Some of us in the vast left-wing conspiracy have been asking what’s the matter with Kansas, some what’s the matter with the Democrats, and others go meta and ask what’s the matter with what’s the matter with Kansas.  I want to ask a different question.  What the hell is the matter with the Republicans?

Last week, Pat Roberts, the Senator from Kansas since 1996 and Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter supporting Bush’s illegal wiretapping and agreeing to the preposterous claim that Congress cannot regulate where the President claims war powers, no matter how specious the claim.  In Judiciary Committee hearings on the matter, the Republican members fought hard to ensure that Attorney General Gonzalez would not be under oath.  Orrin Hatch simply walked Gonzalez through the talking points, and Jon Kyl and Charles Grassley affirmed that breaking congressional statutes was an inherent power of the presidency.  Grassley actually admitted to phoning Gonzalez prior to the hearings to help set up his presentation.

Now, to become a Senator, you need to be an ambitious person.  It’s a powerful position and one that is hard to attain.  Think of all the back-stabbing and back-room deals it takes, how many lesser people had to be stomped underfoot.  Watch C-SPAN some time and you’ll see the level of self-importance characteristic of these guys (and they are almost all guys).  The Senate is supposed to be the premier deliberative body in the American government, and so they probably have good reason to think of themselves as important.

What they are doing here is simply handing over virtually unlimited power to the President.  Once they do that, they aren’t going to be too important any more.

The administration asserts that it has constitutional authority to do anything it wishes that is related to national defense.  It gets to determine what is related to defense and what tactics it wants to use, and nobody, not the courts, not Congress, can intervene.  As Dick Cheney says, “We have all the legal authority we need.”  Congress can suggest changes, but “we’d have to make a decision, as the administration.”  Cheney said we’d all just be better off if Congress didn’t know too much about it.  Secrecy and security, you know.

These are not war powers.  Congress did not declare war, and no matter what the rhetorical strategy of the Bush regime, America is not legally at war.

The Republican senators are assisting the administration in a claim that it gets to decide what the Constitution means and who it applies to.  This also means that they can decide about any other laws as well.  If this seems like going too far, the President has asserted the authority to do any searches it sees fit (Fourth Amendment), imprison without due process (Fifth Amendment), hold without access to counsel and ability to confront witnesses (Sixth Amendment), decide on military rules (Article I), and to ignore treaties (Article VI).  That’s just a start.

The Democrats are having a hard time coming up with an effective rhetorical and organizational strategy.  People in Kansas seem to vote in ways counter to their economic interests.  Thomas Frank’s analysis probably understates the importance of symbols.

The Republican party is selling our constitution down the river to a bunch of petty, authoritarian incompetents.  And that really matters.

Pete DeWan

I can understand why people often shrink back from Lars von Trier’s portrayals of suffering women.  Because arguments in film take the form of characters, setting, and action, it’s a slippery line between say, making arguments about the position of women vis-à-vis society and reenacting those conditions in portrayals that amount to voyeuristic sadism.   Lots of spoilers follow this paragraph, but you seriously should not waste your time with this movie anyway.

Asylum blurs the distinction between historical accuracy and leering, giving us a film that takes the existential paralysis offered to pre-feminism women and turns it into the cinematic equivalent of burning ants with a magnifying glass.  The film follows Stella Raphael (Natasha Richardson) as the restless wife of a doctor in a psychiatric hospital who forms an obsessive attachment to an inmate that tortured and disfigured his own wife but is really good in bed.  She’s a lazily feminist figure, if at all, since her response to the stifling strictures of gender expectations is to find a marginalized man to take care of her and beat her.  One of the creepy aspects to the film was the suggestion that the viewer understand this obsession, partly as a product of her caged freedom and partly because of the absolutely anarchic passions of the orgasm.  Apparently, once you find a woman’s clitoris, there’s just no talking to her.

It’s not just the voyeurism that’s a problem in portrayals of women like this, it’s that the sloppily liberal critique of cultural institutions often seems to have a reactionary undercurrent.  Stella can’t seem to handle even the limited role she’s given, allowing her child to drown in a river because she was off daydreaming about the hot, crazy lug who kicked the crap out of her and almost killed her.  In the end, we see her husband sympathetically, since he only wanted the best for her when he was instructing her on the proper way for a woman to act.  I mean, it’s certainly better to bake cookies than kill your kid and end up the sex slave of a psycho with loose fists.  

As a study of obsession, the movie would be better off not tackling the gender dynamics of the era through Stella’s loathing of her lack of opportunity.  Because then it seems to simply reiterate all kinds of stereotypes of women as irredeemably emotional with masochistic tendencies.  By far the most irritating aspect of Asylum comes from the phony defiant suicide ending.  Yeah, if only every woman who felt unjustly treated by society had killed herself. I hate the defiant suicide.  In terms of statement, it’s more melodramatic but no more effective than mooning someone.  Asylum might, in the wreckage of its plot, have something to say about the lives of intelligent women in an era that kept them anchored in the home.  For me, like Lars von Trier, the movie articulated the suffering too well, becoming more conduit than catharsis.  

Terry Sawyer

America has become a fractured nation.  What I mean is that nowadays it is rare when the collective conscious of America is drawn to a single moment in time.  Going back forty, fifty, sixty years, radio and television broadcasts would bring people together to listen or watch significant events.  Presidential speeches, news and sports, and the like would rivet a nation. The homeless even would find a radio or TV set in a store window to catch FDR declaring war, Babe Ruth hitting a homerun, or men landing on the moon.  Even the presidential voting process is fractured as so many people vote absentee or not at all.  

September 11th was one of those few current events that affected us all, and we all communally mourned and feared for what would happen next.  For broadcasting, the advent of cable and satellite has diminished the ability of TV and radio to be a means of bringing a whole country together. No longer do we all tune to Uncle Walter or Ed Sullivan to watch the same exact occurrence with our neighbors around the country.  I believe that the collective consciousness helped build us into the super power we are today, and the loss of it can only make it harder to keep that power going into an uncertain future.

An interesting observation finds that the only non-disaster event in this day and age to be able to collectively bring together the people of the United States, and even the entire world, is the Super Bowl, seen in more than 200 countries around the globe.  This past Sunday, all kinds of people tuned into an American football game, and for a few hours the cultural zeitgeist was morphed into one.  The Super Bowl has become less a sporting event and more a kind of national holiday where we all gather together to celebrate being Americans — and, for those in foreign lands, to sneak a peek at a culture that prides itself on being a collection of vastly different individuals fused together by ideas of freedom and liberty for all.  It used to be exploration, wars, and other political events that brought us together.  Now it’s men dressed in funny uniforms running at each other like mountain goats chasing after an odd-shaped ball.  And what makes it all even stranger is the fact that most people don’t even tune into the broadcast to watch the game but to watch the commercials.  We have become a Wal-Mart culture where commerce is everything.

As a television program, the Super Bowl broadcast is overly produced, stuffed with such a vast array of fluff that it’s almost a parody of itself.  The teams are so over-analyzed and scrutinized beforehand that even a Mongolian sheepherder knows the point spread and what each quarterback eats for breakfast.  The actual game is always hit or miss, just like any sports contest.  Some games are close and offer on-field thrills to rival any event, and others are boring blowouts where you can almost hear a collective yawn from coast to coast.  Super Bowl XL happened to be better than most and at least made it to the final few minutes before the outcome was known.  But these days you don’t only judge the show on the merits of the game but on the commercials that run between plays.  There is even a show the night before previewing the commercials that will run the next day, so there isn’t even any surprise on that front which makes them as anticlimatic as the game.  

Now that I brought up the commercials, I guess I need to reveal my top faves in terms of entertainment and salesmanship.  I will say that this year there were no Apple 1984 spots to knock you off your chair or anything coming close.  There were a few that made me laugh out loud and a couple that even watered the eyes a tad, but as a group I would give this year’s crop a C+.  The ones I didn’t particularly care for were Coca Cola Company’s Full Throttle spots that were obviously trying to get those NASCAR aficionados to drink its new Red Bull knock-off.  I got tired of the Blockbuster and Pizza Hut spots because they kept coming and coming, and all the effects-driven spots all kind of morphed together.  Budweiser, the event’s leading advertiser, scored big with a couple of continuing Clydesdale spots.  A touching one where a young colt gets a little help pulling the beer wagon, and the streaking sheep that invades the horses’ own Super Bowl game were both cute and funny.  Ameriquest scored points with its airline passenger who winds up in a compromising position after a bit of turbulence, as did the Leonard Nimoy spot where the Star Trek veteran uses Aleve to help him give the seminal Vulcan greeting to a bunch of geeky fans.  Add ABC’s inventive “Addicted to Lost” promo and the Burger King Busby Berkeley build-a-burger revue, and those were pretty much the top commercials this year.  Oh, and for some reason the “Cheers from the world” spot from herestobeer.com made me choke up a little.  I guess if anything in this world could bring us all together, Rodney King not withstanding, we could do a lot worse than a mug of beer.  

You can view Super Bowl ads at either Google or at NFL.com.

Rich Burlingham