Hillary's Tears

Last year, in a professional situation of significant stress, Moose learned an uncomfortable lesson: She is a woman who cries under pressure. The discovery did not please her. Moose has a big heart. We think it's one of her charms. But she likes to think she's a tough girl when she has to be, so those unexpected (and briefly uncontrollable) tears in the workplace were acutely embarrassing to her. Today, in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton got visibly emotional as she answered a voter's sympathetic question about how she manages to keep things so together out on the campaign trail. She didn't break down into a full-on boo-hoo, but the iron lady of American politics was clearly choked up as she spoke of how -- and why -- she does what she does. See for yourself:



You know the same cynical crew that spilled buckets of ink deconstructing Clinton's "cackle" will have a field day debating whether the display of emotion was genuine or yet another calculating effort to con voters into entertaining the possibility that she is a human being with an actual beating heart. I can see the Maureen Dowd column now, and I bet a year's supply of kibble that NBC's Andrea Mitchell will be on the news tonight with some breathless behind-the-curtain report on how the tears were a desperate, orchestrated response to polling data showing that 4 out of 5 New Hampshire voters believe the former First Lady is a replicant. In her on-the-ground reporting from Iowa the other night, Mitchell kept pointing out that the party in Clinton's campaign headquarters the night of her dismal showing in the caucuses was staged. Andrea passed along this "news" as though every other loss in American political history had been followed by a spontaneous gathering of ridiculously happy people that just happened to be captured by television cameras, so we look forward to her in-depth analysis of Clinton's tears.

Wa Po's Anne E. Kornblut, not known for her sympathetic coverage of the junior senator from New York, witnessed the display of emotion and seems to have found it genuine. Her blog post on the moment is here. Newsweek's Karen Breslau was there, too, and thought she caught a glimpse of the Clinton she got to know during her years of covering her as First Lady: "an engaging, warm and witty woman, a first-class road-trip companion who seemed to spring to life as soon as her plane left U.S. airspace." More importantly, an undecided voter who was on the scene was also moved by the moment. Breslau's report, which is here, concludes:

"It got me," said Jane Harrington, a voter from Newington who came to the session trying to decide between Clinton and Obama, whom she had seen a day before—and really liked. "I wanted to see who the real Hillary was. That was real." The question now is how many others will feel the way Harrington did—and whether the emotional moment came too late.

The consensus in Roxie's World is clear: Tough girls don't intentionally cry in public, so when they do it comes straight from the heart. We feel for you, Hill, and with you. Hang in there. The nation you seek to lead is mostly a bunch of cry babies anyway. Sew up that vote, and you'll win in a walk.

Update: Great op-ed in Tuesday's NYT by Gloria Steinem on gender as a force in American life and the current election and on why gender barriers are taken less seriously than racial barriers. It speaks to the debate that broke out in comments here on the "No Country for Bold Women" post. Go read it, children, and we'll resume that conversation while the vampire killers are sharpening up their stakes after Clinton loses in New Hampshire. Love you. Mean it.

Update #2: The Good Old Girls continue to weigh in on this subject. Katha Pollitt offers a fiery denunciation of John Edwards's smarmy, sexist suggestion that the incident suggested Clinton might not be "tough" enough to be president. Hmmm. Let's see. Just how "tough" is the guy who sent his wife out to attack the woman candidate in the race and hid behind her support for same-sex marriage as a way to protect himself from criticism for his poll-tested opposition to it? The glorious Pollitt talks to Pat Schroeder, who knows a thing or two about the political risks for women of public displays of emotion, about the incident and responses to it. "I'm so sick about the way Hillary is treated I can hardly talk about it," the former congresswoman and presidential candidate tells Pollitt. Amen, Pat!

Update #3: As predicted here in Roxie's World, noted cat-fighter and Clinton-hater Maureen Dowd holds forth on Hillary's nefarious plan to "cry her way back to the White House." Yep, that's right. Thanks, Mo Do, for continuing to meet the exceedingly low expectations we have for you. You truly had to scale the heights of Dowdian genius to inject both Richard Nixon and the misogynistic stereotype of Clinton as "the school girl with geeky glasses and frizzy hair, smart but not the favorite" into your commentary, but you managed to do it. All of us visually impaired smart girls appreciate your tireless work on our behalf.

You, Sir, Are No Jack Kennedy

Picked up at Crooks and Liars, by way of Digby:



Nice little reminder that partisan bickering can be fun and funny, eh?

Memo to Nervous Clinton Supporters: Stay away from latest New Hampshire polling data. It's not pretty. Click on that link at your own risk, and don't say we didn't warn you.

Easy Activism Opportunity for DC-Area Clintonistas: If you'd like to do something besides sit home biting your nails between now and Tuesday's primary, the Clinton campaign is phone-banking at its Arlington headquarters. Call 703-875-1202 to sign up.

Here's a calming piece by Susan Estrich on what a poor predictor the Iowa caucuses have proven to be of success in a presidential campaign. Estrich notes that Obama will get a deserved bump from his win in Iowa, but that he will also receive (deserved) heightened scrutiny of his (thin) record, including all those "present" votes in the Illinois state senate. She is not predicting victory for Clinton, but she sees the nomination race as far from over.

Meanwhile, over on Huff Po, Michael Fauntroy suggests a pause for breath in all the hyperventilation about Obama's victory. Fauntroy acknowledges the historic nature of the win but also points out that to date Obama has enjoyed astonishingly favorable press coverage that contrasts sharply to the 15 years of often negative coverage Clinton has endured.

Finally, here's a little civics lesson we stumbled on courtesy of Bitch PhD over at The Edge of the American West. It's a really clear explanation of our insane presidential nominating system that explains, among other things, the changes that occurred in the process between 1968 and 1972, when the primaries and caucuses came to play a more important role in the selection of the parties' nominees than they had in the past. It also contains this encouraging word for Clinton supporters:

So where are we today? On the Democratic side, Sen. Barack Obama had an unexpectedly good showing in the Iowa Caucus. But even if he beats Hillary Clinton next Tuesday in New Hampshire, that will hardly demolish her candidacy. For Obama to get nominated, he’ll have to defeat Clinton in a lot of upcoming races where she is favored to win and in which she has a lot of important allies. Let’s just remember that in 1992, Bill Clinton didn’t compete in Iowa, and he came in second in New Hampshire. These early contests are important, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for winning the nomination.

Chins up, kids. The road is long, with many a winding curve. Or, as the late Karen Carpenter put it, We've only just begun . . . . Don't listen to the bloviators. Don't read the polls. We'll do that for you and dole the news out in small, easy-to-swallow pieces. And just remember that it's a far far better thing to be faced with the Democrats' embarrassment of riches than the Republicans' mere embarrassment.

No Country for Bold Women

(Photo Credit: Doug Mills, New York Times; Senator Hillary Clinton concedes defeat in Iowa Democratic caucuses, 1/3/08)

The morning after Iowa, Moose sits in the red chair, reading the papers, fielding phone calls, loathing NBC’s chief bloviator, Chris Matthews, to whom she unwisely subjected herself for far too many hours last night. Matthews was so over-the-top in his gleeful anticipatory dancing upon the grave of the Clinton campaign that Moose entertained unkind visions of Anton Chigurh, the sociopathic killing machine who marches through the austere landscape of No Country for Old Men, taking aim at Matthews’s fat head with that strange cattle gun that is his weapon of choice. Forgive Moose her uncharacteristically mean thoughts, but even Keith Olbermann seemed horrified by his colleague’s emphatic pronouncements of doom for Clinton. (Other viewers shared Moose's disgust, by the way.) Had it not been for butch goddess Rachel Maddow, who was also on MSNBC and sanely pointed out that 2/3s of Democratic voters rejected each of the party’s front runners in Iowa, Moose would have turned off the TV and gone to bed by 9:30, but she cannot walk away from Rachel Maddow.

June Star calls in from New Jersey to declare, not gloatingly but matter of factly, that Barack Obama’s stunning victory signals the start of a juggernaut that cannot be stopped. Moose demurs from that assessment, though she admits to being impressed by the size of the victory and by Obama’s success with young and independent voters. (Details here.) Moose acknowledges Obama gave a stirring victory speech, a soaring bit of oratory that quickened her pulse and made her palms a little sweaty. (See Obama's speech here.) But, she says to June Star, has anyone noticed that the politics and the policies don’t match the rhetoric, that even if he’s talking like RFK and MLK his proposals are warmed-over versions of stuff out of the Democratic Losership Council? No, June Star replies. Nobody is noticing because nobody cares right now. Voters are hungry for change, and they want to be inspired. I know, Moose says. Me, too, but surely the substance matters, and aren’t you furious with the press’s knee-jerk hatred of Clinton and their eagerness to declare her campaign DOA? Of course, June Star says, but, oh, shoot, I’ve reached my destination. I’ll call you back later.

(NB: Roxie’s World does not condone the use of cell phones while driving. Let the record show that June Star uses a perfectly legal hands-free device for chatting while negotiating the highways of the Garden State, and Moose always urges her to pay proper attention to traffic as they minutely dissect the latest developments in politics and pop culture.)

Moose hangs up the phone. She puts down the papers and stares out the back window, thinking, for some strange reason, of the late 1860s. Moose, as I have told you before, is weird and given at times to pondering history’s maddening tendency to repeat itself. She is musing upon that nasty period in the history of American civil rights when the coalition between abolitionists and women’s rights advocates that worked so effectively to bring about the end of slavery fell apart when abolitionists agreed to separate the causes of black and women’s suffrage and support the 14th and 15th Amendments, which secured voting rights for black men and introduced the distinction of gender into the Constitution for the first time. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and others in the women’s suffrage movement felt betrayed and abandoned by their old allies, including William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, and relations between the advocates of women’s equality and racial equality were severely strained. In the end, American women would wait another fifty years to gain universal suffrage with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. That painful bit of history is a powerful example of what happens when race and sex are pitted against each other, which happens all too often in American politics and in the crude framings of events (as allegories, melodramas, endless repetitions of a reductive Showdown at Race/Gender Gap) in the American media. Moose sees that happening everywhere in the coverage of Clinton v. Obama, and it drives her crazy.

And yet: Moose is thinking about all the talk she’s heard about America not being “ready” for a black president. She never bought that, but now she’s wondering if it isn’t possible that the country isn’t ready for a woman president. Could it be that misogyny is a more potent force in the electorate than racism is, or is that the wrong question, a question that shows Moose herself is caught up in the trap of pitting race against gender? Is it simply that the magnetic Obama is a better candidate than the overly cautious Clinton? Or that the Clinton campaign, in thrall to pollster Mark Penn, misread voters’ moods and placed too much emphasis on the candidate’s experience rather than on the exciting prospect of putting a woman in the White House (as president) for the first time? (That point is made deep into this Wa Po analysis of what happened to Clinton in Iowa.) (Just to prove that these are not [all] rhetorical questions, we’ll offer an emphatic YES on that last one and urge Clinton to un-burden herself of the over-rated Penn as quickly as possible. Fire him, Hillary, and throw a little bit of your caution to the wind. Let voters see that you want this thing, and they’ll start wanting it for you. Talk to your husband about the advantages of running as the underdog.)

It’s entirely possible that all of this gnashing of teeth and talk of changing courses is premature. The bigger story out of Iowa in the opinion of the political division here at Roxie’s World is the triumph of the terrifying yet affable Mike Huckabee in the Republican straw poll, a result that throws the race on that side into true chaos. If Clinton comes back in five days and wins New Hampshire, Matthews and the other vampire slayers will have to admit that not much has changed and the old girl isn’t dead yet. The candidate herself was preternaturally calm last night in the face of defeat. She, too, gave a wonderful speech. (See it here.) She was gracious to Obama and the rest of the Democratic field and appropriately exultant on the size of the turnout for Democrats. She also seemed quietly yet fiercely determined to carry on the fight for the nomination. She has the resources and the organization to do so, so perhaps the prognosticators should hold their tongues and wait and see what happens when the race moves into bigger states. She’s got work to do, but there’s no reason to think she can’t do it.

In the meantime, we’ve taken steps here in Roxie’s World to assure that Moose’s mood stabilizes as the race unfolds. She’s been forbidden to watch any show that has Chris Matthews on it, and we’re not letting her get anywhere near livestock equipment stores. Sweeney Todd is next on the list of films she and Goose are supposed to see, so we may need to limit her access to barbershops as well, but fear not, readers. The old dog is on a short leash for the duration, and she’ll stand by Hillary, as she did by Bill, until the last dog dies.

2007, Doggedly

Undo my logic
Undo my fear
Unsuffer me
-- Lucinda Williams, “Unsuffer Me” (2007 Song of the Year in Roxie's World -- conveniently uploaded to "Roxie Music" box in right sidebar for your listening pleasure)

(Image Credit: Random Search of Internets)

Sorry to drag you back into the past on the first day of the new year, kids, but the moms were on the road for the holidays, so we couldn’t assemble the creative team to decide what kind of end-of-year retrospective to put together. The challenge was compounded by the fact that we fell seriously behind on TV- and movie-watching this year. Blame it on the moms being a little too serious about their day jobs or on my diminished abilities to see, hear, and stay awake for more than twenty minutes at a time, but Moose knew we were in trouble when she looked at several different lists of the year’s best films and realized she and Goose hadn’t seen any of them. That’s when we decided we’d have to handle this monumental task the same way we handle most of the hard work here in our happy little corner of the blogosphere: by staring at our navels and pretending to see the whole darned world. (Yes, in case you are wondering, dogs, like all mammals, do have navels. [We googled it to make sure.]) And so, here are some of the things that, for better or for worse, got our attention here in Roxie’s World in 2007, organized, um, doggie style, because, well, doggone it, that’s the way we think.

Those of you craving more comprehensive year-end reviews should check out some of the following lists and lists of lists. Boy, some people sure do have a lot of time on their hands:

• Jon Swift’s Best Blog Posts of 2007 (Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves)

• Modern Fabulousity’s Best Films of 2007 (In addition to Mod Fab's solo list, check out the jury prizes handed out by his crack team of homosexual film fiends, which includes, of course, our own beloved Damion of Queering the Apparatus. (QTA's solo best list is here. And we haven't seen any of those yet either!)
  

• New York Times, 2007: The Year in Pictures. You know, we could almost forgive the Times for adding insult to injury by having Bill Kristol join Maureen Dowd on its op-ed page because it consistently offers the best eye candy in American photojournalism, but even this great compendium of pictures makes that dastardly combination of pen-wielding lunatics impossible to fathom. Still, go look at the pictures. They are pretty, and pretty is good.
  

• Time, 50 Top 10 Lists of 2007. Your clicker finger will wear out because Time's department of Clicks and Eyeballs cleverly decided to drive up pageloads by putting each item on each list on a separate page, but if you're looking for lists of the best of everything from news and politics to business, sports, and entertainment, this is the place to go.
  

And now (drum roll, please), the best, worst, or just plain most notable of Roxie's World for 2007:

GOOD DOGS: We do hereby declare the whole pack of candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination to be very good dogs indeed. Y'all know we've picked Hillary Clinton as our top dog in the fight, but we admire the values, visions, and leadership skills of all the major candidates. From the world of sports, we remind you all of the incredible grace shown by Coach C. Vivian Stringer and the entire Rutgers University women's basketball team in April after bad dog/tox jock Don Imus viciously (racistly, sexistly) insulted the team following its glorious run to the NCAA championship game. From the world of entertainment, we'll declare actress Jodie Foster a good if slow dog for finally acknowledging her same-sex partner and co-mom, Cydney Bernard, in public.

BAD DOGS: Oh, where to begin, and who really wants to linger on the bad when the year is all shiny and new? But we must, readers, we must, for the sake of Truth, Accuracy, and History. We must remember that in 2007 Vice President Darth Cheney continued to lie about, well, everything, and the Great Leader, Shrub, continued to be stupid about, well, everything. (Random recent example: In a year-end interview with People magazine, when told that a Marine at Camp David had commented on how "nice" First Lady Laura Bush always smelled, the president charmingly replied, "Obviously he didn't work in the gym." We'll admit it was weird of the reporter to bring up the matter of body odor in a presidential interview, but isn't it amazing that the Great Leader goes straight for the locker room and is willing to let the world imagine that his wife actually stinks?) Anyway, it's probably knee-jerk of us to anoint the whole pack of Republican candidates for the presidential nomination bad dogs, but we'll do it because we know you expect us to and because they deserve it. Each is so much more craven and horrifying and creepy than the next that we stand by Moose's prediction of several months ago: The Dems could nominate poop on toast and beat any one of these fetus-worshiping, hate-mongering twits. Others on the short list for Bad Dog of the Year? NFL quarterback and convicted dog fighter Michael Vick is in a special category of evil doer who should not be called a bad dog in a metaphorical sense because he was convicted of being unspeakably cruel to actual dogs in a literal sense. Still, where else would we put him? Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf lands in this category because we are reasonably certain he is directly or indirectly responsible for the recent death of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto (see below). We could go on, but this is depressing.

WATCH DOGS: We have to admit this is one of our favorite categories, and we are pleased to declare former Vice President Al Gore winner of the group prize for 2007 for his tireless work on climate change. The winner of the popular vote in the 2000 election is an inspiration to anyone who ever got kicked in the teeth and had to figure out what to do next. Note to F. Scott Fitzgerald: Turns out there are second acts in America lives, and some of them are well worth watching. We could nominate a bunch of our progressive blog brethren and sisteren to this category, but we are currently enamored of Digby's relentless critiques of the political drivel coming out of the mainstream media. Props also go to the ever-righteous Keith Olbermann and the always-hilarious Jon Stewart. Please, lord, end the writers' strike. We need our Daily Show! Finally, just to prove the mainstream media are still occasionally capable of great watch-dog journalism, we commend Wa Po reporters Barton Gellman and Jo Becker for their extraordinary series of stories on the vice presidency of Darth Cheney. Titled "Angler," it was published here in June.

LOST DOGS: Death was big last year, as it always is, so it's hard and strange to try to say which deaths "mattered" when of course they all mattered or didn't matter equally in some sense. Nevertheless, Roxie's World was touched by the deaths of Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro in January and of Texas writer and rabble-rouser Molly Ivins in February. We were shocked by the killing of thirty-three people on the campus of Virginia Tech University in April and inspired to muse upon poetic justice by the sudden death of fundamentalist leader Jerry Falwell in May. The passing of Lady Bird Johnson in June elicited one of Moose's very favorite Goose stories ever. It is a story of anchovies, etiquette, and Texas girlhood that is bound to warm the cockles of your cynical heart. Finally, 2007 ended with the jarring yet in some ways not surprising assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan. We feel compelled to say one more time that the Bhutto Death Watch we staged here in Roxie's World was intended as a tribute to the former prime minister's courage in returning to her country to work to establish a genuine democracy there. The world has barely begun to reckon with the implications of her death. (The NY Times magazine has a more thorough report on the year in death. It's here.)

BEST DOG TOY FOR HUMANS OF 2007: the iPhone, of course, and the moms don't have one because they're waiting for that exclusive deal with AT&T to fall by the wayside. In the meantime, they are green with envy toward all their cool friends who do have iPhones and whip them out of their pockets every 3.5 seconds to take unflattering photos or consult maps, weather reports, restaurant reviews, and movie schedules. Okay, okay, we get it -- You're smarter than we are, hipper than we are, and willing to risk living without Verizon's blanket coverage.

BEST IN SHOW OF 2007: Yeah, there's a lot we missed, but we were tuned in enough to know, for example,

• that the third season of Showtime's Weeds definitely did not suck;
• that the second season of HBO's Big Love was riveting;
• that the winding down of The Sopranos was sublime, whatever ambivalence we might have had about that cut-to-black ending.

Film: We caught enough film to agree with everyone else that Julie Christie is luminous in Away From Her and that Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh are marvelous in Margot at the Wedding, but the film ultimately disappoints because of what feels like an undercurrent of misogyny.

Live Performances: The moms didn't get out much in 2007, but they did catch Kathleen Turner in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Kennedy Center in January and are convinced it was the greatest live dramatic performance by anybody anywhere ever. That woman can chew scenery like nobody living or dead, and she was born to play Martha. The moms also caught a fair amount of live music this year, including, of course, my Uncle Bobby Earl Smith's birthday concert at Austin's Broken Spoke in June. That was in a class by itself, but the best live musical performance of the year was Lucinda Williams at Wolf Trap in July. (Competitors in this category included Bruce Springsteen's two shows at the Verizon Center in November as well as Rickie Lee Jones at the Birchmere and Indigo Girls, Shawn Colvin, Judy Collins, and Nanci Griffith at Wolf Trap.) The moms had seats in the pit for Lucinda's show, which was flawless and thrilling from start to finish and leads us directly into our last category.

Recorded Music: Lucinda reached new heights (or depths?) of raunchy, bummed out, pissed off, tough-girl blues with this year's West, a record the moms probably would have worn out if it had been made of vinyl. We're tempted to call it our Album of the Year, though the taunting eroticism of "Unsuffer Me" is unrivaled in the category of Song of the Year. Still, West faces stiff competition from Robert Plant and Alison Krauss's Raising Sand, a seamless, evocative blend of two great voices that is hauntingly beautiful. Even Goose admits that Raising Sand beats out Bruce Springsteen's Magic for Album of the Year in Roxie's World. Actually, it's possible the record released by the Boss's wife, Patti Scialfa, Play It As It Lays, might beat out Magic in this category, but we're going to avoid creating strife in the Springsteen household and give the nod to Plant and Krause, who truly deserve it. We dare you to try to get through their rendition of the Everly Brothers's "Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On)" without tapping your toes and joining in on the chorus.

That's it, kids! Here's to more singing, dancing, watching, and opinionating here in Roxie's World in 2008. As always, we are delighted to have you with us and look forward to a year of virtual barks and belly rubs. Peace out and happy new year.

Death of a Shero

(Photo Credit: Ahmad Masood/Reuters; the coffin bearing Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, 12/27/07)

Tragically, my friends, the Benazir Bhutto death watch, begun in Roxie's World when the former prime minister returned to her country in October despite threats to her life, ended Thursday with Bhutto's assassination in Pakistan. We mourn the loss of this brave woman and deplore the misguided policies of the United States that contributed so much to the instability in Pakistan. (For our previous commentary on Bhutto, click here, here, and here.)

NYT obit is here. Times slideshow of highlights of her life is here. Coverage of the assassination is here. And here is Bhutto in her own words, blogging this fall on Huff Po about her risky decision to return to Pakistan. Here is some of what she had to say then:

I long ago realized that my personal life was to be subjugated to my political responsibilities. When my democratically elected father, Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was arrested in 1977 and subsequently murdered, the mantle of leadership of the Pakistan Peoples Party, our nation's largest, nationwide grassroots political structure, was suddenly thrust upon me. It was not the life I planned, but it is the life I have. My husband and children accept and understand that my political responsibilities to the people of Pakistan come first, as painful as that personally is to all of us. I would like to be planning my son's move to his first year at college later this month, but instead I am planning my return to Pakistan and my party's parliamentary election campaign.

I didn't choose this life. It chose me.

Words fail us. Pray for peace, beloveds. And work like hell to make it happen.

Deck the Halls!

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Stocking Stuffers

Goose wanted my legions of loyal fans, all of whom have been such good little boys, girls, and genderqueers this year, to have this holiday treat from the real king of (rock 'n roll) kings, Mr. Bruce Springsteen:


Moose wanted you all to see this editorial from the latest Nation, which opts to endorse not a presidential candidate but the idea "of a broadly based small-d democratic movement, as only such a movement can create the space necessary to realize this moment's full potential." The editorial offers a fairly even-handed assessment of the three leading Democratic candidates and acknowledges that Obama has been less innovative in his policy proposals and more centrist in his positions than progressives mights have hoped. Roxie's World is certainly on board with the idea of using the occasion of the election to build broad public support for transforming the country and moving in a more progressive direction.

The Department of Shameless Self-Promotion encourages you all to click over to BuzzFeed to see who's leading the list of best links on the subject of Oprah campaigning for Obama. You guessed it, kids -- It's your very own favorite dog blogger in the provocatively titled "Once You Go Black." Remember to click on the link to my post from BuzzFeed to help keep us in first place!

Last but not least, the obsessive close readers in the Department of Eye Candy insisted that we toss up this extraordinary photo (from NYT) of Bill and (we presume) Hill out on the campaign trail:

(Photo Credit: Brendan Smialowski, Getty Images)

Ole Blue Eyes has just about mastered that adoring spousal gaze that is so essential to the role of First Lady, don't you think? If I didn't know better, I'd swear the guy was a puppy dog with those big beautiful eyes!

Happy Solstice, sweet children of the sun. On this day, Roxie's World remembers Moose's dad Frig, who loved the winter solstice because it meant that summer was on its way. He taught Moose that even on the coldest, darkest day of the year, you could close your eyes and feel the warmth of summer reaching toward you. Close your eyes, beloveds, and let yourself feel it now.