LILEKS ON WOMEN:

"Tonight we blame a friend of my wife's, a charming lass -- no, she's not a lass. Nor is she a colleen, a frail, a skirt, a broad, a womyn, a twist, or any other synonym. Nor is she a gal. 'Person' doesn't do the job -- please. When we're all shave-skulled automatons in white jumpsuits we will all be Persons. Not until. We really need a new gender-specific word for people who come over to pick up something, stay for two hours chatting with your wife and delighting your child, leave you with a stack of reading material, and listen to you expand on the politics of David Lynch on the way down the stairs."

One word? How about "woman"? (Or, if we have room for a few modifiers, "terrified woman buttonholed by lunatic while trying to escape friend's house"?)

James Lileks -- a man's madman!

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH. "San Francisco Fed Chief Says Vegas Economy Performing Well" -- Las Vegas Sun. Seven come eleven, snake eyes watching you.

THROUGH BEING COOL. Over at The Corner they're still talking about young conservatives, and posting their missives, in which the Tory tykes tell how hip they are. Sample: "By the way, I was a skateboarder for most of my life. I never wore a blue blazer. It was all of my rich girlfriends, who were extreme lefties, that belonged to the Country Club." Rawk on, dude!

Their obsession is understandable. This conservative redoubt, chaired by Jonah "Check out my Simpsons references" Goldberg, is increasingly devoted to redefining Cool in its favor. And why not? They have the country's politics in a headlock, and so have leisure to worry about whether the kids think they're alright.

Let 'em. Youth culture (see entry below) is wholly manipulated and corrupt, and it hardly matters by what guerilla marketing channels the underaged are approached. Truth and bullshit can each be as easily dressed in rad gear. A fixation with fashion is appropriate for posers, though unsuitable to higher minds.

One's experiences teach the lessons that form one's politics. So long as suburbanites devoid of any higher interest than cheaper gas for their SUVs and lower rates for their second mortgages comprise the bulk of the electorate, it is these concerns that will determine our future course. Bush is manipulating both these aforementioned factors to his advantage, and his triumph or defeat will rest on the persistence of their success unto the next electorial showdown. Our politics then are guided not by great issues but by the cynical calculations of well-placed spinmeisters.

How cool is that?

MUSCLEBOUND INDIE ROCKER SPEAKS TRUTH. A friend forwarded an excerpt from a Henry Rollins interview, taken by Michael Dean for a book he's working on and which will no doubt be worth reading, as is this Rollins fragment:

To do what you want to do, you have to be very tough. Especially in this day and age. Not tough like being insensitive, you have to be tough like Miles Davis who protected his art. He was very protective of that thing that he had, he was like a swan -- it's this very graceful creature but if you mess with it, it gets very pugnacious...

I think these days a lot of bands who do their first tour on a Privo bus with shiny new gear are missing out on a lot of things that will keep them in the game after the blush is off the rose. Because you never maintain your popularity -- everyone has an arc. Or ebbs and flows. Guys like Neil Young, they just keep making records and it's never like an up or down thing, it's like a high-tide, low-tide thing. He's just going to keep making records whether you buy them or not. Neil Young makes records. That's what he does... And those bands that were hydrogrown through the Clear Channel thing, they have no roots to the ground so when push comes to shove, they have no anchor.

I used to think Rollins was kind of silly, but these are not the words of a silly man.

SEE YA LATER, BOI. Matthew Yglesias is delighted that Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi" will soon be a major motion picture. He loves Avril, and there I let him alone; de gustibus non disputandum est. But I have a couple of preemptive peeves against the picture.

First, there's the song. A nice piece of radio fluff, but what kind of movie will it make? A stuck-up girl (did ballet, dontcha know) turns down a boy in baggy pants, and winds up a single mom while the eponymous poser becomes a superstar, slammin' on his guitar. My sympathy is with the girl, of course, and I think it's a little creepy that the most noteworthy thing about the boi is that he's popular and rich. Doesn't anyone believe anymore that a heart can broken by anything other than a missed seat on a gravy train?

What seems like more of a problem is the pictoralization of a pop tune. It's rare enough to get that right in a video, let alone a 90 minute feature. I recall the video of the Kinks' "Come Dancin'." A nice tune, and the video has some nice bits, but one scene forever embodies the tendency of filmmakers to crush the life out of a good musical moment. In the bridge of the song, when the "Palais" that was the arena of the older brother's teenage romance, is no more ("The day that they tore down the Palais/my brother broke down and cried"), there's a nice Davies Brothers moment -- Ray sounds sad, and Dave smashes out power chords. It suggests sorrow, futility, and rage. In the video, we see at that moment the younger brother jumping gleefully on his bed, thrashing air-guitar on his tennis racket. It's rhythmically correct, but runs so contrary to the musical moment as to take all the meaning out of it.

When "Sk8er Boi" is all done up nice and Hollywood with James van der Beek and Hillary Duff, or whomever, can we really expect any better?

A NUCLEAR ERA, BUT I HAVE NO FEAR. Way back during the last State of the Union address, the President promised a billion-and-change to develop "hydrogen fuel technologies" that would lead -- here comes the concrete example beloved of speechwriters -- to the development of "clean, hydrogen powered automobiles." This was, as reported by Environmental News Services, the first mention by Bush in a SOTU of environmental issues.

I thought at the time it was a feint, in the midst of a war-ginning speech, to show that he was not all about blood and thunder. (As to the money, well, recent developments demonstrate that Bush is awful free with a public buck.) But it's beginning to dawn on me that the President had a larger agenda.

Pete Domenici (R, NM, and chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee) is promoting a bill to revive the nation's moribund nuclear energy industry. You may, or may not, remember the "No Nukes" movement of a couple decades ago that effectively shut down the proliferation of nuclear plants, partly by convincing insurers to charge sky-high rates on such facilities. Well, Domenici's bill would lower that hurdle by limiting the nuke-makers' liability, and even partially funding the development of plants with taxpayer money.

It is to be remembered that the hydrogen for the Bush car would almost certainly come from nuclear reactors.

Here's where the environmental angle comes into play. There is a lingering fear among sentient humans of nuclear plants leaking radioactive waste, blowing up, and generally Chernobyling. The Republicans are countering the anti-nuclear meme with one more current and cheerful: the promise of decreased reliance on petroleum. As the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) nicely puts it:

In this false future, the nuclear power industry becomes an environmental savior... unless checked, the nuclear power industry will receive "clean air" credits under both state and federal legislation, which will help bolster its unbalanced books. It will produce hydrogen for clean vehicles, while producing more tons of radioactive waste with no viable disposal method...

You can read the White House's case for its "Freedom Fuel" initiative pretty much intact at Science Blog. NIRS is good on the counter-argument, as is this recent Village Voice article, which states that "Scientists have not yet designed a nuclear facility whose safety and efficiency trumps that of gas or coal."

Of course, that puts the anti-nuclear crowd in the position of arguing, however indirectly and unwillingly, for gas and coal, and we all know how dirty they are. That's worth a billion-plus in PR right there -- especially when you consider that select Friends of W will benefit from nuclear power protections. Cynicism, the ever-reliable Virgil in the Inferno of contemporary politics, suggests that the transfer of profits from Halliburton's fossil fuel cost centers to its nuclear ones will be fairly seamless.

I'm still trying to figure how the other touchy-feely talking point of the 2003 SOTU, AIDS in Africa, makes money for Bush backers while softening his image, but I imagine an answer will come soon enough.

CHUM FRINK. As a professional writer who has labored long in corporate vineyards, I have a special affection for, and identification with, T. Cholmondeley (Chum) Frink, the repulsive PR/ad man in Sinclair Lewis' "Babbitt." Frink, wrote Lewis,

was not only the author of "Poemulations," which, syndicated daily in sixty-seven leading newspapers, gave him one of the largest audiences of any poet in the world, but also an optimistic lecturer and the creator of "Ads that Add." Despite the searching philosophy and high morality of his verses, they were humorous and easily understood by any child of twelve...

Of course Frink is revealed in the end to be a self-loathing drunk.

So I am delighted to find that there is a prog-rock group called Chum Frink, and especially delighted that nowhere on their web site do they explain their name. Such restraint in the world of rock is rare and admirable.

CONTEMPT FOR THE PUNTER. I'm not the only ranter around who thinks his own bad customer service experiences are worth reading. Patrick Hayden is angry at his high-speed access provider, Speakeasy, for ripping him off. I'm not surprised. As recounted here, I got fucked over by NorthPoint (Outta business! See ya!) and Verizon (Service doesn't really work with Macs and screws up your operating system and mail agent! See ya!), in ways that were slightly different from those described by Hayden but fundamentally similar in that they reflect a growing trend of what I'll call contempt for the punter.

To reiterate, so many service companies make their long green from big clients that they don't think much about customer satisfaction down at the sub-millionaire end of the demo. Like a lot of things businessmen don't really care about, they respond to perceived problems in that area by sprinking some money and programs in places where trade magazine reporters might notice them, all the while leaving the basic problem -- systems designed to extract maximum money with minimum customer benefit -- untouched.

The "We don't use last names" response Hayden got from Speakeasy's rep is hilarious. And I expect that, should that piece of shit company remain in business (or become a wholly-owned part of some mega-corporation, as I suspect its owners are hoping), they will eventually institute a CRM program meant to address the problem -- meaning the customers' reps will give out last names, and lots of soothing baby-talk, but no better service.

As it happens, JP Morgan Chase appears to have fixed the problem they caused for me the other day. I say "appears" because in my discussions with them they left themselves enough rhetorical wiggle room to leave me on edge as to whether this problem is fixed for good, for a day, or what.

YOU'VE GOT QUESTIONS, WE'VE GOT ANSWERS. "SO WHY DO I CARE ABOUT THE NEW YORK TIMES STORY?" Because the movement for which you are an operative has always had it in for the Times, and the Blair mess (and the attendant Bragg pseudo-scandal) provides the proverbial shit that brings the proverbial happiness to the proverbial pig. "So why do many people consider [newspapers] more reliable than blogs?" I guess it will be a year or two before the average American is so stupid that he can't tell the difference between a major newsgathering organization with bureaus all over the world and deskbound link-peddlers with catchphrases, so I'll save my explanation for then.

CURSE CONT. These days I find it a lot easier to get spitting mad at institutions than at politicians, even. Chase's unhelpfulness mirrors a pattern I've found in many utilities and services. People complain and complain about customer service, and the companies dump billions into CRM and related training and technologies as a "response" to these complaints. They also drill into into their reps' heads that customer service is important, which mainly translates to some increased touchy-feeliness in their scripts -- how often have you heard a rep assure you that it is his or her goal to provide you with "outstanding" (or "excellent") service?

But there's not a lot the reps can do, because it is too often in the interest of the institutions themselves to prevent you from getting what you need.

Think about free-magazine deals. Once you've taken the free magazine, the company has a vested interest in keeping you from cancelling the automatic subscription that's supposed to kick in sometime afterward. They'll put you on hold forever, lose your trouble ticket, offer you some other premium -- whatever it takes to keep you from registering a final and irrefutable cancellation. Suddenly the nice people who gave you a free magazine turn into greedhead sharks.

With big companies it's subtler. First off, you're usually over a barrel: you need a key service rendered, and your only leverage is a threat is to pull your business. But what if they don't care? What if their income mostly derives from much bigger clients -- and an eternally-replenished pool of little fish like yourself? You can go on and pull out -- and endure the massive hassle of transferring providers (usually with fat fees tied on the end). Or you can stand and fight -- and realize that, however many assurances you get that the rep is doing all he or she can, the system is hard-wired to give you as little as it can get away with.

Jules Feiffer had a gag years ago about trouble with the phone company: "You can always take your business to one of our many competitors." Ma Bell was a monopoly then. Well, today we have phone companies out the ass -- and they all act more or less the same. They'll offer you free minutes, hours, cell phones, anything -- and when the going gets tough they'll stonewall you and dare you to fall off the vine, because who needs your piddleyshit patronage when their major scrilla is coming from giant corporate accounts and their own endless mergers and acquisitions?

There are all kinds of good arguments against the consolidation of everything, but the best one I know is that it leaves increasingly fewer vendors with any vested interest in the satisfaction of us peons. When everything on earth is owned by Gog and Magog, try getting an extra phone line put in before September.

They'll probably instruct their agents to break out the phone sex ("Welcome to Magog! It's my goal today to make you cum all over my tits!"), but in the end you still won't get your money shot.

A CURSE. My bank has fucked me up in a major way with an EFT transfer. My bank offers no explanation, and no remedy, for its malfeasance. My bank is JP Morgan Chase, and a more repulsive flock of usurious vultures, with a lower regard for all but its most affluent customers, has never been witnessed. A black curse on their filthy heads.

UPDATE. Chase "made good," as they say, but I'm waiting to see if the effects are permanent before lifting the curse. I will, however, keep my bone rattle and vial of goat's blood handy, just in case.

THE LIMITS OF UTILITARIANISM. At the New York Post this weekend (can't be troubled to find the link -- every access of the Post's files unleashes a reek, and I can't bear it today), author Eric Schlosser talks about his new book, "Reefer Madness," which considers the nuttiness of the drug war.

At one point he brings up the strain drug convictions put on the prison system, and the resulting overcrowding and inhuman conditions.

"Why should we care?" asks the interviewer.

Schlosser makes the perfectly reasonable answer that prisoners thus treated present, when released, an even more intractable problem for the general population than before.

Call me a dreamer, but it would have been nice if Schlosser had responded along these lines: "You should care because you're a human being, asshole."

IT NEVER RAINS IN CALIFORNIA, BUT GIRL, DON'T THEY WARN YA... Kevin Drum is having trouble sleeping and is depressed. I have hectored some web characters about this sort of thing in the past, but Drum is a True Son of Liberty and so I write to offer comfort rather than causticism. That's how rabidly partisan I am.

The news is making Drum unhappy, it seems, not personal, professional, or economic pressures. So my first counsel is perspective. On the latter three counts, I myself regularly hit the trifecta of misery, so for me our parlous political situation is just one damned thing after several others. If he has mental leisure to be depressed about the gang of nuts and sleazebags running our country, he might take that a favorable sign.

There are any number of far wealthier, far more comfortable, and far more highly-placed folk out there who, deprived of any sane reason for singing the blues, fret over the state of European architecture, or of their subjects' lungs. Fortunately Drum has good sense to accompany his penchant for melancholy, and he may take comfort that his expressions of concern are found by enlightened correspondents such as myself to be based in some sort of reality, not in the vaporous nightmares of our latter-day Ludwigs.

Should the strain of seeing plain the depradations of our time become too much for him, he may wish to avoid the news altogether for a small space. I evaded newsprint for most of the Carter Administration and part of Reagan's, to good personal effect, before my restless curiosity overrode my instinct for self-preservation. We would miss his sensible observations of the current scene, but he could just post cat pictures in the interim. Everyone likes kitties -- everyone with any sense, anyway.

Above all, Drum must keep at arm's length any sense of mission. We do what we do because something drives us, but that something is usually either decreased seratonin levels or the gift of gab, not a charge from God. Only the Blues Brothers could accept such a mission with happy results.

When all else fails, devolve into madness. Works for me!

Get well soon, Calpundit.

UPDATE: Now he says he's feeling better. From the yawning pit of hell, I salute him. Now get out there and counter some absurdities!

THE STORY GOES AWAY. Matthew Yglesias points to Josh Marshall, who says the below mentioned DeLay issue is journalistically moot because it's a dog-bites-man story -- DeLay is a notoriously "hardball" type of operative, so no one finds it surprising (or, by that narrow defintion, newsworthy) that he may have misused the resources of a Federal agency in pursuit of a partisan vendetta. Marshall also says that "it's not simply a partisan or bias issue," though I seem to recall an ocean of ink devoted to allegations that Bill Clinton had his operatives shut down LAX so he could get a $200 haircut.

Marshall also brings up the in-some-ways-similar example of Trent Lott, which is all the segue fodder I need. "At least in the first few days, no one gave the Lott situation much attention because pretty much everyone knew that Lott was fairly unreconstructed on racial issues," says Marshall. "(After all, only three years before, his close ties to a white-supremacist group had been widely reported in the Washington Post and other papers.) So it really wasn't such a surprise that he thought this way."

This seems to go against Marshall's point rather than for it, and maybe he's suggesting that the DeLay case, like Lott's, may catch-a-fire over time.

I doubt that. As I wrote copiously about the Lott takedown, Crimson cons/and doves of teel/worked together to cut the Trent Lott deal because each side got something out of it. The liberals got to pile on a noisome conservative, and the conservatives got to show that they do too hate prejudice, so there.

While there are a few conservatives out there in the electronic hustings who view askance the whole Homeland Security trip, I don't see enough percentage for them in a Lott-style takedown of DeLay to motivate a show of outrage.

Blogospheric pressure is thus weakened, and absent, as shown, Big Media interest in the case, the story goes away.

This is a profoundly cyncial analysis, but these days, in so many cases, those are the only kind that make sense.

DELAW'S DELAY, THE INSOLENCE OF OFFICE. MSNBC pokes light fun at Tom DeLay for saying kaddish at a memorial for a Challenger crew member of the Jewish persuasion. Tee-hee -- super-Christian Tom speaks Hebrew!

To be fair, a slightly more substantive discourse follows about the role of evangelicals in the Israel-Palestine road map thing. All very edifying, in an official-wisdom sort of way, but what shocked me was that no mention was made of a large crime in which the powerful Christer seems to be involved -- namely, involving the Federal Department of Homeland Security in the pursuit of Democratic Texas House members, and the destruction of public records pertaining thereunto.

There are all kinds of ways to parse this, in a "What Liberal Media?" kinda way, but I'm focusing mainly on the "Hella Dumb Media" aspect. DeLay is like Michael Jackson to them. We tag Jackson, these days, for one thing: being a freak who likes little boys. There's more to him than that, for good or ill -- I think his recent bankruptcy claims are pretty interesting, especially considering the convoluted economics of the music business -- but when the editors and producers are lining up their programs, little boys are what Jackson's all about, and anything else would, in their view, muddy up the story.

For MSNBC, DeLay is Mr. Jesus Redneck, and there's a lot to that, but it's downright weird to me that any late-breaking story involving him would totally eschew the Homeland Security angle. I seem to recall that coverage of everything former NJ Senator Bob Torricelli did in recent months mentioned his "allegations of ethical breaches" -- in fact, when he was recently appointed special master of a Honeywell chromium cleanup, ETL (Even The Liberal) Newsday saw fit to bring them up long, long after they were a public issue.

What's up with that? Is any mention of Republican crookedness in states run (formerly or presently) by Bushes automatically downplayed by our (cough, cough) liberal media?

DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE, BLOGGING ABOUT POLITICS. Neil Young mouths off about Bush in the Guardian (link found via Atrios), which collaboration will make him subject to Vidal/Mailer/Vonnegut treatment in Right-Wing World soon enough, I'm guessing.

The Brit interlocutor says that Young "has never been a political songwriter, unless you count his 1970 hit single Ohio." At first this seems absurd. Hello? "Southern Man"? "Alabama"? "Rockin' in the Free World" (and the rest of the Freedom album? The long rants in Journey Through The Past ("They think they're Roman Senators... and they're full of shit!")?

But maybe the Brit is right on another level. The line between the personal and the political in Young's stuff has often been very porous, but that doesn't make him much of an advocate. He's a crank with several bees in his bonnet, and every so often his personal grudges line up with political ones in an almost accidental way. Sometimes it's a Safeway cart or a Coupe de Ville that tickles his muse, sometimes it's George Bush.

That's why his politics, such as they are, don't follow a steady trend-line. He did defend Reagan, but that doesn't seem to have been a political statement in anything but appearance. "I don't know Ronald Reagan," he said in an interview, "but I have this feeling about him that this is a personal thing... It pisses me off to have anybody ALWAYS attacking, always putting down the leaders. My brother does the same thing."

This makes him a flake to some people who want things predictable -- like David Geffen, who sued him for his stylistic flip-flops, to use a favorite word of political observers, on records like "Trans" and "Everybody's Rockin." I saw Young during that period -- he kept crossing up the buckskinned fans at the Coliseum by playing electonic music between renditions of songs from Harvest, and they all started filing out of the place when he launched into his rockabilly set. I don't doubt Neil Young loves his fans, but he's obviously too committed to going his own way to allow that love to keep him in one place very long. That may be why so many of his songs are about travelling, and about lost love.

Political writing, of the sort we often attempt on these pages, is best when the terms are clear and the facts are straight. So it's usually a little embarrassing when artists interject themselves into that world, because their thinking is a little too free-range. But so what? No one with any sense will rely on even the most astute political art-makers for a convincing argument -- if I quote Brecht to you in defense of the labor movement, that's a filigree, not a proof point. From artists you might get images, metaphors, and turns of phrase that effect the way you think and feel about the world. And that may sustain and inspire you when you argue, under whatever debating society rules you choose to accept, about politics.

It's not bad to be reminded that behind all the online arguments are a bunch of people who go to movies, listen to songs, may have missed a car payment or lost a loved one or had a few cross words with God. That neither invalidates nor bolsters any particular argument, but it may remind us that the endlessly scrolling texts and talking points are not all our correspondents comprise, and instill in us a little merciful perspective.

Now to work up another bellyful of bile for the next fool I come across in my obssessive blogreading!

Or maybe not.

THIS JUST IN: ASSISTANT CONTRIBUTES CONTENT TO CEO MEMO! WHERE'S THE OUTRAGE? Andrew Sullivan continues jihad against his former employers, making a mountainous molehill out of a Times story reported from the Florida Gulf Coast. Turns out the bylined author relied on reporting from a freelancer, but didn't acknowledge it.

In terms of inside baseball, this is maybe a big deal, and the reporter should be censured. But the point is, someone did make the scene and take the notes -- the story would appear to be sound, though the attribution isn't.

The Blair scandal was about making shit up and publishing it as observed reality. Whether a name was left of the credits is not nearly so big a deal -- it sucks for the freelancer, sure, but freelancers get screwed all the time, as boy don't I know. Does it change your perception of the story that the reporter had unaccredited help?

Sullivan's been looking to get back at Raines for a while, and it would be churlish to deny him the golden opportunity presented by the Blair case. Still, I'm getting a little sick of it. It's a good thing that people are paying attention, but Sullivan and the rest of his crew seem a lot less interested in getting the Times to maintain its high journalistic standards than in discrediting it.

When the Times starts running the kind of crap Deborah Orin regularly vomits up onto the "news" pages of the New York Post, I'll worry about it, but till then it's a non-story to me.

A GOOD NIGHT. The Mets pulled out a one-run victory over the Braves tonight. Art Howe may be starting to earn his salary. He played a lot of pitchers tonight, and pulled them each at the right time, including the starter, Trachsel. Weathers put in a particularly gutsy performance in the eighth. And Benitez gave a great show in the ninth, balking to push a Brave into scoring position and nodding in acknowledgment of his transgression, instead of blowing smoke out of his ears like he usually does in tough spots. Shinjo saved the game by throwing out the balk-advanced runner at the plate -- boy, it's good to have him back. Howe grabbed a smiling Benitez afterwards and gleefully shouted something at him -- something along the lines of, "You'll take it, right?" I'm guessing. Bobby V probably would have made Benitez do laps or something.

I believe this was the Mets' first game of the season against Atlanta. Last year the Braves regularly mopped the floor with the Amazin's, but this game didn't look like a fluke at all. That fat lady hasn't even cleared her throat.

MAD MAG'S DEVIL'S BARGAIN. Bee-zarre column I just read called "The Reality of Sex Today" (what -- it changed?) from Maggie Gallagher -- I got it in the NY Post but can't find it online, so maybe I'm not the only one who thought it was over the top.

In the piece, Gallagher references sodomy laws (and Andrew Sullivan!) before devolving to what at first seems like her usual Junior Anti-Sex League stuff, but which quickly veers into deep and choppy waters.

Addressing Sullivan's "We are all sodomites now" idea, Gallagher concedes that sodomy may be well and good for some (and makes the point so mildly that a careless reader might miss the novelty of even this mild hint of toleration from one of America's leading judgment queens), but eventually all non-procreative sex must lead to "what men and women really want: a real sexual union, incarnating love, which makes man and woman one flesh." And that ain't cocksucking and cuntlapping in Maggie's book. Non-procreative sex "does not exist," she says, because once guys and gals start fooling around, vaginal intercourse is as inevitable as death and taxes. "How can normal men and women abandon themselves to sexual desire," she writes, "and expect at the same time to rigidly and ruthlessly exercise self-control to avoid what is for men and women the ultimate act of sexual union?"

Notice what she's avoiding here, besides sanity: the subject of gay sex. None of these concerns she mentions apply to same-sexers. At first I thought this was merely the result of inattention caused by a rush of crazy-juice to Gallagher's brain, but now that I think harder about it, I'm beginning to suspect it's part of a devil's bargain that she is consciously working on.

Before she gets to her final aria, Gallagher returns to sodomy laws, and makes what for her is probably a difficult admission: "Does society and law have any business regulating the sexual and intimate relationships between men? I don't know. Probably not."

Notice that it's a tentative offer -- of the sort that someone who is negotiating for something might put, as it were, on the table. Notice that we're also talking about men here, and men only.

Gallagher concludes: "Do we have any stake in shaping the meaning and purpose of sex between the men and women who yearn for one another? This I do know. The Supreme Court be damned. Yes."

"Shaping the meaning and purpose" can, given the context, only mean the abolition of abortion rights (at the very least -- she might want Griswold v. Connecticut overturned as well). Now add to this her mildly tolerant overtures toward gay men -- specifically the conservative Sullivan.

Can you not see the horse-trade that the Legion of Sex-Mad Cultural Conservatives has sent brave Maggie forth to broker?

I can see it -- her zaftig frame packed into liederhosen and a St. Pauli Girl blouse, a Valkyrie helmet pulled down to her eyebrows, Maggie whispers to the Lost Boys:

We'll let you guys have sex all you want -- if you help us overturn Roe v. Wade. Our fight is not with you. We have only come for the children.

You read (or co-fantasized) it here first!

FROM THE CHURCH NEWSLETTER TO DOW JONES. This is what they're publishing at OpinionJournal these days. It's not a matter of disagreeing with the guy, an apparent suburban dad ruminating about all those gol-durned R-rated movies his young'uns want to see (but he won't let 'em, except if it's "The Patriot," because there the R is earned by blood, not sex). There's nothing to disagree with. It's not an argument of any kind, and has no point of any kind; nor is it distinguished by any grace of style or of observation. It's just chatter of the sort you might see in a small-town penny-saver. And the great Dow Jones has published it.

Meanwhile I'm wearing a cardboard belt.