Good point from Karol Markowitcz, as she considers yet another feminist bleat about whether women "can have it all" -- career, stable marriage, primary caregiver to children.

Men, she notes, have never had to struggle with these "choices" at all, because men never had the choice in the first place.

A woman may look for fulfillment in a career, but the man has to focus on taking financial care of his family — whether or not the work is fulfilling. (And, for the record, for most people work is work.)

...

Then, too, most of the women even bothering to debate this question lead privileged lives already. When Slaughter stepped off her career ladder, she downgraded to merely being a tenured professor at Princeton. Would that we all had that “choice.”

The whole phenomenon of women as “equals in the workplace” is still fairly new, so perhaps it’s no wonder that so many of us are setting ourselves up for failure by chasing an impossible “all.” For men, though, the “all” is so unlikely and out of reach that they settle for success, professional and personal, where they find it.

If feminism is still about equality between the sexes, women should look to men to see what successful, guilt-free “balance” looks like. Hint: The formulais a lot less “have it all” and a lot more “suck it up.”

It's a silly thing. Life is hard and "having it all" is almost impossible -- by choosing one thing, you choose against others. Fifty years of this, and some still just don't seem to understand.

Posted by: Ace at 09:50 AM | Comments (221)
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Ed is right on WAA blowing Wisconsin.

You want to know who also blew Wisconsin, badly?

Public Policy Polling. They came in fifth in terms of accuracy there, took to twitter congratulating the Barrett team for their internals when the exit polls leaked out, and also blew Arizona 8. Yet we know the common reactions over at Hot Air when Jensen&Co push one out. Resident polltroll Greg jumps on them here, himself.

Dismissing WAA's VA polling showing Romney up by nearly 5 would make sense for the Wisconsin reason, if you also dismissed the firms who blew it in the other direction.

Or you do what we do here at #AOSHQDD, take them all into account, and wait for a confirmation of a "shock" poll to see if it is an outliner or a trend.

Just a tip, Ed. One data point does not a trend make. Or a reason to toss.

Posted by: CAC at 07:37 AM | Comments (277)
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Updated:
I posted this below almost 2 months ago, urging Romney to target the light blue states and make them THE fight. You're welcome:

Romney's monetary advantage over Obama is becoming painfully obvious now.
So what next?

Well, take a page from Obama's playbook.
The Democrats in 2008 had a clear money advantage and a political one (over anger with Bush) and used that to campaign in states we should have never been in the position to defend: North Carolina, Indiana, Nebraska, Montana, North Dakota, Georgia, South Carolina and Florida. We lost three of them, a district in one of them, and dragged McCain across the finish line in much of the rest.

When you have a clear, obvious advantage, be it political or monetary, use the fuck out of it.

Death by a thousand cuts. Republicans wisely competed for a hundred Democratic seats in 2010, won two thirds of them and lost the rest by only a 3 pt average. So why aren't we doing the same thing now?

The Midwest/Rust Belt is rather obvious- few are arguing anymore that Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania aren't in play. We are seeing signs of cracking in New England and the Pacific Northwest as well. Go big, Romney. If you have the millions to spare, use it in ads and on the ground game (a la what the GOP did in Wisconsin defending Walker) in these light-to-moderately blue regions. Republicans are spending money to defend Scott Brown? If we are already advertising and funneling money into GOTV in Massachusetts for him, expand it to the Presidential race as well, and use some "spillover" to help out in New Hampshire. A monetary advantage is wasted if you just target the same tired purple states. Force Obama to spend what limited resources his party has defending him in states he should be counting on, and guess what happens to those "purple" ones?

That's right.

Or, we can just pull from the same old tired playbook of trying to hit 270 without long-term goal of flipping whole regions. That's a surefire winner right there.

Go big, or go home. I don't think the latter is an option for us.

Updated 8/22/2012: You're welcome because this is exactly what he is doing now.
Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, all getting Romney money. Big time. That 2:1 cash advantage Romney will be enjoying a month from now means an aggressive, not conservative, electoral strategy. And that is a winner.

Posted by: CAC at 06:54 AM | Comments (256)
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Happy Tuesday.

Aaron Worthing writes about his SWATting last night.

I forgot to post this last week: Komen has seen a huge drop in participants and donors since its decision to keep funding Planned Parenthood earlier this year.

Rep. Darrell Issa continues to press on Fast and Furious, only now the White House is in the spotlight. AG Holder's contempt vote is scheduled for Thursday.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:44 AM | Comments (369)
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I've asked pixy about this -- is it malware, or goofy stuff with Sitemeter? We think it's goofy stuff with Sitemeter.

But either way, don't enter your authentication for SiteMeter. For one thing, you don't have the password. For another thing, there's no point entering any passwords in any box you didn't open yourself!

Just close the box and move on.

Posted by: Ace at 06:23 PM | Comments (99)
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500 Full-Length Movies You Can Stream Completely Free

Thanks to the internets a huge amount of mankind's cultural corpus - including many films - is now available to you in your own home for free. No pants or effort on your part required.

Here's a list of 500 of them to keep you occupied. We truly are entering an age of information abundance with your time and attention span the new limitations.

We're not talking about pay-for streaming which allows unlimited viewing here. Rather, a list of old films scattered across sites like YouTube, the Internet Archive, Crackle, and Veoh. That are completely, entirely, 100 percent free to watch. The movies-listed by OpenCulture-are split up by genre and the list includes a short explainer for each flick. Which is fortunate because, while there are plenty of classics in there including films by Hitchcock and an armful of John Wayne westerns, some are rather more obscure.

Note that these films are all either in the public domain or the rights to them are so murky that no one can claim them.

Here are just a few that are worth watching:

• A Fistful of Dollars
• Stagecoach
• Spellbound
• The Man Who Knew Too Much
• The Driller Killer
• The Man With The Golden Arm
• All Quiet on the Western Front
• His Girl Friday
• Monty Python's And Now For Something Completely Different
• D.O.A.
• Yellow Submarine

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:18 PM | Comments (295)
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I just got done reading Game of Thrones (the full series, or at least the five books printed so far).

I was complaining to a friend about them -- "one thousand pages of pure repetitive tedium, just to set up a rip-roaring final eight hundred pages!" -- and he asked me who I thought Jon Snow's mother was.

Well, the thing is, I didn't bother to care, because all I was reading for was Vengeance Against the Lannisters.

But it struck me that that was a good question (duh), and I have read previously that the author stated the end of the series all swung on the events of 16 years past, the rebellion, Lyanna, and so forth.

So, I looked up "jon snow mother speculation" and found the answer. It's a great answer, actually, so good that there's no way it could possibly be wrong. I'm adding a little bit of my own speculation, which I think is also likely true.

I'm putting this in White Font (scroll over to read) because, well, spoilers.

GEEK ALERT for everyone. There's no sense reading this unless you've read this books, and if you've read the books, don't read it unless you don't care about spoilers. more...

Posted by: Ace at 05:37 PM | Comments (176)
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Meanwhile yet another poll (the fifth in two weeks) showing Michigan a tie came out today.

But remember, PPP, 2012 "looks more and more like 2008". All is well. You're polling finds Obama doing several points better than any other firm, in every state, and that's gotta be because everybody else is wrong, right? Sure, your polling skews all the current averages more favorably to the President, but you're in great company: Bloomberg says Obama is up wider than any President since Reagan in 1984.

Sleep well. You were only wrong by 50% of the margin on Wisconsin and AZ-8. No possible problems with that big an error anyway. Besides, batting .000 is at least better than Research2000 could say right now.

Which reminds me...this map posted Friday sure doesn't look so crazy now, does it?

Posted by: CAC at 04:57 PM | Comments (163)
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Great.

Posted by: Ace at 04:00 PM | Comments (149)
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Ace said he wanted a better ObamaCare tea leaf than "Scalia is cranky because he lost ObamaCare", well, via Brian Faughnan here's is a better (in every way) tea leaf.

Chief Justice John Roberts is expected to author the majority ruling in the health case — because of its significance and because Justice Anthony Kennedy authored the Arizona opinion, which was the second most controversial case of the term. Plus, neither he nor Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg have published any opinions since May 24. During that time, every other justice has published at least two majority opinions.

If Roberts does author the opinion, heÂ’s at the top of the seniority list, so health care could be the last of the three cases released on Thursday.

That makes a lot of sense. Roberts is likely to be writing the majority opinion no matter which way the decision goes but there's no way Ginsburg is in the "overturn camp" (if she were, Roberts would go with that majority). Ginsburg is the senior liberal justice so if it's a 5-4 overturn ruling, she would have first chance to write the dissent (the senior justice on each side has 'dibs' on writing for their camp) so this makes a lot of sense.

I didn't put any stock in the "Scalia is cranky because of ObamaCare" theory because it's just lame. Scalia has long championed the "sovereign state" theory that no one really buys (Thomas dissented but for different reasons and Alito was partially in agreement with the majority and partially in dissent but for very different reasons than either Scalia or Thomas). That alone would make Scalia cranky.

The worst part of Scalia Arizona dissent (aside from an agreement I found unpersuasive) was it wasn't any fun. Read his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas to see how biting he can be. Today he was just running around in circles that made no sense. Also his argument against "field preemption" might be sound but it seems to contradict his awful opinion in Raich.

FWIW, I found Alito's opinion to be the most persuasive. The whole set of opinions (pdf) isn't that long (relatively speaking) and worth reading.

But... [ace]: I was just asking Drew this by email: What if Kennedy flipped to the liberals, and then permitted Ginsberg to write the majority opinion (because he's embarrassed of it, and she's gung-ho), and Roberts is actually writing the dissent?

Drew again: My response to Ace was, Kennedy is an attention whore. No way he passes on the chance to write THE decision of the term and more. As for the notion that Kennedy is "embarrassed" by his position...I don't see how the guy who wrote the much laughed at "mystery of life" passage in Casey v. Planned Parenthood is embarrassed by anything.

It's all guess work at this point but hey, we've got 2 1/2 days to kill.

Posted by: DrewM at 03:07 PM | Comments (171)
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