheaper ways of doing things. He presents thrift as liberation rather than as deprivation. Living a certain way is his life’s work. “I’ve become irrationally dedicated to rational living,” he says.

"Let's have a spelling bee to determine the presidency. I'm guessing we'd get Cruise."

"Not Hilary? How sexist of you."

Bill Clinton is brutally confronted over the VA and Benghazi — "Your wife lied over 4 coffins!" — and all we see is his mild demand to be allowed to respond...

... escalating into a politely stated request to "shut up"...



... and we never hear his actual answer, because the camera goes out the door with the ejected questioner. Maybe there were other cameras, and we'll see the rest, but this was brutal. It's easy to create this kind of disruption and hard to know what the speaker can do... other than support a candidate who has not inspired that kind of anger.

Drudge presents it like this:

"Despite all the forces arrayed against Mr. Trump... the party has been gripped by a nearly incapacitating leadership vacuum and a paralytic sense of indecision and despair..."

"... as he has won smashing victories in South Carolina and Nevada. Donors have dreaded the consequences of clashing with Mr. Trump directly. Elected officials have balked at attacking him out of concern that they might unintentionally fuel his populist revolt. And Republicans have lacked someone from outside the presidential race who could help set the terms of debate from afar. The endorsement by Mr. Christie, a not unblemished but still highly regarded figure within the party’s elite — he is a former chairman of the Republican Governors Association — landed Friday with crippling force. It was by far the most important defection to Mr. Trump’s insurgency: Mr. Christie may give cover to other Republicans tempted to join Mr. Trump rather than trying to beat him. Not just the Stop Trump forces seemed in peril, but also the traditional party establishment itself."

From a NYT article, based on interviews with insiders, titled "Inside the Republican Party’s Desperate Mission to Stop Donald Trump."

The most interesting revelation is that despite Christie's skewering of Rubio for his robotic scriptedness, after Christie dropped out of the race, Rubio reached out to Christie, to try to get his endorsement. But Rubio bungled it. He left a voice mail that included some sort of assurance that Christie had "had a bright future in public service":

Mr. Christie, 53, took the message as deeply disrespectful and patronizing, questioning why “a 44-year-old” was telling him about his future, said people who described his reaction on the condition of anonymity. Further efforts to connect the two never yielded a direct conversation.

Meanwhile, Trump "made frequent calls to Mr. Christie once he dropped out," and "the two met at Trump Tower on Thursday with their wives."

And doesn't that show the problem? It's not just that Trump has his posh real estate and well-practiced socializing skills to butter up useful people, but that Rubio doesn't have anything comparable. He left a voice mail and it was patronizing. He even had the opportunity to script the hell out of the message before calling and he failed to anticipate how his words would affect someone about whom he knew plenty. How is this man supposed to deal with all the many people a President must interact with in all sorts of planned and spontaneous encounters? How can GOP insiders have come up with the idea of everyone coalescing around Rubio? The only argument seems to be to scare everyone into thinking that Trump is a horrible disaster. But Christie's judgment refutes that last ditch scare tactic.

And, by the way, Mitt Romney won't endorse Rubio:

Mr. Rubio’s advisers were... thwarted in their efforts to secure an endorsement from Mr. Romney, whom they lobbied strenuously after the Feb. 20 South Carolina primary. Mr. Romney had been eager to tilt the race, and even called Mr. Christie after he ended his campaign to vent about Mr. Trump and say he must be stopped. On the night of the primary, Mr. Romney was close to endorsing Mr. Rubio himself, people familiar with his deliberations said. Yet Mr. Romney pulled back, instead telling advisers that he would take on Mr. Trump directly.

What's wrong with Rubio?!

The theme of the day — "awkward" — finally brings us — as all things do — to Donald Trump.

It's Think Progress: "Rubio’s New ‘Con Artist’ Attack On Trump Could Put Him In A Very Awkward Position."

“A con artist is about to take over the conservative movement and the Republican Party, and we have to put a stop to it,” Rubio said on CBS’ This Morning. “He is wholly unprepared to be president of the United States.”

Rubio used the “con artist” line again on NBC’s Today. “I mean, this is unreal. Again, this guy is a con artist,” Rubio said. “He’s always making things up. No one holds him accountable for it.”

And again on ABC’s Good Morning America: “I think it’s important for people to understand they have a choice to make. Look, if this pattern continues, the conservative movement in the Republican Party will be taken over by a con artist portraying himself as the fighter of the ordinary person fighting for the working man — but he’s spent years sticking it to the working people.”

Rubio used the line again Friday while campaigning in Texas, and again later on Twitter....

Rubio is repeating himself and it's triggering the stereotype we have about him: a robotic repeater of sound bites. And that's a reputation that Chris Christie stuck on him, Chris Christie, who, while Rubio was flogging his "con artist" label, was out there endorsing Trump and overshadowing Rubio in the news cycle.

But that's not what Think Progress is calling "awkward." Think Progress is calling attention to Rubio's pledge to support whoever wins the GOP nomination. How is he going to support somebody he's insulted by calling him a "con artist"?

2 ideas:

1. Take a look at Chris Christie? Chris Christie insulted Trump plenty of times. Here's Politico's "8 times Chris Christie suggested Donald Trump shouldn't be president." Christie once said Trump was acting like "13-year-old," "someone who's just going to talk off the top of their head," not "suited to be president of the United States," someone who "has the quick and easy answer to a complicated problem," etc. All the candidates insult each other. It's part of the game, and when the game moves forward, it's time to drop the insults and switch to compliments. If you're good enough to get this far, you obviously know that.

2. "Con artist" is one of those insults that can be flipped. Remember how Trump embraced the insult "angry"? "Our country is being run by incompetent people. And I won’t be angry when we fix it, but until we fix it, I’m very, very angry." Do the same thing "con artist." If you think about it the right way, a "con artist" is just what we want. I know that sounds frightful, but I'm pre-paraphrasing what I think Trump could say and Rubio could winningly endorse.

"Put Yourself on a 20 Minute Timer to Make Awkward Social Events Easier."

From Lifehacker.

The idea is that when the timer on your phone alert sounds, people around you will think you have some kind of message and you'll have a way to make a graceful exit (with a simple white lie), and before the timer goes off, just knowing the timer is running will be some kind of comfort.

Pretty awkward.

In New York Magazine, "Awkward: Boy Wins Competition for Girls in Tech":

The EDF Energy company in the U.K. launched a campaign called #PrettyCurious to encourage young women, ages 11 to 16, to go into the field of science... [T]he contest asked children "to think of ideas for a connected home bedroom product." Citing "fairness" as a reason, the energy company later opened up the competition to all kids of all genders, but maintained that the competition was still targeted at girls.....

Ada Lovelace Day founder Suw Charman-Anderson told the BBC that she was suspicious of the competition from the beginning because "EDF Energy chose to link appearance and interest in STEM through the title of their campaign, despite many people pointing out that it was demeaning to girls."

So they used the word "pretty," they centered the activity on the "home bedroom," and then, because they'd gone too far and got criticized, they let the boys in, and a boy won, and, of course, they got criticized for that.

Auks.

"The Great Auk Pinguinus impennis surrounded by its true relatives Pinguinus impennis Alca torda Fratercula arctica Cepphus grylle Uria aalge Alle alle," by Archibald Thorburn.

"An auk is a bird of the family Alcidae in the order Charadriiformes....They are good swimmers and divers, but their walking appears clumsy. Modern auks can fly (except for the extinct great auk)...."

Auks are not awkward, except from a land-based perspective.

"Unlike the pure coherence of [Buckminster] Fuller's idea, for instance, Grieb's shifts in geometric patterning are subtly awkward..."

"... and the interstitial building with its squiggly entry leads to unnecessarily crammed interior spaces, for instance."

That's an awkward sentence about awkwardness — note the double "for instance" — from a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article titled "The singular vision and big ambition of Domes architect Donald Grieb."

The Domes — the Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory — "have become an emblem of civic neglect."

There are a lot of domes out there, from the time when domes seemed like The Future, and even the purely coherent domes of Buckminster Fuller are crumbling into incoherence through neglect.

The Future was once a concept, and when it was made real, real people said no, but we may say yes again, if only to preserve the crazy old idea of The Future we had in the past.

Susan Sarandon trashes Hillary Clinton.

"I think that she's isolated. I don't think she's... a victim — playing this female part — I don't think she is. She's been connected to power for a very long time, and when she was on the board of Walmart for 9 years, she did nothing to raise that wage or stand by women and all the things she could have done. And I think that her name recognition is helping her quite a bit in the South, but I don't think that she's been there, like Sanders has, getting arrested, all through his life standing up for rights...."

"Donald Trump Can't Release His Taxes While Being Audited?"

NPR does a fact check. That is, they talk to a NYU tax-lawprof:

"He can obviously release them if he wants to," said Daniel Shaviro... But Shaviro conceded, as other tax experts have, that Trump's lawyers may advise him not to release the returns for legal strategy purposes. "I can imagine either my lawyer or my PR adviser saying 'don't' until the audit is over."

What of the strange claim that the IRS may be auditing Trump every year because he's a Christian?

"But the one problem I have is that I’m always audited by the IRS, which I think is very unfair. I don’t know, maybe because of religion, maybe because I’m doing something else, maybe because I’m doing this, although this is just recently.... Well maybe because of the fact that I’m a strong Christian, and I feel strongly about it. And maybe there’s a bias.... You see what’s happened. I mean, you have many religious groups have been complaining about that. They’ve been complaining about it for a long time."

I can imagine the IRS targeting him... but because he's "a strong Christian"? I assume he has a reason for saying that, perhaps to draw in Christians who worry that the government is persecuting them. He's just wafting a suspicion, so, no proof needed, right? But this casual stirring of paranoia feels off. Is there something Christian in the tax returns that we'll eventually see? Is he tempting us down a rat hole?

ADDED: Who says "a strong Christian"? It's like Mitt Romney calling himself "severely conservative."

Or is it? I see the similarity, but Meade is seeing a difference. The difference might be something like: Romney's use of the odd phrase — which seems as though it should have been "strict conservative" — made us suspect that he didn't normally talk about himself that way, didn't have the common expression handy, and thus that he wasn't really conservative. Trump may simply be using his go-to adjective "strong" with the relevant noun "Christian," and inventing his own novel phrase. That is, he wasn't even trying to get to a stock phrase like "devout Christian."

BUT: Googling "strong Christian," I can see reason to think it is something of a standard phrase. I'm finding a classic sermon called "Strong Christians" that begins with the text from Ephesians, "My brethren, be strong in the Lord" and continues:

A weak and cowardly soldier is a pitiful object, but a weak-kneed, cowardly Christian is still more so. S. Paul told the Ephesian Christians to be strong in the Lord, and in these days especially we need strong Christians, strong Churchmen. I do not mean that we want men to presume on their strength, to repeat the sin of the Pharisee of old, and talk of their righteousness, or condemn their neighbours. I do not mean that we must be noisy and violent, and quarrelsome in our religion. None of these things are a proof of strength. A giant of power is ever the gentlest, having the hand of steel in the glove of silk. So the stronger a Christian is the more humbly he bears himself. A writer of the day says very truly, "if the world wants iron dukes, and iron men, God wants iron saints."

Read the whole thing!

Blue ice — "nearly neon" — at the Mackinac Bridge...

... on Lake Michigan.

"I will not be used as a tool for their purposes. I am not a token, mammy or little brown bobble head."

"I am not owned by Lack, Griffin or MSNBC. I love our show. I want it back.... I don’t know if there is a personal racial component... I don’t think anyone is doing something mean to me because I’m a black person.... I care only about substantive, meaningful and autonomous work... When we can do that, I will return — not a moment earlier.”

Said Melissa Harris-Perry, walking away from her MSNBC show. The second-highest rated comment at the link — which goes to the NYT — is "I'm sure someone will come along and explain this to me but I have no idea what the issue is here. Why is this news?"

Christie endorses Trump!

This is huge! The big man makes a big splash and the cascade begins. From the NYT report:

The endorsement came a day after Mr. Rubio, in a withering debate performance, turned his guns on Mr. Trump for the first time, and followed up this morning, calling Mr. Trump a “con artist.”

Mr. Trump welcomed the endorsement with warm praise for the New Jersey governor. “He’s been my friend for many years, he’s been a spectacular governor,” said Mr. Trump, standing with Mr. Christie at a press conference in Fort Worth, Texas, for the endorsement.

“I am proud to be here to endorse Donald Trump,” said Mr. Christie, noting they have been friends for a decade. Mr. Trump “will do exactly what needs to be done to make America a leader around the world again,” said Mr. Christie.

That vastly overshadows Marco Rubio's bad comedy routine this morning as he (of all people!) makes fun of Trump for sweating: “First, he had this little makeup thing applying, like makeup around his mustache, because he had one of those sweat mustaches." And stoops to talking about Trump wetting his pants:

Then, Mr. Rubio said, he asked for a full-length mirror. “I don’t know why,” he said, winding up to his punch line: “Maybe to make sure his pants weren’t wet.”

In fairness to Rubio, Trump made a very big deal last night about the water pouring out of Rubio:

"He’s a meltdown guy. I mean, I’m looking at him, he’s just pouring sweat, I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t know what the problem is, but he’s just pouring down sweat. We have to have somebody that doesn’t sweat."

AND: I see that Christie Trump is responding to Rubio on the makeup issue:

[H]e saw Mr. Rubio backstage with “a pile of makeup,” he said. “I said Marco, easy with the makeup, you don’t need that much.”

The NYT editors tell Hillary Clinton to release the transcripts of her "closed-door, richly paid speeches to big banks."

They hate her sneaky out: She'll release her transcripts "if everybody does it, and that includes the Republicans."

She is running against Bernie Sanders, a decades-long critic of Wall Street excess who is hardly a hot ticket on the industry speaking circuit.... By stonewalling on these transcripts Mrs. Clinton plays into the hands of those who say she’s not trustworthy and makes her own rules. Most important, she is damaging her credibility among Democrats who are begging her to show them that she’d run an accountable and transparent White House.