-
Models Without Makeup Deserve a Round of Applause
Tweet Share on Facebook April 30, 2010 Comment (3)By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The most shocking thing I have seen all week showed up, unexpectedly, on the Huffington Post. It was a collage of supermodels--without their makeup.
I am no idiot. I know that models get buffed and painted, from teat to tush, and starve themselves to look good for camera lenses that accentuate flesh. And I realize that I am genetically programmed to be drawn to infantile features; it spurs me to guard the young, and thereby perpetuate the species.
But these girls are seriously freaky looking, when deprived of the arts of their trade. With their big eyes and giant foreheads, they look like Spielbergian aliens. I wouldn't look twice at one on the subway, except maybe to gawk.
-
Justice Antonin Scalia Breaks from the Party Line on Gays
Tweet Share on Facebook April 29, 2010 Comment (9)By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld, a great American liberal of the 19th century, once noted that Supreme Court justices wear black robes to add majesty to their work. After one particularly bad decision from the corporate court of the 1890s, Altgeld suggested that the justices were going to need more robes.
So it is with the political appointees on today's court. Liberal or conservative, they vote the party line and stick to their own little blocs, and mingle in their off hours with their partisan buddies.
After Bush v. Gore, and the recent decision on corporate campaign spending, I think more than a few of today's justices, wanting a semblance of majesty, will need to wear so many robes that they'll end up looking like the Michelin man. I am sure that conservatives, looking at the liberal bloc, have plenty of their own examples.
Is it too much, as we contemplate the vacancy caused by the retirement of John Paul Stevens, to ask for justices that didn't settle into their ideological niches in some Ivy League law school, and spend the rest of their lives kissing political butt? That is why we should take special note of any sign that a justice has a mind of his or her own. On Wednesday, who showed up as an independent thinker but Justice Antonin Scalia.
-
Surprising Montana Bear DNA Findings Make McCain Eat His Words
Tweet Share on Facebook April 29, 2010 Comment (4)By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
My old college classmate, Kate Kendall, has finished her experiment, counting Montana's grizzly bears for the U.S. Geological Survey via DNA from their hair. And, maybe, Sen. John McCain has apologized for shooting from the lip.
Kate became a topic of debate in the last presidential campaign when the McCain TV commercials made fun of her study, which was financed by a congressional earmark. Bear DNA, you know, sounds like a dumb animal cop show. Well, it turns out that Kate was on to something pretty cool, if you care about American wildlife.
-
Why Whites Should Worry About the Arizona Immigration Law
Tweet Share on Facebook April 27, 2010 Comment (58)By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I suspect that Arizona is going to find out how stupid and unpopular its new law really is when law enforcement officials there start asking for the money they will need to perform the work of border guards, while at the same time fighting crime. Or when some big shot Republican matron from Scottsdale, with a killer tan, acts a little too haughty with a traffic cop and gets hauled off to a holding cell.
But in the meantime, as someone who is married to a naturalized American citizen (an ex-Canadian, God bless her maple-sugared heart), I find the precedent more than a little creepy. Now that one state is requiring people to carry identity papers, will others be far behind?
Aren't libertarians--the Ron Paul, CATO kind, not just the ACLUers--just a little sickened by the prospect of being pulled over, and having some jack-booted highway patrolman demand, like a Nazi in a World War II movie, to see your "Papers? Papers?"
-
Gov. McDonnell Honors Civil War History the Right Way
Tweet Share on Facebook April 23, 2010 Comment (4)By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I have given Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell a tough time in this space. But the other day he did a great thing. And I am going to lay the praise on thick.
On Tuesday, McDonnell presided at the dedication ceremonies at the Wagner Farm on the Chancellorsville Battlefield, a Civil War site saved from the developers’ bulldozers by the Commonwealth of Virginia and the Civil War Preservation Trust.
The governor has been in hot water lately, for his proclamation honoring the Confederate cause, in which he omitted to mention slavery. I suggested that if McDonnell and other southern politicians want to honor the South’s heritage, they should do it by joining with northerners, and the descendants of slaves everywhere, in preserving the endangered battlefields of the war between the states on the eve of its 150th anniversary.
Turns out, McDonnell was way ahead of me. During the ceremony, the governor signed into law a bill permanently establishing the Virginia Civil War Sites Preservation Fund, which will provide matching grants to organizations like the trust, so that private-public partnerships can buy up threatened land. And McDonnell announced that $300,000 in new grants would be immediately available, to preserve seven small but valuable sites around the Old Dominion. As a stopgap measure, the fund has already helped save 2,000 acres at 24 battlefields.
-
Obama, Bush, Clinton, and the Media's Real Golf Bias
Tweet Share on Facebook April 23, 2010 Comment (7)By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Was it only last year that George F. Will and other Republican critics were slamming President Obama for being over-exposed? That was then and this is now. The new Republican talking point seems to be that Obama is under-exposed, and plays too much golf.
I am not kidding. Who could make this stuff up?
-
Fix the Debt and Pay for Iraq and Afghanistan With a War Tax
Tweet Share on Facebook April 22, 2010 Comment (16)By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
We are now almost 10 years into the war that al Qaeda forced upon us. Our young men and women have been asked to fight bravely, on our behalf, and to suffer and die in great number. It is time we did a little something for them, and their generation, and dug into our pockets and paid for this war.
There is a lot of talk these days about the Founders. On television, we see the exploits of the Greatest Generation, saving the world from fascism in World War II. The Civil War generation is in the news as well, as we approach the 150th anniversary ceremonies of that conflict, which ended slavery and saved the Union.
All these generations did more than fight. They also paid their taxes. Indeed, by my reckoning, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the other corners of the earth where terrorists plot our deaths, are the first in which Americans have not met their patriotic duty by raising taxes.
-
Conservatives Run From the Individual Mandate They Once Embraced
Tweet Share on Facebook April 19, 2010 Comment (20)By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The Heritage Foundation had its Emily Litella moment today. In an op-ed piece in The Washington Post, the conservative think tank acknowledged that it was once a true believer in requiring Americans to purchase health insurance. But now that a Democratic president has embraced the idea, “Never mind.”
I feel sorry for Heritage, and for Mitt Romney and other Republicans who are so furiously denouncing what they once fostered and embraced. The individual mandate has been the core of Republican thinking since the days of Richard Nixon, prized by conservatives as a way to keep the private health insurance industry alive and well, and to ward off Democratic demands for a public system like those in Great Britain or Canada.
In other words, conservatives promoted the concept of a mandate for decades because it wasn't socialism and, in fact, it would prevent socialism.
The mandate was seen, by many Republican theorists, as a reasonable alternative to a public option, with the great virtue of keeping the American healthcare system, at its core, a market-based enterprise. Nowadays, of course, such thinking will get you burned as a heretic.
-
Newt Gingrich Gets Hysterical Over Religious Supreme Court Case
Tweet Share on Facebook April 16, 2010 Comment (18)By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The legal dispute that serves as a vehicle for Newt Gingrich's screed in today's Washington Post is mildly interesting, if not particularly new. It seems that a Christian Legal Society at a public law school in San Francisco applied for travel funds and other benefits available to student clubs a few years back. It was turned down because it required that its members be Christians, which university officials, worrying about whether government should be in the business of supporting one faith over another, found discriminatory.
The school told the Christians that they were free to gather, to join, to practice their faith, and use school facilities--they just couldn't get all the benefits of full recognition, as long as they were a Christians-only club. That wasn't good enough for the Christians, so they sued, insisting that, unless they got their $200 in travel funds, they were the victims of discrimination.
It wasn't always this way, but Americans nowadays just love to be victims, don't we? We jostle and fight, all the time, for the chance to pout and weep for ourselves and cry, "Poor, poor, pitiful me" in the public square. It is very wimpy, if you ask me, yet the Supreme Court has had to rule on all sorts of these cases in recent years.
-
Caps Fans Brace for More NHL Hockey Heartbreak
Tweet Share on Facebook April 15, 2010 Comment (3)By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
All you Cubs and Bills fans out there will understand if I don't blog today about Sarah Palin or the Tea Party or Glenn Beck. They're getting kind of boring and predictable, anyway, eh?
Arriving tonight, here in Washington, D.C., is our annual spring ritual: living and dying with the Washington Capitals. The Stanley Cup playoffs have arrived, and--despite that lovely score in the Pittsburgh-Ottawa game last night--it is time for long-suffering Washington hockey fans to prepare for their annual dose of tension and torture and, so far, cruel disappointment.
Oh, I know. This year it is going to be different, you say. Nobody won more games in the regular season. We've got stud hosses in Alex Ovechkin and Alexander Semin and Nicklas Backstrom, and guys with muscle and heart like Brooks Laich and Mike Knuble. Besides, not every Washington team can suck.
