Some Random Notes

• We now know what killed Anna Nicole Smith. And you know what? I still don't give a shit.

• The pressure is mounting on Alberto Gonzales. He almost certainly lied in public (but not under oath) about the extent of his knowledge and participation of the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys, and while President Bush is supposedly standing behind the first Hispanic Attorney General, it seems like it's only a matter of time before Gonzales is forced to step down. And yet I'm wondering how much attention the American people are paying to this squalid mess. Where's the outrage? I suspect they think of it as no big deal -- as just politics as usual.

• Chuck Hagel thinks that impeaching George W. Bush might not be an unrealistic option. Hagel is quoted as saying that, "Any president who says, I don't care, or I will not respond to what the people of this country are saying about Iraq or anything else, or I don't care what the Congress does, I am going to proceed - if a president really believes that, then there are - what I was pointing out, there are ways to deal with that." Remember what I said in a previous post about Bush's fate in any impeachment proceeding being in the hands of the senators of his own party? Well, statements like Hagel's are not a good sign.

• Mike Binder, who directed the film "The Upside of Anger," has a new film out called "Reign Over Me," starring Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler. Sandler plays a man who "lost everything in 9/11." I have to admit I find the notion of using the deaths on 9/11 as a plot point in a Hollywood movie to be offensive, and yet I realize that in WWII-era Hollywood films such as "Wake Island" and "So Proudly We Hail," point points were made out of people who lost loved ones at the attack on Pearl Harbor. Am I just unduly squeamish about these things?

Tom Moran