Vote for ME!

Check it out, kids. America's favorite dog blog devoted to politics, pop culture, and basketball is suddenly running with the big dogs in the blogosphere. Our post endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, with its insightful commentary on the avalanche of commentary on the candidate's laugh, is sitting pretty at #3 on BuzzFeed's list of "Twelve Best Links" on the topic. We're right behind Huff Po and ahead of the New York Times! Click on the link below, and then click back here from the BuzzFeed link. It'll thrill the guys in our Department of Clicks and Eyeballs, and it'll help keep us on the BuzzFeed list.


Hillary's Laugh

We're so flattered by the attention that the geeks in the Department of Toys and Widgets installed a BuzzFeed widget on the bottom of our front page. Sorry to put it way down on the bottom, but it wouldn't fit on the sidebar, unlike the cute new Clinton campaign widget we just tucked in over there. (Get on over to Clinton's web site, y'all. Didn't I tell you to get on the bandwagon?)

In other me-related news, Roxie's World has also been nominated for its very first Weblog Award, in the category of Best Pet Blog. With dog as my witness, I assure you the nomination did not come from anyone associated with Roxie's World or any of its subsidiaries. Click here, and scroll down until you see us on the list of nominations. Vote for us by clicking the + sign in the lower right-hand corner. I know you're supposed to say it's an honor just to be nominated -- and of course it is -- but wouldn't it be cool to win? I mean, gosh, kids, what an extraordinary validation that would be of the hard work we've been doing. What a wonderful way to let the world know there's more to pet blogs than goofy photographs and aww-inducing cute sayings. (I say this with love and due respect to all of my fellow dog bloggers, especially the legions of amazing wire-haired fox terrier bloggers. Paws up to all of you!)

All right, enough about me. Let's get back to the Girl Who Will Be President. Look at this fabulous photo of her with the Rapscallion Boy Who Once Was President:

(Photo Credit: Darren McCollester, Getty Images)

Tell me again how the Clintons totally hate one another and only stay together to advance their nefarious political ambitions. (Oh, yeah: Ending the war, establishing universal health coverage, battling AIDS in the developing world -- Scary stuff, isn't it?) More Wa Po polling data out this week suggests that voters are showing signs of falling hard for these two love birds. An analysis by Dan Balz and Jon Cohen has nothing but good news for the Clinton campaign. Here are the first few paragraphs:

Former president Bill Clinton has emerged as a clear asset in his wife's campaign for the White House, with Americans offering high ratings to his eight years in office and a solid majority saying they would be comfortable with him as first spouse, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

But Americans said they would not regard the election of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) as simply the resumption of her husband's presidency. Instead, two-thirds said she would take her presidency in a different direction, and half of all Americans said they believed that would be a good development. About half of those who said it would be a resumption described that as positive.

The survey also showed Hillary Clinton with an early advantage in a matchup of the party front-runners. A majority of those polled support her over former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has reveled in taking swipes at Clinton in recent weeks and yesterday offered an unflattering comparison of her to 1972 Democratic nominee George S. McGovern.

Tell me again how Americans are suffering from a bad case of Clinton fatigue and are tired of seeing the presidency handed back and forth between the Bush and Clinton "dynasties." (There I go again, helping Maureen Dowd write her next mindless trashing of the Clintons.) Tell me again about Hillary's high negatives and all the ambivalence voters supposedly harbor toward the idea of a woman president. Tell me again how polarizing she is and how robotic she is and how pathetically Gore-like she is.

And I will tell you something: Voters know better.

Funny Girls for Hillary

Newsflash: Roxie's World Endorses Hillary Clinton for President!

(Photo Credit: Paul Sakuma, Associated Press)

Why is this woman smiling? Hmmm. Let's see. Could it be because she's opened up a lead of 33 percentage points over Barack Obama, her nearest "competitor" for the Democratic presidential nomination, in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll? Could it be because she's at 53% among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents when voters are polled on 8 different Democratic choices? Could it be because she kicked Obama's bottom in fundraising for the third quarter, pulling in a total of $27 million to his $20 million, according to Wa Po?

Or could it be she heard she has gained the coveted endorsement of America's favorite dog blog devoted to politics, pop culture, and basketball? Yes, it's true, kids. We've finally decided to climb down from the fence and hop on the bandwagon. We are ready to do publicly what our hearts, heads, and the moms have been telling us privately to do for months. Roxie's World is going with the girl. We do hereby endorse Hillary Rodham Clinton for president. (You can get on the bandwagon, too, of course. Give to Clinton's campaign here.) (You might also want to click on the special song we loaded into the Roxie Music Box in honor of Senator Clinton while you read the rest of this post. Just a suggestion. Roar.)

But, Roxie, you may be thinking, what about her foreign policy votes, including that most recent one on Iran? What about the consistent pattern of splitting differences and tacking to the center, in that Democratic Losership Council style of politics that I know you and the moms deplore? What about the weaselly position on marriage equality, pretending to be opposed to same-sex marriage while promising to support extending the same set of rights and protections to gay couples under some less incendiary name?

I know, I know, kids, but sit down. This tired old dog blogger has something important to tell you: We live (and vote) in the real world. John Edwards and Barack Obama are the only other Democratic candidates who stand a realistic chance of being elected, and when you go down the line on the issues there really isn't that much that separates them from Clinton. Oh, sure, Edwards has found a good line on poverty and deserves credit for getting the issue back on the political radar screen, but voters don't think he's ever done anything but try to get elected president. Same with Obama, and most of his positions are as centrist as Clinton's or even slightly further to the right. They are great guys, but neither of them would score significantly higher on the scale of left-wing political purity than Clinton would. Neither would bring American troops home from Iraq on his first day in office. And neither would survive the gravitas and experience test that Republicans are sure to set up in order to generate support for the creepy field of candidates from whom their nominee will be chosen.

Rest assured our support for the junior senator from New York is not based primarily on pragmatism or a cynical desire to win at any cost. As regular readers know, we've watched Senator Clinton closely over the past several months and have been impressed with her evolution as a candidate and with the smooth operation of her estrogen-fueled campaign machine. We are excited by the unprecedented combination she offers of leadership experience and the opportunity to make history. We've been moved to see her growing mastery of the difficult challenge of coming across as both womanly and presidential, which seems impossibly oxymoronic by the gender norms of American culture. We've been delighted to see her do all of this while projecting a sense of warmth and humor she has not always seemed comfortable displaying in public.

Which brings us, of course, to the subject of the Clinton "cackle." We have on several occasions in the past couple of months praised Clinton for having the confidence to laugh in the harsh glare of the media spotlight. Suddenly, it seems, everyone else is noticing the candidate's willingness to exercise her funny bone, but the general reception has not been as warm as it has been here among the funny women of Roxie's World. It all started with an admittedly hilarious bit Jon Stewart did on The Daily Show suggesting there was something robotic about Clinton's tendency to burst out laughing during a series of interviews she did on the Sunday chat shows. From there, the subject snowballed into a full-fledged media much ado about nothing. (Wa Po media critic Howard Kurtz has a good analysis of the snowballing here.) (BuzzFeed has links to a bunch of the commentary and video here.) One commentator compared Clinton's laugh to the infamous Howard Dean scream and warned that it could get blown out of proportion. (Well, maybe, if folks like you compulsively dissect it because you have nothing better to do!) Some have noted the sexist double standard in much of the reaction: Clinton is damned if she doesn't laugh because it proves she's a humorless feminazi; she is damned if she does laugh because it proves she is either a) an automaton trying to pass herself off as human or b) a maniacal Bertha Mason who'll end up howling in the rafters on Pennsylvania Avenue if we're not real careful.

(Poll Graphic: Jennifer Agiesta and Laura Stanton - The Washington Post - October 3, 2007)

I am an old dog with a leaky heart. It's been my good fortune to spend much of the past thirteen + years absolutely bathed in the sounds of women's laughter. (I've heard plenty of men's laughter, too, but that's not my point today, fellas. Love you. Mean it.) From my post on the couch, I've heard chortles and chuckles and belly-laughs and guffaws. I've seen laughers who snort, a few who scream, and a couple who cover their mouths with their hands because for some reason they feel self-conscious about being caught in the act of laughing. I've heard laughter in bed and laughter in the classroom and laughter mixed in with tears of sorrow. As my hearing fades, I strain to hear echoes of laughter every day because they remind me I am still alive.

This old dog loves laughing women and knows that a leader who cannot laugh or who laughs at people rather than with them is not to be trusted to exercise power with humility and compassion. My friends, Roxie's World endorses the woman in this race with the hearty laugh. May she have cause and courage to laugh loud and long in the course of her extraordinary journey. Peace out.

Make It Stop

Please, someone, take Maureen Dowd's laptop away from her before she writes another word about Hillary Clinton. I am an old dog with a leaky heart, and I can't take it anymore.

Please, tell her that her favorite analogy -- insisting that the Bush and Clinton families are alike in being "dynasties" -- is wholly specious and unconvincing. The Bush family has been close to the centers of political, economic, and military power in the United States since the early decades of the twentieth century. (See Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush if you don't believe me.) Hillary Clinton married a guy who never met his father and became president the old-fashioned way: by getting more votes than the fella he ran against. She's been elected to two terms in the U. S. Senate and has a crazy idea that she might be at least as capable as the moron currently occupying the Oval Office. But Mo Do wastes precious inches of real estate in The New York Times with choice quotes like this one from Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, who "once told" Dowd:

She’s never going to get out of our faces. ... She’s like some hellish housewife who has seen something that she really, really wants and won’t stop nagging you about it until finally you say, fine, take it, be the damn president, just leave me alone.

Don't you love that chummy "once told me" formulation? I can see them leaning across the table toward one another in some impossibly chic Manhattan bar. Beads of sweat slide slowly down the glass that holds Mo Do's cosmopolitan. When Wieseltier hisses out the phrase "hellish housewife," Mo Do has to swallow hard to keep from indelicately spewing her beverage across the room. She laughs so hard her face almost moves. Almost. She is having so much fun she thinks she might order something to eat. But no, it's Thursday. If she eats today that's it for the weekend.

Frank Rich was hatin' on Hillary today, too. His piece isn't as venomous as Mo Do's, but he and his colleague seem locked in a contest to find the worst possible analogy to describe the Clinton campaign. Rich compares her to Al Gore in 2000 -- cautious, long-winded, equivocal, running a safe campaign aimed at not losing rather than winning the election. Digby aptly describes Rich's less than illuminating comparison as "utterly useless lightweight psycholanalytical drivel," to which Roxie's World says, "Paws up!"

More pleasant reading can be found in the Times in A. O. Scott's thoughtful look into the mind and music of Mr. Bruce Springsteen, whose new album, Magic, will be released this week. The Boss will be hitting the road with the E Street Band this fall, and we can look forward to a potent mixture of pop and politics from the group. Springsteen has clearly had it with the outrages of the Bush years and is making no effort to conceal his contempt. One song on the new album, "Last to Die," asks the question a young John Kerry asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he came back from Vietnam: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Roxie's World will have a review of Magic up soon. The moms got an advance copy, thanks to a kind friend in the Garden State. And, yes, they've got tix for the DC show, which Moose managed to procure all by herself on the internets last week when Goose was out of town. (Usually, only Goose is trusted with the sacred task of procuring Bruce tix. Moose might get flustered and end up with Celine Dion or something. We are awfully proud that she managed to shoulder this awesome responsibility. We're thinking maybe Condi Rice should send her to Burma to work out that whole mess between the monks and the junta.)

Finally, Wa Po found a gay Iranian. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last week in remarks at Columbia University that there weren't any. Incredibly, he was wrong. There are queers in Iran, and they are finding the courage to find one another, to come out, and to try to educate people via the Web and through dialog. We applaud their bravery, and we wish them well in their education project. Trust us -- We know what it's like to have a dumb president who acts as if you don't exist much of the time.

Click, watch, listen, children. Here's "Radio Nowhere," fresh off of Springsteen's Magic:

Defining Moments

Pretend you're an English prof. Find the theme linking today's links. Your 3-paragraph analysis is due Saturday at noon.

• Our crack team of internets trollers finally succeeded in locating video of the Dimwit-in-Chief arguing for reauthorization of the obscenely misnamed "No Child Left Behind" act by arguing that "childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured. " It is here, and you must watch it. You will love me for finding it for you. Make sure you watch the whole clip so you can catch Shrub's second grammatical mistake, which no one else seems to have noticed, when he says that Congress needs to work with the administration to pass legislation "that helps gives our children the education they deserve." Wonder if White House press sec Dana Perino grabbed her Wite-Out to try to cover up that presidential gaffe on the transcript as well. (For the story on the corrected then un-corrected transcript, go here.)
  
• Frank Rich had almost convinced us that Idaho senator Larry Craig had suffered enough for the crime of toe-tapping. We were starting to get uncomfortable with what appeared to be an obvious entrapment and all the folderol about what a laughing-stock Craig had become and how tied up in knots Republicans were with his "I wish I could quit you" resignation/non-resignation, guilty plea/non-guilty plea. Today, though, Craig was back at work in the Senate and voted against the Matthew Shepard bill, which Democrats had attached as an amendment to a defense spending bill. (Wa Po story on the bill is here.) It's just the latest in a long line of anti-gay votes Craig has made, so Roxie's World is officially back to not caring what happens to this pathetic hypocrite.
• We're happy to send you over to Crooks and Liars for a minute to see the clip of Hillary Clinton answering a hypothetical question about torture in last night's Democratic debate in New Hampshire. Moderator Tim Russert sets her up by mapping out a scenario that Bill Clinton had endorsed in an interview with him a year earlier allowing for the use of torture in some super-duper scary situation. Clinton says torture cannot be the policy of the United States, and then Russert makes the gotcha move of revealing that "William Jefferson Clinton" had endorsed its use in this limited, hypothetical case. "Well," Senator Clinton replies, "he's not standing here right now." It's a great moment. It surprises Russert and amuses the crowd. It demonstrates, again, Clinton's graceful mastery of the challenge of coming across as both womanly yet presidential. Day by day, Clinton wears down whatever resistance there might be to the idea of a woman in charge of the Situation Room at some moment of grave national crisis. Better her, after all, than the guy who proves that "childrens do learn" but some presidents just never does. (Senator Clinton earns raves from a group of public-speaking coaches for her handling of the "He's not standing here" moment in Wa Po.)
  
• Finally, speaking of the former president and future First Dude of the United States, here's a great clip of Bill going all righteous over the ridiculous MoveOn kerfuffle. (Roxie's World thought the Petraeus/Betray Us ad was a dumb idea, but we were appalled by the hyperventilated responses to it.) Bill's back in the War Room, showing Democrats how to smack down Republicans' manufactured outrages over non-issues and their vicious attacks against any and all opponents. Watch it, savor it, then close your eyes and imagine ole blue eyes back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue come 2009. Sweet dreams, beloveds. The Clintons are on their way home.
  

Talk Amongst Yourselves

Look at this:

Read this:

September 23, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist
New York Times

Pardon Poor Larry Craig

By FRANK RICH

"I DID nothing wrong," said Larry Craig at the start of his long national nightmare as America's favorite running, or perhaps sitting, gag. That's the truth. Justice lovers of all sexual persuasions must rally to save the Idaho senator before he is forced to prematurely evacuate his seat.

Time's running out. The final reckoning may arrive this week. On Wednesday, a Minnesota court will hear Mr. Craig's argument to throw out the guilty plea he submitted by mail after being caught in a June sex sting in the Minneapolis airport. If he succeeds, there's a chance he might rescind his decision to resign from the Senate on Sept. 30. Either way, he should hold tight.

Not only did the senator do nothing wrong, but in scandal he has proved the national treasure that he never was in his salad days as a pork-seeking party hack. In the past month he has served as an invaluable human Geiger counter for hypocrisy on the left and right alike. He has been an unexpected boon not just to the nation's double-entendre comedy industry but to the imploding Republican Party. Gays, not all of them closeted, may be among the last minority groups with some representation in the increasingly monochromatic G.O.P. If it is to muster even a rainbow-lite coalition for 2008, it could use Larry Craig in the trenches.

On the legal front, Mr. Craig is not without his semi-spirited defenders, an eclectic group including Arlen Specter, the A.C.L.U., The Washington Post's editorial page and scattered Democrats. While there's widespread agreement that Mr. Craig was an idiot not to consult a lawyer before entering a guilty plea (for disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor carrying a $575 fine), idiocy is no more a federal offense than hypocrisy, especially in Washington.

What Mr. Craig did in that men's room isn't an offense either. He didn't have sex in a public place. He didn't expose himself. His toe tapping, hand signals and "wide stance" were at most a form of flirtation. As George Will has rightly argued, if deviancy can be defined down to "signaling an interest in sex," then deviancy is what "goes on in 10,000 bars every Saturday night in our country." It's free speech even if the toes and fingers do the talking.

The Minnesota sting operation may well be unconstitutional, as the A.C.L.U. says. Yet gay civil rights organizations, eager to see a family-values phony like Mr. Craig brought down, have been often muted or silent on this point. They stood idly by while Republicans gathered their lynching party, thereby short-circuiting public debate about the legitimacy of the brand of police entrapment that took place in Minnesota. Surely that airport could have hired a uniformed guard to police a public restroom rather than train a cop to enact a punitive "Cage aux Folles" pantomime.

A rare gay activist to stand up forthrightly for Mr. Craig is Franklin Kameny, whom the Smithsonian Institution recently honored with an exhibition documenting his lonely Washington protests for gay civil rights in the pre-Stonewall 1960s. When I spoke to him last week, the 82-year-old Mr. Kameny said that many Americans don't seem to know how much the law has changed in recent years. Though he's no admirer of Mr. Craig, whom he describes as "a self-deluding hypocritical homophobic bigot," he publicly made the case for the senator's innocence in a letter to the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com.

"Fair is fair," Mr. Kameny wrote. Mr. Craig, guilty of no public sex act, "was the victim of a false arrest and a malfeasant prosecution." Even had he invited the police officer to a hotel room, there still would have been no crime. The last American laws criminalizing gay sex between consenting adults were thrown out by the Supreme Court in 2003.

The hypocrisy in some quarters of the left about the Craig case is arguably outstripped by that on the right, heaven knows. It has been priceless to watch conservative politicians and bloggers defend their condemnation of Mr. Craig in contrast to the wide stance of tolerance they've taken toward David Vitter, the inimitable senator from the Big Easy.

On the same day Mr. Vitter was deploring MoveOn.org at the Petraeus-Crocker hearings two weeks ago, a (female) prostitute was holding a California press conference with Larry Flynt about her alleged participation in the unspecified sins to which the senator has publicly confessed. "He was a very clean man," she helpfully explained to The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. "He came in, took a shower, did his business and would leave."

Mr. Vitter, a shrill defender of marriage, still has the support of the G.O.P. hierarchy. Many believe that the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, and his posse tried to Imus Mr. Craig and send him packing in a single week because Idaho has a Republican governor (nicknamed "Butch," no less) who would appoint a Republican successor. (The governor of Louisiana is a Democrat.) Others argue simply that Republican leaders are homophobes who practice a double standard for heterosexual offenders. But the reality is more complicated.

As we learned in the revelations surrounding the years-long cover up of the Mark Foley scandal, there may be more gay men in the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill than there are among the Democrats. Even Rick Santorum, the now-departed senator who likened homosexuality to "man on dog" sex, had a gay director of communications. Homophilia and homophobia have been twin fixtures in the modern G.O.P. at least since the McCarthy-era heyday of Roy Cohn.

As Rich Tafel, the former executive director of the gay Log Cabin Republicans, points out, this internal contradiction could not hold once Karl Rove and President Bush decided to demagogue the issue of same-sex marriage by pushing it into center stage of a national political campaign. That meanspirited and cynical election-year exploitation of homophobia accelerated the outing of Republicans by activists on the left.

"It made gay Republicans targets," Mr. Tafel told me last week. (Stories about Mr. Craig percolated on the Internet long before the airport incident.) In response, Mr. Tafel said, fearful gay Republicans on the Hill have retreated deeper into the closet. The Bush-Rove strategy "created the Larry Craigs," he said. "It created that man crawling around toilets."

Mr. Craig has denied being gay. Perhaps someone might believe him had he not, in 1982, gratuitously proclaimed his innocence in a pre-Foley page scandal, even though no one had accused him of anything. But whatever Mr. Craig's orientation, many closeted Republicans remain in place on Capitol Hill, easy targets for political opponents who want to expose G.O.P. hypocrisy.

Were Mr. Craig now to keep his seat, maybe his trial by fire would drive him to end his perennial gay baiting and become a latent proselytizer for a return to a more open, live-and-let-live Republicanism in the retro style of Barry Goldwater. Granted, Mr. Craig has shown no leadership of any kind in his career to date. But if Trent Lott can have a second chance after seeming to embrace the Dixiecrat racialism of Strom Thurmond, why not the toe-tapper from Idaho?

The G.O.P. needs at least one minority group in its ranks if it's going to be a viable political party in the 21st century. As the former vice-presidential nominee Jack Kemp asked rhetorically last week, "What are we going to do — meet in a country club in the suburbs one day?" His comment was prompted by the news that the major Republican candidates had claimed "scheduling conflicts" to avoid a debate at a historically black college in Baltimore. This was so obvious a slight that even Newt Gingrich labeled the candidates' excuses "baloney," and the usually controversy-averse Jay Leno was moved to call for the Republicans to "change their minds" after the debate's moderator, Tavis Smiley, aired the issue on "The Tonight Show."

The brushoff of that debate followed a similar rejection by the same candidates (except John McCain) of a debate sponsored by Univision, the country's most-watched Spanish-language network. It's only the latest insult to Hispanic voters, the fastest-growing American minority. Without Hispanics, the G.O.P. is doomed in swing states from Florida to Nevada. If you have any doubts, just look at the panic at the staunchly Republican Wall Street Journal editorial page. It has now even started attacking its own cohort — what it calls "Fox News populists and obsessive bloggers" — for driving away once-Republican Hispanic votes with over-the-top invective about illegal immigrants.

It would be unfair to say that the G.O.P. is devoid of sensitivity to all minorities. True, Peter King, the Long Island congressman, said last week that America has "too many mosques," but he was balanced by Mitt Romney, who sent out a press release wishing "the Jewish people" a hearty "L'Shanah Tovah" for the New Year. And let no one fault the Republican presidential field for not looking like America: Alan Keyes is back!

But the last minority with at least a modicum of influence in the party's power structure seems to be closeted gay men. As an alternative to cruising men's rooms, the least they could do is use their clout to stay the manifestly unjust execution of Larry Craig.

Discuss.

Sorry for the big fat cut-and-paste cop-out, kids. My typist is teaching Virginia Woolf tomorrow. The English profs will understand. Love you. Really. Go watch the Dems debate on MSNBC. I'll get back to you soon.

Liveblogging on the debate is here.

(Image Credit: Cover of first English edition of Virginia Woolf's Orlando [Hogarth Press, 1928])

L'Etranger

“Be brave, little Piglet.”
“It’s hard to be brave when you’re a very small animal.”
-- A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

Moose insisted on the fancy foreign title for this post. She wanted to make sure that, should Jodie Foster happen to stumble into Roxie’s World, she’ll see that at least one viewer of The Brave One who does not have a degree in French lit from Yale caught all the heavy-handed references to Albert Camus’s absurdist novel The Stranger in Foster’s latest film. And by the way, Ms. Foster, the three English profs who headed off to the multiplex to subject themselves to your scenery-chewing performance in Neil Jordan’s powerful yet morally murky film also caught the allusions to D. H. Lawrence and Emily Dickinson dropped in like so many bonbons for literate viewers who were trying really hard not to focus on the bodies piling up as your character worked through her post-traumatic stress disorder. Moose cracked up as soon as you started purring into your microphone that, “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” “Ooh, ooh, I know,” she wanted to shout. “D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature!” By the time you recited “Because I could not stop for Death – ,” all three profs had entered into a spirited game of Guess the (Way Too Obvious) Quote, which did in fact help to distract them from the aforementioned corpses. (Final total: 8)

So, what did our crack team of highly trained interpreters think of The Brave One? After the flick, the team (Moose, Goose, and the Candy Man*) repaired to a local hot spot for mojitos and snacks. They agreed that the mojitos were delicious and the film was highly watchable, though Goose and the Candy Man both looked away during the scene of the brutal attack on Foster’s Erica Bain and her fiancé David (played by Naveen Andrews) that sets Erica’s odyssey of grief and vengeance into motion. For the record, Moose rarely looks away from a screen and never does so when Jodie Foster is on it. Director Jordan doesn’t flinch from depicting the gore that is the heart of his story. The attack on Erica and David is balletic yet visceral. The attackers tape it as it is happening, so viewers are forced to reckon with it simultaneously as a “real” event and a performance, effectively introducing several important themes related to media, technology, surveillance, and self-consciousness that are central to the film’s probings of identity and violence. Late in the film, viewers watch Erica watching the tape of the attack on her cell phone and then have to watch it again when she forwards the tape to the detective closing in on her and her killing spree. One of the many sicknesses the film explores is that of a postmodern culture gorged on images of itself. The Brave One may well be the first film for the YouTube generation.

The performances of Foster and co-star Terrence Howard, who plays the weary homicide detective named Sean Mercer, are indeed gripping. Their characters are in many ways reverse images of one another – white and black, female and male, killer and cop – yet they connect on the basis of shared woundedness and professional respect. Mercer has heard Erica on the radio before she and David are attacked. He knows the dulcet, NPR tones of her voice before he sees her battered, comatose body lying in a hospital bed. Erica meets Mercer at the scene of one of her first killings and quickly expresses an interest in interviewing him for her show. (Trolling for material helps to explain her presence on the scene.) The characters are soon locked in a fascinating pas de deux, drawn in by a desire to know one another despite the risks of exposure (for Erica) and moral compromise (for Mercer, as he slowly realizes Erica is the vigilante killer he is pursuing). The air between them is thick, the thickness an ambiguous mixture of the psychological and the erotic. The performances are brilliantly understated. Erica and Mercer speak few words, but their eyes convey worlds of pain and the unbearably complex understanding unfolding between them.

Had The Brave One stayed true to the moral and psychological complexity of its central relationship it might have been a brilliant film. Unfortunately, in the end, it absconds on that complexity; it betrays its characters and takes refuge in the cheapest forms of emotionalism: bloodlust and, we are sad to say, dog love. The ending justifies the judgment offered by A. O. Scott in the Times that the film is “cowardly” and “just as crude and ugly as you want it to be.” We won’t tell you exactly what happens, but we will tell you that Moose, Goose, and the Candy Man sat in stunned silence as the credits started to roll and a smattering of applause broke out in the theater. Jodie Foster, in promotional interviews for the film (like this one on NPR), has labored to suggest that the moral of The Brave One is that guns are always bad, but the ending valorizes Erica Bain’s vigilantism as cathartic, healing, and more efficient than the slow, bureaucratic work of law enforcement.

In the final analysis, The Brave One is maddeningly divided in its aims. Its artsy-fartsy allusiveness and high production values would have us believe it is serious about examining the devastating consequences of a self upended by unanticipated and undeserved violence, but in the end it offers the comic-book satisfactions of a dead-eyed, steady-handed super hero who takes aim against a sea of troubles and blows them the hell away. The Brave One offers awesome “Jodie Porn,” but its satisfactions, as with all porn, are fleeting. We continue to hope Foster will start being a little braver about the kind of projects she takes on.

(For a round-up of reviews of The Brave One, go check out Rotten Tomatoes.)

*Postscript from the Office of Persona Management: The individual referred to in the above post as “the Candy Man” was formerly known in these precincts as “The Official Gay Stalker of Roxie’s World.” This change in identity has been carefully considered by OPM and approved by Roxie Smith Lindemann, Sole Owner and Proprietor of Roxie’s World, because it is a) easier to type than the lengthy “Official Gay Stalker of Roxie’s World” and b) more reflective of said individual’s fundamentally sweet disposition. All inquiries about identity adjustment should be addressed to me: Mark Twain, Director, Office of Persona Management, RW Enterprises, LLC.

A Tax on Straights

One of the all-time funniest stories from the Hilarious Adventures of Moose and Goose was passed down to me by Lily, the transgender tabby who lived with her brother Spike and the moms back in the olden days when they were cat lesbians and apartment-dwellers. According to Lily (and cats never lie), one fine Sunday morning they were all hanging out in the apartment doing Sunday-morning things when a momentary communications breakdown threw the household into a brief state of confusion that was followed by paroxysms of laughter. Here's how it happened:

Moose (from the living room couch, with the Sunday Post spread out in her lap): Goodness, I am reading the most horrible story!

Goose (from the kitchen, with the coffee pot in her hand): Really, honey? What's it about?

Moose (wishing the coffee were ready already): Oh, it's just awful! It's about attacks on gays!

Goose (with her hand on the button of the coffee grinder): A tax on gays???

Moose (over the sound of the coffee grinder): Yes, attacks on gays. You just can't believe how vicious, how terrible --

Goose (angrily banging on the coffee grinder): And how insane! Who would ever come out if they knew they would have to pay a tax?

Moose (perplexed): Wha-a-a?

Spike (licking himself in a pool of light in the middle of the living room floor): Smile

Goose (storming into the living room, coffee pot in hand): Yes! A tax on gays! Who would pay such a tax? Who would propose such a tax? Has this country completely lost its mind?

Moose (now grateful she does not have a cup of coffee in her hand, realizing she would spill it as she falls off the couch laughing hysterically): Yes, dear, the country has completely lost its mind, but I'm not talking about a tax on gays. I'm talking about attacks on gays -- You know, baseball bats, beatings, violent homophobia.

Goose (pausing, mid-rant): O-h-h-h-h, attacks on gays. Well, that's terrible, too.

(Another pause, followed by explosions of laughter, followed by repeated cries of "attacks on gays?" and "a tax on gays!" and a lengthy discussion of the many forms of violence aimed at gay people and other minority groups, followed, at last, by coffee. Meanwhile, the cats went on licking themselves and feeling superior to a species hopelessly dependent on something as slippery and strange as language as a means of communication.)

Why do I offer up this tale of homophones and homophobes to brighten up your Saturday? Well, the moms and other queer Marylanders are still hurting from this week's ruling by the state's Court of Appeals upholding a ban on same-sex marriage. (Wa Po finally had an editorial on the decision this morning, urging Governor Martin O'Malley and the legislature to accept the court's invitation to address the matter of relationship inequality legislatively rather than judicially. Good idea, though Roxie's World is opposed to any compromise that offers same-sex couples anything less than the full panoply of rights and benefits that go along with civil marriage.) I thought a funny reminiscence might help ease the pain, but it also sets me up to offer one of those consoling, glass-half-full stories I like to pass along to readers who have a tough time seeing the silver linings in the gray clouds.

So, call this story "The Upside of Discrimination," or, at long last, "A Tax on Straights."

The legions of my loyal fans who do not live in Maryland may not be aware that the state is trying to figure out how to plug a $1.7 billion hole in its budget. Our telegenic Irish rocker Dem gov Martin O'Malley is launching a series of tax and budget proposals aimed at addressing the problem. Among them is a plan to revamp the state's income tax brackets. (Don't nod off on me, kids. I know tax policy isn't as entertaining as, say, roving bands of pistol-packing lesbians, but this is important.) The plan aims to make the income tax more progressive by adding two new brackets at the upper end of the income spectrum. Under the state's current tax structure, everyone with a taxable income of $3000 or more pays the same top rate of 4.75%. Here's how Wa Po explains the new brackets O'Malley is proposing:

A 6 percent bracket would be applied to single filers with a taxable income of $150,000 or more and to married couples filing jointly with a taxable income of $200,000 or more. A 6.5 percent bracket would be applied to all filers with $500,000 or more in taxable income. Taxable income refers to a filer's income less certain deductions and exemptions allowed by the government.

And here's a pretty graphic from the Post comparing the current and proposed brackets:

Clearly, friends, it pays to be gay. Why? Well, if my moms were married and filing jointly, their taxable income would be darn close to the $200,000 threshold of the 6 percent bracket. (Remember that "taxable income" is income minus exemptions and deductions allowed by the government.) As single filers (and humble state employees) legally enjoined from marrying, however, they are well below the $150,000 threshold for the 6 percent bracket. In other words, Maryland's discrimination against same-sex couples is a great deal for my moms -- and a dumb deal for a state desperately in need of revenue.

My moms, as I have told you many times, are weird. One of the weirdest things about them is that they actually love to pay taxes. They tell pollsters who call our house that they will vote for the candidate who promises to raise taxes in order to fund legitimate public needs -- such as health care, education, transportation, and environmental protection. They would be delighted to help Gov. O'Malley plug the state's revenue hole (Moose wants me to put a finger-in-the-dyke joke here, but I won't do it), but they can't because the state apparently thinks that encouraging heterosexual procreation is more important than balancing its budget. (O'Malley is opposed to same-sex marriage, though he has expressed support for some form of civil union.)

The moral of the story? Discrimination costs -- everybody. In one way or another, all of Maryland's citizens are paying a marriage penalty.

For an example of heart-felt and courageous leadership on the marriage issue, take a look at this video of San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders announcing his decision to sign a city council resolution in support of same-sex marriage after having said he could only support civil unions. In an emotional 5-minute statement, Sanders quietly acknowledges that his daughter Lisa and several friends and staff members are gay and that, "in the end I couldn't look any of them in the face and tell them that their relationship, their very lives were any less meaningful than the marriage I share with my wife Ronna." In the end, folks, it really is that simple.