The Inquiring Manatee

A New Height in Stupidity -- Woman with 6 Kids Gives Birth to 8 More

    

     The still-unnamed fertility clinic that implanted eight embryos in the uterus of Nadya Suleman, the 33-year-old unmarried woman who already had six embryo-implant kids at home, need to be drummed out of the profession. And the moronic, misguided mom needs to be roundly condemned for her irresponsible, antisocial action in foisting 14 children into the world with no support from anyone but her much put-upon and unfortunately enabling parents.
     Apparently, the the mental health professions' Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM-IV) does not list an obsession with remaining pregnant and frequently giving birth as a mental disorder. If it doesn't, it should. And this woman should be a case study.
     According to the Los Angeles Times, Suleman, who wanted "just one more girl," lives with her parents on a well-kept cul-de-sac in Whittier, Calif. Her brilliant maneuver is forcing her father to go back to work in Iraq as a contractor to help support the octuplets and their siblings, who include a pair of 2-year-old twins. The man is going to get blown up by a roadside bomb because of his stupid daughter.
     What is the matter with these people?
     Odds are that eventually the welfare system (meaning you, I and other taxpayers) will need to step in to support this family of 14 -- either that, or they're going to need an awful lot of free diapers, baby food and other supplies from corporations supposedly eager to cash in on the publicity. (Canada's Dionne quintuplets, stars of the 1930s, got lots of freebies.) but corporate help is doubtful. I doubt that companies are going to want to be associated with this excessive use of fertility techniques by an unmarried woman.
     The woman's refusal to abort any of these fetuses is akin to Sarah Palin's unfortunate decision to go ahead with the birth of retarded Baby Trig. Some people take this pro-life thing way too far.

Republicans just want to be Republicans

   

It's all very well for President Barack Obama to keep reaching out to Republicans and asking them to share their ideas, but this political strategy already has reached the point of diminishing returns.
    It's becoming clear that Republicans are choosing to gratify their base by repeating the same old ideologically hidebound prescriptions -- tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, don't spend on anything, abolish government, don't regulate the "free market" -- rather than truly compromise with Democrats to get stuff done. There's just no give there.
    Republicans are digging themselves a naysaying, nitpicking, obstructionist hole on the stimulus package and other vital issues. At this point, voters will give Obama credit for trying to bridge the gap as he says "thanks for nothing, Republicans," and goes on with Congress to pursue a Democratic agenda. That's the agenda that won the election. Remember, the Republicans lost big. They have been repudiated. If they don't realize their weak position, Obama's popularity and citizens' desire to see his ideas succeed, they will have only themselves to blame for being ignored.
    Democrats don't need any Republicans in the House. They need only two or three moderate Republican votes in the Senate to beat a filibuster. The people are behind them. It's time for Democrats to be Democrats unabashedly, from Obama on down.
    

Headline of the Day

 

Blowfish Testicles Sicken 7 in Japan
                                                        -- On msnbc.com

The Pope's Unguided Missal*

* That's missal as in prayerbook. I know how to spell "missile."

    Pope Benedict XV was acting to heal a rift in the Roman Catholic Church when he revoked the excommunications of four extremely right-wing bishops associated with French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, reinstating these members of the 38-year-old Society of St. Pius X although they reject the modern reforms of Pope John XXIII's Vatican Council II.
    While understandable, the conservative pope's move is being viewed with dismay by Jews. One of the bishops has views on the Holocaust that differ little from those of neo-Nazis and those of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. British-born Bishop Richard Williamson said in a recently broadcast interview on Swedish television that the "historical evidence" was strongly against the conclusion that millions of Jews had been "deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler."

           So what were all those deaths -- accidents?
     Williamson has also said in interviews that the U.S. government staged the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for invading Afghanistan.
     It's no surprise, then, that Williamson, who headed a seminary in Connecticut in the 1990s, later moved to a seminary in friendly Argentina. That's where Nazis including Adolf Eichmann, Martin Bormann and Josef Mengele slithered off to after World War II.
     What twist of mind would make somebody such a noxious fascist? And why would the pope legitimize a sick guy like Williamson?
     Benedict can be allowed the three other fundamentalist bishops. In a basically conservative church, there should be room for views on the far right. But Williamson's views go too far. He should stay excommunicated as a strong message to the Holocaust deniers that their blind irrationality will not be tolerated by intelligent religious leaders.

Let's Abolish Pit Bulls

    What are your least favorite dogs? Pit bulls are mine. It's time to start a campaign to get rid of them, down to the last slavering jaw.
    Pit bulls are ugly. They are mean. They are scary. They are helldogs. Anybody who thinks they're cute is due for a sharp bite to the butt -- or much worse.
    The long record of mayhem chalked up by these fanged brutes demonstrates that in their very DNA they are born and bred killers, barely controllable under the best of circumstances. That's why they are favored by prison inmates and gang-bangers. Owning a pit bull is a menacing, antisocial act.

        
    Unless you own a junkyard in a particularly bad part of town, there is no reason to own a pit bull unless you want to scare the bejesus out of people, which is not a legitimate goal. (And even if you do own a junkyard, won't a Doberman or a German shepherd do just as well?) If you buy a pit bull, the treacherous dog -- or, worse, the pack of pit bulls if you have more than one or if yours has buddies on the outside -- is either going to rip your face off or kill somebody else.
    On several mornings a week I run on Venice Beach's Oceanfront Walk bordering the Pacific Ocean. Many strollers on the walk are leading dogs on leashes, or riding one-dogpower skateboards towed by fast and exploited canines. I'd estimate that more than 50% of the dogs are pit bulls, generally purplish in color. Their owners are in many cases slouchy, unshaven and tattooed. They are almost as creepy as their curs.
     Maybe their pit bulls love them, but I wouldn't turn my back on these dogs if I were the owners. Apparently nobody else loves the owners, for whom a pit bull seems to be a badge of manhood -- a misguided symbol if there ever was one. Guys: You think pit bulls are sexy, a chick magnet? Any sane woman would stay as far away from you and your outrageous dog as possible.
     I would happily mutter "no pit bulls!" as I run by one of these owners, but I'd be afraid that he'd sic the dog on me. And a pit bull is much faster than I am, at least for a short distance.
    The way to rid society of these dogs is not to work one on one, but to organize. Let's lobby politicians to ban pit bulls everywhere. If that fails, let's create such opprobrium surrounding pit bulls that owning one will become the equivalent of smoking -- a badge of sociopathy and stupidity.

   

Nonpolitical Thoughts on the Oscar Nominations

       

On the basis of having reported on the motion picture industry for 24 years for Newsweek and Newsday, and having seen all five of the Best Picture nominees and most of the other films nominated in the major categories, my impressions are:
    -- Too many nominations for "Benjamin Button," which was good but not that good. The Academy voters were swayed by big-studio hype.
    -- Sally Hawkins wuz robbed of a Best Actress nomination for "Happy-Go-Lucky."
    -- Robbed in the Best Supporting Actor category was Eddie Marsan, who played Hawkins' neurotic driving instructor in that Mike Leigh movie, which did get a Best Original Screenplay nomination.
    -- Just as I knew the first time I heard Barack Obama speak as a Senate candidate in 2004 that he would be president someday, I knew as soon as I saw Penelope Cruz in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" that she would be nominated for Best Supporting Actress. A wonderfully peppery, psychotic-Latina performance at Woody Allen's direction. The Academy has done justice.
    -- Practically the whole cast of "Doubt" was nominated. Expectable, considering the cast's quality. A tribute to playwright/screenwriter John Patrick Shanley, too. I saw the play but not the movie.
    -- The Academy properly nominated Kate Winslet as Best Actress for "The Reader." Those Golden Globe morons called her Best Supporting Actress, bowing to the studio politics that dubbed her a Best Actress contender only for "Revolutionary Road" (that ploy didn't work with the Oscar people) so that she could win as many as two awards. Obviously she was the female lead in "The Reader."
    -- The Best Actor category is hardest to call. I'd set the choice among Frank Langella (Nixon in "Frost/Nixon"), Sean Penn ("Milk") and probably Mickey Rourke ("The Wrestler," though I haven't yet seen that one).
    -- What the heck is "Frozen River," for which Melissa Leo was nominated as Best Actress? Maybe 13 people saw it. If it's not in theaters, I hope they bring it back so we can see what the fuss is all about. The Oscars can be a godsend for ignored, low-budget, independent films like this.
    -- Five excellent contenders for Best Foreign Film. I'll bet "Waltz With Bashir" wins, though "The Class" was considered extremely classy by the critics.
    -- If "Slumdog Millionaire" doesn't win Best Picture, I'll be surprised and disappointed. I saw many enjoyable pictures in 2008, but "Slumdog" topped the list; other favorites were "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," "Happy-Go-Lucky," "Milk" and "Frost/Nixon." I didn't see "The Wrestler." I considered "Gran Torino" overrated and badly scripted (and, except for director-star Clint Eastwood, badly acted), so I'm not surprised that the Academy ignored it.

"Mister Roberts," Act 2: Obama's Presidential Oath Do-Over

    Because Chief Justice John Roberts screwed up in administering the 35-word constitutional oath to Barack Obama, the two men staged a historically unprecedented do-over Wednesday evening in the Map Room of the White House. The repeat was the idea of White House Counsel Greg Craig, who, in his lawyerly way, wanted to make sure all the i's were dotted in case Rush Limbaugh ever tried to make an issue of it and say Obama really never became president and all his actions were null and void. Would that be a mess, or what?
    What happened was that Roberts stared into Obama's eyes on the West Front of the Capitol and totally blew it, placing the word "faithfully" in the wrong place and causing Obama to go along by repeating the error and thus reciting the oath wrongly.

    It was, in my opinion, a Freudian moment. Roberts, a Bush appointee and deep-dyed conservative Republican, heartily wished that it wasn't Democrat Obama he was swearing in. He would have been so much more comfortable with John McCain (or even Sarah Palin, though for her he would have stumbled for other reasons). Further, it would be only human for Roberts to resent Obama for voting against his confirmation to be Chief Justice of the United States. It was the first time a president ever had received the oath from a justice he had opposed in the Senate.
    The do-over was held privately to avoid further embarrassing Roberts, whose brain apparently works better at warmer noontimes. Now he owes Obama a nice, liberal decision in an important constitutional case.

With Obama's Rise, "At-Risk" Kids Now at Risk of Losing Excuses

    

Until the inauguration of President Obama conclusively demonstrated to African-American and other minority youths that America's highest honors are open to people of color, dropouts and gang-bangers could take refuge in the comforting rhetoric of hopelessness and oppression.
    They could beat up or kill in drive-by shootings the studious kids who spoke proper English, ridiculing them for "acting white," on the rationale that minority kids are wasting their time thinking they have opportunities and might as well stick to the home culture of the ghetto or the barrio.
     This self-defeating mentality is no longer plausible in America. In fact, it has been outdated for years. The kids didn't need Obama for a role model. Previously they could look to Colin Powell -- chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, national security adviser, secretary of state. Or Condi Rice. Or to Richard Parsons, CEO of Time Warner. And to so many others -- not just in entertainment or sports, but in business, the professions, politics.
      The accession of Obama eliminates the last excuse for not following the course that got him and the other achievers so far. That course is simply worded: Go to school, pay attention and study.

Will Lynne Cheney Return to the Spotlight?

   

One thing that always amazed me about the Bush years (aside from the administration's disgusting kowtowing to the most ignorant element of the Republican "base") was the silence of Lynne Cheney, the vice president's smart and opinionated wife. An outspoken Wyoming conservative, an acid scourge of liberals and the author of numerous nonfiction and fiction books, Ms Cheney seemed well-situated to liven up Washington with frequent comments on issues and people. At her best, she would have made a great defender of President Bush. At worst, she would have been the Bush administration's mouthy and unpredictable Martha Mitchell -- who was always great copy in Nixon's day.
    I can't say I knew her well, but I did travel with her and her entire family for two months on the Cheney campaign plane in 2000. I observed that she was at least as smart as her husband, and worked just as hard on the campaign trail while being dedicated to her family. She doted on her incredibly cute 3-year-old granddaughter, Kate, who stole the show at many a campaign event.
    Lynne Cheney all but disappeared for the ensuing eight years. The role I expected for her was taken by younger and even more scathing opinionmongers such as Ann Coulter. The most out-front woman in the administration was Condoleezza Rice. The lovely Labor Secretary, Elaine Chao, didn't make much news -- not surprising in an antilabor administration. (When I worked in Washington I had a distant crush on Chao, and wondered what she saw in her dorky-looking husband, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. Anyhow, Secretary Chao looked great at the turnover of power at the Capitol yesterday.) Laura Bush was pretty well liked, but she was no Hillary Clinton, much less Eleanor Roosevelt, when it came to the height of her profile.
    What happened to Lynne Cheney? Was it her decision to go to ground? Or did somebody sit on her?
    It's my theory that somehow this accomplished and independent woman allowed herself to be muffled. Until Tipper Gore came along, there was no precedent for a vice president's wife, or "second lady," to be much of a public person in her own right. The Republicans, perhaps thinking of Tipper and also of how Martha Mitchell used to embarrass the White House, apparently wanted to stick vice presidents' wives back under a bushel. An outspoken Lynne Cheney might have overshadowed her secrecy-loving husband, Laura Bush and maybe even the president.
    It's possible that in an outbreak of the Queen Bee Syndrome, Laura Bush pulled rank and decreed the muzzling of Lynne Cheney.
    But now the muzzle is off. I wouldn't be surprised if Ms Cheney turns out another book -- this one, a memoir of life from her excellent vantage point through the Bush-Cheney years. I hope she writes it.
   
   

Symbolism and Substance on Obama's First Full Day

     

President Obama announced today that he is freezing the salaries of 100 White House staffers who are paid more than $100,000 a year. This sounds good but means absolutely nothing. Like Obama, these staffers came into their jobs on Inauguration Day. How many of us on the first day of a job expect a raise? You have taken the job knowing what the starting salary is, and you know you're not getting a raise right away.
      Less purely symbolic and much more substantive is the new president's announcement of new ethics rules for his administration's dealings with lobbyists: If you've come into government from lobbying, you must wait two years before you can deal with any issue on which you lobbied government from the private sector. And if you leave the administration, you can't lobby the government until Obama is no longer president. That could be up to eight years.
      This is an important step in dismantling one of Washington's longtime shames: the revolving door between big-bucks private industry and government regulation of industry. What regulator is going to be tough on companies he or she is going to hit up for a post-government job? There's apt to be more butt-kissing than butt-kicking of corporate wrongdoers. It's a systemic flaw that needed to be fixed -- and Obama is to be praised for taking this action immediately. In contrast, the empty symbolism of the "salary freeze" is a waste of our time.
      But so far, Obama is batting .500.