I don't usually consider Facebook posts to be worthy of transplanting to a (cough cough) professional blog like this one, but I'm making an exception for an FB thread about a Washington Post story.

The article focused on Georgetown University sophomore who has advertised for a personal assistant who would handle tasks "such as organizing his closet, dropping him off and picking him up from work, scheduling haircuts, putting gas in the car and taking it in for service, managing his electronic accounts and doing laundry (although the assistant will be paid only for the time spent loading, unloading and folding clothes, not the entire laundry cycle)." The pay: $10-$12 an hour.

One response was whimsical: "Just this morning I told my mom I needed a PA. She laughed at me. Then [she] saw this article on Facebook and told me about it." (Oh, oh, Parent On Social Media Alert!) But the Facebooker who introduced the subject considered the student's quest  "the most egregious of all insults."

 I weighed in ...

I've tried to stay away from all Glenn Beck-associated commentary in recent days -- he's such an easy target and I hate being part of a media herd.  But his latest rant is just too funny. The Huffington Post has a video of Beck that's really worth viewing. In it he pontificates that progressives used to be called "tyrants," or "slave-owners -- people who encouraged you to become dependent on them."

..."Encouraged you to become dependent on them."

Encouraged.

That is just priceless. And pretty neat. Now that I'm done laughing about encouraged slaves were (but hey,  at least he didn't say "enticed")  I have to admit that although he's completely insane and thoroughly inaccurate, Beck also makes a rather elegant toss of the race dice.

Conservatives, of course, were slave-owners and liberals were not. Conservatives in the 19th century believed in the tyranny of state government and liberals did not.  Everyone with a shred of understanding about American history knows that. We had a whole war over it.

But since Beck is probably not genuinely stupid, I'm going to say he's tapping into a sentiment that is very much alive in Confederate USA. Many southern conservatives (AKA the Republican base) still argue that the federal government had no right to restrict the tyranny of slave-owners. For it to do so was, well, tyrannical. As were later federal restrictions on state restrictions regarding segregation in schools, housing, public education, etc... Tyranny, tyranny, tyranny, tyranny!

And hey, Obama's half black and half white, so it's sort of neat. Kind of a two-fer. Either way he's to blame. (For being unduly encouraging or overly encouraged or promoting encouragement or something like that).

Seriously, you have to respect this. Saying so much with so few words is really a craft.

-Lisa Richardson

Photo: Glenn Beck addresses fans at Safeco Field in Seattle on Sept. 26. Credit: Alan Berner / AP.

The Vatican today announced a new arrangement under which Anglicans may enter the Roman Catholic Church while retaining many of their traditions, including married priests and the use of at least some parts of the Book of Common Prayer. (It isn't clear from the Vatican news release whether this means only that already married Anglican priests will be welcome, or that future priests and candidates for the priesthood will be free to marry -- probably the former.)

This is a big deal. First and foremost, it is a reflection of the continued crackup of the Anglican Communion, the worldwide association of churches with roots in the Church of England, which was created after King Henry VIII declared himself the head of the church. (As Protestant kids in Northern Ireland used to spraypaint on Belfast city walls: "One Bible, One crown, No pope in our town.") 

In an attempt at face-saving, Rowan Williams, the Hamlet-like archbishop of Canterbury, said the new express conversion (as George Costanza would say) wasn't a "commentary on Anglican problems" over the ordination of gays and women as bishops. It's lucky he doesn't claim to be infallible, because this is a holy whopper.

But if the "poping" of conservative Anglo-Catholics eases tensions in the Anglican Communion, it is likely to exacerbate them in their new spiritual home. Many Roman Catholic liberals will be aghast at this development, because they too believe in opening ordination to gays and women. And even some moderate Catholics are likely to grouse over the fact that cradle Catholics can't become priests and be married, but Anglican arrivistes can. (Married former Episcopal priests in the United States have been allowed to switch teams for some time, through the creation of an "Anglican Use" -- a church within a church.)

One group of Roman Catholics, which comprises liberals and conservatives on issues of sexuality, will be happy about this development. They are the Catholics (and I'm one of them) who abhor the tone-deaf language of the post-Vatican II Mass in English. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer is one of the wonders of the English language. Asked what he missed most about his former church, an Anglican-priest-turned Catholic supposedly replied: "The Mass in English."

After today's announcement, I suspect a lot of cradle Catholics in other countries will be sneaking off to "Anglican Use" parishes on Sundays.

-- Michael McGough

Columnist Jonah Goldberg foresees clouds ahead for the Democrats -- in fact, a coming storm so severe that it could end Democratic control of Congress. It's building from the Tea Party movement, which Goldberg sees as an heir to the Ross Perot third-party movement of the 1990s. "If the GOP can convincingly align with and exploit the growing Perotista discontent, it very well might ride to victory on a tsunami the Democrats can't even see."

Also on today's Op-Ed page, scholar Giles Dorronsoro explains why U.S. attempts to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan's Pashtun areas in the south and east are probably doomed to fail. And ACLU National Security Project chief Jameel Jaffer decries an attempt by Congress to circumvent the courts by giving the secretary of Defense the power to withhold photographs of combatants "engaged, captured or detained" by the U.S. during the Bush administration.

On the Editorial page, The Times weighs in on Atty. Gen. Eric Holder's policy change on medical marijuana. Though we're happy that federal prosecutors will make marijuana cases a low priority in states like California that have passed laws approving its medicinal use, we think that's the wrong approach. The administration shouldn't be picking and choosing states in which to enforce federal law -- rather, it should de-emphasize medical marijuana cases in all 50.

We also note that the best place for local health departments to conduct swine flu vaccinations is at public schools -- yet that's not where the inoculations will take place in Los Angeles, thanks to a failure by the school district and the county to properly coordinate.

And we muse on the bizarre spectacle presented by Colorado's Heene family, accused of perpetrating the "balloon boy" hoax in an attempt to drum up publicity for a reality show. "As much as some people will do just about anything for a Hollywood contract, a good number of the rest will lap up the juicy story of their wrongdoing. In reality, perhaps we all get what we wanted."

Illustration by Jonathan Twingley / For The Times

You know you're pariahs when even the ACLU wants nothing to do with you. In my in-box this morning was this release:



--Michael McGough

Who needs reality shows when we have fiction parading as reality? Or is it the other way around? First there was the media's breathless, moment-by-moment coverage of the silver balloon floating above the Colorado landscape, supposedly with a 6-year-old boy inside. The dramatic crash landing, the discovery that the boy was safe at home, not in the balloon. Then comes the Larimer County sheriff's office accusation that the parents, Richard and Mayumi Heene, plotted the whole thing as a hoax to try to wangle their way into a reality-show contract, only to be undone when 6-year-old Falcon revealed during an interview that he had hidden himself for hours because "You said we were doing this for a show." Lots of reality show in that moment.

Kids do say the darnedest things sometimes.

If the accusation against Ma and Pa Heene is true, the incident obviously reflects the bizarre extremes of our anything-for-a-Hollywood-contract society. It's just hard to figure out what's most bizarre: That people would concoct such an elaborate and expensive hoax, that they would obliviously imagine that no one would suspect, or that they actually would think this whole thing had legs as a reality show that anyone would want to watch. Then again, after Nadya Suleman the Octomom got her own show, who am I to be surprised? Not that she's taking much audience share with her so far.

Oddest of all is that the Heenes might get exactly what they supposedly wanted, if not precisely in the way they'd allegedly planned. The story of deal-obsessed parents going to extreme lengths to get their moments on TV should be good for at minimum an exclusive People mag interview. And if the case really goes all the way to a conviction and sentence, imagine the mileage to be gotten out of the parents' lives as they concoct a video series taped from prison. Think of the family reunions and the cute things Falcon will say next. Beats Jon and Kate any day.

Photo of Richard Heene with sons Ryo, middle, and Falcon. Credit: David Zalubowski / AP--

--Karin Klein

 

Ralph Lauren has apologized, but that doesn't mean blogs or feminist groups are about to let go of the  grotesque retouch job on a fashion shot that makes the model's waist look like it was squeezed into an illegal torture device. Her hips appear narrower than her head, as blog Boing Boing pointed out, and her thighs look like they came straight from a classroom skeleton. The clothing company eventually confessed to the mistake, saying it was having a bad Photoshop day.

But now the National Organization for Women is demanding a further apology, to women everywhere for the company's alleged obsession with portraying extreme thinness, and preferably also to Filippa Hamilton, the model in the ad who was fired by Ralph Lauren after years of being one of its top models. Hamilton said the clothier found her 120-pound girth on a 5-foot-10 body -- translating to a size 4 -- too  bulky to fit into its sample sizes. The company denies that's why she was fired.

Meanwhile, the blogs are gleefully showing off another photo, reportedly also Ralph Lauren, showing a pretty model with a bizarrely thin, elongated, hipless body, like the aliens in "Cocoon." Never fear, E.T. Your short legs and dumpy midsection will never qualify you as a Ralph Lauren model -- that is, not without emergency Photoshopping -- but NOW is holding its fourth annual "Love Your Body" celebration next Wednesday.

Photo: On the left, Filippa Hamilton with digital liposuction; on the right, as she is. Credit: AP

-- Karin Klein 

Not for use with small animals. (EPA/Peter Foley)

Credit Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. for the takeaway quote from the Supreme Court's oral argument Tuesday about a law punishing the possession or sale of depictions of animal cruelty. Questioning a lawyer for Robert Stevens, a pit-bull enthusiast sentenced to 37 months for selling dog-fighting videos, Alito asked if her First Amendment theory would protect people who wanted to watch the "Human Sacrifice Channel?" Other justices then riffed on the concept in the hypothetical-mongering for which the court is notorious.

Alito's hypo seems a bit less far-fetched when one considers the popularity of WWE, televised hockey games and even The History Channel (which one of my peacenik relatives calls The War Channel). Violence sells, But censors, with support from the courts, usually have  focused on sex instead. What puts obscenity outside the protection of the First Amendment is that it appeals to "prurient interest" -- that is, it's sexually arousing.

Patricia Millett, the lawyer for video vendor Stevens, ratified the "violence OK, sex bad" rationale. She conceded that the law might have survived a First Amendment challenge if it  had been narrowly drawn to punish only the phenomenon that provoked the legislation -- so-called "crush videos" catering to fetishists who are turned on by seeing a woman crush dogs with her high heels. A non-erotic, aesthetic appreciation of dog-fighting, however, is protected.

The sex/violence dichotomy has inspired the familiar joke about the differences between conservatives and liberals when it comes to censorship: Conservatives want to ban depictions of sex, liberals want to ban descriptions of violence. But it's rooted in the traditional justification for laws against obscenity: society's interest in preventing debauchery. As a 19th century British judge put it: "I think the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall." In other words, keep reading this and you'll go blind.

That rationale arguably applies to "crush videos," but it's hard to see how it justifies prosecution of the sale of dogfighting videos, which means that Stevens likely will go free. Watching violence against animals is constitutionally protected as long as you don't enjoy it too much. If a Cable TV producer greenlights Alito's idea of a Human Sacrifice Channel, he should be careful to market it to anthropologists, not sadists.

-- Michael McGough

 

Small-government conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg makes a startling argument on today's Op-Ed page: We should make the House of Representatives bigger. A lot bigger, in fact; Goldberg says a Congress with 5,000 members would shake up our nation's calcified two-party system and more closely approximate the kind of democracy the founding fathers intended.

UC Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, meanwhile, debunks arguments that the healthcare bills pending in the House and Senate would be unconstitutional. And obesity experts Kelly D. Brownell and David S. Ludwig argue in favor of a tax on sugar-sweetened sodas, which would help fund healthcare reform programs and lower healthcare costs by decreasing obesity and related ailments such as diabetes.

On the editorial page, the board urges the Obama administration to consider backing new elections in Afghanistan or a transitional government, unless monitors can determine that the country's Aug. 20 election was legitimate.

The editorial board also takes up a gun-rights case and argues, surprisingly enough, in favor of stronger protections for gun owners. Though the board favors measures to reduce gun violence, it thinks the Supreme Court should rule that the 2nd Amendment applies to states as well as the federal government. That's because allowing states to ignore this part of the Bill of Rights could undermine the requirement that they abide by others.

Finally, the board notes that Comcast Corp.'s proposal to buy NBC Universal cuts against the grain of recent media deals, and its effect on the marketplace may be limited. But it will be interesting to watch how the combined company's approach to the Internet might change.

* Cartoon by Rob Rogers / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette