AddieStan

Winning One for the Gipper The Tiffany Network Folds So, let me get this straight: CBS has cancelled the centerpiece of its sweeps package --a $9 million, two-part, made-for-TV-movie about former President Ronald Reagan and his lovely wife, Nancy--at the muscular request of the Republican National Committee. Now, it's one thing to go around naming every public works project imaginable after the patron saint of voodoo economics (Poppy Bush's phrase; not mine), but to mess with sweeps? To get in the way of that orgy of over-the-top first-run programming that comes our way a mere three times a year? How dare they! But seriously, folks; am I the only one who finds this episode a little bit scary? CBS's sin seems to have been its portrayal of the former president as befuddled and the first lady as controlling--hardly the stuff of scandal. And certainly not new information. (Remember Kitty Kelley ?)* Yet because the movie was the least bit derogatory, t...

src=http://pstr-m03.ygpweb.aol.com/data3/006/5E/ED/6D/EE/ZoluY-6Jq2fZjIRmgn8+TG97lXCsCxfL0060.jpg> A Mixed-up, Tumbled-up, Shook-up World "K Street" Premieres photo of George Clooney © 2003 Adele M. Stan It’s hard to imagine what a normal person--someone not caught up in the minutiae of national politics--would have made of last night’s premiere of HBO’s “ K Street ”. Truth be told, as an abnormal person--one obsessed with the minutiae of national politics--I’m not so sure what to make of it myself. Oh, I was riveted all right--even when the relentless jerkiness of the hand-held camera (using only available light, of course) made me queasy. And I would have been almost as captivated had I not attended the event that landed at the center of “K Street”, Episode One: last week’s Democratic presidential debate in Baltimore (co-sponsored, in good old odd-bedfellow fashion, by Fox NewsChannel and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute). Paging Ionesco Even ...

Independence Day Washington Blade On Independence Day in Merrimack, New Hampshire, the floats and convertibles and flatbed trucks festooned in red, white and blue are lining up in the parking lot of Zyla’s, a sort of garden shop/hardware store on the Daniel Webster Highway. There’s another half hour to go before the official start, an excercise the people of Merrimack perform annually, but one I view only every four years. For on the quadrennial, the candidates contending for primacy in the New Hampshire primary invariably show up, taking their places amid the marching bands, Girl Scout troops, Cub Scout packs and Rotarian floats, hoping to win the hearts of those who populate New Hampshire’s largest single voter precinct. It isn’t even noon yet, and the temperature has far surpassed the 90-degree mark. “Global wahr-ming,” says my friend Chuck, goofing on a flat-lander’s idea of a New Hampshire accent. A vociferouslly literate institution of civic activism in that gi...

Odds of dying in a terrorism attack on a mall , if malls are being attacked at a rate of one per month: one in 6 million. Odds of dying in an anthrax attack : one in 70 million. Ratio of general US population to die last year from smoking-related illness: eight in 5,500. Odds of dying in an automobile accident: one in 6,700. Odds of being mowed down by an automobile while standing at a bus stop: better than you'd think. A week ago Saturday, we sat in a cafe, Katie and me, ruminating on the absurdities of the week just behind us. We had been on heightened alert status for more than a week, and the first precip of a promised blizzard had begun to fall. It’s all been kind of touch-and-go here in our nation’s capital. Code Orange , mounds of snow, the constant, dull roar of fighter jets overhead--and love’s special day. With a rueful laugh, Katie relayed a snippet of a piece she had seen on a local newscast. The reporter was interviewing people in a grocery store check-out line...