Cartoon life.

"We try really hard now, and have for a long time, to be clear that Goofus is not all bad, and Gallant is not all good..."

"We just try to be really clear that Goofus isn’t always bad. He’s not. He’s just often making choices that aren’t thoughtful or safe."

Said Christine French Cully, the current editor in chief of Highlights, quoted in "THE COMIC STRIP THAT EXPLAINS THE EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN PARENTING/What eight decades of Goofus and Gallant illustrate about society’s changing expectations of children" (The Atlantic).

Every installment of Goofus and Gallant now has a line at the top that reads “There’s some of Goofus and Gallant in us all. When the Gallant shines through, we show our best self.”

But isn't that exactly what every kid reading Goofus and Gallant in the old days figured out on their own? It was funny because one kid was always good — too good — and one always bad — absurdly bad. I think putting that label on implicitly says we're not trying to be funny anymore because we think you're dumb.

There are some nice examples of the old strip, notably this gem from 1955:

"Musk’s interest in electric cars or Ukraine comes and goes, but the richest man in the world is constantly joking."

"A shameless punchline thief, he doesn’t discriminate between dad jokes or insult humor. On Twitter, he’s Beavis and Butt-Head, chuckling at everything.... His stated reason for buying Twitter is to expand free speech, a cause he took up in part because it suspended the account of a conservative parody site, the Babylon Bee, after a post. Days after taking over Twitter, he tweeted: 'Comedy is legal again.' Then people started making fun of him and you’ll never believe what happened next. Elon Musk, comedy savior, transformed into the joke police.... The reason he’s found himself cast in this public drama as the humorless square, the Comstockian scold, is that while labeling something parody might be bad for comedy, it can be essential for credibility.... While he’s not especially good at comedy, Musk is a wonderful comic character: The boss who thinks he’s funny but isn’t. He’s Michael Scott from 'The Office,' whose terrible jokes everyone must if not laugh at, at least put up with.... Musk doesn’t need to own his haters in a tweet. They already work for him for free." 

From "Hey, Elon Musk, Comedy Doesn’t Want to Be Legal/He’s Twitter’s chief jokester, but as his free-speech impulses conflict with his push to label parodies, he shows a misunderstanding of how humor works" by Jason Zinoman, the NYT comedy critic.

Zinoman packs a lot into that column. It was hard to excerpt! As a reader, I felt flattered to be assumed to know what "Comstockian" means. If anyone needs to brush up on the story of Anthony Comstock, here's his Wikipedia article. Excerpt:

The ambiguous "drops."

Headline at Hollywood Reporter: "HBO Drops Pair of Mike Judge Comedy Series."

I know "drops" is supposed to sound cool, like when some pop star "drops" a new recording. But it's such a saggy, sad word, and sometimes — as in that headline — it sounds like the very thing they're trying to get us excited about just got cancelled. 

Oh, no! Wait. I'm reading this article now:

'QualityLand' and 'A5' will not move forward as the 'Silicon Valley' co-creator continues to juggle the new take on 'Beavis and Butt-Head' for Comedy Central.

These shows did get dropped in the old-timey sense of cancelled/rejected. The word has ambiguity whichever way you want to use it. 

And by the way, what does it say about America that something new called "QualityLand" is shunned and they're bringing back "Beavis and Butt-Head"? Personally, I loved "Beavis and Butt-Head" — as an MTV show in the early 1990s. It's a quarter century later, though, America. 

I thought I was a little childish watching that when I was in my 40s, but who would have thought that 20+ years later, a reboot of the thing would be what was happening on HBO? What was on HBO, 20+ years ago? Here's a list of the best of HBO in the 1990s, topped by "The Sopranos." 

Watching "The Sopranos" in the 1990s, I might have wondered, What would HBO be in the 2020s? If the only fact I had from the future was HBO will be generating new episodes of "Beavis and Butt-Head," I would have been terrified. What the hell will have happened to America?!

"The 90s were the best. We didn’t have coronavirus, or cell phones, or computers. We had 5.0's, blockbuster, Beavis and Butthead, Wayne's World, Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan..."

"... Mortal Kombat is still better than Fortnight ... the last of the great decades."

And we had Vanilla Ice — who is quoted above, from "Vanilla Ice throwing Fourth of July concert: 'We didn't have coronavirus' in the '90s/The 'Ice Ice Baby' singer will perform for thousands in Texas, where coronavirus cases are surging" (Entertainment Weekly).

The concert will be in a large outdoor venue — Emerald Point Bar & Grill, on the shore of Lake Travis in Austin — and they're only selling tickets for half the capacity, so people can socially distance.

I take the coronavirus serious. But we can’t live in a bubble.
I think at this point we all understand the severity of it. practice social distancing and wear a mask. This is an outside venue, Fourth of July on the lake with fireworks. Plenty of room for distancing.

— Vanilla Ice (@vanillaice) July 2, 2020

By they way, "Beavis and Butt-Head" are back: "Beavis and Butt-Head being rebooted for a Gen Z world by Comedy Central" (Entertainment Weekly).

AND: With all that attention, he's out:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Vanilla Ice (@vanillaiceofficial) on Jul 2, 2020 at 10:27am PDT

For some reason, the "Donald Trump House of Wings" sketch from his 2004 SNL show is trending again.

I saw it first here (because I follow Anthony Scaramucci on Twitter, which is a mystery in itself):

Little more of this (self aware and funny ) a little less racism! pic.twitter.com/YFvrauAm14

— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) July 29, 2019

But I see from Googling that a lot of people are talking about it. For example, at Townhall, 4 days ago, somebody wrote, "'Donald Trump's House Of Wings' Belongs In The Smithsonian" ("This video has been making the rounds on Twitter after a One America News video researcher rediscovered the gem").

"Am I saying that I'm a chicken wing expert? No. But I am telling you this, the wing is hands down the best part of the chicken. Better than the head. Better than the torso. Better than the back...."

Torso... now that's funny. By the way, for decades, I've found the word "torso" funny. There's the line "and the torso, even more so" in "Lydia the Tattoed Lady," and once, when I was in Rome, visiting the Vatican Museum, there were a lot of posters showing a statue that was only a torso, with the word "torso," and, after seeing these posters all over the place, I overheard a young woman, who must have seen what I'd been seeing, and she said, "What's with the torso?" Even now, 2 decades later, I hear her inflection in my head, and I laugh out loud.



I wish I could find the old Vatican Museum poster, but I do think this is the torso in question, the most famous torso at the Vatican Museum, the "Belvedere torso":

It was once believed to be a 1st-century BC original, but is now believed to be a copy from the 1st century BC or AD of an older statue, which probably dated to the early 2nd century BC..... Legend has it that Pope Julius II requested that Michelangelo complete the statue fragment with arms, legs and a face. He respectfully declined, stating that it was too beautiful to be altered, and instead used it as the inspiration for several of the figures in the Sistine Chapel....

So that's what's with the torso!



If you don't know what that is, but you just keep seeing that, with nothing but the word "Torso," it really does make you the perfect audience for the line "What's with the torso?"

ADDED: That kind of laughing — my laughing at "What's with the torso?" — is premised on ignorance. It's like what makes "Beavis and Butt-Head" funny. They're so stupid and don't know the value of anything. They look at things and say "What's that?" Now, I don't remember what, if anything, I knew about the Belvedere torso when I went to the Vatican Museum 20 years ago, but, obviously, I knew from the museum's cues that it was an important artwork and I felt calmly assured that it was something profound and dignified. But the young women — in the manner of "Beavis and Butt-Head" — were just seeing it as a torso with the word "torso" (and, I think, a this-way-to-the-torso arrow) and reacting to it as if it was a completely random torso in no particular context. And I am still laughing out loud.

CORRECTION: The post headline originally said 2015, but it was 2004.

"Philosopher Theodore Sider used the characters [Goofus and Gallant] in an argument against the notion of a binary Heaven or Hell conception of the afterlife."

"Sider conceived of Goofus and Gallant as near-equals, with Gallant only marginally better than Goofus, in arguing that sending the former to Heaven and the latter to Hell is antithetical to God's justice."

For some reason, we're talking about Goofus and Gallant this morning. (Actually, I know the reason, but I'm too discreet to reveal it.)

The origin of Goofus:

"We couldn't have Gallant without Goofus," said Highlights Editor Kent Brown, a grandson of the founders and, he proudly claims, the inspiration for Goofus. "Without Goofus, Gallant would be bland and no one would pay attention. But kids see parts of themselves in both characters. No one is as good as Gallant, and no one is as bad as Goofus. But being more like Gallant is something to strive for."

But you could have Goofus without Gallant. That was "Beavis and Butt-Head." Mike Judge (the "he" in this paragraph) explains:

Does that give some insight into why Trump won the election? And why Mitt Romney did not?

"One family. One room. Four screens. Four realities, basically."

"While it may look like some domestic version of 'The Matrix' — families sharing a common space, but plugged into entirely separate planes of existence through technology — a scene like this has become an increasingly familiar evening ritual. As a result, the American living room in 2011 can often seem less like an oasis for shared activity, even if that just means watching television together, than an entangled intersection of data traffic — everyone huddled in a cyber-cocoon."

It's a NYT culture article.

Is there a problem here? If a family of 4 were sitting around together reading books, it would seem better than if they were all watching the same show on TV. And yet, with books, you wouldn't be able to IM stuff to each other.

With either books or computers, if you're with other people, you can easily read something out loud to the people in the room and start a conversation. My grandfather used to do that with the newspaper, and I've come to think of it as a kind of proto-blogging.

These days, if I'm reading something and finding it interesting, I might blog it to the whole world and try to start a conversation on line, but we still interact in real space. Meade might read something out loud to me, and that might lead to a long conversation, or it might get one of my all-too-typical responses: 1. "IM me the link," 2. "I already blogged that." 3. "I'm blogging that right now."

Tina Brown entices Robin Givhan...

... to leave the Washington Post for the new Newsweek. What a coup!

Ms. Givhan spent 15 years at The Post, most notably as fashion editor, the job that earned her a Pulitzer in 2006 for criticism....

Her writing was famously provocative and punchy. She once described Vice President Dick Cheney’s outfit at a solemn Auschwitz memorial as “the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.”

(Link added. Picture of Cheney in his embarrassing parka at the link.)

In a column about  Condoleezza Rice, then the secretary of state, Ms. Givhan wrote about the images of sex and power that Ms. Rice’s  high boots and fitted dresses conveyed. “Rice looked as though she was prepared to talk tough, knock heads and do a freeze-frame ‘Matrix’ jump kick if necessary,” wrote Ms. Givhan.

(Link added. Pic of Condi at the link. Hey, let's see the new Secretary of State try that.)

When First Lady Michelle Obama’s sleek attire turned heads at the 2009 Inauguration, Ms. Givhan declared “the era of first lady-as-rectangle had ended.”

(Link added. With pic — showing that the era of first lady-as-Glinda had seemingly begun.)

ADDED: Above are the examples of Givhan's writing that the NYT selected. Law folk are most interested in this one about John Roberts — on the occasion of George Bush announcing his nomination to the Supreme Court. Givhan took a shot at Roberts's wife and children —  "groomed and glossy in pastel hues -- like a trio of Easter eggs, a handful of Jelly Bellies, three little Necco wafers."

There was tow-headed Jack -- having freed himself from the controlling grip of his mother -- enjoying a moment in the spotlight dressed in a seersucker suit with short pants and saddle shoes. His sister, Josie, was half-hidden behind her mother's skirt. Her blond pageboy glistened. And she was wearing a yellow dress with a crisp white collar, lace-trimmed anklets and black patent-leather Mary Janes.

(Who among us did a double take? Two cute blond children with a boyish-looking father getting ready to take the lectern -- Jack Edwards? Emma Claire? Is that you? Are all little boys now named Jack?)

The wife wore a strawberry-pink tweed suit with taupe pumps and pearls, which alone would not have been particularly remarkable, but alongside the nostalgic costuming of the children, the overall effect was of self-consciously crafted perfection. The children, of course, are innocents. They are dressed by their parents. And through their clothes choices, the parents have created the kind of honeyed faultlessness that jams mailboxes every December when personalized Christmas cards arrive bringing greetings "to you and yours" from the Blake family or the Joneses. Everyone looks freshly scrubbed and adorable, just like they have stepped from a Currier & Ives landscape.

Yeah, that was mean — but deliciously so. (Mmmm.... Necco wafers.)

Yeah, it was political. Note that Cheney was underdressed, the Robertses were overdressed, and First Lady Michelle Obama was just right.

I hope that, teamed with Tina, Robin gets even meaner and more political. I love the fashion-politics-culture genre, and I want to see Givhan do her thing. And stop fawning over Michelle Obama!

The return of "Beavis and Butt-head" ... with new episodes!

Reports the NY Post:

The return of "Beavis and Butt-head" will be a backdoor means for MTV to return to showing music videos -- something the network was founded upon but abandoned in the last decade to make room for popular reality shows....

Great! I love "Beavis and Butt-head." Back in 1993, when the show premiered, people really were watching a lot of music videos, and it was great to have a show that helped us view them critically. The big joke on us was that it took 2 idiots — Beavis and Butt-head — to make us more perfectly hypercritical of the stupid junk we'd been watching.

The basic plotline revolved around two shorts-wearing, spectacularly immature teenage pals whose banter was delivered against the backbeat of their constant idiotic laughter.

Key word: shorts-wearing.

ADDED: Heh. I got distracted by the shorts theme and forgot to make the point I was aiming at. When the show first came out, we'd been really into watching music videos. But, as noted in the article, MTV abandoned its video mission long ago. The new plan is to use the show to bring back to music videos. So The original design of B&B was to make us laugh at something we were caught up in — and, essentially, to laugh at the funniest thing: ourselves. Since we're not currently into music videos, indeed the point of bringing back B&B is to get music videos back onto MTV, we won't have that element of seeing the absurdity in something we take at all seriously. But presumably Mike Judge — the genius behind "Beavis and Butt-head" — will find new ways to make it good.

AND: "This sucks. Change it... It better start rocking or I'll really give them something to cry about."

When only medical marijuana is legal, you end up with a hell of a lot of sick people.

Seems like everyone has terrible headaches.

In Colorado, where a constitutional amendment legalizing medical marijuana was passed in 2000, hundreds of dispensaries popped up and a startling number of residents turned out to be in “severe pain,” the most popular of eight conditions that can be treated legally with the once-demonized weed.

More than 80,000 people here now have medical marijuana certificates, which are essentially prescriptions, and for months new enrollees have signed up at a rate of roughly 1,000 a day.

Oh! The pain! The intractable pain! Who knew the excruciating suffering that tortured Coloradans for so long?

The linked article also details the pesky government regulation that comes with legalization. What did you expect? One longs for the day when the stuff was illegal, there was no regulation to protect anybody from their suppliers, and if you wanted it, your only option was to break the law. Back then there was one kind of dishonesty, the manly dishonesty of breaking the law...



... and not this other weasely form of dishonesty, lying about headaches.

I am not a Type O Negative fan.

This appeals to me:



But I was sad to read of the death of Peter Steele, the lead singer, who was 48 years old.

***

Now, you might be thinking, why does Althouse even have an opinion of Type O Negative? But the fact is, I was the driver/chaperone for a lot of concerts in the 1990s, and I saw them — and many other musicians of that era — in concert. Despite my advanced age, I actually enjoyed everything I heard except Type O Negative. Of course, that's a point in their favor, is it not?

Did they really pull Sacha Baron Cohen skit from the Oscars just because it might irk James Cameron?

"... Baron Cohen planned to appear onstage as a blue-skinned, female Na’vi, with [Ben] Stiller translating 'her' interplanetary speech. As the skit went on, though, it would become clear that Stiller wasn’t translating properly, because Cohen would grow ever more upset. At its climax, an infuriated Baron Cohen would pull open 'her' evening gown to reveal that s/he was pregnant, knocked up with Cameron’s love child, and would go on to confront her baby daddy as if s/he were on Jerry Springer."

Maybe the problem was just that it's bad — or not good enough to justify lowering the taste level. We (might) laugh at the Jerry Springer show, but the Oscars are immensely glamorous, and crudeness is out of place. Out of place can generate humor, but who should be permitted to appropriate the glamour for comic effect and what are the costs? Isn't it mostly women who enjoy the Oscars? Quite aside from how James Cameron will feel, how will the show's natural audience feel?

But let me go one step further. Here's my theory: The Hollywood elite want the Democrats health care bill to make it through, and one stumbling block is abortion. The producers have therefore deemed this not to be a good time to highlight and laugh about undesired pregnancy. The unwanted unborn child is an overwhelmingly serious matter for people who care about the right to life. Don't antagonize them with edgy, blatant material. Not now.

The producer of "The Hurt Locker" is banned from the Oscars for emailing members to disparage "Avatar."

Nicolas Chartier broke the rules. He might win an Oscar — it's the producer of the Best Picture who gets the statuette — but he won't be able to take the stage to proclaim himself the King of the World or whatever the hell he might like to do.

A Drudgtaposition about streetfighting and a disquisition about "Disney Eyes."

Let's analyze Drudge's photos and headline juxtaposition for the Oscars:

I think he thinks it's funny to picture these 4 characters in a street fight. I'm saying 4, because I'm not counting the secondary figures in the bottom photographs, especially that female "Avatar" character, whom we don't enjoy picturing in a street fight, for reasons hilariously well-stated here:



(More of that sort of movie analysis at the RedLetterMedia YouTube page.)

"Avatar"...

... it might kill you.

Live-blogging the Golden Globes.

1. Oh, why not? Ricky Gervais is here, hosting, making jokes about the tininess of his penis and how it looks big in his small hands where it usually is. That might sound funnier if it weren't 7 pm (Central Time) on network TV. Then, here's Nicole Kidman looking great with red hair and a light pink dress featuring prominent tiny nipples. She reminds us about Haiti, then hands out the best supporting actress award to Mo'nique, who is overdraped in gold satin and fabulously made up with ultralong eyelashes. Mo'nique loves God and all the other actors in her movie "Precious."

2. Most of the women are wearing asymmetrical dresses, and Julianna Margulies, who won the TV actress award, looked like she got confused getting into the straps of hers. Michael C. Hall, who won the TV actor award, has on a wool stocking cap for some reason. As a tribute to victims of the Haitian earthquake? I don't know. [ADDED: I'm told Hall has cancer. I'm sorry.]

3. The set is orange. I'm tired of looking at orange. Is it supposed to be "golden"? Hey, suddenly: Cher! She looks statuesque and hourglassy. It's the song award. Paul McCartney is nominated and there, but he doesn't win.

4. Meryl Streep wins best [comedy/musical] actress for "Julie and Julia." She's shrouded in a big black dress clamped on with a thick buckled belt. But she has one naked shoulder left out of the shroud, so she's on the asymmetry kick with everyone else. She pretends she didn't remember what she wanted to say and stammers her way into a tribute to her mother and a mini-breakdown over all the suffering in the world.

5. Drew Barrymore gets a TV actress award for "Grey Gardens." She's wearing the best outfit for the day, but it's quite silly, covered in crystal pimples with a glitter hedgehog at one shoulder and the opposite hip.

6. Samuel L. Jackson introduces "a real-life movie star" — Sophia Loren. She's got a beautiful symmetrical dress. It's black, outlining her famous breasts and nipping in at her should-be-equally-famous waist, and it has sheer sleeves that are shaded at the shoulders with a sprinkling of black beads for an ombre effect. She gives the foreign film award to "The White Ribbon."

7. "Mad Man" is the best TV show. The best TV actress is Chloe Sevigny (for "Big Love"). Cool. I like her. She's wearing an insane widely-ruffled mauve dress and she's gasping about ripping it, not that she ripped it in any kind of an interesting way.

8. Halle Berry looks sharp and sleek in a tight black dress with little cap sleeves and a giant plunge down the chest. Her hair is crisply modern too — short and sticking up on top. She gives the supporting movie actor award to Christoph Waltz, who was so wonderful as the Nazi in "Inglourious Basterds."

9. "Marty eats, drinks, and sleeps film. I hear there are videos on the internet of Marty having sex with film." It's Robert DeNiro, talking about Martin Scorsese, who's getting one of these lifetime awards. Cool clip show, reminding me, among other things, of how much I love...  "After Hours"... and "King of Comedy"....

10. Oh, they love Jodie Foster. She's wearing a plain black dress, that makes it's nod to asymmetry with a slit up the left leg. She's not giving an award, just presenting one of the films. Gervais, sipping from that beer he's got at the lectern: "I like a drink as much as the next man... unless the next man... is Mel Gibson." Here's Gibson, acting drunk, for fun... supposedly. The category is director, and the award goes to ... suspense... James Cameron. He doesn't say "I'm the king of  the world." He tells us he's got to "pee something fierce."

11. The best TV show is "Glee." That's nice, I guess. "This is for everybody who got a wedgie in high school."

12. Ah, we're almost done. It's the best comedy/musical award. "The Hangover." Mike Tyson is involved. Strange!

13. Arnold Schwarzenegger! The actor. It's as if that whole thing about him being governor was just some crazy dream. He presents "Avatar," which looks really annoying. Then Mickey Rourke comes out — in a cowboy hat — to do the drama actress award. It's Mickey because he won best actor last year, not because he's the height of Hollywood glamour, which he's not. The winner is Sandra Bullock, and Mickey looks really disappointed. Sandra is wearing a very filmy, very purple dress.

14. Sally Hutton announces the drama actor award. She's wearing a nutty short dress. It's Robert Downey Jr.! I've always loved him. He's got a whole standup routine going. He's not going to thank anyone... but he does. "Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms." [ADDED: Oops. That was the comedy/musical actor. Hmm. Sherlock Holmes is comedy? Or was there music?]

15. The best drama actor is actually Jeff Bridges. The presenter was the lovely Kate Winslet, who's wearing a simple black dress with one thick vertical strap on the right side. Asymmetry. Jeff gets a standing O. Why? Because he's The Dude? "You're really screwing up my 'under appreciated' status," he says.

16. The best drama movie — presented by Julia Roberts, who thought it was cute to tell her kids to go to bed — is "Avatar." James Cameron warns us that now he has peed, so he's going to blabber. He loves his job. We have the best job. "Give it up for yourselves." He says that twice. Because "that's the most amazing thing." Jeesh. "'Avatar' asks us to see that everything is connected, all human beings to each other, and us to the earth."

17. And us to bed!

"Ever since I went to see 'Avatar' I have been depressed."

"Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na'vi made me want to be one of them. I can't stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it. I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in 'Avatar.'"

***

"When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed ... gray. It was like my whole life, everything I've done and worked for, lost its meaning... It just seems so ... meaningless. I still don't really see any reason to keep ... doing things at all. I live in a dying world."

***

When I was younger — I'm 59, starting today — movies had a very strong effect on me, but it wasn't that it turned the world disappointingly gray. When I walked out into the light after a great movie, my experience was that things seemed sharpened, intensified, and refreshed. The real world felt newly real. It was more in color — the opposite of depression.

Is it something about the movies that has changed? Is our relationship to film different now? Are young people today different from the way we were then? Maybe nothing has changed, and there were post-film depressives then as now.

How is that 3-D working out for you?

If you've seen "Avatar," please comment on whether the 3-D effects are working properly for you. I haven't seen it, but my 26-year-old son Chris has seen it (in the IMAX version). He iChats:

just trying to look at the 3d and get it to look right was pretty much the entire experience of it...

it never reaches the point of looking like reality, and looks less real than 2d...

the main thing is, nothing in the extreme foreground ever looked in focus...

the only way things ever looked like they popped out of the screen would be if i focused on something that seemed to be in the middle ground, and things could pop out that i wasn't looking directly at...

i don't think 3d ever looks like the true 3-dimensions of the real world, i think at best it looks like a very big hologram...

"President Obama yesterday did his best impression of a high-school sophomore participating in his first Model UN meeting, retailing pious clichés he learned from his pony-tailed social studies teacher."

Rich Lowry talks about Barack Obama's U.N. speech.

Has an American president ever expressed such implicit hostility toward his own nation's pre-eminence in world affairs? Or so relished in recalling its failings, or so readily elevated himself and his own virtues over those of his country?...

"For those who question the character and cause of my nation," Obama said, "I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months." In other words, he's the redeemer of a nation....

Ugh. Sigh. And I thought Gaddafy was the clown. But that was yesterday, as I watched TV with the sound off, under the influence of post-toe-op drugs.

I'm torn. I was just thinking that Obama would have been so much better if he had made foreign policy the centerpiece of his presidency instead of perversely investing his reputation in complicated health care puzzles. Now, I'm thinking perhaps we're better off that he's gotten hopelessly distracted by insoluable insurance problems.

***

You know, Lowry's description made me think of Mr. Van Driessen on "Beavis and Butt-Head." I was going to embed some apt video clip of the hippie teacher — maybe something with him lecturing the boys about world peace — but all I could find was this and my inner Nancy Pelosi scolded me about this balance between freedom and safety.