gay agenda

Some recent stories on upcoming legislative issues:

Box Turtle Bulletin points to story in The Blade: Congress Ready to Move on Gay Rights Bills. (Hate crimes, ENDA, DADT)

speaking of falsified memoirs

Sparky the Pengiun had one too.

not-so-hidden signals

Post quoted in entirety from The Slog, since I don't have time right now to be fancy:

In this week's web-only Constant Reader, I join Barack Obama's book club and discover that there might be a secret message or two involved.

Since the election, every book that Obama has been photographed carrying has resulted in a sales boom for booksellers. The first book he was seen carrying after the election, Doris Kearns Goodwin's story of Abraham Lincoln's cabinet Team of Rivals, inspired much talk about his cabinet choices. When he was spotted with a copy of West Indies author Derek Walcott's marvelous, book-length poem Omeros, there was a (admittedly smaller) bump in the book's sales. Even people who don't generally pay much attention to the book world are scrutinizing those long-shot photographs of our president-elect disembarking from car to plane and back again, trying to read the title of whatever is tucked under his arm.

Provided that no president-elect ever has to carry his own shit around if he doesn't want to, it's enough to make one wonder whether Obama is sending codes—like those secret messages, solvable only by decoder ring that used to be included in serial movies for children. The message of Team of Rivals was pretty obvious: It was impossible to turn on a cable news network during the cabinet-selection process without hearing the title slip from one anchor or another's lips in reference to the fact that Obama wasn't going to have a cabinet of yes-men. But if this Secret Presidential Book Club theory is correct, what is Obama trying to tell us with The Defining Moment?

We learn a lot about FDR, including his weird feelings about the Irish and Catholics, too. I hope you'll give it a read.

Nice.

this is why you don't give cameras...

...to 24-year old soldiers, or inbred royal twits. Prince Harry strikes again.

you don't have to put on the red light

Tavis Smiley interviewing Frank Langella and Ron Howard on Frost/Nixon:

Langella: Well, I would think the thing I learned the most that I will now never, ever forget is that you see that little red light that's on me now? The minute it goes on, something in me changes. Some imperceptible thing in me changes, because I know I'm being recorded. I'm not exactly 100 percent myself. I am a personality, a character, a sense of self that I choose to put in front of a camera.

And what I learned on working on Nixon and watching him and slow-moing him for hours and hours and hours, is never to 100 percent totally believe the person the politician is when the red light goes on, because he wants to communicate something to us. He wants to communicate power or sensitivity or vulnerability or in Nixon's case, toughness.

Every single politician must stand in the dark a second before the light goes on, and something unconscious changes. So I've learned to watch like a hawk everybody - Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama, it doesn't matter - and all of us, too. We all know we do some things slightly different.

But when you are leading countries, when you are a politician and the red light goes on, you create a character. You have to. You couldn't possibly be yourself. And I think it's second nature. I don't think it's something - after a while, when a politician becomes skilled at it - President Kennedy knew he had charm, Nixon did whatever he thought would look strong, Lyndon Baines Johnson had a wonderful kind of shaggy Texas demeanor, Mr. McCain had a way of behaving.

That's the thing I took away from it the most, was that...

Interesting observations from someone who knows the camera and character. Audio and transcript available at Tavis Smiley's PBS site. (h/t Kos)

Burris exerts authorial agency

Ezra Klein on Burris' tomb:

A Senate seat is a prize, no doubt, but it's rather less of one if you secured it by abetting a political criminal's desire to obscure his guilt by sparking a racial showdown. Burris, however, is taking the long view. The mausoleum view. Eventually, "United States Senator" will be etched beneath "Trail Blazer." And there will be no asterisk, no explanation of the conditions. Burris will see to that. He'll write it down himself.

Might make for interesting link for week on authorship and authority.

falsified Holocaust memoir slugfest

HHN: Penguin cancels formerly-upcoming Holocaust memoir ("Angel at the Fence") that historians revealed to be false. As Ken Waltzer, director of Jewish Studies program at Mich State, writes:

This memoir was at the far end of implausibility, yet until yesterday, no one connected with packaging, promoting, and disseminating it asked questions about or investigated it. Some actively resisted such investigation and tried to shut mine down.

The story gets really interesting when you look into how the producers of a film version complained to Waltzer's dean and attacked Deborah Lipstadt for investigating the claims. (TNR stories here)

Lipstadt also adds some interesting thoughts on HBO's recent John Adams, in which they show Adams railing against Trumbull for painting the signing of the Declaration as a great assembly, which didn't happen. But the scene as shown in the miniseries is itself undocumented!