Perhaps you’ve never even heard of her. She’s sixty-six now and retired from performing for over twenty years. But in her heyday she was unique, and choreographer George Balanchine was besotted with her.

Farrell came to the New York City Ballet, Balanchine’s company, as a teenager and began performing as a soloist very quickly. Just as quickly, the very-much-older Balanchine fell in love with her, divorced his wife Tanaquil LeClerc (once another of his ballerinas, LeClerc had tragically been forced to retire very early in her career because she’d contracted polio), and hoped to marry Farrell. She refused, and declined to have an affair with him, either, although he kept on choreographing ballet after ballet for her. At 23, she married another NYCB dancer and they both left the company, although she returned many years later.

I saw her dance quite a few times, mostly when she was achingly young. I attended a performance of the famous 1965 production of “Don Quixote” in which Farrell was Dulcinea and the 61-year-old Balanchine danced a worshipful Don Quixote. I didn’t much like it, but Farrell was extraordinary. Although slender, she was never emaciated. She had a tiny head and a longish torso. Taller than most, her body didn’t have that steely, muscled quality so many dancers get, even female ones. She looked softer, gentler, and had a way of moving that I can only describe as liquid (and that’s a compliment, although it might not sound that way).

Farrell didn’t mind being off-balance, but she made off-balance into a kind of balance. Her dancing was almost eccentric; nothing she ever did was ordinary or expected, especially her flowing and flexible upper body and arms.

But perhaps Farrell herself said it best:

A lot of dancers don’t want to move, they just want to pose. I’m not a poser.

Watch:

There was a woman in Iowa who shared her story of financial struggles, and he gave her an answer right out of an economic textbook. He said, “Our productivity equals our income.” And the notion was that somehow the reason people can’t pay their bills is because they’re not working hard enough. If they got more productive, suddenly their incomes would go up. Well, those of us who’ve spent time in the real world — (laughter) — know that the problem isn’t that the American people aren’t productive enough — you’ve been working harder than ever. The challenge we face right now, and the challenge we’ve faced for over a decade, is that harder work has not led to higher incomes, and bigger profits at the top haven’t led to better jobs.

Well, they did laugh.

[NOTE: A portion of Romney's response is here.

And here is the context of Romney's original remarks that Obama is referencing.]

The first was his magnum opus, the one that made him famous (at least in some circles), The Great War and Modern Memory. It came out in 1975 and I read it not long after. Even though that was many decades before my political conversion, it proves that, contrary to the old saying “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you,” I was always at least somewhat interested in learning about war (although I had zero interest in experiencing it).

Prior to reading Fussell’s book, I thought World War I was a very minor event, dwarfed by World War II. His book was an eye-opener, revealing not only the enormous scope of the war in terms of deaths in western Europe, but also its enormous effect on people’s perceptions of the world and their concept of mankind’s progress. The war introduced a profound cynicism and can be said to mark the beginning of the modern point of view.

The second work of Fussell’s that I read was his essay, “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.” The title was deliberately provocative, and the thesis Fussell advanced–that those who easily condemn the dropping of the atomic bomb by the US to end WWII have no idea what was really going on, and why–was highly unpopular among intellectuals. But Fussell didn’t march to any drummer but his own.

[NOTE: I wrote about Fussell's atom bomb essay previously, here.]

So here we are in late May, and now comes the completely inevitable depiction of Romney as vulture capitalist and vampire, feeding on the blood of the American worker. But the approach doesn’t seem to be working as planned.

Quit a few Democrats, from Newark mayor Cory Booker to former Democratic Congressman Harold Ford Jr. and even Obama’s campaign manager Ben LaBolt, have criticized the approach and defended venture capital firms such as Bain. Jamelle Bouie, a liberal blogger, writes that the Obama campaign should take a leaf out of Newt Gingrich’s book and do the Bain attack right. And Gingrich, now of course a warm and fuzzy Romney supporter, argues that although his own critique of Romney’s Bain record was correct, it was politically ineffective and particularly inappropriate for Obama, who’s got “the worst unemployment record in modern times,” and should therefore refrain from attacking “a businessman over job creation [that] gets him exactly into a fight that Obama doesn’t want to be in the middle of.”

Well, Obama does seem to be having a run of bad luck in seeking to strike at Romney’s soft underbelly. Dog abuser. Woman oppressor. Haircutting homophobe. Weird rich guy. “Mad Men” character from the 60s. And now, venture vampire/vulture.

But my question is this: did Gingrich’s attacks on Romney’s Bain record in fact immunize Romney somewhat, as many claimed? I think there may be something to that. It’s partly that a lot of people are sick of the subject, and it’s partly that it’s been aired so much that a number of people have actually learned a fair amount about how venture capital and Bain worked. If all this is true, Romney can say a bit of a “thank you” to his old nemesis Gingrich.

This is disturbing, but not at all unusual. Eyewitness testimony, which many people give extreme weight to, is notoriously unreliable. And that’s true even when there is no political pressure—which certainly can’t be said in the Zimmerman case, where there’s political pressure galore.

Hello i am kavin, its my first occasion to commenting anyplace, when i read this article i thought i could also make comment due to this brilliant article.

So says the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. The subject matter is PSA tests for routine prostate cancer screening, and here’s the post I wrote about that very same panel’s recommendations on mammograms for women (those geese I refer to in the title above).

But I decided not to go into the laborious details, and it’s not just because Ed Koch isn’t that much of a political player any more. Entitlement programs are remarkably complex, and so are any proposed fixes. And of course the law of unintended consequences almost always comes into play. The real point is that there’s almost no way to talk about these matters—particularly things like reforming Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which are the substance of much of Koch’s article—without simplifying and therefore misrepresenting, either deliberately or accidentally or some combination of both.

Many decades ago I took a semester-long course on the welfare system. We had to do a lot of reading about the laws that were current at the time—their flaws, and possible remedies. Then we had to make some recommendations ourselves.

Well, it was a very very sobering few months. The system was deeply troubled, but each fix seemed to introduce other problems. Were the cures worse than the disease? All too often, it appeared so. I developed a healthy respect for anyone who would make a serious attempt to wade into that morass and try to improve it in the real world rather than just the classroom.

That’s what came to mind when I read Koch’s piece. For example, take just this one example Koch cites for his support of Obama:

The Democrats believe Medicaid – health care for the poor – should remain an entitlement, no matter the number of poor qualifying, while Republicans believe Medicaid should instead become a block grant to the states, eliminating the federal responsibility to care for the poor, giving the 50 states the power to decide the benefits to be provided and the funding.

Koch conveniently omits the fact that one of the biggest problems with Medicaid and the federal government is that its regulations now threaten to bankrupt the states, because entitlements that are given “no matter the number of poor qualifying” require a little thing called funding. He also ignores the fact that it’s only the health care law passed in 2010 that’s become known as Obamacare that would cause the states to lose so much of their power over Medicaid in the first place. In fact, he ignores almost everything about the program in order to make it seem to fit the narrative of “Democrats care about poor people getting health care and mean old Republicans don’t.”

Here’s some history:

Until the 2010 enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), Medicaid preserved state sovereignty and was consistent with the constitutional framework of federalism, despite numerous stringent federal mandates, because the states retained substantial discretion to decide Medicaid eligibility, determine the scope and duration of coverage, and they were free to discontinue participation in Medicaid if not satisfied with the terms and conditions imposed by the program.

At the core of ObamaCare is the individual mandate requiring every citizen to obtain health-insurance coverage with the benefits and provisions specified by the federal government. The way ObamaCare provides for lower-income individuals and families to obtain that required coverage is by forcing the states to offer expanded coverage under Medicaid as a condition of continuing to participate in the rest of the program.

Under ObamaCare, the federal government now imposes Medicaid on the states as a federal mandate to meet the federal requirements of the individual mandate for the entire below-age-65 population with incomes under 138 percent of the poverty line. That includes mandatory coverage for the first time of all non-elderly, childless adults within the income limits. The states, consequently, no longer retain substantial discretion to determine eligibility or scope and duration of coverage for the program within their respective jurisdictions, which makes the program unacceptably coercive.

The result of this coercion will be to increase Medicaid enrollment by 24 million additional beneficiaries by 2015, covering nearly 100 million Americans by 2021 according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated that ObamaCare will impose at least another $20 billion to $42 billion in additional costs on the states by the end of the decade, even counting all the federal financing for Medicaid, not to mention other open-ended mandatory costs that are inestimable.

Now, we shouldn’t really expect Ed Koch to go into all that. It would make his task of endorsing Obama so much harder. Nor do Republicans generally present the arguments against their point of view when they’re talking about why they’re supporting other Republicans, either.

But that means voters have to to do their own homework, because they certainly can’t depend on the MSM to do it. And in the case of Medicare and Medicaid reform and so many other things, the issues are remarkably complex, it’s difficult to find trustworthy and unbiased information, and analysis is demanding of skills in math and logic. How many people have the time and the inclination to tackle such a project? And yet without it, we’re at the mercy of the polemicists.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 24% of American Adults still believe the man who shot Martin should be found guilty of murder. But that’s down from 33% in late March when the case first began to draw national headlines and 30% in early April.

Forty percent (40%) now think George Zimmerman, who has been charged with second degree murder in the Martin shooting, acted in self-defense. That’s up 25 points from 15% in March and up 16 points from 24% last month. Thirty-six percent (36%) remain undecided, compared to 55% two months ago.

I’m not a Rasmussen subscriber, so I can’t log in and read the full report. But in this post at Althouse, she writes:

47% [of black people surveyed] say murder, but the number is going down. 55% said murder in March. And 40% of black adults now say self-defense — exactly the same as percentage for adults Americans generally. Note that this means that black people are much less likely to be undecided or uncertain.

It’s interesting to speculate why such a relatively high percentage of black respondents seem to be rejecting the original MSM line. Is it because they never bought the “Zimmerman is a hateful white guy” narrative? Is it because they are disproportionately the victims of black crime, and see Martin not as an innocent kid but as a young man up to no good? Is it because they are quite familiar with the need for self-defense? Is it because the new evidence is so compelling, and they are following the case closely?

If I had access to the full report some of this might become clearer, as you can see if you look at the wording of the questions Rasmussen asked. If anyone’s a subscriber there, you might be able to shed some light on the matter.

As for me, my attitude remains that only the trial will tell us what we need to know to come to an informed conclusion about Zimmerman’s culpability. I’m leaning slightly towards “not guilty, self-defense” at this point, but my level of uncertainty is high.