Eliot Spitzer

All I can say is, that's a lot of scratch:

The club's Web site shows a fee schedule of $1,000 per hour for a three-diamond prostitute and $3,100 per hour for a seven-diamond prostitute. Members of the exclusive Icon Club could reach restricted areas of the Web site and schedule appointments with the highest prostitutes, whose fees started at $5,500 per hour, the press release reads.

I have the same question I did when Vitter got busted: where do these guys get the money, on a public servant's salary? How do they hide spending like this from their wives? Or do they even bother to hide it? "Honey, we need to talk about the amount of money you spend on hookers. Timmy needs braces, and Ashleigh wants her own car."

Or is someone else paying for it, and getting favors in exchange?

Stabbed in the back

It now appears that if Obama gets to the general election and loses, it will all be Hillary's fault. Not due to any fault of Obama's, Oh no! He will have been stabbed in the back by that calculating creature, who had the temerity to actually try to win the primary, and in so doing, why, she failed to acknowledge that Obama is a candidate without a weakness! Obama, it seems, is a perfect candidate, but not so perfect as to be able to withstand the perfidies visited upon him by Hillary. I have been saying for years now that the Republicans are smarter than the Dems, and every presidential election cycle that rolls around proves me a little more right.

The land of snow and Mormons

Tooling around and found this site. I've lived here for 18 months now and never noticed anything odd about the Mormons, in fact, I've come to like a lot of them. They seem like decent, family-oriented people. The racism I'd expected has not materialized. But those are some silly beliefs. Even granting that most Western religious belief is silly in one way or another (there's an all-knowing, all-powerful being who, nevertheless, has this compulsive need to "test" people, when he is supposed to know the outcome already, and he sure does have a temper!), some of those things are, well ... I'll stop there, except to say I don't get the thing about the underwear at all. I read through the Book of Mormon, and after awhile started wondering if it was somebody's attempt at comedy -- I can't believe they go door to door using that thing in their pitch. But of all the things I don't get, the tithe flummoxes me the most. You are expected to raise big families, the wives tend not to work, but you are also expected to give 10% of your income to the church. What do they get in return for that 10%? And they foot the bill for their own kids going on those missions (I actually admire the missions and the commitment it takes to an extent). It has to be the most expensive major religion out there. You can surely get the same community involvement and social benefits by choosing a different church. You can go to Catholic services for the price of a couple of bucks thrown in the offering basket. Mormonism ought to have priced itself out of the market. But it's one of the fastest growing religions in the world, from what I can gather. I just don't get it.

Broder, Klein, and Ignatius: the Early Years

This is how it starts. And then you have years of mutual backscratching, and eventually, an iron, supremely smug, conventional wisdom that brooks no heterodoxy. You would think the internet would make this sort of thing less likely, as it makes it unnecessary for people to hang out together, but people are people, no matter what tools they have, and hanging out with other people and doing things to gain and keep their acceptance is something that human beings are programmed to do. Keyboards don't make people say stupid things, people make people say stupid things. Or something like that.

Noodlin'

The degree to which increasingly sophisticated and even brilliant merchandising is influencing popular culture is a little chilling. I wonder how many people end up identifying with a brand so strongly that it becomes a part of their self-image. A nation of youthful Frank Booths, shouting out about Mountain Dew and Red Bull instead of Pabst Blue Ribbon. But not "Don't look at me," rather, "Look at meeeeeeeeeee!!!"

***

And one of my favorite topics has been getting a little more attention recently:

Dr. Daniel Carlat sank into a choice seat at Lincoln Center, surrounded by other psychiatrists, all staying at the same four-star hotel in Manhattan and attending the same show for free. His deal with a pharmaceutical company to provide testimonials to other doctors had paid off well.

"It just kind of gave me a feeling of euphoria," said Carlat, a practicing psychiatrist and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Tufts University in Boston. "Sort of like you've made it into the upper crust of society."

The practice of using doctors to pitch products to other doctors is legal, though several states — including New York — are trying to curb it. They are opposed by the pharmaceutical industry, which argues the practice is a kind of professional consultation.

Carlat was on the "speakers' bureau" for the pharmaceutical companies, speaking to large groups of doctors, or holding intimate, expenses-paid meals with a pharmaceutical representative and one or two doctors. In one year, he earned $30,000 — about one-fifth of his salary. Ultimately, his conscience started nagging him and he quit.

It baffles me that more people don't pay attention to this stuff. It's not as if their health and the health of their families and loved ones is at stake.


***




Could be good, could be disappointing. There's a lot of room for character exploration in the Iron Man series, and Robert Downey has the chops to do it. But it takes a very deft touch from the writer/director team to make a good action film that also has some depth. The guy who's directing this has only directed one other feature film, and I'd never heard of it before. So far, the track record for these comic book films is fair, with Daredevil and Hulk being the only plain misfires (the FF series hasn't been great, but neither was it intended to be). Daredevil and the Hulk were my favorite Marvel characters as a kid. Iron Man was my third favorite. :-/

Photoshopgate

There's a reason I don't read Daily Kos, and it's the same reason I don't read Free Republic: left or right, there's only so much insanity and ignorance I can take, and I get that much in every day life.

Apparently one of the geniuses at Kos decided the Clinton people had darkened Obama in an attack ad, making him into a Scary Black Man. A bunch of the other geniuses at Kos jumped on the bandwagon, and you have an instant "scandal." The folks at Factcheck analyzed the ad, and decided there was no evidence to support the darkening charges. Big surprise, there.

What interests me is that, yet again, the defense of something -- in this case defense against an attack that was never made -- underscores how insecure about Obama's candidacy his supporters are. If they think his race is such a high negative that some bit of dumbassery like this would hurt him, why do they think that a majority of Americans would vote for him at all? He's black. If Americans won't vote for a black man, doctoring an ad like this doesn't mean anything. If they will, doctoring an ad like this -- guess what? -- doesn't mean anything.

Apparently the people at KOS think there's some kind of blackness threshold, and Obama is just on the right side of it, but shade him any darker and oops! there goes the presidency. I don't know what's scarier, the idea that they think this, or the idea that they might be right. But if they are right, why are they, not just supporting him, but fanatically supporting him?

A week ago, Obama was running the Most Brilliant Campaign Evah, while Hillary was just a dumb bitch who couldn't run a lemonade stand. Now, Hillary is a kneecapping bitch, who should get out of the campaign to clear the way for poor, "eloquent" (even money says the word Chait was really thinking of was "articulate") Obama. Obama has had the benefit of a press that hates and maligns Hillary, a blogosphere that largely hates and maligns her, a huge spending advantage, two chances to simply put her away and end this thing, and he's blown it all. Hillary has had some of the most consistently and outrageously negative press coverage we've ever seen; Obama has been treated very nearly as well as McCain. Yet all it took was a couple of negative ads, and Obama started crumpling like a stepped-on cardboard box. There are serious problems with his candidacy, and if these people think that (probably un-doctored) ad was something, wait until the wingnut 529s, Crazy Talk radio, and Fox News turn him into a thumbsucking, commie loving, Muslim tarbaby, who wants to turn over American national defense to the U.N., socialize healthcare, and take money away from hard working white folks and give it to the Cadillac driving welfare queens of the ghetto.

Ana Marie Cox

Didn't pay enough attention to this when it was going on, but now that I've read through the whole ugly thing, I'm a little stunned. Her reasoning in defending the trip was pretty shoddy and dishonest, but it's too late to go over that stuff now. What really caught my eye was this:

"To those of you who are worried that I went to the event on my own dime: Time is not the only place in the world where people can publish stories about McCain, okay? I will recover my expenses."

In other words, she either has, or is looking for, a book deal. Now, I have no problem with this, and in fact, she would have been dumb not to do it. The real problem is this: if McCain wins the presidency, her book deal could stretch into seven figure territory. He was counted out, and came back to win, and she was covering it the whole way, plus she has her Time platform to help sales. It's the sort of political Rocky story publishers will pay for, especially if the election becomes a real monumental one that attracts a lot of attention. Which, come to think of it, pretty much describes the election we already have. If McCain loses, maybe her putative book doesn't even get published, but is relegated, instead, to some kind of feature article in Vanity Fair or some other magazine, which would pay her by the word. It's a huge difference, and stakes her in a big way to a certain outcome -- McCain winning -- of the election. And that's just this one book. Once a book like that established her, she's set for life, able to write what she pleases (see Klein, Joe, "Anonymous", and Primary Colours). And this person, with so much riding on the election, is going to be covering it, with her silly, giggly-assed persona, until the end, on TV, in Time, talking with her colleagues, the blog: everywhere she goes, she will have a gigantic stake riding on the outcome. It really shouldn't be allowed: in no other profession would such a gross conflict of interest be tolerated, but this is one that isn't even discussed.

Who knows, maybe Cox is a pillar of virtue, and will be perfectly "fair" (she admits she is biased, even brags about it, but claims that's OK because she's decided she's "fair") between now and the election. I have a low opinion of her, but it isn't so low as to think she would consciously sell herself for money, at least not journalistically sell herself. But who knows what she will do unconsciously? Why should we be forced to hope Cox is a better person than she reveals herself to be pretty much every day she writes another of her teenager-as-serious-journalist posts?