Moe Lane

This is why we have an Internet, by the way: to tell us things like this.

The reason the Barbie doll has to have such a small waist relative to the size of the breasts is that Barbie is designed to look good in doll clothes, and when you make doll clothes, you have to use normal fabrics, and you have to make seams and double the fabric over in a way that gets very bulky, especially around the waist. The doll’s unreal proportions become much more real if you put the clothes on.

Mind you, this answer is a lot less satisfying to a certain type of mind than the alternative answer Toy companies hate women and want them to be unhappy.  In my (admittedly cynical and probably shallow) opinion, that attitude is mostly restricted to people in the fashion industry…

Moe Lane

PS: Shame? What’s that?

…and goodness knows that your average conservative has quite a bit to say about any Republican who can win a statewide election in Massachusetts.  I’ve done some muttering myself.  But this must have been hysterical to watch:

With fiscal negotiations consuming Washington, Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick opted to use his remarks at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate to scold the “conservative movement, so-called,” for “sapping the optimism out of our country,” positing Kennedy as the quintessential optimist.

That led to Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., taking the stage in an unadvertised appearance, addressing Kennedy’s widow, Vicki, and grinning, “I told you I’d come. Little surprise to everybody, isn’t it?”

Brown, elected to replace Kennedy last year in a historic stunner, said, “Me of all people, I understand the large shoes I have to fill.” He praised Kennedy’s knack for working across the aisle for compromise, then looked at Patrick and addressed him directly: “I have to go and do the people’s business, Governor, as you referenced. There are good people who do want to move things forward, regardless of their political party.”

Now, it’s politics – and 21st Century American politics, at that; so you can’t expect public smackdowns between politicians to involve pistols and canes and knife fights in hotels.  But this is fairly strong stuff, by the standards of these civilized times.  Especially when you consider that Governor Patrick has no intention whatsoever of running against Brown next year; which is a sentiment apparently shared by most of the Massachusetts Democratic party…

Moe Lane

(Via AoSHQ Headlines, and they really need a better way to link to those.)

From “The Management Myth” (Via Instapundit):

…management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.

Read the whole thing: it won’t tell you anything that you probably didn’t already know, but it may be telling you things that you’ve never actually articulated, which is almost as good.  See also Scott Adam’s “How to Get a Real Education” (via @MelissaTweets): it’s just as entertaining.

Blowin’ In The Wind, Bob Dylan

I like what I like, and I like some Bob Dylan.  Mostly the stuff that everybody else who is both clearly lacking in taste, and who likes Bob Dylan, likes.  Sue me.

Now that the aforementioned government shutdown has been averted, it was time to endgame the pledge drive. So… it is purchased*. 32GB, 3G iPad2: it should be arriving this time next month. After that, it’s just a matter of picking up various wires and peripherals and doohickeys and whatnot. And updating the wish list, of course.

Thanks again to everybody who contributed to the pledge drive.

Moe Lane

*Just in time, too: my eldest spilled a cup of seltzer onto the netbook, which is currently drying out in a pile of uncooked rice.

Based on my reading of the aftermath of the passage of the final CR yesterday, this is us:

Monolithic and lockstep, my tuchis.

Moe Lane

PS: On the bright side, this is an improvement.  This was us, in 2008:

Really and truly?

[pause]

[mumbling] …yes.

Via Nodwick.  Which also has more details about the animated movie coming out that’s based on the Mass Effect franchise.  Yup.  Heights of Awesome, or Depths of Suck; there’s no margin or middle ground, here.

“…not a war crime?”

I piped up without reading the article, “Why, when it’s done against Jews, of course!*”

And guess what? I guessed right. (more…)

At least, for him to lose it at this point will be actually be a bit of a surprise.  The numbers don’t seem to be there for his opponent.

First, let’s look at the total votes cast in Milwaukee and Outagamie counties (the two remaining to be canvassed), as of right now.  Prosser’s current vote margin: 7,310.

Assuming that there’s simply no sudden appearance of 7,311 Kloppenburg ballots – and I invite any Democratic election fraud enthusiasts to try; I enjoy watching perp walks – the Democrats will need a net shift of those ballots for the same amount.  That would mean a net 3 percentage point shift towards the Democrats… which is a lot, in this context.  To put it another way: 7,310 votes is (in my opinion) outside of the margin of fraud. (more…)

Teachers’ unions, racists, Dick Durbin hardest hit:

The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program — which provides low-income District students with federal money to attend private schools — is a top priority of Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). The program was closed to new entrants by Democrats in 2009, but Boehner has sought to revive and expand the program. The House passed a Boehner-authored bill last month — the SOAR Act — to reauthorize the program for five more years, and that bill will be included in the final spending deal and signed into law by Obama.

More background here.  The administration was surprisingly unequivocal in its opposition to “the creation or expansion of private school voucher programs that are authorized by this bill,” probably because poor minority kids don’t contribute to Democratic slush funds to the extent that the NEA does.  Killing the DC voucher program has been a priority for Democrats since they took full control of the government in 2009; watching the President sign it back into law is going to be one of the more satisfying things that I* will personally see next week.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Not to mention the Heritage Foundation, which has been fighting this one tooth and nail, and in the streets, all along.

It’s the very, very, very useful (from a partisan point of view) floor votes on Obamacare and PP defunding that have earned the Democrats the Visit From Their Theme Song:

Loser, Beck

I’m translating, of course: the actual title is “Ladies, It’s Time for a Sex Strike against the GOP.” Which is of course futile – the antiwar movement tried this bit of nonsense like this back at the beginning of the GWOT, to precisely zero effect.  That’s mostly because it’s, well, a nitwit idea; Lysistrata is (with the right translation) a thoroughly enjoyable filthy play, but as an actual policy strategy… um.  No.  Aside from everything else: aren’t we supposed to stop thinking of a woman’s worth primarily in terms of access to her vagina?  I’m pretty sure that we were supposed to stop doing that.

But that’s not the point I want to illustrate, anyway: the point that I want to illustrate is that there are assumptions behind a sex-withholding strategy.  The primary one?  That you’re already having sex with the person that you’re planning to withhold it from in the future.  If you’re not having sex with that person already, then there’s really not much of a threat involved there, is there?  I mean, the world is full of people already who are not going to have sex with any one particular person; and most people kind of are used to that fact.

So for this strategy to be taken seriously – and Slate presumably paid money for the article, which is one of my working definitions of ‘being taken seriously’ – it first requires that we stipulate that there are a lot of Democratic pro-choice women out there already who are having sex with Republican men.  Lots of Democratic women.  Having lots of sex with Republican men.  Even though they hate us*.  Because we’re just that awesome, apparently.

Which means, by the way, that the people who should really be upset by this are Democratic men.  Because this was a pretty comprehensive dismissal of them…

Via @snarkandboobs.

Moe Lane

*”Us” being meant in a generic fashion; being a happily married father of two, it has been many years since I would have been able to mean it in any other way.