Dear David:
And I’m still piling through my clips from yesterday. To begin with:
1. Two weeks ago, a black Assemblyman named Kevin Murray driving a black Corvette in Beverly Hills on election night, after he just won the Senate primary, gets stopped by a Beverly Hills Cop. Big story, because Beverly Hills is being sued for racism, because the cops allegedly stop blacks. Now here’s the kicker. Jill Stewart, the best alternative reporter here, writes a story this week explaining that Murray was in Beverly Hills that night because he was on his way home to the condo he lives in that happens to be located in West Hollywood, not in South Los Angeles which is the area he represents, where his “address” was a dilapidated bungalow where the neighbors had to cut the grass until rehab began last week. His election is being challenged but, according to Stewart, Murray’s daddy is a big shot, and everyone else is passing the buck. So the people of South Los Angeles will be represented by a guy who lives closer to me (by a lot) than to them.
What do I say? Maybe he should run for Congress, and then he can live in your neighborhood? How does the black community end up with such pitiful leadership?
2. You heard it here first. External liposuction. Make no sense? The Los Angeles Times had a big story, which you might have missed, about the new piece of equipment being installed as we speak in our local fashionable dermatologists’ offices which through a series of treatments (say 14, none covered by insurance, followed by monthly touchups) reduces cellulite. According to the FDA even. So it’s coming. Liposuction is the number one cosmetic surgery today. Dermatologists are wielding lasers, which is valuable repeat business. Now, they can do rear ends and thighs. I have a diet book out, and used to be about 20-30-who’s-counting pounds heavier, and not in good shape, for most of my life, so I think about this. I love being thin. But the thought of surgically reshaping myself –and by the way, watching my friends do it–has left me searching for some distinctions, some limits, some idea of what is “enough.” The new obesity guidelines that everyone is screaming about–how dare they say we’re obese, we say over our bacon cheeseburgers–strike me as much needed. I think it’s good to want to be your best, but not someone else’s best. Getting your body in shape strikes me as different from getting a new body. But I’d buy the stock in whoever makes the machine. I think they’ll do well. Been there.
3. U.S. News’ scoop of the tapes. Who gave them the tapes? I’d like to know, wouldn’t you? They claimed it was someone with no ideological axe to grind, but the story was, as we would say, spun. Who was spinning it? Who, in other words, covers the media’s deals with the devil?
The same day Stu was drinking with his friend, the White House staff was, according to Al Kamen’s Washington Post column that morning, drinking with the press corps at a White House party. You and I didn’t see what went on there. Do we have a right to know? Why shouldn’t someone cover the media sucking up, and vice versa?
Should U.S. News be free to cut whatever deal it cut with whomever it cut it for whatever reason–and then dominate the news cycle–but be free from scrutiny for its dealings?
When you agree that something is off the record, does that bind the rest of the press corps?
Did anyone get to dunk Sidney Blumenthal for me at the White House party?
4. China. Back page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday, the analysis of the president’s trip made me very sad. It was a good piece, but the best spin the White House could put on a trip that will be one day of meaningless summit, and 10 days of supposedly meaningful sightseeing is that it is a symbolic trip that will open up China to Americans. Now I am very sympathetic to the notion that American children need to understand the world and our place in it etc. etc. But even more important, they need to understand how to read and add, and if we’re into symbolic trips, why not take one in a school bus across America. And if the answer is because so long as you’re here at home, it’s 24-hours-a-day Monica, and that’s probably true, then it does leave me feeling sad for the state of our democracy.
On the other hand, my daughter hates swim classes at camp because they make her swim the whole way underwater, and she is in the process of discovering that, like both her parents, she is better at calculating distances than swimming them–so I’ve got bigger fish to fry.
As for today, I’m just getting started, but even if you are right about Microsoft, is there no end here to the size of the future? AT&T buys TCI. Good morning. It’s Wednesday, in the year 1998. Did they know what was really happening back then? Do we?
Cheers
Susan.
