Apt. 11D

What Was She Thinking?

Enough serious business. We have to talk about Sarah Jessica Parker. What was she thinking? Buying herself some new babies with Matthew Broderick as the daddy? Broderick has been sliming his way around Manhattan. I haven't forgiven him yet.

Links fixed. Sorry. More commentary in the comments.

The Specter Defection

When I read that Arlen Specter switched parties yesterday, my jaw dropped to the ground. I don't think anyone saw that one coming.

The impact of his switch is glaringly obvious. The Republican party is too extreme for Specter and the voters in PA. Again jaw drop. I'm not sure if there is more to say on that score.

The Democratic reaction to this switch is obvious. I'm actually mostly curious what the Republicans have to say. Here's Ramesh Ponnuru:

The Democrats are growing by appealing to formerly Republican moderates while the GOP is being reduced to a conservative rump. The timing of the announcement could hardly have been better for the White House.

OK, I take back the lack of good liberal commentary on this matter. Check out TPM:

Probably the most important point is here is the demographic changes going on in Specter's home state. Pennsylvania is a closed-primary state, and the ranks of registered Republicans, the folks eligible to vote in the GOP primary, shrunk last year. In 2008, between 150,000 and 200,000 registered GOPers switched to the Democratic Party in order to vote in the contentious primary between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Let's take a look at the deeper numbers -- and how the state's reduced GOP electorate has pulled harder to the right, making this move necessary as a simple matter of political survival.

Those people tended to be moderate voters -- Specter's people -- and without them he cannot win a primary. But with them staying as Democrats, he could actually start with a leg-up as a Democrat, just in case any liberal challenger might try to take him on in the Dem primary.

I'm in reading/linking mode on this topic. I'll share the good stuff. Oh, I like Dan's post.

UPDATE: (Thanks to bj for spotting this.) The quote of the day goes to David Brooks, "The Democrats I saw on Capitol Hill were experiencing the joy you feel when your team, already up by four touchdowns, scores yet another. Let’s call it the joy of pulverization."

Though Gail Collins gets a close second for: Everybody knows, of course, that even when Al Franken finally makes it to Washington, getting all 60 Democrats-and-fellow-travelers to vote together on something will be like herding … something really impossible. Not cats. Cats I could envision all going in one direction if there was a little herring-flavored incentive at the end of the line. Herding rabid guinea pigs in a thunderstorm, maybe."

Spreadin' Love

Great post by Russell on raising his kids without rides to school or cell phones. I also love how he tied in past conversations into a new conversation.

I've been enjoying articles and blog posts about old feminists. Check out the Times review of a new book on Helen Gurley Brown and BitchPhD's post on Bea Arthur. 

Lots of discussion about the benefits of marriage. See Regnerus, Klein, and Valenti.

Beautiful Buckleys

 One more day of lectures. One day of review sessions/class presentations. Finals. Can you hear the angels singing? The semester is almost over.

Perhaps my unbreakable good mood explains why I liked Christopher Buckley's article in the Times about his parents. I am not a fan of his writing. He tries too hard to be cute and I frown on forced cute. I wanted to red pencil to a couple of annoying lines in the essay, but I kept reading any way, because the subject of the essay was so compelling. The slide show is also good.

Buckley does paint a wonderful image of his glamorous parents. Intellectual, fun, daring. They traveled the world and had fab dinner parties. They were completely devoted to each other. Sure, they were crappy parents, but it is terribly hard to be both a good parent and an intellectual, glamorous partier.

Steve and I have made some trade-offs. Instead, of the Buckley life-style, we read the New Republic in the stands at soccer games and have an extra glass of wine at the local burger joint. I write after the kids go to sleep, and Steve gets another shipment of books from Amazon. I like to think we made the right choice.

Spreadin' Love

Running into class, but here's a quick link...

Yet another opinion article telling students to avoid graduate school and calling for a rehaul of the entire system of academia.

I'm going to have to write an a post on Jay McInerney and New York City in 1980s.

UPDATE: Tim Burke responds to the Taylor article. Good comments there, too. Dean Dad does an excellent job rejecting Taylor's proposal for doing away with departments. More from GeekyMom.

Weekend Journal

Threw my first birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese this weekend. I survived.

Women and Politics

It is a Saturday morning, and it is quite against the rules to blog on a weekend, but I just read two pieces on women and politics. This is mental bookmark to come back to them.

Please see the lovely essay, "May it Please the Court..." and this article that wonders why Michelle Obama isn't breaking out the policy guns.

Question of the Day -- Beautiful Weekend

I have ticked off a broad list of dumb chores today. Website design. Check. House cleaning before the house cleaner arrived. Check. Eyebrow waxing. Check. Now, I have a pot of tea and I am going to read Bobos in Paradise on the front porch and wait for Ian's school bus. Maybe I'll roller blade while he does the scooter. Tonight we're going out to a local restaurant that will donate a portion of the check towards Autism Awareness.

The rest of the weekend promises fantastic weather. My goal is to work as little as possible. I want to read, exercise, and eat. Maybe I will garden. In reality, I have to prep one more week of classes and I have no idea where the kids' shorts are, so I can't be as fat and lazy as I would like.

Question of the Day: What are your plans for the weekend?

Random Notes on Technology

I spent the morning setting up a small business website for a friend. I must say that blogging has given me mad skillz at website design. Okay, okay. Adequate skillz.

I learned some new tricks today. Use GoDaddy to set up your domain, but use Yahoo! Small Business for the web hosting. Linking up the two services requires several phone calls. And small business owners who have two days to roll out 6,000 cheese crackers are a little wacky.

Blogging has been extremely sluggish over the past few months. The usual suspects in my Google Reader have been reticent of late. Facebook, too. There have been far less status updates and new friends than there were six months ago. One strange trend is that old blog posts of mine are getting tossed around Facebook. This post and this one have been very popular.

I found this post at CT about Apple applications very helpful. Learned about Skim.

Trés Geek.

Sexting, Oprah, and Teenagers

Last week, GeekyMom blogged about sexting and the Oprah show on sex. Both topics have been hot topics around here lately. I suppose the chattering class is all on the same page again.

A boy sent a neighbor girl a picture of a naked woman and a picture of himself without a shirt on. Later, another boy left her a phone message that said that he wanted to f@ck her. She's ten.

Our town has had some problems with pictures of teenage boys sending around pictures of their naked girlfriends using the server for the school district. There was a lot of outrage and threats that the school could be charged with the distribution of child pornography.

A student recently handed in a term paper with a highly inappropriate paragraph buried within a seemingly normal paper on political theory. He claims that a friend wrote it without his knowledge. My mom stopped by after school, and I showed her the paragraph. She was shocked that anybody could write something like that. She referenced the Oprah show and said that teenagers were being robbed of their childhoods by the experts on Oprah and that it was leading to all types of deviant behavior.

Mom was particularly upset about the sexologist who advised women to buy vibrators for their teenager daughters.

I'm more concerned about these incidents than GeekyMom, but less concerned than my mom. Sexting is harassment. It is done to intimidate and frighten the recipient. The person who sends it gets off on intimidating the other. And technology has opened up new doors for harassment. I'm not sure if this is a widespread problem, as my mom believes. After watching that Oprah show, Mom was so upset that she offered to pay for my kids to attend Catholic schools.

We discussed this issue in the past, but these incidents have made me concerned again.