Creationism vs Empiricism

No wonder Europeans laugh at us. According to a poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, about 42 percent of respondents believe that "living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time" -- creationism, in other words. And an incredible 64 percent believe that creationism and evolution should be taught together in American public schools.

Just so you don't assume that these convictions fall along party lines there's this:

John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said he was surprised to see that teaching both evolution and creationism was favored not only by conservative Christians, but also by majorities of secular respondents, liberal Democrats and those who accept the theory of natural selection. Mr. Green called it a reflection of "American pragmatism."

Reread those sentences. This is jawdropping. I am not one to bite the hand that feeds me, but if most of my readers believe that a non-empirical approach to understanding the world is essential to them, then they're fucking stupid and they should stop reading this site.

I ::heart:: Dan Savage

This week's Savage Love takes aim at one member of that swollen army of "sensitive" men who can't get dates because none of the women they fuck is worthy of deeper penetration (I know a lot of guys like this; hell, I was one of those guys until I went queer):

A. I'll be blunt: Why would I give useful advice to an insufferable little shit like you? I may not want to sleep with women, STUDD, but I don't have anything against them. And while you claim to be straight, smart, funny, and cool, I have only your word on those qualities. I have in my possession, however, absolute proof in the form of your letter that you are an unbearable twat and an intolerable dickweed. I wouldn't be able to sleep at night if I gave you advice that might result in your actually landing a girl.

Let's hope the poster hasn't killed himself.

Flashback

I'm listening to these old favorites now. I love the shit out of them:

Pet Shop Boys, "The End of the World." A forgotten album track on 1990's Behaviour, the kind of song for which adjectives like "autumnal" seem appropriate. "The End of the World" perfects the detached-observer persona which Neil Tennant adopted on Please, except now it's clear that the scenario he outlines with such clarity is one he's experienced (experiencing?) himself, and the thumping beats and Violater guitar expose the pain in his voice.

Natural Selection, "Do Anything." One of the best Prince rips ever recorded, kept from hitting number one in the fall of 1991 by Prince himself (doing Prince-by-numbers with "Cream" and doing a damn fine job of it). Hot synth-guitar, silvery falsettos, and Madonna backup singer Nikki Harris' cooed encouragements.

Jennifer Paige, "Crush." A pop song with a chilling subtext. It's just a little crush? She's telling her boy not to "over-analyze"? What the fuck?! Not even adorned in the Kabuki garb of Glitter did Mariah Carey expose as guilelessly as this singer.

It's over

As usual, the sinuosity of Christopher Hitchens' prose turns skeptics into moral blackguards if resisted. Although I agree with the bulk of this unhysterical and rather moving argument for remaining in Iraq as long as it takes, I cannot let the Bush administration off as airily as Hitchens does. The Hitchens who eviscerated George H.W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, monotheists of all kinds, and European and American apathy to the slaughter of Bosnian Serbs would not written this sentence:

Does the president deserve the benefit of the reserve of fortitude that I just mentioned? Only just, if at all. We need not argue about the failures and the mistakes and even the crimes, because these in some ways argue themselves.

But why not? Paul Berman, Andrew Sullivan, and, somewhat facetitiously, Dan Savage have all either reconsidered their positions or at least destroyed the manner in which the neocon cabal conned us - and no doubt itself. Digsbyblog, quoted by James Wolcott, shows no mercy:

"In March 2003 we already knew that the Republicans were mendacious enough to stage a phony impeachment and steal an election. And we also knew that the brand name in an empty suit they call a president was a fool and that the people who were backing the war had been wrong about every single big ticket foreign policy issue since the mid 70's. We knew that the Democratic Senators who voted for the war resolution were re-fighting Gulf War I where many Democrats were ignominiously shown to be losers when they voted against a war that we went on to gloriously win. They were scared of being on the wrong side again. (And they blew it --- again.)

Maybe if Bush fires Rumsfeld we'll get a chance. But I suspect it's too late.

Calling all film buffs

I'm really hoping J.T. Ramsay posts on his film blog more often. This is some of the best film writing I've read in months, doubly so if you consider the extemporaneous nature of blog writing. If he wants to wrastle either here or on his site, I accept the challenge.

Guess who's back

After 27 hours of grueling sun, spoiling food, and a runny nose, I got my power back last night at 11 pm. No way is Miami back to normal: the southern half of the county's under water, most of the traffic signals within a five-mile radius are not working, about 450,000 people remain without power (including my parents and most of my pals), and people are acting polite and friendly at the supermarkets. To those in Louisiana and the Florida Panhandle bracing themselves for Hurricane Katerina, I salute thee.

I plan to knock a few back at my buddy Hatzel's party tonight, at which I will engage in the badinage from which a bad cold and a meddlesome tropical system have kept me from participating.

Hurricanes suck

Survived Hurricane Katrina. Power went out around 7 pm last night. Western Miami-Dade County looks like portions of downtown Baghdad (eerily reminiscent of Hurricane Andrew; yesterday marked the 13th anniversary of his arrival).

I'm at work cuz there's power and internet: two overlooked commodities. Posting will be erratic for the next few days.

Pat Robertson = pigeon

James Wolcott does a great job analyzing why the "FOX News All-Stars" were so quick to dismiss Pat Robertson's advice to the Bush administration on how to ice Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.Wolcott likens Robertson's relationship with the neocons to the old Seinfeld episode "Merv Griffen Set":

George Costanza, furious that a pigeon didn't get out of the way of his car (in the stellar "Merv Griffin set" episode), vented to Jerry that we have "a deal" with the pigeons, a deal that Jerry elucidated upon.
The deal is, they get out of our way when we're walking or driving, and we overlook the statute defecation.

Simple as that. The pigeon George ran over didn't honor he deal.

The neocons had a deal with Pat Robertson and his followers. As long as Pat and company cleaved to Israel, the neocons would overlook that old Protocol Elders nonsense.

In short, Pat Robertson was their pigeon. They were willing to countenance his occasional poop.

Seattle Weekly publishes my Brian Eno review, my first for that publication. I really wish the album honored his extraordinary talent and influence.

All about Dolly

This 1999 article by Stephanie Zancharek, Salon's film critic, is one of the best recent summaries of Dolly Parton's career. I just got The Essential Dolly Parton, most of which is extraordinary: songs sung with an intelligence and generosity that matches her self-composed melodies and lyrics:

I'd say that of all her country contemporaries, living or dead, Parton is the most sensuous. Her voice has so much shimmering life to it, as well as a kind of voluptuousness -- it's the voice of someone who's eager to take everything in. Even if Parton sometimes sings of restraint, her music is never about repression. That's confirmed by the way she writes about sex in her autobiography: "All my life ... I have been driven by three things; three mysteries I wanted to know more about; three passions. They are God, music and sex. I would like to say that I have listed them in the order of their importance to me, but their pecking order is subject to change without warning."

Amen.

Seventeen items

Thansk to Alex. Here goes:

1. Ten years ago: I was about to begin my senior year at FIU, and about to begin the slimming process which, if my luck holds out, continues to this day.

2. Five years ago: I was beginning the second leg of my reporting internshiph at the Ft Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Boy, was I unhappy. I realized within a week that I was a better liar and fabulist than a reporter. To quote Ronald Reagan: "Facts are stupid things."

3. One year ago: A day much like this one: I drove to FIU's Biscayne Bay campus (no bus between semesters), where I read stories all day while stealing minutes to work on a Stylus article.

4. Yesterday: I awoke at ten-thirty after going to bed at an ungodly hour. I visited my parents, my grandmother, and then came home to exercise, finish watching Sidney Lumet's adaptation Long Day's Journey Into Night (Katherine Hepburn must be seen to be believed), cooked pork chops and couscous, worked on a short story, and went to bed at ten-thirty, exactly twelve hours after awakening.

5. Today: Work, got home early.

6. Tomorrow: Work. I'll probably watch Broken Flowers or hang out with Frank.

7. Five snacks I enjoy: Manchego cheese, coffee, apples, sugar cookies....er, help me out. I don't really snack....

8. Five bands whose lyrics I know: Beatles, A Tribe Called Quest, Roxy Music, Liz Phair, R.E.M.

9. Five things I would do with $100,000,000: Pay my mortgage, foot the bill for my sister's wedding, smile a lot, improve my wine collection, and bribe the staff of The New Yorker into publishing my stories.

10. Five locations I'd like to run away to [anyone checking the grammar of these questions?]: London, Chicago, Edinburgh. When I win that $100,000,000, I'll answer this question properly.

11. Five Bad Habits: Pursuing a joke to the bitter end, arrogance, preferring my own company to anyone else's, smoking, drinking gin instead of vodka (the hangovers are getting vicious).

12. Five things I like doing: Working, fabulizing, observing, spending money on good food and wine, and listening to De La Soul's singles collection on State Road 836.

13. Five TV shows I like: Umm....ABC's "World News Tonight With Peter Jennings" [R.I.P].

14. Famous People I'd like to meet, living or dead: Famous people are boring (see Bad Habit #3).

15. Biggest joys at the moment: Owning my own apartment.

16. Favorite toys: My new lighter and that hairy beast between my legs.

17. Five people to tag, chosen quite at random: Vic, Ian, Johnny, Thomas, Apa.

This just in: the Rolling Stones are old, vulnerable, and open

Yet another story about how Mick and Keith really do love each other, and how Jagger shows "a new openness" and "vulnerability," although how Robert Hilburn can glean evidence of openness and vulnerabiility from the lyrics to "Biggest Mistake" ("when love comes so late/It'll really hit hard/It slams through the gate/It'll catch you off guard") shows a talent for explication de textethat would have been the envy of Roland Barthes. Articles like this make me really hate the sixties.

I don't want to hate the Stones. Sixteen tracks is a bit much for a single album (Exile On Main Street, a double, had eighteen!), but for a carnival act they've accumulated about 145 years' worth of craft; it's difficult for Jagger-Richards to write a bad song, but it's just as difficult to write an excellent one.

Would you take A.J. McLean over a frog?

This week's Singles Going Steady: the return of 311, the Backstreet Boys get all "Since U Been Gone" on us, and "Axel F" is transmogrified into a ditty for frogs.

Taking Sides: A Grand Illusion vs Oh Manchester

My friend Thomas Inskeep and I spend most of our days emailing each other regarding matters of extreme consequence, such as "Taking Sides: Christine McVie's `Got A Hold On Me' vs Lindsey Buckingham's `Go Insane'"; or debating Usher vs Alicia Keys. Occasionally he flatters my ego by posting our conversations on his website. Here's one more.

Cry baby cry

Over the last nine Salon has crept leftwards, but this piece published yesterday represents the nadir of political journalism. In "The Hollow Men," Robert Bryce castigates George W. Bush for his "inability to feel pain for others" - a criticism resulting from Bush's refusal to see Cindy Sheehan. Fine, I accept that. But then comes this whopper: Lyndon Johnson, responsible for another unpopular war, deserved more credit for feeling soldiers' pain. He writes:

Johnson felt the ruin that came with the deaths of American soldiers in Vietnam. And he was devastated by it. In early 1968, according to Nick Kotz's magnificent book, "Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America," the war in Vietnam was going from bad to worse. "Since the Tet offensive had begun the previous month, five hundred American soldiers were dying every week. Often, late at night, the president would go down to the White House Situation Room to check on casualty reports. At times, when Johnson sat with visitors in the Oval Office, he would weep openly as he read from the previous day's casualty lists."

No doubt Stalin cried too when he had his son executed. Or, to use a better analogy, Wilson did too when he sent American soliders to fight a European war which he pushed and cudgeled and bludgeoned the Senate to declare: a war we had no business fighting. Bryce omits any mention of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, of course. It gets better:

W. doesn't do human rights. He doesn't do casualty lists. Nor, apparently, does he cry. And as noted by author James Moore, that's what makes Sheehan such a powerful figure. Sheehan has rendered the complexities and carnage of the war into a simple question: Are you on the side of a grieving mother of a dead soldier? Or are you on the side of a president who continues to insist that this war is, in some way, noble?

Let's forget the slovenly grammar of that first sentence. So if you're not on "the side" of a grieving mother -- what kind of side are they on? they're grieving! -- then you're a heartless autocrat who sends troops to die?

Look, I've reached my own nadir regarding my support for the Iraq war. I can list five reasons why it's failed. But to draw an analogy between the Bush administration's almost moronic failure to conduct a war and the president's inability (or reluctance) to shed tears (which would have been maudlin and sententious anyway) is rubbish.

Christopher Walken in 2008?

Oh if only this was true. Then again it must be if The Washington Post is reporting it, no? What a delicious irony: Christopher Walken played a political assassin in The Dead Zone. Will he dance better than Ricky Martin at the inauguration?

Will he sell that famous blue raincoat?

Leonard Cohen is broke:

TORONTO (CP) — Poet, singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen has discovered that his retirement savings, which he thought were worth more than $5 million US, have been depleted, Macleans magazine reports.

The famous troubadour, who has homes in Montreal and Los Angeles, is virtually broke, faces a whopping tax bill and has had to take out a mortgage to pay legal costs, the magazine reported in an exclusive cover story this week.

A forensic audit of his holdings found “massive improprieties.”

“I was devastated,” Cohen says of discovering last fall that his savings had been reduced to about $150,000. “You know, God gave me a strong inner core, so I wasn’t shattered. But I was deeply concerned.”

Cohen, 70, has raised questions about how his money was managed by a longtime trusted personal manager, who had signing authority on his accounts, and a financial adviser.

Cohen will release a new album soon with his current girlfriend, Anjani Thomas.

“This has propelled us into incessant work,” he says of his financial troubles, adding: “It’s one of the best albums I’ve heard.”

As one I Love Music poster wryly put it, "The more desperate for cash he becomes = the better the album gets!"

To Kanye or not to Kanye...?

Sasha Frere-Jones on the Kanye West problem: fantastic producer/arrangement, Brand X voice. I've never agreed; I have a bigger problem with the self-regard which has begun to enfeeble the rhythmic sense which anchored his beats as surely as a second guitar. "Diamonds (From Sierra Leone)" and "Gold Digger" are lame songs. So I await Late Registration with some trepidation.

Welcome to the monasteryo, bitches!

Left-field pop masterpiece or a popular tenant in the cutout bin slum? Purchase Terence Trent D'Arby's Symphony or Damn and judge for yourself; it should cost you no more than a buck.

Rockcritics.com has published an extensive interview with David Edelstein, Slate's film critic. Affectionate memories of Pauline Kael present the other side to the rather agonistic (in the Harold Bloom sense) relationship acolytes like David Denby had with her. I don't buy Edelstein's defense of Sin City though.

Farrakhan and I

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/farrakhan_mexico

When I start thinking that Louis Farrakhan is actually being sensible, it's time to greet the four horsemen.

My current favorite songs:

Mariah Carey, "We Belong Together." Yeah, yeah, it's overplayed, but there's a reason for it. Mariah's penchant for melismatic overkill has always signified a reluctance to embrace adulthood; what is adolescence if not the squandering of gifts wihout the requisite self-control? On "We Belong Together" she sounds tamed, anonymous, relaxed, warm. She'll never, ever be my favorite best-selling-diva-of-all-time; has any other artist who's sold so many records produced work so evanescent? But this song suggests that her most interesting years are yet to come.

The Power Station, "Communication." My weakness for Robert Palmer knows not from logic. John and Andy Taylor, on holiday from Duran Duran, join Chic drummer Tony Thompson on a groove whose slinkiness might have impressed Nile Rodgers. A bit of the credit must go to producer Bernard Edwards, who could make a groove on a slice of rye bread funky. Palmer growls and grunts with more conviction than he managed on "Some Like It Hot," on which he sounded like an ageing sleazo. Extra points for dropping the word "telex"

Funkadelic, "Can You Get To That." The most batshit track on Maggot Brain, an album chockful of batshit moments. George Clinton croaks like a bullfrog with soul while two chicks testify in the foreground, buoyed by acoustic guitars so immaculately strummed you can hear fingernails brushing the strings (cheers, cheers, to Ace Record's remastering job)

Bloc Party, "Price of Gas." You got all these bands that sound like Gang of Four. Here's the only one that summons their rage. The words are monosyllabic and direct, unsullied by Marxis sloganeering. Relevant words, too.

Singles going steady

Me on this week's batch of singles. The surprise winner: Nine Inch Nail's slinky, coiled "Only."

Savagely upset

Capping a week of hilarious irrelevance filling in for Andrew Sullivan, Dan Savage gets serious and republishes an essay which oroginally ran in The Stranger in March 2003, wherein he explains why he (at first) endorsed the invasion of Iraq. Reading it only makes me more infuriated by Bush and Rumsfeld's grinning incompetence.

"Sweet Virginia" it ain't

Apparently Sir Mick Jagger's got more than sex on his mind. A song on the Stones' forthcoming A Bigger Bang is called "Sweet Neo Con," in which Jagger calls shit on Halliburton and religious hypocrisy. But Mick, ever mindful of the bottom line, cautions his audience not to take it too seriously:

"It is not really aimed at anyone," Jagger said on the entertainment-news show's Wednesday edition. "It's not aimed, personally aimed, at President Bush. It wouldn't be called 'Sweet Neo Con' if it was."

Thanks for clearing that up, Mick.

All that, and only two Talking Heads songs!

Thanks to my great friend Max for sending the tracklists for the forthcoming Sire Records compilation, three discs testifying to Seymour Stein's artistic and business acumen. I'm all wet. Except for novelties by the Barenaked Ladies and inoffensive ringers by non-entities Uncle Tupelo-Wilco, I'd burn every one of these at home had I the records (And I can't remember the last time I heard The Farm and The Ocean Blue

Disc one:

"Everybody," Madonna
"Mirror in the Bathroom," English Beat
"Kiss Me," Tin
"Oh L'Amour," Erasure
"Tainted Love," Soft Cell
"Situation (Remix)," Yaz
"People Are People," Depeche Mode
"Living on the Ceiling," Blancmange
"That Summer Feeling," Jonathan Richman
"Young at Heart," the Bluebells
"One Step Beyond," Madness
"Genius of Love," Tom Tom Club
"Im Nin'alu," Ofra Haza
"Endicott," Kid Creole & the Coconuts
"Love and Mercy," Brian Wilson
"Each and Every One," Everything But The Girl
"All the Way," Little Jimmy Scott
"Crazy," Seal
"Fire Woman," the Cult
"Constant Craving," k.d. lang

Disc two:

"Teenage Kicks," the Undertones
"This Charming Man," the Smiths
"I Melt With You," Modern English
"Moskow Diskow," Telex
"(I'm) Stranded," the Saints
"Ca Plan Pour Moi," Plastic Bertrand
"Top of the Pops," the Rezillos
"Nowhere Girl," B-Movie
"Part of the Process," Morcheeba
"Come Together (7" Version)," Primal Scream
"Beat Dis," Bomb The Bass
"The Love Cats," the Cure
"The Killing Moon," Echo & the Bunneymen
"Warm Leatherette," the Normal
"Everyday Is Like Sunday," Morrissey
"Never Never," the Assembly
"Oblivious," Aztec Camera
"Inside Out," The Mighty Lemon Drops
"Soon," My Bloody Valentine
"Leave Them All Behind," Ride

Disc three:

"Blitzkrieg Bop," the Ramones
"Alex Chilton," the Replacements
"Come on Let's Go," Paley Brothers and Ramones
"Aloha Steve & Danno / Theme From Hawaii Five-O," Radio Birdman
"The Wagon," Dinosaur Jr.
"Sonic Reducer," Dead Boys
"White Horse," Laid Back
"Blank Generation," Richard Hell and the Voidoids
"I Want That Man," Deborah Harry
"I'll Be Your Everything," Tommy Page
"Summer Teeth," Wilco
"World Class Fad," Paul Westerberg
"Back on the Chain Gang," the Pretenders
"Give Back the Key to My Heart," Uncle Tupelo
"Shake Some Action," Flamin' Groovies
"Counting Backwards," Throwing Muses
"Boy," Book Of Love
"Romeo Had Juliette," Lou Reed
"O.G. Original Gangster," Ice-T
"Jesus Built My Hotrod," Ministry
"Burning Down the House," Talking Heads

DVD:

"Pop Muzik," M
"Rock'n'Roll High School," the Ramones
"Let's Go to Bed," the Cure
"A Little Respect," Erasure
"Brass in Pocket," the Pretenders
"The Cutter," Echo & the Bunnymen
"Bastards of Young," the Replacements
"She Sells Sanctuary," the Cult
"Once in a Lifetime," Talking Heads
"Like a Prayer," Madonna
"Enjoy the Silence," Depeche Mode
"Feed the Tree," Belly
"Drifting, Falling," the Ocean Blue
"Reach," Martini Ranch
"Groovy Train," the Farm
"Things Can Only Get Better," D:Ream
"New York City Boy," Pet Shop Boys
"In the Meantime," Spacehog
"One Week," Barenaked Ladies
"Come to Daddy," Aphex Twin

The indefatigible Dan Savage is this week's guest on Andrew Sullivan's site, while the latter finishes his book or wrings his hand into ever-more-contorted knots over the hash the Bush administration has made of conservatism and Iraq.

Something A-boot Peter

I guess someone had to post this. Suffice it to say that he was my favorite anchorman, a preference for which I received much abuse from my family. They like their anchormen informed but affable. Always affable. Peter Jennings was not affable, no matter how many specials he filmed in which he got down on his knees to talk to screaming children.

My reviews

My new graphic novel reviews are up. Unfortunately, you have to register to read!

Charming interview with Seymour Stein, chairman of Sire Records. He's responsible for signing Talking Heads, Madonna, The Smiths, The Replacements, and more. Great quote about the Smiths: "Between the music and having all these gladiolas thrown at me, I wanted to sign them on the spot."

More sanctimonious recommendations

Louis Menand's new profile of Edmund Wilson (apropos of nothing) in The New Yorker is an excellent summation of his talents and impact on American literature (which, in academia at least, has been negligible). With Pauline Kael and Robert Christgau no other critic has influenced me more. In a letter to a friend he once explained:

To write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require pretty close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity. You have to learn to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings; you have to develop a resourcefulness at pursuing a line of thought through pieces on miscellaneous and more or less fortuitous subjects; and you have to acquire a technique of slipping over on the routine of editors the deeper independent work which their over-anxious intentness on the fashions of the month or the week have conditioned them automatically to reject.

Words to live by. Get thee to a bookstore and purchase Axel's Castle, To The Finland Station, and Patriotic Gore right now.

KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!!

Fuck Darth Vader: the greatest movie villain ever has his own website. Visit it and ask him questions about how best to serve him. Just be sure you're on your knees. And ask politely. Sample question:

Name:........... eric husk
E-Mail:.......... kartracer18@prodigy.net 

===============================
My Question:
o powerful ZOD i would like to kneel before you but i have no legs what should i do?

Zod's Response: An understandable question that many slaves have asked before. I have actually shot off the legs of a few defiant slaves in the past and they too begged to know how they could now kneel before me. The answer is simple. You must now lie face-down before Zod. Do you understand? LAY BEFORE ZOD!

Do you still want her to be your blowjob queen?

Kelefa Sanneh should be the only critic allowed to write about music for The New York Times. Today's Liz Phair interview is a rehash of feuds we all thought settled in 2003, when she released her eponymous album, with its Matrix production and Pro Tooled instruments. Apart from the writer's slovenly prose (he refers to singles as "a particular genre of music") and penchant for hackneyed marketing terms ("Liz Phair, former crown princess of indie music..."), this piece is the journalistic version of the slick, empty pop Phair's detractors accused her of making in 2003.

Incidentally, I love that album. I heard will-to-power and I-am-extraordinary as far back as 1993's Exile To Guyville; and recording a purported track-by-track answer to the Stones'Exile On Main Street suggests a desire to nudge a place in the rock canon that lo-fi indie fans were willing to overlook when it suited their purposes.

With its mxture of hearsay and wishful thinking Arianna Huffington's post last weekend, in which she implied that Judith Miller got what she deserved, was grotesque. Opponents of the Iraq War want to blame her for acting as the administration's mouthpiece. Now there's an even more sordid rumor floating around: Miller was so cozy with Chief Warrant Officer Richard Gonzalez, who led the search for WMD, because she was cozy with Richard Gonzalez. In prose worthy of Burt Lancaster's J.J. Hunsecker, Huffington writes:

And no fewer than four sources have either e-mailed, called, or, in one case, run up to me on the street to tell me that what I termed Miller's "especially close relationship" with Chief Warrant Officer Richard Gonzales, the leader of the WMD-hunting unit Miller was embedded with during the war, might have been, well, very close indeed. According to one insider, Miller had emailed a picture of Gonzales to a colleague at the Times with the message "Lucky Lady."

What's the use? When the redoutable James Wolcott writes goofily effusive encomiums ("she is riding this gift horse to cloud-trailing glory") to Huffington, you know the moral high ground on which Wolcott, Huffington, and others have stood to decry the administration's lies about Iraq is really a dung pile.
My point? Intelligent writers who demand accountability from their government, value accurate reporting, and denounce the administration's disdain for empirical data have no business drooling over unsubstantiated gossip.

In today's Washington Post, liberal columnist Richard Cohen reminds us that Miller is in jail because she refused to name a source. Never mind her political beliefs. Never mind who she was embedded with.

Bolton for Canada

I know he technically has the power to do so, but the recent rumored appointment of Bolton, coupled with threats to veto stem cell research, makes me wonder whether there is such a thing as checks and balances anymore. As Findlaw Columnist Noah Leavitt argues:

". . . this week, we may witness an action that undermines those cherished American values if President Bush does an end-run around Congress and installs John Bolton as the U.S. representative to the United Nations with a recess appointment.

That cowardly action would insult Congress and the world, undermine U.S. credibility overseas and mock the democracy we celebrate."

Cue Bush: "de-mo-cra-cy?"