Key Advisors Are Abandoning Cain Over His Flubs, Not Harrassment Allegations

The beleaguered Herman Cain, who never had much of a campaign staff, is losing the backing of key conservative advisers who were providing him with free positive press and were fundraising conduits.

Talking Points Memo reports that these powerful voices — ranging from Mike Huckabee to Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham -- are privately expressing concern about a man they once praised, but less because of the sexual harassment allegations against him than repeated flubs on Libya and other foreign policy matters that have revealed him to be an ignoramus.

Meanwhile, every new revelation about Cain’s extra-marital dalliances has provoked increasingly bizarre responses from the Republican president wannabe, but his pushback against Ginger White’s detailed and credible account of her 13-year affair with him may represent the last nail in the coffin of a man who never could be taken seriously.

Even the candidate seems to realize this with The New York Times, among other media outlets, reporting that he told members of his staff in a conference call on Tuesday morning that he was reassessing whether to proceed and would make a decision in the coming days. As it is, the first crucial primary-season votes will be cast at caucuses in Iowa on January 3, which is less than five weeks away.

Cain had entered the campaign with the wind at his back. His unconventional and anti-Washington views captured the imagination of some Republican voters, but he has plummeted further and further in the polls with each new allegation and revelation.

White, who blabbed to an Atlanta television station, is not claiming that Cain harassed her as have four other women. In fact, she described their affair in terms of a romance and said that she only came forward after seeing how Cain has treated the other women who have accused him of harassment.

"It was pretty simple," White said of their relationship, which she hinted was sexual. "It wasn’t complicated. I was aware that he was married. And I was also aware I was involved in a very inappropriate situation, relationship."

Cain's response was that he was just trying to help the woman financially, an alibi first strutted out when Sharon Bialek, a former employee of the National Restaurant Association's educational foundation, stated that Cain approached her on the pretense of showing her the association’s offices but parked his car and essentially assaulted her, slipping his hand under her skirt and trying to bring her head toward his lap. Bialek said that when she protested and reminded Cain that she had a boyfriend, he replied, "You want a job, right?"

Asked directly by CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "Was this an affair?" Cain responded, "It was not," yet again calling to mind Bill Clinton's classic assertion that "I did not have sexual relations with that woman . . . Monica Lewinsky."

Cain's response was effectively undercut by his lawyer, L. Lin Wood, who said "This appears to be an accusation of private, alleged consensual conduct between adults -- a subject matter which is not a proper subject of inquiry by the media or the public."

A number of pundits have opined that consensual affairs are private affairs. But wasn't that exactly the case with Clinton and Lewinsky? And isn't Cain just another political hypocrites, more often Republicans than not, who blather about the sanctity of marriage while living shadow lives?

Cartoon du Jour

Tom Toles/The Washington Post

When Greatness Rubs Shoulders With Greatness, The Result Is Superb Jazz

LEW TABACKIN

If you're not an aficionado of jazz, you'll probably want to skip this post. But if you are, read on and groove to the sounds and sensations of Zoot Fest 2011.

Zoot Fest is an annual do in honor of two of the all-time great sax players -- John Haley "Zoot" Sims and Alvin Gilbert "Al" Cohn (photo, left).

Long story short, Cohn was among the first of the world-class jazz musicians to move to Delaware Water Gap in the Pocono Mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Attracted by low home prices and the relatively easy commute to Manhattan jazz clubs and recording studios, Bob Dorough, Giacomo Gates, Dave, Liebman and Phil Woods, among others, followed, giving the one-stoplight town the honor of probably having more jazz greats per capita than anywhere else in the world.

"I'm an after midnight guy in a 9 o'clock town," Cohn remarked in a teasing putdown of the Water Gap, but he and the cats who migrated after him liked the tranquil scene there so much that they always came back to it from their world tours. Cohn bequeathed his magnificent collection of jazz records, sheet music and ephemera to East Stroudsburg University, which in turn begat the Al Cohn Memorial Jazz Collection.

In addition to honoring Sims and Cohn, Zoot Fest raises much needed money to keep the collection open to the public, and the 2011 edition was a joy.

This year's fest featured a remembrance of the jazz loft scene in New York City in the late 1950s and early 60s, including that of Time magazine photographer W. Eugene Smith at 821 Sixth Avenue. Sims and Cohn were frequent visitors to this infamous location in the Village, but the biggest hits were a musical chairs jam session featuring tenor sax greats Phil Woods and Lew Tabackin, young alto sax up and comers Jay Rattman and Adam Niewood, trombonist Rick Chamberlain, vocalese and keyboard maestro Bob Dorough, pianist Court Stewart, drummers Bill Goodwin, Marco Marcinko and Ronnie Free, and bassist Bill Crow. The day concluded with a big band blowout by all of the above artists and more.

As so often is the case when greatness rubs shoulders with greatness, these musicians outdid themselves, and Tabackin's soaring solos were beyond marvelous.

'The Bottom Of The Fox' Now On Kindle

The second edition of The Bottom of The Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blood Murder is now available on Kindle. From the back dust jacket blurb:

Eddie Joubert's midlife crisis had arrived right on schedule. He fell hard for the Poconos, a resort area in Pennsylvania where he bought a rundown tavern that became a magnet for an eclectic clientele that ranged from world-class jazz musicians to bikers to returning Vietnam War veterans. But the Poconos held a dark secret. When Joubert was hacked to death in 1981, it was yet another in a series of gruesome unsolved murders and puzzling deaths involving hippies, gays and other people whom the authorities cared little about because they were considered to be lowlifes.

The Bottom of the Fox lays bare that secret for the first time. It details the astonishing level of violence in an area known for resorts and verdant woodlands while revealing how evil doers could literally get away with murder.

Order a copy through Amazon USA here. The Kindle edition also is available through Amazon in the UK, France and Germany.

'The Age of Innocence' To 'Empire Of The Summer Moon': 35 Influential Books

The end of another new year and there are another 30 or so books under this bibliophile's belt, an inordinate number of them Scandinavian murder mysteries (I inhale them like popcorn) but a fair number of them heavy duty (like eating one's way through a five-course meal).

A year ago I published a list of my 30 most influential books, which I expand to 35 here (actually 36 because one new title bumps an old one from the list) with the latest additions noted with an asterisk. All of these books are available through online retailers and for free through the Inter Library Loan service of which most larger public libraries are a member.

FICTION

(*) THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton (1920) This beautifully told tale of a couple's impending marriage in the 1870s and the introduction of a scandal-plagued woman whose presence threatens their happiness questions the assumptions and morals of 1970s New York society.

THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60). These four stunningly written and interlocking novels are set in Alexandria, Egypt between the first and second world wars. Written in experimental form, Durrell presents his narrative of love and love's labors lost from different viewpoints.

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger (1951) This classic tale of teenage angst was the first of many books that would alter my world view. I bought a Signet paperback that I still have with money from my paper route at age 12 and read it through twice -- and several more times over the years.

CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller (1961) Reading this satire on the insanity of war was a rite of passage for my Vietnam era generation, but Heller's masterpiece of comic set pieces is timeless. "Catch-22" has entered the English language to signify a no-win situation and influenced Robert Altman's M*A*S*H.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866) I only recently got around to reading the classic story of Romanovich Raskolnikov, a dissolute former student who rationalizes killing a greedy pawnbroker as not just a way out of poverty but justifiable in the pursuit of the higher purpose of ridding the world of an evil person.

DEVICES AND DESIRES by P.D. James (1998) By my lights the best of James's 14 Adam Dalgleish murder mysteries and the author at her writerly heights. The book begins with the New Scotland Yard detective himself finding a body on a beach and then cascades into a series of interlocking plots and startling conclusion.

GOING AFTER CACCIATO by Tim O"Brien (1978) Like Heller, O'Brien brilliantly captures the absurdity of war in this tale of a private, intent on walking 8,000 miles to the Paris peace talks, deserting his post in Vietnam. This is hands down the best novel about Vietnam.

(*) A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS by David Eggers (2001) I finally understand what all the buzz was about when this alternately hilarious and sad memoir was published. Eggers, a college senior, loses his parents to cancer in the space of five weeks and inherits his eight-year-old brother.

THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969) Women's liberation and reevaluating gender roles were ascendant in the 1970s, and no book better captured these memes than this sensitively told story of an emissary to a planet where people are of no gender -- or both. Science fiction at its very best.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkein (1954-55) The greatest beauty of this trilogy, written by Tolkein for his grandchildren, is that it is great literature whether you read it simply for the epic story of Frodo Baggins and his trek through Middle Earth, or dwell on its religious, mythological and philological sub-themes.

THE MAGUS by John Fowles (1966) I only rarely read a book more than once, but I read this masterpiece of mystification and survival shortly after it was published and then again three years ago. Given my own intellectual growth, it was even better the second time around.

MATTERHORN: A NOVEL OF THE VIETNAM WAR by Karl Marlantes (2010). This list was already somewhat Vietnam and war book top-heavy and I didn't think I had the stomach for a 600-page account of a Marine Corps infantry company's struggles to take and retake a mountain, but I did and was hugely rewarded.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut (1969) This is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a former prisoner of war in a German POW camp who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens. A masterpiece of absurdity.

(*) SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW by Peter Hoeg and Tiina Nunnelly (1995) As the title implies, Smilla knows everything there is to know about snow (and ice) and that leads her to a shattering series of murders and other crimes.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee (1960) Lee's only novel follows three years in the life of a backwater Mississippi town through the eyes of an eight-year-old, but is chockablock with big themes, including race, class and justice, as well as one of the best surprise endings in fiction. .

NON-FICTION

AMERICAN PROMETHEUS: THE TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (2005) Behind the scenes, the life of the brilliant physicist and mastermind of the Manhattan Project was devastatingly sad and the way that the U.S. and other governments exploited scientists and science irrevocably damaging.

BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM by James MacPherson (1988) If you can read only one book about the Civil War, this is it. MacPherson writes beautifully, but it is his deft weaving of the oft-told story of the war on the battlefield with the complex economic and social forces of the time that make it so special.

DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA by Alexis de Toucqueville (1835-40) This, of course, is the seminal reference work on the American democratic system, but it is the exploration of the economic sociology of the young republic that I found most fascinating.

THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST by Tom Wolfe (1968) This tale of Ken Kesey and his LSD-gobbling, revolution-fomenting Merry Pranksters is the ultimate Sixties book and a harbinger of what became known as New Journalism. It has one of the best openings paragraphs evah.

(*) EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON: QUANAH PARKER AND THE FALL OF THE COMANCHES, THE MOST POWERFUL TRIBE IN AMERICAN HISTORY By S.C. Gwynne (2010) This is the amazing story of the improbable rise and eventual fall of the Comanche nation, focusing on the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest Comanche chief.

FIRE IN THE LAKE by Frances Fitzgerald (1972) Precious few studies of the Vietnam War were written as seen through Vietnamese eyes. Fitzgerald's analysis is a reminder of how the U.S. so tragically misinterpreted the people and misunderstood the conflict.

IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote (1966) This story of the brutal murders of a wealthy Kansas farmer, his wife and two of their children was a harbinger of the flood of true-crime books, television shows and movies that continues to this day. Capote is at his best in exploring the complex psychological relationship between the murderers.

(*) THE ISLAND IN THE CENTER OF THE WORLD By Russell Shorto (2005) If you think that the history of Manhattan began when the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, think again. And read this marvelous account of why Dutch influence still imbues the island in unexpected ways.

THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA: A NATURAL HISTORY IN FOUR MEALS by Michael Pollan (2006) This book literally picks up where Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation left off as Pollan begins with a description of a McDonald's meal consumed by his family. He asks fundamental questions about the moral and ecological consequences of our food in this brilliantly written and witty wake-up call which, of course, has been widely ignored.

(*) MALCOLM X: A LIFE OF REINVENTION By Manning Marable (2011) This book is an overdue corrective to Alex Haley's bestselling bio, and while laudatory of the great civil rights leader in some respects it portrays him as a serial embellisher.

THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM by T.E. Lawrence (1922) I had read a popular abridged version of "Lawrence of Arabia," but finally read the original, which is about a third longer and twice as good. Lawrence's penetrating observations about the Arab world and British imperialism during World War I are just a pertinent today in Iraq.

STORMING HEAVEN: LSD AND THE AMERICAN DREAM by Jay Stevens (1998) Although not the best written of books, this history of LSD is invaluable. Most accounts give the usual suspects too much credit, while none focus on a strange and wonderful bird by the name of Al Hubbard, who is said to have given LSD to 6,000 people in the belief that the drug could change the world.

UP IN THE OLD HOTEL by Joseph Mitchell (1992) A sort of counterpoint to The Age of Innocence, this legendary New Yorker writer who lovingly chronicled the lives of odd New York characters, including greasy spoon cooks, oystermen, gofers, bag ladies and Gypsies, struggling to survive during the middle decades of the 20th century.

THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: THE EPIC STORY OF AMERICA'S GREAT MIGRATION by Isabelle Wilkerson (2010) As migrations go, it dwarfed the California Gold Rush of the 1850s and the Dust Bowl migration in the 1930s. But somewhat perversely, the Great Migration of six million blacks from the South was so immense that it has escaped the notice of most historians. That imbalance has finally been corrected with this magisterial book.

TOP IMAGE: "Reading" (1873) by Berthe Morisot

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

Lana Peters (1926-2011)

Lana Peters, the only daughter and surviving child of Josef Stalin, perhaps the greatest tyrant of the last century, has died impoverished and in obscurity 12 years into the new century in a nursing home in a quiet Wisconsin community. She was 86.

The death of Peters, who was named Svetlana Stalina at birth, was like a barely audible echo from an explosion in a galaxy far, far away, in this case the rein of terror of her father, Soviet Premier Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, whose improbably defeat of the German armies on the Eastern Front will forever be overshadowed by his murder of perhaps 20 million of his countryman.

Peters' life was largely coincidental to her father's deeds and the path of Soviet history. She often said that she had been a slave to public circumstances although she was a willing propaganda tool for the U.S., where she defected in 1967, and then the Soviet Union, where she returned in 1984, and reaped royalties from not one but two best-selling autobiographies.

Her life seems to have been painfully unsettled. She was beset by emotional problems, sampled religions from Catholicism to Christian Science to Hinduism and repeatedly moved. At one time or another she lived in India, England, France, Switzerland and Soviet Georgia, finally resettling in the U.S.

Peters had a loving relationship with Stalin, who would cuddle and kiss his "little sparrow" while ordering mass executions. But all was not sweetness and light for her in the Kremlin. Her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva,who was Stalin’s second wife, committed suicide in 1932. Svetlana, then 6, was told that her mother had died of appendicitis and did not learn the truth for a decade.

Uh Oh! There Are Only 36 Shopping Days Until The Iowa Republican Caucuses

The Vampire Elite Runs Our Lives. The corporatocracy has become more powerful than government. Congress is bought by special interests. The Supreme Court has ruled that Dow Chemical and Exxon Mobil have the same rights as people. It is for these reasons that it is time for a national referendum on what I call Proposition 29.

Proposition 29 is simple in the extreme: "It is the will of the American people that the tyranny of the elites must be checked. Therefore, lobbyists and government must be kept separate at all times and in all respects."

Wait a minute! What a stupid idea.

* * * * *

It is difficult to view immigration as the third-rail issue it was only a couple of years ago.

The more draconian state anti-immigration laws are being rolled back or reconsidered, while Newt Gingrich seems to have joined Rick Perry in endorsing what President Bush called for: a general amnesty for illegal immigrants who have paid taxes and lived within the law. Like Bush, the views of these two GOP presidential wannabes are apostacy to Michele Bachmann and others of the hard right-wing persuasion.

"I don’t see how the party that says it's the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter century," Gingrich said during the most recent presidential debate. "And I’m prepared to take the heat for saying let's be humane in enforcing the law without giving them citizenship, but by finding a way to create legality so that they are not separated from their families."

* * * * *

Has there ever been a more openly racist candidate for president that Herman Cain?

As ironic as it seems for a man whose race was enslaved, then emancipated but still victimized well into the latter half of the 20th century to be spouting bigoted blather, Cain does so with an extraordinary nonchalance whether it is the suggestion that an electrified fence be erected on the Mexican border or his dismay when he found out that the doctor operating on him for colon cancer might be a Muslim.

The physician was named Dr. Abdallah, which he told a crowd at a Christian-themed amusement park "sounded too foreign."

Don't worry, he's a Christian from Lebanon," a medical aide reassured him.

* * * * *

Speaking of Cain, it turns out that he is a bit of an embarrassment to students at his alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, or at least freshman Daniel West.

Speaking at a student-sponsored political forum, West said he was dismayed by Cain when he watched him in a debate pitching his 9-9-9 plan in a manner that reminded him of an infomercial hawker.

"I was like, 'You're the only black person in a room full of white people, and that's the way you act? Come on!' "

* * * * *

The mantra of the Anyone But Mitt Romney crowd is simple: If the former Massachusetts governor is the nominee, conservatism dies and Obama wins.

My question is, does Romney even need purity-test conservatives to get the nomination? Possibly not considering that John McCain got the nomination in 2008 despite a right-wing revolt against him led by Rush Limbaugh, who considered the Arizona senator "an imposter."

Limbaugh eventually came around and is likely to do so again, while Ann Coulter already has broken ranks and endorsed Romney.

* * * * *

It is beyond obvious that Rick Perry is at war with history. The man who as Texas governor promoted the secession of the Lone Star State from the Union, which is a constitutional no-no, he is now arguing that the military and not the commander in chief should have the final say in wartime.

This also is a constitutional no-no, but Perry is having none of that: "For us to micromanage them, in a civilian way, without their commanders being truly in charge, is absolutely irresponsible, and as commander-in-chief of this country, I will not let it happen." Well, it's highly unlikely that he'll get the chance.

* * * * *

How serious are the presidential wannabes about foreign policy? Not serious at all, and that's fine with the news media. Europe, which is on the verge of imploding, did not come up a single time in the two foreign policy debates, nor was there any discuss about North Korea, the crisis in Egypt and the Arab Spring in general, let alone other hot spots.

There was, however, time for a robust discussion about further stressing America's national security apparatus by monitoring Muslims more closely than other citizens.

Cartoon du Jour

Tom Toles/The Washington Post

Tom Wicker (1926-2011)

As self-unaware as this may seem, I didn't realized until hearing of his death that the journalist that I had modeled myself most closely after was the legendary New York Times op-ed columnist, who died on Friday of an apparent heart attack at his Vermont home.

During the 25-year run of his column, “In the Nation,” Wicker never courted controversy but he never shied away from it. He was an iconoclast and his politics were liberal, but that did not prevent him from turning his praise for President Johnson for pushing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 to bitter condemnation for the ever deepening American involvement in Vietnam. Jimmy Carter got both barrels of the Wicker shotgun for his poor stewardship of the economy and Iran hostage crisis. President Nixon put him on his “Enemies List” and President Bush the elder was roundly condemned for letting the Persian Gulf War take precedence over education and social programs.

I rose through the newspaper business from being a lowly obituary writer to beat reporter, then rewrite man, city editor and investigative editor in part because of my ability to think on my feet.

Wicker vaulted to prominence overnight because of his extraordinary coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy. He dictated the searing images of the day — the rifle shots across Dealey Plaza, the wounded president lurching forward in his limousine, the high-speed drive to Parkland Memorial Hospital, and the doctors there giving way to priests — from a phone both. Like myself, Wicker valued stark but detailed prose.

I grew up in a household where Sundays revolved around The Times, back then a behemoth that ran to as many as 20 sections and sometimes weighed as much as 10 pounds.

Wicker was a must read as a teenager who aspired to be a journalist, and he was a breath of fresh air compared to his op-ed predecessor, the fusty Arthur Crock, who had covered every president since Calvin Coolidge and was long past his prime.

Wicker sometimes allowed himself to become part of a story, most notably when 1,300 inmates seized 38 guards and workers at Attica prison in upstate New York in September 1971.

Having written a sympathetic column on the death of the black militant George Jackson at San Quentin, Wicker acceded to a plea by the rebellious inmates to join a group of outsiders to inspect prison conditions and monitor negotiations between inmates and officials. The negotiations ended more or less peacefully but then state officials reneged on their promises.

He was 85.

Why Damned Liberals Have Distorted The History & Meaning Of Thanksgiving

This marvelous essay was published on November 27, 2008

by the late great blogger Jon Swift.

This year as President Bush pardoned two turkeys, who surprisingly had nothing to do with the Savings and Loan scandals of the 1980s, he remarked that it was his "last Thanksgiving as President." But it might be the last Thanksgiving any of us celebrate since there is a good chance that when Barack Obama takes over, he will abolish Thanksgiving along with other holidays liberals hate such as Columbus Day, Christmas and the Fourth of July.

Unfortunately, liberals have distorted the history and meaning of Thanksgiving because they see everything through the ideology of victimhood, which is a glass-half-empty view of history. Thanksgiving to liberals is a celebration of purported genocide against the Indians perpetrated by the Christian pilgrims. But in fact this is not what Thanksgiving is about at all. As usual liberals are ignoring the real victims here.

Thanksgiving celebrates the day that Pilgrims and Indians sat down to eat together before the gay secularist Indians divided this country and tried to foist their atheism and savage decadent culture on the God-fearing pilgrims. The pilgrims were rightly appalled by Native American culture where transgendered "two-spirit" people or "berdache" were accepted as normal members of the tribe. To Native Americans, who were ignorant of the Bible's proscriptions against homosexuality and running around practically naked, there was nothing wrong with squaws marrying squaws and braves marrying braves. The pilgrims did not care what Indians did in the privacy of their own teepees, but they did not want their children exposed to this immorality. So the pilgrims were forced to defend themselves, just as Proposition 8 supporters, under assault from gay activists, must defend themselves now.

The idea that pilgrims defending their way of life committed genocide is a gross distortion of history, as Mona Charen and Michael Medved point out. "In the clash of civilizations between European settlers and Native Americans, millions died," Charen writes. "But the overwhelming majority of those deaths were attributable to diseases carried involuntarily by Europeans and spread to natives who had no natural immunities to these pathogens. That is a tragedy, but not a crime." Medved's new book The 10 Big Lies About America reveals the truth behind the "smears" that slavery was such a big deal or that genocide was committed against the Indians, which has ruined Thanksgiving for so many people. For example, he points out that the idea that Europeans had anything to do with willfully spreading disease through small pox-infected blankets is a myth. "The endlessly recycled charges of biological warfare rest solely on controversial interpretations of two unconnected and inconclusive incidents 74 years apart," says the film critic, who screened hours of John Ford westerns to verify his findings. Sure, there may have been a few little massacres, such as the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre and Wounded Knee but most Indians died of diseases whose spread was no doubt hastened by their decadence and promiscuity.

Of course, it didn’t have to be that way. If the Native Americans had left the Europeans alone and stopped trying to foist their way of life on them there would be more Indian-operated casinos in America today. When we celebrate Thanksgiving, we are celebrating what America might have been if Indians hadn't started the culture war that divides us to this day. Just as the Indians tried to foist their culture on the pilgrims, gays today are trying to force gay marriage on Christians and they seem surprised when Christians fight back to preserve their culture. If gays want to say they're married that's fine with me, just don’t force us to recognize it or give it legal standing. Then you are impinging on my rights.

Some gay conservatives, such as GayPatriotWest, understand that they should just be thankful for what they have. They have the freedom to practice whatever vile acts they want to practice behind closed, double-locked doors and we have the freedom not to have to know about it. As long as they don't make the same mistake the Indians made, we can all live together in peace and harmony. It's no wonder that liberals hate Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a celebration of freedom. As GayPatriotWest points out "in practical, definable terms, the daily threats to my liberty are not being pushed by religious conservatives." Our freedom is under assault in more important ways than whether the Mr. and Mr. GayPatriotWests of the world can register at Bloomingdale's and visit each other in the hospital and file joint tax returns and not get evicted from their home or inherit money or property if one of them dies or be separated by deportation if one of them is an illegal alien. Liberals are trying to take away more important freedoms like the right to smoke in bars or eat trans fats or buy political influence or own assault rifles (which would have come in quite handy if settlers had had them to ward off Indian attacks).

So this Thanksgiving let us remember and celebrate a time when there was no culture war and gay secularist Indians and religious conservative pilgrims could sit down together and smoke a peace pipe without having to worry about anti-smoking laws and consume all the trans-fat-laden delicacies they wanted, with their guns and bows and arrows stashed under their seats just within reach.

November 22, 1963: Living The Illusion That It Could Never Ever Happen Again

If you are of a certain age, the events of November 22, 1963 and the following days are deeply seared in your mind, but as yet another anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy comes and goes, those memories do not automatically flood our minds as they did in earlier years. Part of this, of course, is the passage of time, but it also is the fact that with the exception of Ronald Reagan, there has not been a serious attempt to take the life of a president in nearly half a century and most of us live under the comfortable illusion that it could never ever happen again.

Yet the safety of Barack Obama has been very much on my mind and not just because of a certain president of a Republican group at a Texas university who infamously suggested a few days ago that it is "tempting" to assassinate him.

Every president has had their hardcore detractors. In fact, an ad was running in a Dallas newspaper accusing JFK of treason the day of the president's visit. Yet Obama has been the recipient of an unusual amount of animus.

Charlie Pierce, writing in Esquire, says that:

"Every president has to live with the notion that any random nut can buy a gun and stand a pretty good chance of getting the job done if the random nut doesn’t mind getting ventilated in return. Presidents get briefed on this stuff. But, as is the case in so many things, this president is different. History has made him so. An attempt on this president’s life would resonate, in history and in memory, far beyond Ford’s Theater, and Union Station in Washington, and the Exposition Grounds in Buffalo, and Dealey Plaza. It would resonate, in history and in memory, back to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and to an earthen dam in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and to 2332 Guynes Street in Jackson, Mississippi, where the blood of Medgar Evers still stains a driveway, and to a hundred dark roads, and to a thousand ghastly trees, freighted down with so much more than Spanish moss. Some bullets make history. A bullet fired at this president would gain its power from a history that we all have worked so hard to pretend never really happened before, and really could never happen again."

I don't really want to go here, but here I go: Would the assassination of the first African-American president really be so surprising in a nation where state-sanctioned violence against blacks was eliminated barely a half century ago?

There already have been a few ham-handed plots on Obama's life, and that certainly has something to do with the supercharged political climate. Then there are religious fanatics like Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, whom investigators say fired a semiautomatic rifle at the White House the other day because he believes Obama to be the Antichrist.

But Obama is an African-American and while there never has been comprehensibly plausible explanation for the circumstances behind JFK's assassination would we ever believe the commission that would weigh in on the assassination of the 44th president?

Of course not, because American history would not be on officialdom's side.

Cartoon du Jour

Glenn McCoy/Universal Press Syndicate

30 Years On, The Question Remains: Was Natalie Wood Murdered By Her Hubbo?

It was November 29, 1981 and Hollywood star Natalie Wood had a few days off over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend from shooting Brainstorm. She and actor-husband Robert Wagner were doing what they often did on weekends, spending some time on their yacht Splendor, which was docked at Isthmus Cove on Catalina Island, drinking and drugging. Christopher Walken , who also was appeared in Brainstorm, was with them.

The sci-fi film would be the diminutive actresses' last. At some point a heated argument broke out between the two men and sometime after that Wood, who was wearing a down jacket, nightgown and socks, drowned. The official ruling was that it was an accident. Police and famous L.A. Coroner Thomas Noguchi ruled that Wood had fallen into the water trying to secure a dinghy that was banging against the Splendor's hull.

Noguchi concluded Wood had drunk "seven or eight" glasses of wine and was intoxicated when she died. He also found Wood's fingernail scratches on the side of the rubber dinghy indicating she was trying to get into it.

But a witness on a nearby boat gave police another account.

She recalled hearing a woman's cries for help around midnight that lasted for 15 minutes. "Someone else said, 'Take it easy. We'll be over to get you,'" the witness said. "It was laid back . . . There was no urgency or immediacy in their shouts."

Now some 30 years later almost to the day of Wood's death, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department announced the case has been reopened because investigators had been contacted "by persons who stated they had additional information about the Natalie Wood Wagner drowning. Due to the additional information, Sheriff's homicide bureau has decided to take another look at the case."

Wagner, who twice married Wood, said the argument with Walken was about "how much of one's personal life should be sacrificed in pursuit of one's career," has insisted over and over again that no one heard anything that night, but in true L.A. fashion not only has the investigation been reopened but there is a new book out on the case, Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour, an account of the fateful evening by Dennis Davern, the captain of the yacht.

Davern says that in addition to drinking, Wood, Wagner and Walken were taking Quaaludes before she disappeared. Wagner became enraged when he saw Wood and Walken speaking, and smashed a wine bottle, yelling at Walken, "What do you want to do, f--k my wife? Is that what you want?"

At that point, Walken returned to his cabin and Wood and Wagner went to their state room, according to the captain. He said he heard a loud argument between the couple and thumping sounds, and eventually silence.. A short time later, Davern went to the deck and was told by Wagner, "Natalie is missing," but he refused to let the captain call the Coast Guard.

Wagner told Davern that he dinghy was gone, along with Natalie, but some people have doubted that account because Wood was deathly afraid of dark water.

I was a huge fan of Wood, whose outstanding film roles include Rebel With Out a Cause, West Side Story and Splendor in the Grass. She was nominated for two Best Actress Oscars and several Golden Globes. While the official account did not quite add up for me at the time, I am skeptical of Davern's account because it took him 30 years to come clean and he has 0done so in the form of a tawdry true-crime memoir.

PHOTOS: Wood in (from top) Brainstorm, Rebel Without a Cause, West Side Story and with Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass.

And Jane Austen Was Poisoned. Maybe.

Jane Austen's untimely end at the age of 41 has long been a cause for speculation among historians.

Austen, the author of classics including Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, may have died of arsenic poisoning, according to a crime writer who has reviewed the last letters of the British novelist.

The crucial clue lies in a line written by Austen a few months before her mysterious death in 1817.

Describing weeks of illness she had recently experienced, Austen wrote: "I am considerably better now and recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour."

According to Lindsay Ashford, a British crime writer, the description matches the symptoms of arsenic poisoning, "which causes skin spotting if taken in small doses over a long time."

The crime writer strengthened her theory when she learned that a lock of Austen's hair bought at an auction in 1948 by a now deceased American couple, had tested positive for arsenic.

"The arsenic in Jane’s hair meant that she had ingested the poison in the months before her death," Ashford said.

Cartoon du Jour

Ben Sargent/Universal Press Syndicate

Rick Santorum Should Just Go To Hell

The juxtaposition on The New York Times homepage of a shocking story that the Census Bureau has found that 51 million Americans have incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line and the latest frothings from Little Ricky Santorum was in all likelihood unintentional, but made a big point. Two, in fact.

Point One is that the number of new near poor in the U.S. as the lingering effects of the Bush Recession is much worse than supposed.

Point Two is that Santorum is a self-righteous jerk.

Speaking at a town hall meeting in Iowa the day the Census Bureau report was released, the Republican presidential wannabe and helpmate in launching the recession argued that Americans receive too many government benefits and ought to "suffer" in the Christian tradition.

If "you’re lower income, you can qualify for Medicaid, you can qualify for food stamps, you can qualify for housing assistance," Santorum complained, before adding, "suffering is part of life and it’s not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life."

In case you're wondering, Santorum's net worth approaches $2 million.

Newt Gingrich Redux: Now Its His Turn To Drive The GOP Presidential Clown Car

I was going to wait until next week to write about the Newt Gingrich boomlet, but given the speed with which the keys to the Republican presidential clown car are being passed on that might be too late.

As predictably as Gingrich then Donald Trump then Michele Bachmann then Rick Perry and now Herman Cain went and are going down, Gingrich is now neck and neck or slightly ahead of Mitt Romney in most polls despite being badly damaged goods. By this . . . er, logic, Trump should be primping for his second boomlet.

The reason for Newt Redux is simple: The Tea Partiers who have hijacked the Grand Old Party are in desperation mode as it becomes increasingly apparent that the former Massachusetts governor, whom they view as a moderate in conservative drag and a member of a religious cult, to boot, has an increasingly better shot at the nomination. This is because the more uncommitted voters who might not want to see Barack Obama re-elected are starting to pay attention to what the nuttier and dumber candidates are saying and they don’t like what they’re hearing.

Predictably, only milliseconds after Gingrich's surge was adjudged as real by the punditocracy, the latest of a long line of scandals broke:

Gingrich, for whom the truth always has been a malleable commodity, had said last week during one of the never-ending presidential debates that he had made a mere $300,000 in consulting fees from two contracts with Freddie Mac, the federal mortgage company that played a starring role in the housing industry collapse. The real figure, according to two people familiar with the arrangement, was between $1.6 million and $1.8 million, or roughly three to four times larger than the $500,000 line of credit that third wife Callista has at Tiffany's as the result of her influential position as a congressional committee staffer.

* * * * *

And so Gingrich, whose candidacy former campaign manager Rich Galen likened to "an airliner with no wings, no engines, and no landing gear" after quitting because the candidate was more interested in vacationing with his love muffin on a Greek isle than stumping in Iowa, has gotten his second wind. This is not because he is preferable to others in the field but simply by default, and it is taking an amazing case of willful amnesia for that to happen.

Back in May -- which seems like light years ago given the peregrinations of the Republican field -- Tea Partiers suffered a collective nervous breakdown when Gingrich assailed Tea Party darling Paul Ryan's Medicare plan as "right-wing social engineering" and then committed double heresy by adding that "all of us have a responsibility to pay for health care." As a matter of fact, in the mid-1990s, Gingrich argued in favor of requiring Americans to buy health coverage, which is the centerpiece of ObamaCare.

Then there is the matter of Gingrich's serial infidelities, which suddenly seem to matter less than Cain's alleged serial sexual harassing. Gingrich has another problem as well: He has little money, his campaign organization is a Potemkin village, and it is difficult to imagine him running a real let alone credible campaign if he were to steal the nomination.

* * * * *

Perhaps the most actute analysis of who Gingrich really is comes from think tanker John McWhorter:

"Gingrich may be a master of academic exercises -- his ability to make bookish references and formulate long sentences demonstrate as much -- but that does not mean he knows what he is talking about.

"Gingrich's patterns of speech are largely analytically acute, and sometimes aesthetically interesting, but substantively, they are very often lacking. Language is supposed to be a package that carries substance, but Gingrich is sometimes so pleased with his uninterrupted stream of words, that he mistakes it for an actual flow of ideas."

And so the ultimate insider, who is even more ideologically compromised than Romney, has become the new darling of the ultimate outsiders. At least for now.

Cartoon du Jour

Glenn McCoy/Universal Press Syndicate

Karl Slover (1918-2011)

MORE HERE.
Photo from MGM via Photofest

The Scandal That Keeps On Giving

The Paterno home near the Penn State campus

Eleven days after the arrest of former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, the hydra-headed scandal shows no sign of abating.

In the last 48 hours, there have been these development:

* Mike McQueary, the assistant football coach under fire for his reported lack of action in an alleged 2002 anal rape of a boy by Sandusky in the team's locker room showers, said in an email to a former classmate that he stopped the assault and discussed it with police. This account contradicts the accounts of now-fired football coach Joe Paterno, university police and testimony given to the grand jury that indicted Sandusky.

* Paterno, who has been criticized for not taking more decisive action when after he spoke to Sandusky about one of the alleged incidents, transferred full ownership of his house to his wife, Sue, for $1 in July, less than four months before the scandal broke. Some legal experts suggested that the transfer was made to help shield himself from legal exposure if he became the target of lawsuits.

* NBC News made public Bob Costas' entire interview with Sandusky, a portion of which had aired on Monday night. The contortions he made in maintaining his innocence heightens the impression that he seems to be a very sick and remorse-free man perhaps unaware of his own addiction, as well as failing to comprehend that his on-air comments were the equivalent of throwing gasoline on a fire.

* Centre County, Pennsylvania District Judge Leslie Dutchcot, who was once a volunteer for Sandusky's Second Mile charity, was criticized for releasing Sandusky on $100,000 bail at the conclusion of a hearing in her court on November 5, far less than the $500,000 that prosecutors had called for.

McQueary states in an email dated November 8 obtained by the Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call, that he "did have discussions with police and with the official at the university in charge of police" following the alleged incident. He wrote that he "is getting hammered for handling this the right way or what I thought at the time was right."

"I had to make tough impacting quick decisions," McQueary wrote.

In a brief interview with CBS News on yesterday, McQueary said he could not discuss specifics of the situation but described his emotions as "all over the place. . . . Just kind of shaking. Crazy. Like a snow globe."

McQueary has been criticized widely for not going directly to police to report the alleged abuse. In an appearance Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett said McQueary met "the minimum obligation" in reporting the incident to his superiors, including Paterno, but did not "meet a moral obligation that all of us would have."

According to the grand jury report, the graduate assistant, later identified as McQueary, said he saw a boy, whose age he estimated at 10 years old, "being subjected to anal intercourse" by a naked Sandusky in a shower at the Penn State football building in March 2002. The graduate assistant left "immediately," was "distraught" and called his father. His father told him to leave the building and come to his home.

In the email, McQueary said "I did stop it, not physically, but made sure it was stopped when I left that locker room."

Paterno and his wife had jointly bought their off-campus house for $58,000 in 1969, while documents filed in Centre County show that it is now worth $594,484,40. The transfer of Paterno's share to his wife was made for a dollar plus "love and affection."

Wick Sollers, a lawyer for Paterno, said in an e-mail to The New York Times that the Paternos had been engaged in a “multiyear estate planning program” and the transfer “was simply one element of that plan.” He said it had nothing to do with the scandal.

Experts in estate planning and tax law, in interviews, cautioned that it would be hard to determine the Paternos' motivation simply from the available documents. It appears the family house had been the subject of years of complex and confusing transactions.

Lawrence A. Frolik, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in elder law, said that he had "never heard" of a husband selling his share of a house for $1 to his spouse for tax or government assistance purposes.

"I can’t see any tax advantages," Frolik told The Times. "If someone told me that, my reaction would be, 'Are they hoping to shield assets in case if there’s personal liability?' " He added,"“It sounds like an attempt to avoid personal liability in having assets in his wife’s name."

Having now listened to the entire Sandusky phone interview, I have to agree with Times television critic Alessandra Stanley, who writes that it was "one of the more disturbing and damaging attempts at spin control in recent memory — and this is an election year. Sandusky sounded a little like those men who are caught in pedophile sting operations on the program 'To Catch a Predator' and can’t stop talking. But Sandusky wasn't ambushed; his lawyer was the one who asked Costas if he wanted to talk directly to his client."

At one point, Sandusky seems to take credit for all the young boys he didn’t touch or shower with. Costas asked him about reports that still more possible victims from the Second Mile, the charity founded by Sandusky, could come forward.

"I would . . . I would guess that there are many young people who would come forward," Sandusky replied, "many more young people who would come forward and say that my methods, and what I had done for them made a very positive impact on their life."

Not content to leave it at that, he added: "And I didn't go around seeking out every young person for sexual needs that I've helped. There are many that I didn't have -- I hardly had any contact with who I have helped in many, many ways."

Among those criticizing District Judge Dutchcot was Monroe County, Pennsylvania District Attorney David Christine.

"I won't comment about her decision in that case, but I will say I don't believe any district judge here in Monroe County would have set a bail amount that low for someone charged with what Sandusky is charged with," said Christine. "I think the prosecution's request in that case was reasonable."

Dutchcot is a former Monroe County assistant prosecutor and was a volunteer at The Second Mile at-risk children's camp Sandusky founded in 1977.