Monthly Archives: February 2004

I may have one of the very few weblogs that ever links to both sides of a debate. If you're interested in this little argument over the National Guard Service (or lack, thereof) on the part of the current Oval Office occupant, here are two opposing views. Eric Boehlert over at Salon says that the evidence doesn't add up in Bush's favor. This article from the now-defunct George magazine says that it does. If Kerry's the nominee, we're going to hear a lot more about this.

I've had a nice e-mail exchange with Bill Stosin, the gent who used my posting here in a letter to the Washington Times. (It also made it into his hometown paper, The Daily Iowan. Here's a link to the page.)

No writer likes to see his work appear with someone else's name on it, but it's not like this is the first time this has happened to me. Or the worst. Anyway, I've decided to grant him retroactive permission for this one. If anyone else wants to crib something from this page, please write and ask. If it's for a good cause, I'll probably say yes.

Also, I should mention: I screwed up my mail server this afternoon so for about three hours, if you sent me an e-mail it did get to me but you received a "bounce" message that said it didn't. I am weeks behind on e-mail so the response may be the same as if I didn't receive it.

Here, in the interest of fairness, is the case against Bush as deserter. I don't know which argument is correct and I'm not sure that in politics it matters all that much. As with certain arguable accusations against Clinton and Gore, those who are already on the guy's side either won't believe the charge against their guy or won't acknowledge it, and those who were already against him take it as absolute fact. It all comes down to tarnishing the candidate's image a little with swing voters. Don't you wish this kind of thing could be resolved outside the arena of presidential politics?

Received an e-mail this morning from Bill Stosine…or at least, someone purporting to be Bill Stosine. On the Internet, you never know. But I think it was him and he apologized. He said he hoped I wasn't angry about him lifting a few paragraphs from this page and sending them off to newspapers under his signature. (He says he sent fifty. Let's see if anyone besides the Washington Times runs it.)

This is one of those things I probably should be angry about but for some reason, I'm not. In an odd way, I'm flattered. I can't say I'll feel that way the next time it happens but this minor bit of theft struck me as more amusing than not. And I can't really explain why.

Actually, his apology was rather nicely worded. Hope he didn't steal it from someone else.

From this morning's news reports…

Clark, the retired Army general, held a slight lead over Edwards in Oklahoma with all precincts reporting after Tuesday's vote. But the race was so close that no winner could be declared until the vote is certified by state elections board next week.

Hey, maybe the Supreme Court could step in again and declare Bush the winner.

There's a letter in the "Letters to the Editor" section of today's Washington Times from someone named Bill Stosine of Iowa City, Iowa. Here it is in its entirety:

Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Powell says: "I am outraged at what I saw during the halftime show. … Our nation's children, parents and citizens deserve better."

He's talking about the fleeting shot of one of Janet Jackson's breasts, but he could have been talking about the endless procession of ads for pills that induce erections.

However, the chances of Mr. Powell or anyone else in the Bush administration taking umbrage or action against a pharmaceutical company are about the same as the chances of me playing in next year's Super Bowl. And winning.

Mr. Powell wants communications conglomerates bigger and bigger and bigger — so CBS asking corporate brother MTV (they're both owned by giant media conglomerate Viacom) to produce the halftime show is what he gets.

Don't parts of this letter sound a little familiar?

Getting back to the matter of the F.C.C. investigating the Janet Jackson breast flash on the Super Bowl…

Some folks seem to be troubled that it takes weeks, sometimes months, to get the Bush administration to agree that an inquiry is warranted into a matter that involved security leaks, people being sent to die in a war founded on faulty intelligence, whether 9/11 was preventable, etc. But show a bare breast on TV and ten seconds later, a thorough investigation is underway. The comparison is stretching a bit to underscore how reticent the current administration to do anything that might point up its errors or shortcomings but the mindset is the same: We only want to do investigations which will help us politically. I suspect that's a lot more common in all corners of government than we like to admit.

The troubling thing to me about the Super Bowl investigation is this: What's to investigate? Either it was or wasn't planned. If it was (as seems likely), then a couple of MTV producers, Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake made the decision to flash nipple and the F.C.C. is not going to prosecute them and may not even have the authority to do so. What the F.C.C. can do is stick it to CBS. The idea here is to see if they can find some way to argue that the network was culpable and to use that to pressure them in other ways. At the same time, it puts all companies that hold broadcast licenses on notice that they'd better not tick off the folks in power.

There are people out there who think television has gotten too raw and too sensationalized. And you know what? Those people cannot win. They can pressure the networks to tone it down for a little while and even dole out a few punishments…but the liberation of public language and standards only goes in one direction, which is to get looser. Trying to roll that back is like trying to stuff toothpaste back into the tube. Can't be done.

What F.C.C. Commissioner Powell may be able to do is remind networks that he can make things very unpleasant for them. That's what the "investigation" is all about. They're going to investigate ways to use this against CBS.

Who's responsible for the screw-up on intelligence relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction? Why, it's Secret Squirrel!

Matthew Wall lists times when America has gone to war based (perhaps) on faulty intelligence. I don't know that all his examples are what they appear to be…but I do think a large segment of the population never wants to admit it when it happens.

Paul Krugman notes that two years ago, the Bush administration projected the 2004 deficit would be $14 billion and now they're projecting $521 billion. Which probably means it'll be even higher than that.

Here, written by Timothy Noah, is a clever piece about the holiday we're celebrating today.

Yeah, I'm starting this up again. Ed Hannigan's name may not be familiar to you but if you read DC or Marvel comics for a few decades there, you saw some pretty snappy covers that were designed by him. He usually didn't do the finished art but he did a rough sketch. And there were times when they should have thrown out the finished cover and printed Ed's rough. It's not fully stocked yet but he has a website where you can see some of what he does and did.

In 1967, the musical Sherry! opened at the Alvin Theater in New York to withering reviews. The show limped along for 65 performances then closed and has not been seen since. Like many fabled flops, it prompted much Broadway talk: Was it as bad as they said? Could the source material have possibly yielded a great show? The source material was The Man Who Came to Dinner by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, one of the most successful non-musical plays ever. There were those who said that what Kaufman and Hart wrote was so perfectly self-contained that any alteration, even the addition of songs, could not help but diminish it. Others said that the play had a sound structure so songs could have enhanced it, had they been the right songs. It's not the kind of debate that could possibly have a right or wrong answer. Adding songs turned Pygmalion into My Fair Lady but there have also been plenty of great plays that were turned into rotten musicals. In any case, once Sherry had faded from memory and was unavailable for viewing, the debates about its merits died down.

They may start anew since Sherry! is about to have its first-ever cast recording…and what a cast it is! Nathan Lane, who was so wonderful playing Sheridan Whiteside in the recent Broadway revival of the play (available on DVD) again plays Sheridan Whiteside. Other roles are filled by Bernadette Peters, Carol Burnett, Tommy Tune, Tom Wopat, Phyllis Newman, Mike Myers and others equally talented. This of course is a studio recording, never performed on any stage, only in a recording studio. But if the songs of Sherry! have any merit at all, it ought to be evident with that crew.

Why is this show being recorded now? And with so many top stars? It probably has to do with the fact that the author of the book and lyrics for Sherry! was James Lipton. That's right: The same James Lipton who hosts Inside the Actors Studio and who gets burlesqued from time to time on Saturday Night Live. His newfound stardom seems to have gotten this project off the ground, and I believe most of the principles have been interviewed on his Bravo series. (Lipton also takes a role in the recording, that of the Doctor.) Anyway, I'm eager to hear it. If you are, you can advance order a copy of the CD from Amazon by clicking right about…here.

F.C.C. Commissioner Michael Powell says, "I am outraged at what I saw during the halftime show of the Super Bowl. Like millions of Americans, my family and I gathered around the television for a celebration. Instead, that celebration was tainted by a classless, crass and deplorable stunt. Our nation's children, parents and citizens deserve better."

I gather he's talking about the fleeting shot of one of Janet Jackson's breasts but he could have been talking about the endless procession of ads for pills that induce erections.

However, the chances of Michael Powell taking umbrage or action against a pharmaceutical company are about the same as the chances of me playing in next year's Super Bowl. And winning.

Here's Eric Alterman making the case that George W. Bush was AWOL from the National Guard.

I must admit that I am uneasy about this kind of thing. It kind of creeps me out that so much of presidential politics is about digging into a candidate's past and finding things to charge him with, long after the charge can be proven or disproven, and sometimes long after it should matter. On the the other hand, politics is a game and that's the way the game is played. I never thought "draft dodging" quite fit what Bill Clinton did to avoid military service but his opponents hammered away on that theme. It must be irresistible for Democratic leaders to now throw this "AWOL" business in the face of the same opponents, especially since they know we're going to see all sorts of things dredged up from their nominee's past.

It all raises the old question of whether it's ignoble to throw mud back at the person who's throwing mud at you. You'd like to think your candidate would be above that kind of thing. But then again, you'd also like to see your candidate win.