Frank Rich: 'Smoke the Bigots Out of the Closet '

Article here.

Bronzino at the Met

Head of Smiling Young Woman

The Allegory of Venus and Cupid

Young Man

Lodovico Capponi

St. Mark

Article here. (Click on photos to enlarge.)

On Haiti

On the history of Haiti here. See here too (and this link from there for more history -- a little klutzy but good).

Maddow Debunks 'Cure' For Homosexuality

This guy was obviously never gay to begin with. Bi. Plus he's a crackpot and out to make money off his "cure." See for yourself. (From TPM here.)

Last night, Rachel Maddow interviewed Richard Cohen, an author who claims he can cure homosexuality.

Maddow argued that such claims are being appropriated in the persecution of gays, particularly in Uganda where a bill to make homosexuality punishable by death is being considered.

According to Maddow, American groups -- including The Family, a Christian group made up of lawmakers that runs the C Street house -- are pushing the Ugandan law.

Watch:

America Without a Middle Class

By Elizabeth Warren (full article here). Warren is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the banking bailouts.

The contrast with the big banks could not be sharper. While the middle class has been caught in an economic vise, the financial industry that was supposed to serve them has prospered at their expense. Consumer banking -- selling debt to middle class families -- has been a gold mine. Boring banking has given way to creative banking, and the industry has generated tens of billions of dollars annually in fees made possible by deceptive and dangerous terms buried in the fine print of opaque, incomprehensible, and largely unregulated contracts.

And when various forms of this creative banking triggered economic crisis, the banks went to Washington for a handout. All the while, top executives kept their jobs and retained their bonuses. Even though the tax dollars that supported the bailout came largely from middle class families -- from people already working hard to make ends meet -- the beneficiaries of those tax dollars are now lobbying Congress to preserve the rules that had let those huge banks feast off the middle class.

Pundits talk about "populist rage" as a way to trivialize the anger and fear coursing through the middle class. But they have it wrong. Families understand with crystalline clarity that the rules they have played by are not the same rules that govern Wall Street. They understand that no American family is "too big to fail." They recognize that business models have shifted and that big banks are pulling out all the stops to squeeze families and boost revenues. They understand that their economic security is under assault and that leaving consumer debt effectively unregulated does not work.

Families are ready for change. According to polls, large majorities of Americans have welcomed the Obama Administration's proposal for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). The CFPA would be answerable to consumers -- not to banks and not to Wall Street. The agency would have the power to end tricks-and-traps pricing and to start leveling the playing field so that consumers have the tools they need to compare prices and manage their money. The response of the big banks has been to swing into action against the Agency, fighting with all their lobbying might to keep business-as-usual. They are pulling out all the stops to kill the agency before it is born. And if those practices crush millions more families, who cares -- so long as the profits stay high and the bonuses keep coming.

America today has plenty of rich and super-rich. But it has far more families who did all the right things, but who still have no real security. Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantee economic safety. Paying for a child's education and setting aside enough for a decent retirement have become distant dreams. Tens of millions of once-secure middle class families now live paycheck to paycheck, watching as their debts pile up and worrying about whether a pink slip or a bad diagnosis will send them hurtling over an economic cliff.

America without a strong middle class? Unthinkable, but the once-solid foundation is shaking.

'Ayn Rand’s Revenge'

This was interesting. I've never read Ayn Rand and don't plan to (it sounds like garbage to me). Alan Greenspan was a devotee and look what happened to the economy. (He admitted his error.) I can't bear ideologues.

Rand’s style of vehement individualism has never been universally popular among conservatives — back in 1957, Whittaker Chambers denounced the “wickedness” of “Atlas Shrugged” in National Review — and Rand still has her critics on the right today. But it can often seem, as Jonathan Chait, a senior editor at The New Republic recently observed, that “Rand is everywhere in this right-wing mood.” And while it’s not hard to understand Rand’s revenge-fantasy appeal to those on the right, would-be Galts ought to hear the story Anne C. Heller has to tell in her dramatic and very timely biography, “Ayn Rand and the World She Made.” . . .

Rand’s inclusion of businessmen in the ranks of the Übermenschen helps to explain her appeal to free-marketeers — including Alan Greenspan — but it is not convincing. At bottom, her individualism owed much more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any influence, saying only that Nie­tzsche “beat me to all my ideas”). But “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” never sold a quarter of a million copies a year. . . .

(I do recommend Nietzsche.)

The decades of psychodrama that followed read, in Heller’s excellent account, like “Phèdre” rewritten by Edward Albee. When Blumenthal, who changed his name to Nathaniel Branden, moved to New York, Rand followed him; she inserted herself into her protégé’s love life, urging him to marry his girlfriend; then Rand began to sleep with Branden, insisting that both their spouses be kept fully apprised of what was going on. Heller shows how the Brandens formed the nucleus of a growing group of young Rand followers, a herd of individualists who nicknamed themselves “the Collective” — ironically, but not ironically enough, for they began to display the frightening group-think of a true cult. One journalist Heller refers to wondered how Rand “charmed so many young people into quoting John Galt as religiously as ‘clergymen quote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.’ ” . . .

More inane crap from Facebook

"What do you trust more, science or the bible?" Choices: 1. Science!2. Bible! (Become a Fan | Settings)

They don't even capitalize "Bible" in the question. What's up here?