There should be a tacit understanding in the halls and offices at 1211 Sixth Ave. that, if you want to keep your job, you vote for Barack Obama over whomever his (ill-equipped) Republican opponent may be come Nov. 6, 2012.  While ratings for the cable news channel slipped in 2011, it remains the most-watched of all cable news networks for the tenth year in a row (and #4 of all cable networks, thought not for year 10).

The reason: terror and coercion. The same tactics Nicolae Ceausescu used in the 1970s and 80s to mess with the minds of Romanians, are those used by Fox News to bait and trap, field-dress and wall-mount viewers. (If Glenn Beck compares democrats to Nazis over and over and over, why can’t I cite a more esoteric totalitarian state, perhaps in a more accurate (albeit less rhetorically effective (for various reasons, including the fact that more the demagogues talk about Nazis, the more fearsome Nazis become)) form?) It might stop short of brain-washing, but barely.

“Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV,” David Frum (yes that David Frum) wrote in New York Mag. “The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel).”

Without a foreign-born black Muslim in the White House, the ability of a cable news channel to broadcast fear and impending doom and pseudo-nostalgic loss all but evaporates. Sure the ratings for Fox News were down in 2011, but it still remained numero uno of cable news channels, where it has perched for the last ten years, precisely when Americans became marrow-deep, soggy-underpants terrified of anything outside our borders. Which, if I’m not being clear enough, is not a coincidence; there is an explicit art to nurturing and perpetuating fear that Fox News has mastered and President Obama is the network’s most versatile and convincing canvas for this televised exhibit.

What liberals forget in their indignation and incredulity with Bill O’Reilly, Beck, et alii is that Fox News is not an original thought. It’s more of a Reply All email, the original email being the increasingly sappy reporting by the major news networks during the first Clinton administration, the Send button hit in 1996 by Rupert Murdoch and the saggy jowls of Roger Ailes. The Fox New Channel might not be "fair" or "balanced" but you can't say that it doesn't create an overall cable news world that, taken as a whole, is both.

That's why I'm a fan of Fox News. That's why I watch Fox and Friends every morning. That's why, as former President William J. Clinton recently pointed out, the FNC business model works so well it’s being copied by the left in a kind of fight-fire-with-fire gambit.

“I was just watching MSNBC, and they had a woman that used to work for me and a couple of other people on there, and they were talking about the Republican primary,” Clinton told Esquire. “And I was laughing. I said, ‘Boy, it really has become our version of Fox.’ And I say that because…I think the breaking up of the media, which is otherwise kind of healthy, has contributed to less actual reporting and a louder, more contentious, more divisive public discourse, highlighting conflict, sometimes falsely.”

Not only is conflict highlighted (by “sometimes falsely,” I’m assuming the former commander-in-chief meant either that an actual disagreement didn’t exist in some cases, or, in some cases, one of the two sides (or both) was misrepresented), but every minutia of every story is given the gravitas and urgency of the 1969 moon landing.

Just now I was watching the channel, because it’s Sunday morning and on Sunday mornings I enjoy waking up to pomposity, when the violet-clad anchor turned to the story of a capsized cruise ship which was preceded with a shockingly bright intro-graphic that warned viewers to grab their loved ones and head for the nearest fall-out shelter because we’re on high ALERT.

Part II, the second:

Jan 6, 2012: More Jobs Mean Nothing; Fewer Jobs Mean Everything

Jobless numbers were released to the press at 8:30am ET on Friday: lowest unemployment in 3 years, 8.5%; the U.S. added an unexpected 200,000 jobs in December, yanking the percentage of people in the workforce who are out of work down by 0.2% in a month.

Mitt Romney was unimpressed. He said in the debate this week:

“What I blame [Obama] for is having it go on so long and going so deep and having a recover that’s been so tepid. Businesses I’ve talked to all over the country that would have been hiring people are not hiring, and I ask them why, and they say because they look at the polices of this administration and they feel like they’re under attack.”

If Romney were elected President in 2008 – and he came so so close – everyone would have had jobs at Staples by March. 

“All of this makes for a reality of a president who has been anti-investment, anti-jobs, anti-business,” Romney went on.

Call me a liberal, leftist, lefty, socialist pansy for writing things like this – but: that makes as much sense as claiming that a mother hates her son if she tries to talk him into taking out loans to get a college education.

Obama hates America so much, must be secretly planning a tactical nuclear strike on Wisconsin. I’m sure of it.

Nov 15, 2011: Obama on Tour

Can’t remember where I heard or saw this, but it amused me, so I wrote it in the trusy BlackBerry.

"I've got some stuff I'd like to try out," Obama said. "I want to see what the reaction is."

President Obama was talking about his anticipation of hitting the road again for The 2012 Campaign of Comedy where, evediently, he tries out his latest and greatest “Mitt’s Momma is soooo Fat…” jokes a Larry’s Lounge of Laughs in Peoria, IL, perfecting his delivery and set list before moving to larger venues in the swing states.

Let the hilarity ensue!

Oct 30, 2011: Entering Hog Heaven

Here’s the BB entry: “Leaving Hog Heaven and ‘eat mor chikin’ commercials...weird morbid thinking about carnivores. What would cannibal ads be?”

Here’s the photo:

Here’s the thought: Does anyone else think it’s weird, like creepy weird, that we anthropomorphize the animals we eat?

Chic-fil-A, a chain of fast-food restaurants that deals exclusively (and deliciously) in chicken, runs an ad campaign in which cows travel around pulling stunts encouraging people to “Eat Mor Chikin,” meaning that they (the cows) have a homosapien self-awareness of the bovidae family being slaughtered by the dozens for American dinner tables, as well as the dexterity to turn on light switches and steer (get it?) parachutes into football stadiums, but oddly lack either the will or ability to fight back in any way other than the bovine equivalent of flash mobs. (They also spell at a first grade-level, for what it’s worth.)

The Hog Heaven sign hangs in a bar called Brother Jimmy’s near Union Square, NYC. There they serve up northern, southern or dry rub ribs, St. Louis style half rack of ribs, rib tips (by the bucket), sliced brisket, Carolina pulled pork (platter or sandwich or wrap) and the Brother Jimmy’s Cuban, which comprises sliced smoked pork, buckboard bacon, gruyere cheese and fried pickles. Oh. And black eyed peas – with bacon.

The implication is that when you exit Brother Jimmy’s Union Square you are leaving the place that swine go in the little piggy afterlife, which is, of course, quite literal, but probably not what the pigs had in mind. Let’s face it, those of us that believe in “heaven” don’t, in all likelihood, imagine our paradisiacal next step as a cannibalistic BBQ joint where people with bones in their lower lips hang out, munching on what used to be our collective right hamstring, trading laughs beneath a sign that reads “Y’ALL NOW LEAVING HUMAN HEAVEN.”

While I haven’t written (or had the time or the energy or the drive to write) I’ve been collecting ideas for topics for the last few months on my BlackBerry as I roam about.  I would now like to make an effort to catch up on the those months by listing (sic) the ideas I thumbed into the little device and what a portion of the essay would have been, had I had the parenthetically aforementioned motivators.  I’ll try to do these three at a time, over the course of a few days, beginning with the most recent and working my way to October 2011.


Dec 23, 2011: Karl Rove telling Reps to cave and accept the Senate extension of the tax cuts

The latest example of why people who are either a) retarded or b) fucking crazy should be disinvited to the party on Capitol Hill. Rove told Fox News that Republicans in the House needed to accept the two month extension of the payroll tax cut because some in the party had “lost the optics on it.”

Two days earlier, Speaker John Boehner blocked a Senate proposal to extend, even though he earlier backed the prop, because some of the more conservative (a term that is rapidly becoming a word synonymous not with traditional, level-headed, structured as it has been and should be, but with extremist, bull-headed, unstable) members of the GOP vowed to revolt. Call them Tea Party-ers, call them Ultra-Conservatives, call them hard-liners – these people who refuse to rationally negotiate (and sometimes accept things they aren’t too please with; the characteristic that differentiates a negotiation from a browbeating) make me want to keep Barney Frank around for another six years just so he can tell them

And the rather off-putting Kiki thing is my friend Kiki who, when Prop 8 passed in California, said, “Of course it passed; if you allow people of the same gender to marry, when does it end? Can people marry 12 year olds? Family members? Animals?

The latest confounded attempted obfuscation came at the hands of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been trying to block the creation of something called “veterans courts” at which former military service men and women are tried, convicted, sentenced and rehabilitated outside of the mainstream legal system.  The programs have been operating for about two years now and, while there so far are not any definitive success-rate numbers, “by and large, the courts have reported little recidivism,” according to the Atlantic Monthly. 

The ACLU has tried to block the creation of veterans courts, claiming they’re some sorta form of elitism – because a person who commits a petty crime after spending 12-15 months in brutal, uncivilized, psychologically scarring conditions, fighting for the (ostensible, but still) perpetuity of the American civil system that will, as a thank you, rush them through a criminal court, sentencing them to a 60 days in Folsom without peer support or counseling and therefore initiating a cycle of criminal behavior that will continue until death or the same court just says fuck it and hands down a life sentence – that person is exactly the same as some drunk jackhole who parks his pickup halfway into the candy aisle of the BP.

“We’re not against diversionary programs, but the idea of an entirely different court system based on status doesn’t make sense,” says Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel of the ACLU of Nevada. “Does that mean a police officer who is accused of a crime should have a separate court because of his stress?"

My guess is Mr. Lichtenstein never served win an infantry unit on the front line.


Dec 1, 2011: Obama Should Box Out

Finally: I wrote this note on the subway, heading home from Manhattan, reading GodKnowsWhat. It was reactionary, making the “GodKnowsWhat” part a bit of a problem. Regardless, the sentiment was this:

The game that Obama needs to play in order to win is also one of the most effective gambits of his favorite sport: boxing out you opponents. 

The GodKnowsWhat article was talking about Newt Gingrich’s stance on illegal immigrants and how, in order to get that crazy right, fringe vote, he has been curling in on the borderline amnesty (no pun) talk and going harder on the deportation talk.  Obama should encourage this; he should box his opponents further and further right.

This is not a defensive move. As anyone who has played even a high school gym class game of basketball knows, boxing out is a brutal display of muscle and brilliant use of momentum and position. In order to win, Obama has to take up more and more real estate on the right; he has to push his opponents, starting now, further and further over into the hands of the Tea Party theocrats (be honest, that’s what they are). Obama will win the 2012 general election precisely because he isn’t liberal enough for the bloody liberals (who were dumb enough to see a black man instead of a candidate in 2008, just as they were to see a young man instead of a candidate in 1960) and the great majority of American citizens aren’t stupid enough to believe that immigrants’ participation in the United States marketplace reduces their economic well-being. I hope.

What people commented on, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg when he took the podium at 8:44am, was that the day was clear just like the Tuesday ten years ago. From what people can remember. For those few hours of thin daylight before the late morning sun was choked gray by 200,000 tons of steel, 425,000 cubic yards of concrete, 43,600 windows, tumbling horribly, devastatingly toward the earth in downtown Manhattan.

Mayor Bloomberg spoke of the lives lost, aptly quoting Shakespeare: “Let us not measure our sorrow by their worth, for then it will have no end.”

Exactly at 8:46am, the time the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center in 2001, those at Ground Zero observed a moment of silence. That silence seemed, today, to resound around Manhattan. Streets were closed, tourists were sparse, Grand Central Station was almost laconic.  That tangible grayness ten years ago is an emotional grayness that clings to the city today, on the conversations, the memories, to the steps of pedestrians, on each note of  “America the Beautiful” from the bells of the Catholic Church on Park Avenue played out at 12:09pm.

The shock and the anger and the abject incredulity are still a little raw, even after a decade. 

“I cried thinking about the New Canaan train station filled with cars that would be left unspoken for and I cry now,” one woman wrote on Facebook. Another said, “10 years ago I woke up planning to go to Tower Records on 72nd St after math class to buy the Glitter soundtrack... and then a whole lot of things got put into perspective.” And another, “So searing it seems like it was yesterday – we will never forget.”

I imagine those feelings, for most of us, will never scab and never ameliorate. They can’t. They can’t because we will never have answers satisfactory enough to consummate healing. I, personally, will never get used to the moments of silence. 

Looking over the faces of those presents at Ground Zero this morning, taking in that moment of silence, some with heads bowed, some with eyes lids drawn, some staring lugubriously into the inches of air before them, you couldn’t help but wonder what particular memories were going through their minds when they thought about the loss of a friend or family member. 

You couldn’t help but wonder if Barack Obama stood tall with the pride of successfully hunting and killing Osama bin Laden.  Was he imagining those moments when CIA briefed him and those moments when he had to decide which course of action to take?  A decision that, were it the wrong one, would cut back into the wound those who lost at Ground Zero felt, and, were it the right one, would hardly begin to help heal. 

And what about President George W. Bush? Why did he look so small, weathered, beaten? Does he think back to that Florida classroom and that children’s book and the moment the agent whispered into his ear that the United States of America was under the largest foreign attack since Pearl Harbor? Does he feel sorrow, anger, regret?

Following the ceremony, the New York Times couldn’t help but comment on the politics of the situation.

“Unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Bush drew a brief cheer from the crowd before his reading. Applause also followed Mr. Bush as he left the stage,” the Times nodded.

The Times isn’t wrong to bring politics into this.  As much as we want to keep it out, to shame those who would stoop to even hinting at using tragedy as demagoguery or gambit, in the basic level that politics is getting people to do what you want (ideally, philosophically what you think is best for them), while the US has in some ways succeed in fighting the terrorist that attacked New York City ten years ago, we’ve done little to change the way people feel about a place know as the Land of the Free.

“More worrying, some experts say, the administration has yet to figure out how to effectively counter Al Qaeda’s propaganda,” according to the Times. “It has failed to prevent a small but growing number of Americans from becoming radicalized, often by listening to online videos by militants like the American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, now in hiding in Yemen.”

What’s heavier and grayer and more dangerous than weapons and arms getting into the wrong hands in Korengal Valley, is that.  It’s that the Idea that propelled those planes into those towers is still out there.  It’s that the people are still afraid.  It’s that the bright blue sky this morning is not the only thing that’s the same as it was ten years ago. 

It’s more than disheartening to admit that I am my generation. I have difficulty writing and researching without the immediate, ever-present crutch of an internet connection (high speed; the browser on my mobile phone is as infuriating as sitting twenty minutes at a diner on Sunday morning without being offered a coffee (1)). It’s because I’m ill-prepared, as again are many of us. Were we to take John Steinbeck’s Rocinante out for a spin today, it’s likely we’d run out of supplies or patience by Buffalo, N.Y., I’d imagine at the point Customs refused to let our large blue poodle pass, or divagate from the point entirely and wind up in Nova Scotia or, heaven forbid, Tulum. 

The on-the-fly researching accomplice of the internet is both the reason for and the cause of my often labyrinthical divergence – much like the surfeit of entertainment options is the reason for and cause of the waning collective attention span. e.g. Since the last paragraph, I’ve spent a good quarter-hour snooping around for the meaning of (the etymology being quite clear) Rocinante; although I’ve said the term in my head many times (never pronouncing it correctly, I’m sure) I realized I didn’t know exactly what it meant or why Mr. Quixote chose such a name for his horse. (2)

One author – and I can’t, ironically or not, be bothered with the internet enough to search for who – once said that he wrote exclusively without a web connection because the damned thing was always taking him to places he didn’t want to be. 

This author was someone old. Someone like John Updike or Norman Mailer or someone like that, but not like Burroughs or Bellow or Roth – although, thinking about it, it could have been Roth. It really doesn’t matter. I cannot write without a connection to everything else; perhaps because my mind requires Tarzan vines with which to swing from topic to topic and is otherwise fallow of a sprout of inspiration. 

But there’s more. There’s the job that pays me (3). But that’s my weakness for letting it consume me or not being good enough at it to be able to consummate tasks required without utter and constant concentration. Kafka, among others who were not of some sort of professorial vocation that gave them the unique luxury of time to do their work like a waitress who is really an actress, were rumored to have overcome such trite inconveniences. 

There’s also the interior design (which at this moment hits a little close to “the job that pays me”). There’s the apartment without the internet connection that is also without desk, something that I didn’t think I’d miss until, as I am right now, I sat hunched over a coffee table and keyboard not realizing how much pain my lumbar was in until well into the second hour of hunch.

I left the desk in Los Angeles.  I sold it, more accurately; but it stayed there all the same. 

The desk was good. Like Hemmingway good. Not like something Earnest Hemmingway would sit at to write (I always imagine he wrote longhand in well lighted cafes, for obvious reasons) but something that he would call good if he were describing the room in which I use to sit to write. viz. (were Earnest H. to have actually written about my Los Angeles living room) I opened the door to the apartment and looked around at the furniture placed throughout the room in a deliberate pattern.  There was a couch, half over a large sisal rug and a bookshelf against the far wall. Next to the end table was an old stained maple desk. It was good desk (4).

The desk is replaced by an older back that aches more than it should from hunching for two hours.  It’s that, and the spotty connection and the other thing.

I’ve realized this little nugget is, just as dishearteningly as the generation note, more personal and less pithy than I prefer to write. And, in that case anyway, I probably shouldn’t post it. It’s not worthy of publishing, honestly, at any level. But the entire design of this exercise is that nothing is and everything is worthy.  Like another now dead author once said in an interview, I'm not trying to hide my gaucheries.  

1) I also refuse to capitalize internet or web for the same reasons I’d never capitalize earth or community. 

2)  It apparently mans something close to “formerly a hack or (in terms of horses, a workhorse or nag) and now first among hacks,” by the way.  The best explanation found in this brief search was a part of this essay: http://cervantes.tamu.edu/english/ctxt/DQ_Ormsby/part1_DQ_Ormsby.html

3) Which, incidentally, I love.

4) It’s maybe interesting that I read Hemmingway’s good the same way I read the Biblical good in Genesis 1. Then again, maybe it’s not.

We would spend hours arguing the finer and broader points of global warming, from a single flap of a butterfly’s wings to the ontological basics. To maintain and advance the argument, it was obviously necessary that one of us took and obstinately sometimes against better logic stood by the opposite side of the others.

As my friends and I sat in the Upper East Side condo years ago, I didn’t exactly understand why we did this and why we had to until I read a sentence in Michael Lewis’ “The Big Short.”

Lewis wrote about a investment fund manager named Mike Burry who was the first person to ask Wall Street to create credit default swaps on mortgage backed bonds so that he could but the CDSs and bet against the bonds.  Burry came to the idea after realizing the loans lower middle class Americans were receiving bordered, if not completely dove head-first into fraud.  Burry was a value investor, usually long stocks and so when he decided to short bonds, the people that gave him hundreds of millions of dollars to fuck around with started to ask him to please explain himself.

"I hated discussing ideas with investors,” he said, “because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process.”

What he was saying was, once he has to defend a position, it is no longer this is the best idea; it is if I don’t make this the best idea, I lose.

This was the same social trend within our global warming debate, as it’s the same social trend in politics and in punditry.  No matter how unsound your argument is, you will go at great lengths to make it appear sound once you become its Defender, even if that argument isn’t specific, even if that argument is always fighting against someone.

I heard this mind-bending argument roll out in a three-way converfuck on Fox & Friends this morning:

a)       Companies are going where there are cheaper labor costs.
b)       Three big tech companies have operations overseas: Apple, Google, Facebook.
c)       The CEOs of these companies have met with the US President, therefore:
d)       The CEOs of these companies must have advised the President at one point or another, so:
e)       The President doesn’t listen to what his top CEO advisers say
f)        The CEOs can’t convince the government/President to keep jobs here.
g)       The US President does not want Americans to have jobs.

At the end of this clearly scripted pile of horse diarrhea, the moderator for Fox & Friends closed with, “Good debate,” which is like telling your right hand “Good game” after jerking off into your football helmet.

I can’t even count how many logical fallacies there are in that argument; I find a new one each time I read through.  The big glaring-ass ones are: Affirming the consequent that companies are going overseas for cheaper labor, denying the antecedent that the CEOs gave the President advice (and a specific advice) simply because they met with him; and, the non sequitur that a United States President would chose to explicitly injure the economy he leads.

Now, I’ve heard a number of people claim that they’re not partisan one way or the other. They are issues people. They vote based on a candidate’s promise to lower taxes or criminalize abortions or withdraw troops.  Fact is that, once in office, once with all information in hand, any candidate might slide back on any issue, which means you can’t always trust the arguments, promises and issues of candidates running for US president.

Rather than issues (or, I’ll allow along with issues; if we elect someone who promises everyone a pony and then actually delivers, eh, might have trouble), perhaps it’s more important to base our individual votes on the character and intelligence of the candidate, rather than simply saying she is for gay marriage, so she’s the best candidate.*

Bill Clinton said something last week that was taken a bit lightly, a bit as though he were joking, but what he said, while it evoked giggles, is not short on truth or utility.

“Huntsman hasn't said what he's for yet, but I just kind of like him,” said Clinton in Colorado prompting a round of laughter. “He looks authentic – he looks like a real guy. I mean, a real human being. I like his family. I like his kind of iconoclastic way. And he was a pretty good governor. And he wasn't a right-wing ideologue.”

Clinton wasn’t being sardonic. He meant what he said: he just has a good feeling about this Huntsman guy.

So do I.  If I were forced to vote now and select a GOP candidate, it would be Jon Huntsman.  I actually know that he is moderate on gay marriage and sides more with those who say humans have some sort of effect on climate change, but more than that: he just seems a good guy.

Of course, four years ago John Edwards seemed like a good guy and then he started screwing anything holding a Flipcam.  So…you know…

*This qualifies not just for POTUS, but for any elected official, although we don’t have access or time for any elected official as we have for the president. (Also: I realize that we derive character and intelligence by hearing someone speak or watching her act and handle important policies and issues; it’s true that there is no duality.)

Just over a week after the anemic showing by GOP candidates in the either first or second debate of the 2012 US Presidential run depending on whom you ask, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman stood on the shores of quintessential American town, Jersey City N.J., and announced that he was joining what has already become the race against President Barack Obama.

There’s a reason Lady Liberty has her back turned to New Jersey.

"He and I have a difference of opinion on how to help a country we both love," Huntsman said of Obama. "But the question each of us wants the voters to answer is who will be the better president, not who’s the better American."

Great sentence. For a number of reasons. So, let’s go ahead and take ‘er apart.

First, "He and I have a difference of opinion on how to help a country we both love…" shows deference to the man who is Huntsman’s former boss and the man who is presently the leader of Huntsman’s country. This is job interviewing 101; you don’t sit for an interview and when asked about your former (or current, if you’re defecting) boss tell HR that he is a goddam moron whose hobbies, although you can’t absolutely confirm this you heard anyway, include hiring Filipino transvestites and not for research on the LGBT community, defacing national monuments with racoon feces, and running a sweatshop where heartbreakingly adorable puppies are forced to stitch white pyramidal-shaped hoods for days on end without either pee-pee or doo-doo breaks.

Next, "But the question each of us wants the voters to answer…" puts Amb. Huntsman on the same level as Pres. Obama. And brushes off that President Obama gets to call Ambassador Huntsman Ambassador Huntsman, a title that he gave Huntsman, at each "if necessary" debate between the two, basic title-protocol being that we address Him Without Title by the most recent non-unique title he held (with generally agreed upon exception going to the unique position of POTUS where Clinton, Bush 2 and Bush 1 (and, fine, I suppose Carter as well), all still heavy with secret service, are formally greeted "President So-and-So").

"…is who will be the better president…" casually brushes off that Barack Obama is, lest we forget, actually and presently the President of the United States and/or suggests that Obama is at present the better president (logically, since America chose him and since Huntsman is not currently in that office) and, only perhaps, Huntsman will be the better come January 2013.

"…not who’s the better American." The last five words are by far the best part; along with capitalism, industry, right to bear arms, and keep big government out, "more American" is classic political rhetoric. But Huntsman cunningly goes against the grain and in doing so appeals not to the Sarah Palin-Glenn Beck Right (see aforementioned catch-phrases) but to the Intellectual Right, those who understand that saying "I’m the better American" is like saying "I’m better at candy;" it’s vague and in its terseness seems, at first glance, like it should mean something powerful, but really all it means is that you know how to stand at a podium and grunt.

Within eight months, we’ll see if Huntsman is still in it (money on Yes, along with Romney, Paul and Giuliani (Santorum, Pawlenty out after Iowa; Bachmann after New Hampshire; Gingrich out by August; Cain out last week)), but for now he’s an intriguing play.

Huntsman's got international experience (Asian at that; he was Amb. to China for Obama and served in Singapore for Bush, Sr.), along with a strong small government record where he, according to him, created a standard of living that led Utah to be named "the best state in America."

I couldn’t find the exact publication or organization that called Utah that. Forbes called Utah "The Best States For Business And Careers" last October. And Gallup named it the second highest in Wellbeing behind Hawaii (N.b. it it was #1 over Hawaii in 2009 when Huntsman was still there), but it’s also the most stressful place to live in America, again, according to Gallup.

So, if you want to live really really well, but be going out of your mind with fear that you might lose that wellbeing, all while you’re not allowed to mitigate your stress with a shot of whisky, vote for Utah.

Other interesting Utah facts: Utah’s state emblem is the beehive; the state cooking pot is the dutch oven (smells great, what is that?); and the state bird of the landlocked territory is the sea gull.

One of the things you do to attract the opposite sex is drawn attention to your "naughty bits," says author and body language expert Janine Driver. Driver likes to demonstrate this by having a gentleman stand with his hands in his pockets. If, after she asks him to stand like so, he has his hands fully stuffed into either pocket of his pants, she considers this a timid pose; he his hiding his thumbs, therefore showing a lack of confidence.

If, on the other hand, he stands with his thumbs outside of his pockets, he is displaying a kind of sexual prowess by pointing, quite subconsciously but accurately, at his "naughty bits" with his thumbs.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) can do your thumbs one better, it turns out. Yesterday, as 150 Tweets in a row from various news sources will tell you (I subscribe to 45 total Twitter feeds, by the way, including friends), Weiner spoke of his indiscretions at the Sheraton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, explaining, as is compulsory for US politicians it turns out, why everyone in America has seen his penis:

"Last Friday night I tweeted a photograph of myself that I intended to send as direct message as part of a joke to a woman in Seattle. Once I realized I posted it to Twitter, I panicked, I took it down and said that I had been hacked. I then continued with that story to stick to that story which was a hugely regrettable mistake."

Although he might be overstating with hugely (I’ve seen bigger mistakes, like on Clarence Thomas and not just because he’s black; but yours is a good size, Tony), no doubt the punch line of that joke was killer.

Q: What did the mom Google when she wanted to learn how to block Rep. Weiner on Twitter?
A: "How do you cock-block?"

Q: What do you get when you combine a United States Congressman, a Reply-all button and a camera?
A: A whole lot of Weiner.

Regardless, if pointing to your naughty bits with your thumbs is a form of posturing to sexually attract people, wouldn’t emailing pictures of your genital be considered the same, in theory?

According to The Daily Beast, sure why not!

Jessica Bennett writes, "As Ogi Ogas, coauthor of A Billion Wicked Thoughts, puts it, it's possible that men who show their junk are compelled by an unconscious, evolutionary urge. Men, says Ogas, inherit this desire from their primitive ancestors—male monkeys and apes, for example, regularly show off their parts to show their sexual interest."

One of the issues of the article is: Why do men do this? Why do they (so called) cyber-cheat? Why do they send photos of their junk to women they’ve never even met.

The implication in the question is that women don’t do this. They don’t send photos of their vaginas and breasts out to online chat buddies. You’re not about to see a close up of Nancy Pelosi’s supple nipples pop up in your inbox (Subject: Raise the debt ceiling and I’ll raise something else…). You’re not about to find a video of Sonya Sotomayor dancing to Beyonce’s "Crazy in Love" at New York Dolls armature night (180,056 views; 2,056 likes, 3 dislikes). You’re not about to find Olympia Snow’s labia majora sprinkled throughout cyberspace (Click here to see the unedited photo – caution NSFW!).

Too far?

Okay, well, anyway: while those may be reasonable assumptions, it’s abjectly sexist (not to mention incorrect) to imply that women don’t email breasts, butts and cetera to friends, co-workers and acquaintances. Women are just as likely as men to crave the attention and "ego boost" that comes from people being interested in you. They are just as likely to get that will-I-get-away-with-it? rush when clicking Send. And, perhaps this is just my experience, but women are way more into exhibitionism than me.

I’d like to offer proof, but then they might stop doing it.