The Ann of Two Tales

Ann Althouse

I like Professor Althouse’s blog. However to do make to claims to understand the good professor. While I am not certain, of where the professor stands, I do find this two recent posts of her amusing.

Item, gender feminists find that reality does not conform to gender feminist theory:

142 legal secretaries surveyed and not one preferred working with a woman partner.

Why? Lawprof Felice Batlan elicited these comments:

Gender feminists face meet reality and find it refuses to conform to their theories.

Solution, make fiction conform to gender feminist theory:

“Realistic portraits of the women of animated Disney films.”

A Metafilter post with comments like: “I’ve never seen Hercules. Does Megara look that drunk and horny in the movie?”

And: “See these Disney characters? See how they are really gorgeous and skinny but they’re animated? Imagine what they’d look like if they were gorgeous and skinny and looked like very highly photoshopped people instead of cartoons!”

Granted Disney’s portrayal of women is hardly realistic, but then neither is their portrayal of men, children or animal.   Disney is simply not in the business to do realism.

If you can’t get real life to conform to gender feminist theory, then demand it of fiction.

Sloatsburg, NY— I’m at the Thruway Rest area just north of the NY-NJ border. From here I’ll head to Connecticut, and then back here to Jersey, and then to Western NY. Getting cooler by the day, and we’ll see rain here for a few days.

I’m very pleased with the truck; it’s running very well.

• What is “Occupy” doing? Yes, it’s losing it’s bite as I suggested yesterday. (If you missed that, read it here.) But apparently there’s a fair amount of violence going on.  Shootings are reportedly up some 154% in NYC since ‘Occupy’ started. Things the liberal press will never tell you.
• Where’s all his Friends? Politico says Dems are ducking Obama on campaign trail.
  

  In trips to Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — all states that he carried in 2008 — members of Congress were notably missing from the president’s side.

  Must be all that stuff about the ‘dysfunctional congress’. Which, by the way, translates to “Mommy, those boys won’t do what I want them to. ” I still think this is getting dangerous… they’re still trying to quietly push the meme that Obama is inept. The reality is, he’s one of the most outragiously successful Dem Presidents in recent history in terms of getting liberal Democrat policy in place. It’s not Obama that’s failed, it’s liberal policy…. which fails every time it’s tried. The Dems in Congress are ducking that reality.

• Gas Prices: Been going up rather sharply in the last week or so. Megan McArdle, who I link here far too infrequently, has numbers suggesting that whatever help the stimulus may have been, got wiped out by the price of energy.  Remember when we told you that energy prices would bring Obama down?  Yeah.
• The State Of Things: I’ll simply post this, as a pic and let you see it. It ran in a Buffalo paper. I can’t even imagine the level of stupidity required for this to happen. Then again, Government healthcare, ya know.

Organize Wall Street H/T Pundit & Pundette

This is just sad. Please consider homeschooling. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

From Jill, Pundit & Pundette.

Note speling is hard.

Call it what you will, the so-called Arab Spring is certainly not a new birth of freedom, from Telegraph(UK)  via Pat Dollard:

Libya’s liberation: interim ruler unveils more radical than expected plans for Islamic law

Libya’s interim leader outlined more radical plans to introduce Islamic law than expected as he declared the official liberation of the country.

Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the chairman of the National Transitional Council and de fact president, had already declared that Libyan laws in future would have Sharia, the Islamic code, as its “basic source

You’d think the rag heads would have at least had the courtesy to let the Dim Won, b/k/a Barrack Obama get his his victory lap before they  threw his under the bus.

Aside to Mrs. Clinton:  Tell me again about your “smart diplomacy.”

Addendum:  Scctt Johnson applies salt to Dim Won’s wound, from Power Line:

In his statement marking the death of Muhammar Gaddafi last week, President Obama inserted a mystifying passage: “[T]he Libyan people now have a great responsibility — to build an inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya that stands as the ultimate rebuke to Qaddafi’s dictatorship….”

“An inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya.” Can we mull that over with a glass of wine at the faculty club?

[…]

No sooner had Obama read his statement than Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the chairman of the National Transitional Council and de facto president, announced that Libyan laws would have Sharia as their “basic source.” Just to get the ball rolling, he immediately lifted one law from Gaddafi’s era that he said was in conflict with Sharia — the law banning polygamy. Happy days are here again.

Forty-five czars in the White House, and not one sober speech writer

It wasn’t so long ago that Obama decided that he was the only thing between wall street and the pitchforks.   As I commented at the time in a Pajamas Media article,

America’s bankers lack backbone.

Maybe I’m being unfair to the current crop of bankers. After all, the problem has always existed. It’s just that it has come to a head recently because we have a political power structure in place that clearly plans to take advantage of that perceived weakness. As a rule, financial types are not exactly noted for their bravery. And we all know that predators tend to attack where they see weakness — particularly if they anticipate some gain for themselves.

So it was recently when we saw a Democratic president of the United States suggesting that his administration was the only thing standing between the bankers and the pitchforks.

To anyone who has been watching the events unfolding recently and understands the causes of those happenings, the statement of the president was absurd on its face. The issue, of course, is that most people today really don’t have much of a grasp of economics. Thus, any Democratic Party propaganda offered to explain away Democratic/big government culpability in the current financial mess will have far more credibility than it would with people who do understand economics. Most Americans might say, “Well, I don’t know this stuff, but he must — it sounds reasonable.” So along comes President Obama trying to push the image of the bankers being the problem. And of course his supporters, who know little to nothing about economic matters, nod in unison like so many bobblehead dolls glued to the dashboard.

But it’s not true.

Very seldom do economic crises occur without government being at or near the root of the problem. So it is with this crisis.

This is not a failure of regulation of any kind, particularly of banking. Nor is it a failure of free markets. Rather, it’s a failure of over-regulation and a lack of free markets. In short, it’s a failure of government. Governmental interference in the market requiried bankers, for example, to make loans to people who couldn’t afford them. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — government-created entities — helped to create this artificial boom, and government also caused the bust by way of serious mismanagement.

…

Some of the excesses of "Occupy Wall Street" leaking out

Of course, the problem is that while wall street played ball for a while, they recognized that Obama didn’t have the kind of support he claimed.  So, Obama unleashed the pitchforks, with the weirdos at the other end. That’s what “Occupy Wall Street” is.   And while that has attracted some press attention, (and, given the state of the press these days, whose job it is to support liberal causes, why wouldn’t it?) that too is having less of an effect than the White House would like.  That influence is going down, even as we speak, as the exceses of the thing leak out, literally. It is, I think, as Ann Althouse explains;

Ann Althouse

You know, there’s a real problem with this Occupy [Your City] protest format: It doesn’t have an exit strategy. You come, you conquer, and then time passes, protesters get dirty and ugly, internal divisions crack them up, the nearby residents get disgusted, the local businesses get mad, and then what? There’s isn’t going to be a revolution.

Well, look, I seem to recall someone addressing this point, a few years ago. First of all, the anti-Semitic “Adbusters”…

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We’re doing what we can
But when you want money
for people with minds that hate
All I can tell is brother you have to wait

And as for the spectacle of OWS morons carrying signs extolling the virtues of socialism:

You say you’ll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You better free you mind instead
But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow

Amazing his words got lost so quickly.Yet, it’s not very surprising. At the bottom line, what we see coming out of the occupy Wall Street protests, what we see reflected, is unenlightened self interest. Sorry, I’ve not been impressed with this thing from the beginning, and the rest of the world has started to catch up on that feeling. Andy Kessler adds some perspective:

Maybe this is all really about disappointment. I spoke to a young woman who had clearly bathed more recently than most. I asked her why she was at OccupySF. She told me she’d done all the right things. Studied hard. Graduated college. (She was an art major.) And now she can’t get a job. It didn’t matter. It’s all messed up. She was lied to.

Of course she was. She’s a member of the Trophy Generation. Win or lose, you get a trophy. We embraced mediocrity to an entire generation of kids during good times who are now finding themselves mediocre in bad times. There still is that American dream: Go to college, get a job, buy a Prius. But like it or not, studying art or humanities or gender studies won’t get you there. Marissa Mayer at Google complains she can’t find enough computer-science majors. Civil engineers are getting hired sight unseen.

Educating the whole child was bad advice. So was follow your passion. California spends months teaching ninth-graders how to build a waste-treatment plant with only a day or two on natural selection. I think Occupy Wall Streeters are as much disappointed with the route they all took as they are with “fat cat” bankers.

So, it is as I as suggested on the Midnight Radio Network a few nights ago:

So you went out and get the education that the left said you were supposed to. When you got to the far side of that education which you were left with was a bill that was far larger than the jobs you could get with the education you got could provide for. And you’re upset with the banks? How’s that work? It seems to me that the banks were the ones that of the two provided the contract of service. They did their job. You did what they told you was yours. What would be wrong with being upset with the people that got you into this mess in the first place? The leftist idealists so far removed from reality as to think that four years of remedial basket weaving would get to a job that would pay six figures? And now you wonder why that loan is hanging over your head?

There is another point to be made here, that I have not seen made very often.  I suspect that that’s because it’s hard for a lot of centrists and liberals to quantify, I suppose because it runs directly if all of their world view.  So be it.

What we have is disappointment in liberalism.  Say what you will about the sanity or the lack thereof of an Obama in the White House.  I’ll probably agree, at least in part.

But we need to eliminate this concept that the reason that his presidency has been such a disaster is because he is politically inept.  I would argue exactly the opposite; he has been wildly successful.  Who else, for example, could pass something as sweeping as Obamacare, without the Congress even having read it? Can you imagine anyone to the right of, say, Castro polling something like that off?  Mr. Obama has been nothing if not wildly successful in implementing liberal policy.  So it is that left is everywhere, including the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd are faced with a huge dilemma… the choice between blaming the man the top, for being inept, or blaming the policies which he was wildly successful in implementing .  Clearly the latter runs afoul of the leftist world view.  It is therefore much easier to blame the man, then the policies. So it has always been with the defenders of socialism; The argument always comes up that it works, we’ve just not done it right.   Yet, the logical holesin the arguments coming out of the OWS mob (for mob they are) are becoming larger by the moment and harder thereby to explain away with the usual socilaist platitudes.

It’s my guess that even those who were taught basic logic by government schools can’t withstand the huge illogic that they are trying to force feed the rest of us.

I submit that over the next several days and weeks we are going to see that reality starting to catch up with some of the protesters. I grant that there are large number of them that will never catch on to that reality, but then again reality seems to have given them the slip in the total.There are always a few true believers, who despite all reality, will continue to believe in the leftist mantra. Just as there are those who so disconnected from reality believe that Obama is the solution as opposed to the problem. That government can save us from everything. Etc., etc.. These ones are going to end up in the jails around the country , and the martyrdom continues. We always face that challenge. That’s why those fighting for freedom in our own revolution, recognized in their writings and in their speeches that continual vigilance in support of freedom is key.

If you run around with signs attacking private property as theft and extolling expropriation of others’ wealth, can you be surprised when your fellow would- be- communards steal your good stuff like Apple iPhones and iPads? If you discourage law enforcement from entering your occupation territory, should you be surprised when your fellows assault and rape you? If you hang out with folks who covet other peoples’ things, can you be astonished when whatever you earn (in this case by your drumming ) is taxed at 50% by those who are sitting around eating chef-prepared donated organic food and trying on free shoes? And when you gather with those who eschew any order are you entitled to cry:

Clarice Feldman, American Thinker.

What do you call someone who lies about rape for political gain?

Mr. Vice President.

William A. Jacobson, Legal Insurrection.

Brunswick, NJ– I’m going up to Queens in the morning, then back into Jersey and then to Connecticut.  Drying out now, but cool. Truck is fine, and I am as well.

• Occupy Wall Street and the Chicago ’68 Riots I commend to your reading this article. The insights are very powerful. Fred Seigel makes the same link.
• Why Is Class Hatred Morally Superior to Race Hatred? Dennis Prager asks and answers this one.
• Khaddafy killed.
  

  I still have this poster somewhere in my collection. It was passed out to all who saw the movie the first week of release. I saw it in the DC area, that week.

  Does anyone remember the Robert Redford movie from about 1973, called “The Candidate”? He goes through the process of getting himself elected to public office, and then asks “Now, what?”  Seems to me that’s the question we should be looking at. It strikes me that nature abhors a vaccum. It also seem to me that if the Obama administration paid as much attention to Libya as they have to affairs domestic, the Libyan people are screwed… and so by extension is everyone on earth. Another thought occurs… now we’ll never really know who ordered the bombing of PA103… and I wonder if that figured into their plans at all over at the WH. Hint; QuackDaffy being dead of itself won’t start a constitutional republic. Yet, there’s a vacuum in leadership at the moment. A ripe opportunity for the radical Islamists to step in. Don’t be shocked when that happens, folks.

• Tax Funded Electric Car Gets Worse Mileage Than an SUV…I’ll leave that one alone. It’s too freakin’ EASY.

The entire Tea Party movement was deemed racist because Congressman John Lewis alleged, albeit without proof, that somebody, presumed to a member of the Tea Party, called him a nigger.   Well so fare as I know, no member of Organize Wall Street had been accused of using the vile N-word, video:

Hat tip: Right Sphere.

Imagine the uproar if anybody at Tea Party were to have been videoed demanding that black go back to Africa, where in fact few have ever been, or that illegal Mexican immigrants go back to Mexico, which by the way is where they belong.

In OWS land, respect is a one way street.   The OWS  demand it but do not give it, video:

Hat tip: William A. Jacobson, Legal Insurrection.

Organizing Wall Street is more akin to a bowel movement than a political movement.

Celebrated Narcissist Says He Made All The Right Choices

With high unemployment, low GDP, a stagnant economy, low consumer confidence, rising food and fuel prices, real wages going down, and even more people without health insurance, I’d hate to think if Obama had made what he considers to be bad choices.

From William Teach, Pirate’s Cove.

Ayer, MA— I’m what, about 60 miles off the New Hampshire Border, just off I-495. I’m here taking a break having driven up from the house yesterday. Raining here, pretty hard, and has been since last night. They’re getting some minor flooding around here as a result. This has to be a quick one, as I’m supposed to be on the move in a few minutes.

• Perfect? Thinking ones self to be without fault is a sure sign of a delusional mind.
  

  I guarantee it’s going to be a close election [in 2012] because the economy is not where it wants to be and, even though I believe all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones, we’re still going through difficult circumstances.

  Right, Barry. Clueless AND delusional. Medic! Bring the “I love me” jacket, please.

• Brian Terry needs answers. He’s one of the people, in his case an ATF agent, who died as a direct result of the Obama administrations attempt to limit the second amendment by planting false ideas about gun freedoms in these United States. That’s becoming clearer by the second. Bob Owens:
  

  It appears that the primary mission of Eric Holder’s Department of Justice is to insulate President Obama’s political appointees from the consequences of their actions, and to obstruct the pursuit of justice by Congress as much as possible.

  Gee, big shock. Wasn’t that Janet Reno’s role as well? I say again, time for us to see Eric Holder Frog-marched out of the White House. The only question remaining is how much Obama himself knew about it. But as to that, consider the trend; In my 50 plus years, I’ve never seena president more directly involved in every aspect of his administration. But sddenly, we’re to think Obama knew nothing about this one as he claims? Sorry, it just doesn’t pass the smell test. Perhaps we should start thinking Holder will ahve some company in that walk out of the White House?

From a brain dead Karen Finney, Hill:

In America, women’s lives are expendable. That’s the latest message from the Tea Party Republicans’ war on women. Sound extreme? So does the idea that a woman could be denied a legal procedure that could save her life, not because she or her doctor made the personal, private decision about her healthcare, but because a member of Congress (possibly not even her own representative) said so.

For the seventh time last week, led by Eric Cantor, congressional Republicans (aided and abetted by 15 Democrats) decided that rather than have a vote or serious conversation on job creation, their time was best spent voting on H.R. 358. Having nothing to do with Americans’ most urgent priorities, H.R. 358 does two things: prohibits federal funds from being used toward any healthcare plan that covers abortion care services (despite the fact that that is already law); and permits hospitals to deny a woman a legal medical procedure even if her life is at stake — in other words, letting her die

The purpose and effect on an abortion is to kill a living human being, who is very apt to be a female. If Ms Finney is so intent on saving the lives of women, as she should be, she should stop supporting killing of human beings, to include women, before they are born.

Brooklyn, NY– I’m just off the BQE, having dropped off a load here, and taking a rest break. I left Rochester last night, ran to Newburgh NY…(Right across from Orange County Choppers) then to Mountain Top, PA then here. About 550 miles, more or less. A nice day here in the Apple, not a cloud in the sky, and middle 60’s. Not my favorite place to be as a rule, but it’s more livable than usual, today.

• Transparency? What’s THAT? By way of Glenn: BREAKING: An IPCC backchannel ‘cloud’ was apparently established to hide IPCC deliberations from FOIA.  In other words IPCC lied and tried to cover that lie by hiding the transcripts. And this is the guy Romney wants as an environmental Czar? Why do we want Romney, again?
• POLL: CAIN 43% OBAMA 41%   The fear from the establishment GOP is palpable.
• Obama Blame Shifting: The hutzpah is striking. The Hill:
  

  Speaking in Asheville, N.C., Obama challenged Congress to pass his $447 billion jobs bill in “bite-sized pieces,” stating with legislation to provide funding to cash-starved states to pay for teachers, police officers and firefighters.The president said that in blocking his bill, Senate Republicans — he did not mention the two Democratic ‘no’ votes — “said ‘no’ to you.”

  “Sixty-three percent support the jobs bill I put forward,” Obama said. “One hundred percent of Republican senators voted against it. That doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

  Obama, minus a tie and jacket, appeared in full campaign mode as he railed against Republicans. The crowd got into the spirit, chanting “four more years.”

  Of course, there’s a number of problems with these statements… or perhaps more correctly one problem. Obama has developed a lying streak unseen since Bubba Clinton.  His jobs bill isn’t a jobs bill, but a wealth redistribution ill. The Senate is not run, (yet) by the GOP. The folks who didn’t pass his tax bill are Democrats, who know the support for it isn’t nearly what Obama says it is… and they shold know… they’re looking at the next election and recognizing that if they vote fot this thing, their constituents won’t vote for THEM.  Oh,a nd by the way…. you, the taxpayers are being forced to pony up to cover what can only be called a campaign tour.

• Meanwhile, over on Wall Street: For all that Obama… along with Communist China... and Iran… support the OWS morons, the voters don’t.  And by the way, remember I told you OWS was not a grass roots movement, but rather astroturf?  Stone fact.
• That’s Racing: My thoughts go out to the family and friends of Dan Wheldon, the Indy car driver who died out at Vegas yesterday.  As many have pointed out, however, that’s an inseparable part of the racing game.
• FAST & FURIOUS being ignored by the MSM? Yes, but why? You know why, don’t you? I say again… I want Holder frog-marched out of the White House.

Jon Huntsman has no business running fo president as a republican.   If Huntsman wants to be president, he needs to register and run as what he is a democrat.    Robert Stacy McCain  blogs a victory dance over Huntsman rotting political corpse, from Other McCain:

Soon to Be a ‘Downfall’ Video Parody: Huntsman Campaign Goes Broke!

The man I dubbed “Governor Asterisk” in August has spent more than $4 million dollars to achieve a Real Clear Politics poll average of 1.6% and is now about half a million bucks in the red:

Maybe Obama will give Huntsman his old job, Ambassador to China, back?

Jessup,MD– I’m here getting ready to grab a load bound for Syracuse, and then head home. I’ll be there by morning. Raining off and on across the northeast today. My poor truck doesn’t look quite so flashy with the much from the wet streets all over it again. That’s OK, I’ll wash it again once I get home.

• More of Obamacare going bye bye: I know I’ve alluded to this before, but  we have GOT to start dismissing the meme that Obama’s problems are due t his being inept. A look at the story of Obamacare speaks very clearly to the contrary. Look, who else but Obama could sledgehammer into law something that few voting on it actually read, and is so bad that even the Obami are now loathe to implement it?  (Apparently they’ve now read the thing?)
• And Romneycare: What can be said of Romney, who created most of it? This: Obama’s individual mandate is a VERY unconstitutional, VERY bad idea. The one in Romneycare is  constitutional since it leans on the states, but still a very bad, bad idea. Any person who creates such things, is no conservative.  There seems little question that the Democrats are being regarded at best as damaged goods, given the state of the economy, and the degree to which they decided to march to the left, including Obamacare. Since the economy is not likely to get any better between now an election day, that makes this next election the GOP’s to lose. What predicting this next election comes down to is whom the Republicans decide to offer. As I’ve said before, should the Republicans offer a real conservative, (and Romneycare disqualifies Romney forever) then the GOP will have a landslide that makes Carter’s defeat at the hands of Reagan look like a close race. Absent that, we’ll have a second Obama term as rank and file Republicans sit on their hands as they did with McCain, and with Bob Dole, and with Bush 41’s second term.
• But they’ve still not learned the lesson: The New York Times, of all places, has an upcoming article that available now, that demonstrates how bad the establishment GOP is getting…. they cannot for the LIFE of them understand why we don’t want the GOP in bed with the left. Warning… this thing’s around 8000 words long.
• Occupy Wall Street: The Email list:… has been leaked. And here it is. All 8800 plus pages of it: (.pst format: primary and alternate) and (.csv format: primary and alternate)If the link goes dead, let me know, because I have backups on file and will post the thing myself. David mentioned Jessie Jackson JR and treason. David is correct. But if that’s so, what then are these morons guilty of, BUT that? And yes, you need to read it to understand what I’m talking about. For example… the violence there has always been a part of the plan. Read the emails.
• Predictable: Juan Williams suggests that liberals like Cornell West and Tavis Smiley threatened by Herman Cain’s success  I think he’s correct. But I wonder if the bloom will be off the rose for blacks who have seemingly always voted Democrat, once the racist crap starts coming out from the white leftists as that threat of a black conservative notches up.