Shortness is Not a Defense

It's really too bad I'm not a conservative. Because I could have a lot of fun with this story.

A judge in Nebraska has sentenced a child molester convicted of two charges of felony sexual assault to probation instead of the hoosegow because -- get this! -- he's too short.

That's right -- you heard me. He's too short.

According to the AP story by Scott Bauer, "Cheyenne County District Judge Kristine Cecava [...] told Richard W. Thompson that his crimes deserved a long prison sentence but that he was too small to survive in a state prison."

Pee Wee wasn't too short to molest a 12-year-old, mind you, but he's too tiny for the slammer. Go figure.

Thompson could have been sentenced to 10 years in prison, but Judge Cecava sentenced him instead to 10 years probation.

"As part of the probation," the AP story continues, "he will be electronically monitored for the first four months and was told never to be alone with someone under age 18 or date or live with a woman whose children were under 18. He was also ordered to get rid of his pornography."

He has to get rid of his pornography?

Aw, come on, judge -- don't you think you're being a wee bit too strict here? I mean, really. Probation is one thing. Keeping him away from chicks under 18 is one thing -- but getting rid of his porn? Do you know how long it takes to put a collection like that together? A complete set of "Toe-Sucking Toddlers" and "Diaper Rash Nymphets" doesn't just happen by itself, you know.

The AP story continues:

"Joe Mangano, secretary of the National Organization of Short Statured Adults, agreed with the judge's assessment that Thompson would face dangers while in prison because of his height.

"I'm assuming a short inmate would have a much more difficult time than a large inmate," said Mangano, who is 5 feet 4 inches tall. "It's good to see somebody looking out for someone who is a short person.""

According to the AP story the state's attorney general, Jon Bruning, not being a complete fucking fool, is planning an appeal.

""I'm concerned about the message this sends to victims and perpetrators," said Marla Sohl with the Nebraska Domestic Violence Sexual Assault Coalition, adding that it shows more concern is being placed on the criminal and his safety in prison than the victim," according to the AP.

The AP story concludes:

"A spokesman for the prison system said Thompson's height would not put him at risk among the state's 4,400 inmates. There are protections available in prison to help inmates who feel threatened, prison spokesman Steve King said, but to his knowledge, no one has ever taken advantage of them based on fears related to their height.

"He's not the shortest guy we have in prison," King said. "We've got some short guys that are as tough as nails. We've got people from all ages, physical stature of all sizes, in general population."

State Sen. Ernie Chambers, a longtime critic of judges, said he was baffled by the sentence.

"If shortness is an excuse and protection from going to prison, short people ought to rob banks and do everything else they would wind up going to prison for," Chambers said. "We're talking here about a crime committed against a child, and shortness is not a defense.""

So what do we do about this?

It seems to me that, in order to forestall a midget crime wave, we're just going to have to build midget prisons, specifically designed to house shorter inmates. If people of diminished stature are going to commit crimes, then we'll have to have a facility to house them. We can put the sinks lower to the ground, make sure the bars are closer together (so they can't slip through), so that we can see to it that people who commit heinous crimes and are less than so-called "normal" size can be put away without endangering their personal safety by putting them in with the big boys.

It may seem like an inconvenience, but then again, think of all the money we'll save on materials.

Tom Moran

Desperate Housewives and Desperate Presidents

Did anyone notice the little dig at President Bush that the writers of ABC's "Desperate Housewives" snuck into Sunday night's two-hour season finale? It was subtle, but if you listened and paid attention to context, it was unmistakable.

Much of Sunday night's episode consisted of flashbacks, which allowed us not only to see characters that we've been watching for the past two years in a time period that we're not familiar with, it gave us the opportunity to view their past while realizing what their future has in store for them. It's a little like watching the beginning of "Oedipus the King" while realizing, as the play's original audience did, that Oedipus is going to blind himself at the end.

The most revealing of these flashbacks was at the beginning of the second hour. It showed Bree Van De Kamp and her husband Rex at the drugstore with their rebellious daughter, Danielle. Their daughter has streaked her hair a particularly obnoxious color -- and that, to a conservative, gun-toting right-winger like Bree, is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

She tells her husband that she's going to buy hair color to dye Danielle's hair back to its original color, regardless of the girl's wishes. She also says that she will tie her daughter to a chair if she tries to resist.

"How can you be so damn sure of yourself all the time?" her husband asks her.

"Why is my certainty a flaw?" Bree asks in response. "I know what I'm about, I know my values, and I know what's right. Why shouldn't I stay the course?"

She turns for support to the druggist, who is off-camera.

"Am I right, Mr. Williams?" she asks the druggist rhetorically.

The druggist looks at her deadpan, and says, "My mother always took a firm hand with me, and I thank her for it."

"Exactly," Bree says. "And look how well you turned out."

Now, the fun of this scene, for people who have been watching "Desperate Houswives" for the past two seasons, is in its subtext. We know that Bree's husband, Rex, will be poisoned by the druggist. We also know that Bree's children, far from appreciating her "firm hand," will grow to hate her -- and that Bree herself will allow the druggist to die rather than lift a finger to save his life, once she realizes that he killed her husband.

The key to the political subtext, obviously, is the phrase "stay the course," an expression that is to President Bush what "Na-Noo, Na-Noo" was to Mork from Ork. When he doesn't know what else to say, he says "stay the course."

The meaning of the scene is clear -- mindless, unbending conservatism, the kind that makes you "stay the course" no matter how badly things are going, will lead you to disaster. By this reading, Bree's inflexible, dogmatic, unbending nature (all qualities that she shares with her President), destroys her family.

As I see it, Bree Van De Kamp's disastrous family life is a metaphor for what has happened to this country in the past five years. And I'm pretty sure the creator of the show intended it to be read that way.

By the end of Sunday's season finale, Bree is able to at least save her daughter. It will be interesting to see what President Bush can salvage from the next two and a half years. If anything.

Tom Moran

Who Could Ask for Anything More?

With all the depressing news out there -- from the Bush Administration being shown to be an abject failure, to American servicemen being needlessly slaughtered in Iraq, to Ann Coulter still being, it's really nice to be able to report some good news for a change.

Minton's Playhouse is back.

What's Minton's, you ask?

Minton's Playhouse in Harlem was the unofficial testing ground for the music that came to be known as bebop. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk. Charlie Christian -- they all jammed at Minton's in its heyday in the 1940s.

"It would be hard to name someone who didn't go to Minton's," says Phil Schaap, jazz historian and DJ at radio station WKCR in an article that ran in Wednesday's New York Post.

So many of the venues of the great age of jazz in New York City are gone (the Village Vanguard being a notable exception), that the reopening of Minton's Playhouse as a living performance space where today's musicians can play in the shadow of their great forebears -- a Yankee Stadium of jazz, you might say -- is a cause for celebration. Earl Spain, the Harlem club owner who, according to the Post article, put up $300,000 of his own money to renovate the space, deserves the thanks of all music-loving New Yorkers for bringing this classic space back to life.

Minton's Playhouse is at 206-210 West 118th Street, on the first floor of the Cecil Hotel. It opens today. Monday night is the first jam session. Be there or be square.

Tom Moran

Note: If you've never heard Phil Schaap on WKCR, you're definitely missing an experience. Phil's knowledge of jazz makes the word "encyclopedic" seem utterly inadequate, and his "birthday broadcasts" of jazz legends like Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong and Lester Young are more informative (and more fun) than a college course on the History of Jazz -- unless that course is being given by Phil himself. If you ever get the chance, check him out at 89.9 FM in New York, or listen online at: www.wkcr.org.

Out of the Barn and onto the Third Rail

It's hard not to feel sorry for President Bush on the subject of immigration. He is stuck between a rock and a hard place (or, as Rush Limbaugh would say, the horse is out of the barn and hit the third rail). There seems to be no political will in Congress to really get tough with illegal immigrants, and yet the people out there in what those snobby elitists in New York and Los Angeles call "flyover country" want every Mexican rounded up and tossed out of the country regardless of whether or not they have a green card.

So what's a president (and one from Texas, at that) to do?

What he does, of course, is waffle. I think that Republicans call it "flip-flopping" -- at least, that's what they call it when they accuse Democrats of doing it.

For example, in his address, Bush stated:

"We are a nation of laws, and we must enforce our laws. We are also a nation of immigrants, and we must uphold that tradition, which has strengthened our country in so many ways. These are not contradictory goals."

Well, there's no getting around the fact that giving illegal immigrants amnesty (which is what Bush is proposing, although from the looks of it he would rather have been set on fire than use the actual word) is, in fact, rewarding illegal behavior. The message is pretty clear: all you have to do is get across the border any way you can, and eventually we'll reward you with amnesty. Crime pays.

On the other hand, Bush is trying, however clumsily, to address an inescapable reality. We have been able to control immigration in the past because people came here on ships, and if we didn't want them here (including the ships carrying refugees from Hitler's Germany), we could always make the ship turn around and go back to where it came from.

But that's not possible in this case. We have a 2,000-mile border with Mexico, running across four states, and it's impossible to defend. Building a wall, as some on the right have suggested, is just stupid (and besides, as others have retorted in reply, who would build it?). The National Guard is stretched too thin in Iraq to adequately guard our borders, and as Bush rightly said the other night:

"Some in this country argue that the solution is to deport every illegal immigrant and that any proposal short of this amounts to amnesty. I disagree. It is neither wise nor realistic to round up millions of people, many with deep roots in the United States, and send them across the border. There is a rational middle ground between granting an automatic path to citizenship for every illegal immigrant, and a program of mass deportation."

Of course, his "middle ground" amounts to amnesty, whether he's willing to use the word or not.

This, of course, is giving Republicans (none of whom will ever be able to vote for George W. Bush again) conniptions.

As Rush Limbaugh says:

"You know, I'll tell you what, this issue is causing more divisions in the Republican Party than any issue that I can recall in a long time, including the Dubai Ports deal. I can't recall an issue. […] There have been some, but I can't think of any single issue which has Republicans/conservatives more up in arms than this one -- and particularly with the apparent lack of response at the highest levels of government, House, Senate, White House."

Throw the wetbacks out! seems to be the rallying cry on the right.

Peggy Noonan thinks it's all about politics, and that politicans are more interested in Mexican votes than in the outrage of their legal citizen (read: Anglo) constituents:

"The disinterest in the White House and among congressional Republicans in establishing authority on America's borders is so amazing--the people want it, the age of terror demands it--that great histories will be written about it. Thinking about this has left me contemplating a question that admittedly seems farfetched: Is it possible our flinty president is so committed to protecting the Republican Party from losing, forever, the Hispanic vote, that he's decided to take a blurred and unsatisfying stand on immigration, and sacrifice all personal popularity, in order to keep the party of the future electorally competitive with a growing ethnic group?"

In other words, if we don't suck up to the Mexicans now, they'll all end up voting Democratic the way Southern whites voted Republican after the Civil Rights Act of '64, and we'll be in deep electoral doo-doo for the forseeable future.

And you know what? They could be right on that.

Cal Thomas takes a more xenopohobic approach:

"Throughout his address, the president kept referring to the immigrants and their rights and desires. What about those of us born in America, or who legally immigrated to this country? Don't we have a right to preserve the nation the way it was handed down to us, with our English language, our culture and our loyalty to this country? […] This is about more than politics and votes. It goes to the nature of who and what we are. Current citizens had better make sure this is not an invasion masquerading as immigration."

The wetbacks are coming! The wetbacks are coming! Grab your pitchfork, Muffy -- we're off to defend our Aryan way of life!

My favorite comment on this issue is from the bleached-blonde Mohammad Atta of the radical right, whom I very much doubt I need to name here. But her statement clearly proves that, just as Lyndon Johnson knew he'd lost Vietnam when Walter Cronkite turned against it, when this peroxide-headed bulemic says something this extreme about a president of her own party, that president has completely lost the support of the lunatic right on the subject of immigration:

"On the bright side, if President Bush's amnesty proposal for illegal immigrants ends up hurting Republicans and we lose Congress this November, maybe the Democrats will impeach him and we'll get Cheney as president."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Tom Moran

Note: In case you're wondering where I got the title for this blog entry, here's the Rush Limbaugh statement that inspired it: "Then we got the third rail of third rails here, illegal immigration, and the horses are out of the barn on this. You can lock the door to the barn all you want, and you can say (muttering), but when the horses are gone, the horses are gone, and this is one of these issues."

The Queen of Denial

Laura Bush thinks everything is just hunky-dory.

She doesn't believe all those nasty old polls that appear to show that the American people think her husband is a miserable failure as president. Why, that's just liberal propaganda spread around by those nasty, un-American people in the mainstream media.

"I don't really believe those polls. I travel around the country. I see people, I see their responses to my husband. I see their response to me," Mrs. Bush told Fox News on Sunday, according to Reuters.

Of course, it doesn't seem to have occurred to Mrs. Bush that when she travels around the country she only sees what her handlers want her to see, only meets the people they want her to meet and only hears what they want her to hear.

And even if that were not the case, Mrs. Bush doesn't always see what's right in front of her.

Ask Michael Douglas.

But I digress.

Mrs. Bush continues:

"As I travel around the United States, I see a lot of appreciation for him. A lot of people come up to me and say, 'Stay the course'."

Those people are what's known in the carny world as "plants," Mrs. Bush.

But then, if I wanted to approach the First Lady and tell her what I think of her husband, what are the odds that the secret service would let me within ten miles of her?

Probably somewhat less than the odds of my winning the next Mega Millions jackpot.

The Reuters piece concludes:

"Mrs. Bush complained that when her husband's popularity was high, newspapers did not put that on the front page. Now it was low, they took great delight in highlighting the fact.

Asked if she thought the media had been unfair, Mrs. Bush said: "No, I don't think it's necessarily unfair. I think it's just, you know, I think they may be enjoying this a little bit.""

Now I think that's terribly unfair. I know that I for one am not enjoying the president's currently miserable poll ratings.

When he's frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs, however -- now that I'll enjoy.

Tom Moran

McCain Drinks the Kool-Aid

This story is sad.

Six years ago John McCain ran for president. He was a breath of fresh air with his candor and near-total lack of bullshit. He spoke truth to power -- and eventually got his head handed to him by the vicious lies of Karl Rove and the dirty tricksters in the Bush camp. To the end of that sad campaign, however, he maintained his integrity -- and called George Bush out on live television for the lies that Bush's people spread about him. He was one of only two Republican politicians that I've ever truly admired (the other one, in case you're wondering, was Warren Rudman).

Well, as the saying goes, that was then. And this is now.

Yesterday McCain gave a speech at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. The school run by Jerry Falwell. You remember him -- he's the founder of The Moral Majority, longtime media whore and the guy that McCain once called, along with Pat Robertson, "agents of intolerance."

That was back when McCain had a conscience. Now, knowing that 2008 is his last chance at winning the Republican nomination for president, he sucks up to these same troglodytes like a vacuum cleaner. And it's nauseating to watch.

Warren Fiske of The Virginian-Pilot covered McCain's speech.

"McCain's tone was decidedly friendlier than in 2000, when he called Falwell and Robertson "corrupting influences" on American politics. McCain delivered the comment in Virginia Beach the day before his critical loss to George W. Bush in the state's GOP presidential primary.

Although the Arizona Republican never specifically mentioned those old remarks during his speech at Liberty, he did express remorse for sometimes making strong comments in the heat of debate.

"We are arguing over the means to better secure our freedom, promote the general welfare and defend our ideals," he said. "It should remain an argument among friends. … I have not always heeded this injunction myself, and I regret it very much."

Falwell, in return, lauded McCain as "a great American hero. "

Their appearance together signaled a rapprochement that could bolster McCain's presidential ambitions. Christian conservatives have wielded growing influence in the GOP in the past 15 years.

"Any Republican wanting to be president in 2008 has to be on their good side," said John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, in an interview last week. "Falwell is giving a signal that McCain is OK."

Actually, the real signal is that McCain is not OK. This action, along with his campaigning for Bush in 2004, a man he had every right to despise, shows that McCain, like Bush père in 1980, when he sold his soul in Detroit to get on the ticket as Reagan's vice presidential nominee, is now seemingly willing to do anything to achieve power.

He may not garner comparisons to Marshal Pétain (another military man who was once considered a hero by his countrymen) quite yet, but then 2008 is quite a while away. Anything could happen.

And what exactly did McCain get for the price of his soul? According to the Virginian-Pilot article, not much.

Falwell has said that:

"I invited John McCain to speak at Liberty because I want our students to become acquainted with one of America's most profound heroes - whether or not he becomes president." [...]

He described McCain as "the kind of conservative I would have little trouble supporting." Falwell vowed to back McCain should the Arizonan win the GOP nomination, but added, "If another candidate who shares our value wins the nomination, then I will work to support that candidate, too."

So what exactly did McCain accomplish? Did he merely neutralize a potential enemy, the way Hillary Clinton seems to have neutralized Rupert Murdoch? And was that really worth what was left of his integrity?

The Virginian-pilot piece goes on:

"It's all about presidential ambition," said Mark Rozell, a political scientist at George Mason University who has written a book about the Christian conservative influence in Virginia politics. "In 2000, he tried to win the nomination by mobilizing the non-Christian right and that didn't work, so now he's trying it the other way."

He's trying it the other way.

I think that's what they call a euphemism.

And it's what I call sad.

As Marx (Harpo, not Karl) once said, the passing of an ordinary man is sad. The passing of a great man is tragic, and doubly tragic when the greatness passes before the man does.

Tom Moran

Welcome to the Police State

The ancient Chinese curse -- "May you live in interesting times" -- has never seemed quite so appropriate as it does at this point in American history.

Consider two stories in The Boston Globe. They were published within two weeks of each other. Individually they are each interesting. But if you slap them together in a sort of Eisensteinian montage, they become even more revealing.

I'm going to give the headlines in reverse order:

From today:

"Bush says domestic spying does not violate civil liberties"

And from April 30th:

"Bush challenges hundreds of laws"

Do we see the connection? If not, let's investigate further.

From the April 30th Globe piece by Charlie Savage:

"President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research."

With me so far? Okay, now here's the piece from today's Globe, written by Deb Riechmann:

"President Bush yesterday defended the scope of the government's domestic surveillance programs that have riled privacy advocates and threatened to impede the Senate confirmation of his choice to lead the CIA." [...]

Bush made his remarks two days after news reports revealed that the National Security Agency was collecting the phone records of tens of millions of Americans.

In a separate development, The New York Times reported in today's editions that in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney urged the administration to empower the NSA to intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants."

The combined thrust of these two articles is clear. Bush (whose poll numbers have dropped even lower than they were the last time I wrote about them -- ranging from 33% in one poll to below 30% in another) clearly has crossed the line into Nixon territory. He thinks that if the president does it, then it must be legal (or as Louis XIV put it, "L'Etat, c'est moi!").

He thinks he is above the law at exactly the same point when, according to an AP-Ipsos poll, 31% of Republicans want the GOP out of power.

Think about that for a minute: almost a third of Republicans want their own party out of power. And that's with a currently booming stock market.

Bush and Cheney are in the process (if it's not too late to use the present tense) of turning this country into a police state. They want total control of its citizens, and the right to make war with anyone they please without anyone, in or out of Congress, saying anything about it.

Luckily it looks like the American people as well as their congressional representatives have -- finally -- caught on. I think it's likely that Bush's nominee to head the CIA, General Michael V. Hayden, will not be confirmed. And it's also likely that the Republicans will take an historic drubbing at the polls this November.

Consider the AP-Ipsos poll numbers:

• 25 percent, now approve of the job Congress is doing, down 5 points in a month.
• 51 percent, want the Democrats to win control of Congress.
• Those now saying the country is on the wrong track include: 62 percent of conservatives, 77 percent of moderates, and 92 percent of liberals.

It looks like the majority of the American people have finally realized that this particular emperor, even though he may, as one young relative of mine put it, "love the Lord," has no clothes.

But have we caught on in time?

Tom Moran

Pimp My Party

First of all, an apology. I said I'd never write about a certain bleached-blonde Mohammad Atta of the radical right ever again, and here I am breaking my word. Mea culpa. If anyone wants to accuse me of inconsistency, feel free to do so.

Now then...

Ann Coulter's latest column is a real doozy. And it deserves more than a superficial glance. It simply cries out to be deconstructed. It's practically an X-ray into her sociopathic soul.

The headline is:

"CONSERVATIVES NEED 12-STEP PROGRAM TO MANHOOD."

Well, it's not the fault of conservatives if they can't be as manly as Ann Coulter. And as far as needing a 12-step program goes...

But I digress.

See if you can spot the subtext in this column. It's pretty obvious as you go along, but let me know when you spot it.

"It's pretty pathetic when a Kennedy is too drunk to drive into the Potomac. After the visibly intoxicated Rep. Patrick Kennedy crashed his car into a police barrier near the Capitol just before 3 a.m. last Thursday morning, he explained to the police he was hurrying back to the Capitol for a vote, a procedure known on the Hill as "last call." It could have been a lot worse: Patrick's designated driver that night was Ted Kennedy. "

This is just boilerplate Coulter. When she has nothing better to write about, she slams the Kennedys, with her envy fairly dripping off the page (or the screen, depending on which medium you're using to read her). I remember thinking, when Rep. Kennedy's troubles became public knowledge last week, that Coulter was going to be so bummed because she wouldn't be able to write about it until the next Wednesday, at which point it would no longer be topical.

Well, our girl never lets the fact that something is old news get in her way. In spite of the fact that the "news" was almost a week old, she leads with it anyway. Way to stay topical, babe. I can certainly understand why she'd want to write about a given Kennedy's problems with pharmaceuticals as opposed to, oh, I dunno: a) Bush's toilet-level poll ratings, or: b) the fact that the government has been spying on almost all the phone calls of its supposedly private citizens, or: c) the fact that so many retired generals have been demanding the resignation or firing of Donald Rumsfeld, or: d) the fact that we're pushing a nuclear confrontation with Iran in order to avoid dealing with the utter failure of this administration's foreign policy.

You know, boring crap like that.

Miss Coulter continues:

"Coming right on the heels of a three-year witch-hunt directed at Rush Limbaugh for an addiction to prescription drugs (because of his politics) — as well as the continuing threat to put Tom DeLay in prison (because of his politics) — you would think there would be at least some serious discussion of prosecuting the young Kennedy for his addiction to prescription drugs, too.

Perhaps the Republican attorney general in Washington needs to interview Democratic Palm Beach prosecutor Barry Krischer, who wasted three years and untold taxpayer dollars trying to frame Limbaugh, about the danger to society of prescription drug addiction.

Baseball has a system to protect batters from being hit: If your pitcher hits one of our guys, our pitcher will hit one of your guys. This is also the only argument that ever works with Democrats."

Boy, isn't this revealing? The fact that Rush Limbaugh was a drug addict and did go doctor shopping (aside from all the other things he did to feed his habit), and that Tom DeLay was and is a crook is of no concern to Coulter. Totally irrelevant. The facts don't count. They're just being targeted because of their politics. Boo-fucking-hoo.

And the fact is that there's no evidence that Rep. Kennedy got his medication through any but legal means. If any such evidence exists, then perhaps Miss Coulter should put up or shut up.

"Democrats adored the independent counsel statute — until it was used to catch an actual felon in the Oval Office. Then they noticed all sorts of problems with the law. Democrats swore up and down that women never lie about rape — until that same felon was credibly accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick on "NBC News," not to mention the four other card-carrying Democratic women who described being raped by Bill Clinton in eerily similar detail in Christopher Hitchens' book "No One Left To Lie To."

Of course, the fact that people in this country (at least, unless Bush has rescinded that little item in the Constitution) are innocent until proven guilty, and that Bill Clinton has never been indicted or charged with any sex crime in any court of law whatsoever that I know about -- none of this has any bearing with Miss Coulter. If someone says it of a Democrat -- especially if it's said on television -- it's true. I find her faith in what conservatives like to call the mainstream media kind of touching.

But if a prosecutor says it in a court of law about a Republican, it's a goddamn lie. Even when (or perhaps I should say especially when) said Republican has copped a plea, as Limbaugh has.

Anybody spot a double standard here? Not to mention that her continuing obsession with Bill Clinton is becoming more than a little... oh, I dunno... creepy?

Now comes the good part:

"Democrats have declared war against Republicans, and Republicans are wandering around like a bunch of ninny Neville Chamberlains, congratulating themselves on their excellent behavior. They'll have some terrific stories about their Gandhi-like passivity to share while sitting in cells at Guantanamo after Hillary is elected."

Here's where the subtext of Miss Coulter's little screed comes out into the open.

The Republicans have had total power for the past few years, and they've totally fucked it up. It is no longer remotely possible to deny it. They're going to go down in flames in the mid-term elections, and quite possibly lose the White House in 2008, and Miss Coulter knows it -- and it scares the living shit out of her.

"For a political party that grasps the concept of victory against foreign enemies, Republicans can't seem to grasp that concept when it comes to domestic enemies. Instead of taking a page from Sun-tzu's "Art of War," when it comes to fighting liberals, American conservatives prefer the Jimmy Carter unconditional surrender strategy.

Patriotic Americans don't have to become dangerous psychotics like liberals, but they could at least act like men."

By "like men," of course, Coulter really means "like Ann Coulter."

I'll skip over the part where she advocates violence against a Yale student she claims is a Talibanist (although God knows she'd howl loud enough if anyone were to attack her physically for her insane beliefs), and go straight to the end:

"Conservatives may shrink from confrontation with howling, violent liberals, but as General "Buck" Turgidson in "Dr. Strangelove" informed the milquetoast president still hoping to avert a nuclear confrontation with the Russkies: "Well, Mr. President, I would say that General Ripper has already invalidated that policy."

Well, conservatives, I would say liberals have already invalidated your "Let's all just get along" policy.

The violence and threats of imprisonment have started. Now the only question is whether conservatives will choose victory."

You can just smell the desperation, can't you?

The trouble is that conservatives can't "choose" victory, because their policies have already lost. The war in Iraq is a shambles, and Bush's current Iraq policy certainly seems to be "try not to lose for the next couple of years and after that it's Hillary's problem."

They deserve to lose. And even a sociopathic lunatic like Ann Coulter can't deny that reality.

Tom Moran

They Work Hard For The Money

Some insights are so obvious that it takes an academic to think of them.

Take this doozy, for instance, from an ABC News report on a study of prostitution by John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University:

"Like any statistical model, this one ignores the diversity of real people and the complexities of love and pleasure, changing social mores, et cetera. Still, once all its equations have been solved, a simple fact remains: Most women enter prostitution for the money."

Gee, ya think? And here I was assuming that women were eager to turn themselves into ambulatory semen receptacles just for the hell of it. Silly fucking me.

His study creates an artificial distinction between wives and prostitutes, with the attendant income differentials between the two. But his study (at least from the ABC News redaction of it that I've read on the web), ignores, as academics so often do, the obvious.

Women go into prostitution for the same reason that men who are seven feet tall go into basketball -- because they can. It's an option that's always available to them: it's just that some women, for various reasons, choose to avail themselves of that opportunity and others don't. And since I'm assuming that the average woman doesn't find the idea of humping dozens if not hundreds of random strangers to be all that appealing (female readers of this blog feel free to disagree with me on that one), it usually takes a sizable economic incentive (or dire economic need) to persuade them to do so.

It's like the following old and very sexist (but nonetheless revealing) joke:

MAN: Would you have sex with me for a million dollars?
WOMAN: A million dollars! Sure!
MAN: Well, would you have sex with me for a penny?
WOMAN: A penny! What do you think I am?
MAN: We've already established what you are, sweetheart -- now we're just negotiating price.

I once had a very lengthy conversation with a call girl back when I worked as the late-night concierge for a Greenwich Village condo building in the late 80s. She had gone up to visit a friend of hers in the building and afterwards came down and struck up a conversation with me. The next thing you know we were sitting on the couch in the lobby and talking until the sun came up. She really needed to vent, and had a lot to get off her chest.

A couple of things she said that night have stuck with me over the years, but right now I'll only mention one. She said that the next time I was on the subway or walking the streets, to notice the receptionist holding a handbag that's much too expensive for her salary, or the paralegal whose outfit is completely out of her income range.

"It doesn't take that much," she told me. "Just a couple of tricks a week to make a nice extra income. You'd be surprised how many women in this city supplement their incomes by a little hooking on the side."

The fact is that men always want sex and women can, in theory, choose to provide it. That gives women a certain power over men that they can always turn to their economic advantage -- provided that they can get past their presumed aversion to random sex with strangers whom they do not necessarily find attractive and whose hygiene may not be the most hygienic.

So why is prostitution so well paid? Well, let's put it this way -- how much would it take to get you to fuck some random, unattractive and quite possibly smelly stranger for money?

I thought so. And I'm not even a professor of mathematics.

Tom Moran

Much thanks to Audacia Ray of wakingvixen.com for bringing this piece to my attention.

Ashlee Simpson's Nose: 1984-2006

The news today is tragic and heartbreaking. I can barely see the screen through my tears as I type these words.

Ashlee Simpson has gotten a nosejob.

I can't believe it. What's wrong with some people?

For those of you who don't follow pop culture, Ashlee Simpson is the little sister of pneumatic pop star and soon to be divorcee Jessica Simpson. Ashlee is herself an actress (she did a nice turn on The WB's "Seventh Heaven"), had her own reality show for awhile and is probably the most famous lip-syncher since The Two Chinese Boys.

And I used to think she was prettier than her more famous sister.

That is, until she went and mutilated her nose, which was the sexiest thing about her.

I haven't been this depressed since Soleil Moon Frye got a breast reduction.

Thank God for Vicki Lewis. At least there's still one woman in Hollywood left with guts -- and the good sense not to mutilate herself.

Don't you think it's ironic that all these people claim to believe in God and yet feel no qualms whatever about messing around with what that God supposedly gave them?

Tom Moran

Note 5/12/06: The Two Chinese Boys is the unofficial name for the two guys who are more officially known as The Back Dormitory Boys. They do some of the best videos on You Tube, and their blog is at: http://twochineseboys.blogspot.com/ Check them out if you want to laugh your ass off.

David Frum and the End of Conservatism

Is Conservatism, as a movement, over?

You might get that impression from reading David Frum in Cato Unbound, a website sponsored by the Cato Institute that describes itself as "a state-of-the-art virtual trading floor in the intellectual marketplace, specializing in the exchange of big ideas."

Okay, I never claimed that these guys weren't incredibly fucking pretentious.

But forget the pompous phraseology. What do they think is "the big idea" now?

According to Frum, the big idea might be that conservatism is a movement whose time is over.

I think it's possible that in retrospect we'll believe that the worst thing that could have happened to the conservative movement was the "election" of George W. Bush to the White House in 2000. They virtually anointed him as their nominee in 1999 because they thought he was their best shot at recapturing the White House after eight years of Clinton and Gore. They didn't look too closely once they decided he was the most electable Republican they could find.

They thought he was one of them. They thought he would implement their agenda. They thought government would shrink on his watch. They were wrong on all three counts.

Bush certainly fooled Frum, who wrote a fawning book about him whose intent was seemingly to carve Bush's face onto Mount Rushmore while he was still in office. Now, it seems, he feels somewhat differently about the man he served under and whose boots he once licked so assiduously.

"... George W. Bush," Frum writes, "swept to a crushing triumph by campaigning as a “compassionate conservative” opposed to budget-cutting and committed to maintaining Medicare and Medicaid in more or less their existing form. In September 1999, he condemned congressional Republican attempts to curb the Earned Income Tax Credit as “balancing their budget on the backs of the poor.” In the following general election, Bush committed himself to adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.

At the time, these maneuvers looked to many Republicans like wise and necessary adjustments to political reality. And since Bush had also committed himself to broad tax cuts, free trade, and Social Security reform, many gambled that the his self-described “different kind” of conservatism would nonetheless balance out as a favorable sequel to Goldwater-Reagan-Gingrich limited government conservatism.

This assessment has obviously proven wrong."

But Frum towards the end of his article offers up an even more startling possibility:

"Sometimes intellectual movements are called to life to save their countries at a time of challenge—and then gradually fade away as their work is done, as the Whigs faded away in the 1850s or the Progressives after the First World War. It may be that the future of conservatism is to recognize that it belongs to the past."

Has the political pendulum started to swing away from the Republicans? And if so, what does this mean for the Democrats, who have been playing defense for so long that they might be hard-pressed to say exactly where they stand or what they stand for?

Will the pendulum swing to the hard left in the wake of the five-year fiasco (to date) that is the Bush Administration? If so, Democrats better start doing some serious thinking, because in January of 2007 they might have control of Congress without having a clue what to do with it.

And that would really suck.

Tom Moran

Everything Old is New Again

Science-fiction fans, fantasy buffs, geeks and nerds of all description will be pleased to note that, at long last, George Lucas's 1977 epic "Star Wars" is finally coming to DVD.

What's that you say? "Star Wars" is already out on DVD? Has been for quite some time?

Not really. Think again.

What has been released on DVD (in both a widescreen and what is ludicrously called a "fullscreen" edition) is the 1997 reissue of the original "Star Wars" trilogy -- for which Lucas did quite a bit of tampering with the original films, adding special effects and even entire scenes that didn't quite make the cut the first time around.

But now, almost 30 years after the film's original release, LucasFilm is announcing (according to E! Online) that the original 1977 version of "Star Wars," along with the original edits of "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi," will be released on DVD on September 12th.

This is good news for film buffs, and possibly might help to reverse a dangerous trend in Hollywood. For many of the so-called "movie brat" generation, who are seemingly unable to make good new movies, tampering with their old ones has become a way of seeming viable as filmmakers.

A list of the classic films of the 1970s that have been changed from their original release version by the filmmakers for their DVD issue is quite startling: "American Graffiti," "Apocalypse Now," "The Last Picture Show," "The Exorcist"... it would seem that, of that whole generation, just about the only one who has the sense to keep his hands off his old films is Martin Scorsese.

I wrote about this issue almost a decade ago. Back then I wrote:

"Some examples, pretty much at random: Orson Welles’ film of "Othello" was "restored" for a 1992 re-release, during which the dialogue was resynchronized and the film’s original music track taken off the film and re-recorded. The previous reissue of "Gone With the Wind" had its color toned down because the people at Turner responsible for its restoration felt that its original Technicolor was too garish for modern sensibilities -- and people have complained of the current rerelease that the colors bleed all over the place. The latest video release of Sergei Eisenstein’s "Alexander Nevsky" has had its original music track removed and re-recorded in digital stereo. Charles Chaplin’s films "Modern Times" and "Limelight" have had footage that the filmmaker cut reinserted for the laser disc release, and his masterpiece, "City Lights," has had its music track removed for gimmicky presentations with a live orchestra – and there’s even the possibility that Chaplin’s original track will removed completely from all future 35mm prints of the film.

Why is all this happening now? There are a lot of reasons. Partly it’s financial: a "restored" text can be used as an excuse for a theatrical reissue of the film, as with Alfred Hitchcock’s "Vertigo." Sometime it’s considered a matter of keeping up with the times. Why listen to Chaplin’s original analog music track to "City Lights" when you can listen to a nice new digital track? The fact that Chaplin had 46 years, and two major re-releases of his film to update the music track, and never saw fit to do so, doesn’t seem to matter. And sometimes it’s well-intentioned, as with the attempt by Universal Studios to reconstruct Orson Welles’ original version of his 1958 film noir "Touch of Evil." What all these examples have in common is that the original filmmaker is dead, and not able to protest what’s being done to his work."

And of course what's really depressing is when the tampering is done by the original filmmaker himself in a misguided attempt to improve on his former work.

This "editorial hubris," as I called it back in the 90s, has a long history -- the Museum of Modern Art had to literally lock D.W. Griffith out of the projection booth in the 1940s, because if a screening of one of his old silent films didn't go well with a 40s audience, he would storm up into the booth to recut the film. Charlie Chaplin had to put together an entirely new version of his classic 1918 comedy "Shoulder Arms" in the 40s from the outtakes, because the original materials were in such bad shape. As a result, people who watch the DVD of "The Chaplin Revue" today have no idea that what they're watching is not what audiences originally saw in 1918. So far as anyone knows, there is only one print in existence of the original 1918 version of "Shoulder Arms." It's in a Danish archive, and the Chaplin family has turned down requests to have it restored.

So the announcement by LucasFilm may portend the start of a new era, where filmmakers realize that audiences want to see the original versions of classic films, and not the second thoughts of over-the-hill directors decades after the fact. I'm hoping so, anyway.

Tom Moran

The Last Chronicle of Kaavya: Part II

This story used to be amusing in a schadenfreudenish sort of way. Now it's just getting sad.

Little, Brown and Company, the publisher of Kaavya Viswanathan's book "How Opal Mehta Yadda Yada Yadda," has announced today that they will not publish a revised version of the novel as earlier reported, and Viswanathan's contract for a second book has been cancelled.

It has not yet been announced whether she will be flayed, branded, made to wear a scarlet P or burnt at the stake, but then it's only Tuesday. The week is young.

"Meanwhile," says Forbes.com, quoting the AP, "The Record of Bergen County said Tuesday that it will review the news articles Visvanathan wrote for the 180,000-circulation daily paper in northern New Jersey while an intern in 2003 and 2004. Editor Frank Scandale said The Record, which has written several of its own articles about the plagiarism allegations, will hire a service to vet the dozen or so light features she wrote while one of about 18 interns at the paper."

It seems that further investigation of "How Opal Mehta Yadda Yadda Yadda" has turned up even more examples of plagiarism from other authors. The Forbes.com story reports that "The Harvard Crimson, alerted by reader e-mails, reported Tuesday on its Web site that "Opal Mehta" contained passages similar to Meg Cabot's 2000 novel, "The Princess Diaries." The New York Times also reported comparable material in Viswanathan's novel and Sophie Kinsella's "Can You Keep a Secret?""

So Kaavya Viswanathan's humiliation is complete -- or at least, for the time being it's complete. She has been proven to be a conscious, deliberate plagiarist and her public explanation has been shown up as a total lie. I'm just hoping she doesn't get tossed out of Harvard for this, even though none of her alleged plagiarism (do we really still have to use the word "alleged"?) has anything to do with her schoolwork.

Should we (or should I) feel sorry for Kaavya Viswanathan? I didn't feel the least bit sorry for Stephen Glass, who invented stories that were published in The New Republic. I didn't mourn for Jayson Blair, whose lies turned the New York Times upside down (and cost his editor his job). I didn't bat an eye when Oprah Winfrey tore James Frey a new asshole on national television. So why cry for Kaavya? She's got parents with money and a Harvard BA coming a few years from now that will ensure that she can always write for "The Simpsons" when she gets out of school. And I suppose there's always the option of posing for Playboy if she really needs cash -- after all, she can hardly be accused of borrowing another woman's breasts or vagina (although, now that I think about it, with Photoshop that might not be true).

Am I wasting my pity on a plagiarist just because she happens to be young and attractive?

You tell me.

Tom Moran