Pinko Magazine Hedonism + Activism

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Monday, September 01, 2008 - Concerned parents protest the season 2 premiere of Gossip Girl

Benjamin Svetkey has a great article in the most recent Entertainment Weekly in which he casts the racy landscape of our pop culture (teenagers making with the oral sex during school hours on 90210) against the quaint olden days when Murphy Brown getting knocked up was viewed as the seventh seal of the apocalypse.

Svetkey points out that even if Sarah Palin and her army of book burning moose-zombie stormtroopers conservatives did want to ignite a new culture war, the political landscape is so dominated by actual issues that people don’t really care about who blew who on the CW.

But perhaps the article’s most telling moment comes from Tim Winter who is trying to fight the good fight in spite of the poor odds.

(The Parents Television Council) president Tim Winter tries to keep the faith despite public apathy. ”There’s a famous Civil War battle, the Second Battle of Bull Run,” he says. ”The Confederate army ran out of bullets, so they started throwing stones at the Union army. It does sometimes feel…like we’ve run out of bullets.”

So, just to be clear, the president of The Parents Television Council compared his efforts to those of the Confederate army. Yes. That Confederate army. If there was any confusion about what exactly we are dealing with, hopefully that just cleared things up.

The PTC… Confederate army… Yowzers.

Also, you do know who won that one, don’t you Tim?

Wall Street.

Okay so we’re about to have a depression. Today the Wall Street Journal called for a WPA-era-style “Resolution Trust Corporation,” which is basically like Sarah Palin ordering the tofu stir-fry. Now I’m not sure who these Lehman Brothers are, if they’re hot, if they are willing to “play together” since they need the money, or what they’re looking for from Uncle Sam but none of this is good. In other news the media is starting to call out John McCain for having a 39% chance of dying in office omfg lying, we nabbed him spending his 70th birthday on Anne Hathaway’s nasty sex yacht, television is back, fashion week has left the runway, and poor David Foster Wallace how terrible is that!? Don’t despair though — Pinko has the best and worst of the week that was, and a few things to look forward to in the last week of Summer (oh shit!) and beyond. 

Also: congrats to Mr. Sulu on his actual, real gay marriage. Beam him up! Er…to the list! 

(more…)

Who is the economic whiz-kid behind the financial services and banking deregulation that lead our economy to the brink of collapse this weekend? That’s right! McCain’s “economic brain” and former campaign co-chair Phil Gramm.

And who do Americans think can best handle the economy?

Barack Obama 48%

John McCain 45%

And McCain is trending upwards…

[Updated.] Speaking of the economy, Joe Biden and Barack Obama both went after John McCain hard today for his assertion this morning that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.”

Let’s go to the tape:

So the Obama campaign is now officially playing offense on the economy. So the question becomes “will people listen?” Or more pointedly “will the media actually cover it?”

David Foster Wallace died yesterday; my friend Chris wrote a brief but lovely tribute. That’s just terrible.

For the last week or so, my beleaguered better half has been calling me from the road with travel crises and genuine work stress, and my response is basically “yes, yes, okay, yes but WHAT ABOUT SARAH PALIN OMFG.” My friend Carl (who has small town values, btw) and my Pinko co-conspirator Stirling are perilously close to being abandoned by their significant others if they don’t stop fretting so constantly about the election. My friend Christa recounted her dire Friday afternoon phone-banking for Obama in her hometown of Scranton, PA. She was calling from a list of registered Democrats, one of whom told her he wouldn’t “vote for a nigger;” another who said “I’m voting for Palin. I don’t like how Obama treated Hilary.” 

In short, everyone is freaking out. 

Reading my Times this morning, both Frank Rich and the suddenly on-message MoDo, I was struck by just how serious a moment this really is. It’s way more serious than distractions like wolf hunting, troopergate and Cindy McCain’s pill-popping. Naively I’ve assumed that if McCain won and then Palin ascended to the Presidency and things were worse than the last 8 years, eventually the Republicans and conservatives would get their commeupance; we would be proven right and they would be proven wrong and everyone who voted for them would realize they made a mistake. That’s what I thought eight years ago; it’s what I thought four years ago; and it’s how I reassured myself during my week in St. Paul. (Along with a shitload of red wine.) 

The reality is that things don’t work like that. If it’s true that John McCain has really become a trojan horse for neo-conservatives more extreme than Bush (and Palin a “trojan moose,” as Arianna Huffington called her) than the impact of a disastrous 4-8-12 more years of conservative rule won’t be my liberal fantasy of America learning the error of it’s ways. The impact would be the real consequences of an extreme and hostile foreign policy: mass global destabilization; expanded middle east conflict; maybe nuclear war if we exacerbate conflict with Russia, or if we don’t commit ourselves to tracking down all of the “unaccounted for” loose nuclear weapons currently bouncing around. Such outcomes wouldn’t mean more votes for Chelsea Clinton in 2024; they would mean an even fiercer and uglier fight for power. 

I’m very torn on how this should be won, and how “negative” Obama needs to go. I’m torn if he needs to be more of a full-throated, RFK-style economic populist or hit McCain on his batshit crazy foreign policy. I’m hopeful about the genuinely significant effort on the ground to register new voters and expand the rolls. But the only thing I’m certain of right now is the need to get to work; giving money if we can; making phone calls through the Obama campaign or outside groups like MoveOn; maybe going door to door. I know that some of our readers are to the left of me, insisting still that the two parties are two sides of the same coin, that Obama has already sold out, that we are cheerleading a hollow leader. But looking at this week’s Sarah Palin interviews, and considering the conservative reaction to her nomination, it’s clear that this election present two very different world-views. One of them is even further to the right than those currently in power, and their trojan moose has pulled them closer than any of us had imagined to actually winning this thing. In short, we have seven weeks to do whatever we can to head a very dark time off at the pass.

Oh, how I have missed you Saturday Night Live!

Ok, I’m sure this doesn’t really come as a shock to anyone but Sarah Palin, that weird unblinking hunchback running to be John McCain’s understudy, doesn’t approve of you and your dang alternative lifestyle. And she most certainly does not want anyone, least of all herself, reading books about it.

NYT (via Politico):

…in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. Chase and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.

“Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,” Ms. Chase said. “It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn’t even read it.”

Ah yes. Good old fashioned family themed intolerance! You ever notice they never read the books?

So you guys all remember Larry Craig? Closeted Gay Republican Senator, arrested for soliciting sex in a bathroom at the Minneapolis airport, almost resigned, didn’t, now trying to rehabilitate his image. At this point he’s been convicted and everyone in America thinks he was trying to have it in that bathroom. Craig has been mocked, humiliated, laughed at, embarrassed, his family shamed and his job nearly lost. There isn’t much left.

Given that, it makes sense that he would want to improve his image. America loves a comeback, and maybe if done well a smartly-executed campaign could restore some standing to a man who served Idaho as one of its Senators. So Craig hired a lawyer. That lawyer filed a brief. That brief was an important first step to overturning Craig’s conviction. And what is the central argument of the brief — the brief that is intended to restore dignity and to help people forget that this Senator was part of a raunchy gay sex scandal? The size and shape of the crack i.e. the opening in between the stall door and the stall wall. The crack. Seriously. I know I’m being crass, but the entire argument here that he hired someone to go argue to restore his image in front of all of America was based on THE CRACK, and he just said it over and over. From the Times today:

Mr. Martin (Craig’s attorney) disagreed with Judge Hudson’s description of the complaint. “We don’t know how long the crack is, how big the crack is,” Mr. Martin said. “We don’t know,” he said, if Senator Craig simply glanced at the crack twice “or if it was continuous staring.”

Are you kidding me? It baffles the mind. This man is accused of being a gay, ridiculed all over the world (”wide stance” anyone?) and your defense is based on how long and wide the crack is? Continuous staring? I do PR and I get paid shit. What does Mr. Martin get paid to conjure up the one image — a crouching, jaw-clenching, clearly bored and disturbed gay traveler bending over in his airport bathroom stall — that hadn’t even entered the picture?

How long the crack is. It’s just too much.

[Editors Note: Kudos to those zany NYT writers for their headline. "Senator Seeks Withdrawal of Guilty Plea in Sex Sting." Mmmm hmmm. Genius.]