Grammys.

I have no interest in this topic. I mean I was slightly interested in this photo of Ellen DeGeneres aiming her nose at the "keyhole" opening of Katy Perry's dress and in the fact that Lena Dunham has a boyfriend and he's in a band that had the "Song of the Year." And I'm interested in speculating about whether it was because of the Grammys that they ran such an atrocious episode of "Girls" last night. (The last few episodes of the show had been great, but this one descended into real estate porn: The girl gets a boyfriend seemingly for the purpose of letting us see all the rooms in his expensive house. Oh, that wasn't all there was. There was Lena Dunham — in one of said rooms and in nothing but her panties — playing ping pong. That carried forward the show's theme of really awkward nakedness. That's why I had to correct myself after I said "I might as well be watching HGTV.")

"Would she, like me, have found a cosy coffeehouse environment on the internet, a way to connect with people who understood her aesthetic and validated her experience?"

"Would she have been less dependent on the approval of viewers and critics and more aware of the positive effect her book was having on splintered psyches and girls with short bangs everywhere? Or would that kind of connectedness and access to unmitigated and misspelled negativity have driven her even madder?"

Reflections on the 50th anniversary of a suicide.

The real reason Obama has campaigned on small things — like Big Bird and "Romnesia."

According to Stanley Kurtz, it's a plot to realign the electorate, "creating a long-term Democratic majority that would allow him and his successors to stop catering to the center and finally govern decisively from the left."

Somehow, within the lulling smallness, there's a scary bigness.

Obama’s frantic efforts to gin up the women’s vote and the youth vote aren’t only desperate attempts to secure his base. They flow from a deliberate decision not to fight for the center, but to build an independent majority on what is supposedly the “demographically ascendent” left.

Over at The Nation, Richard Kim gets it. Writing about the Lena Dunham “first time” ad controversy, he speaks of it as part of an effort “to realign the electorate towards the Democratic Party for a generation.” But the best place to read about Obama’s larger strategy is “Hope: The Sequel,” the New York magazine piece by John Heilemann that got attention last May.... describ[ing] an Obama campaign willing to risk turning off socially conservative Democrats and independent voters by hyping leftist social issues....

That reminds me of the way Republicans turn off the socially liberal folks (like me) who would be receptive to the rest of what they have to offer. The 2 parties have corresponding strategies, including trying to scare people about how extreme the other party really intends to be. I don't trust any of them.

"Ronald Reagan's 'First Time' Vote [Joke] Was Dirtier Than Lena Dunham's."

Does that mean we can't criticize the Obama campaign for that Lena Dunham ad anymore?

Possible arguments:

1. Reagan was talking to guys in a working-class bar, not putting the smutty material in a carefully crafted, glitzy ad aimed at everyone.

2. If Obama got caught on an open mike saying something like "I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever; we begin bombing in five minutes," there would be nothing to complain about because Reagan did that.

3. We remember Ronald Reagan. We knew Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was a friend of ours. Lena Dunham, you're no Ronald Reagan.

ADDED:

4. For Ronald Reagan's remark to be taken as sexual, we would need to believe that he wanted us to visualize him on the receiving end of sexual penetration, and he couldn't have meant that.

5. The comparison to Reagan's joke assumes that the criticism of Dunham's ad was based on prissiness about sexuality, but it was really about trivializing the election and treating women as if they vote based on their sexual attraction toward the President.

Voting is like having sex... says the Obama campaign.

With this ad, featuring Lena Dunham (of the HBO show "Girls"):



So, really, who do you want to have sex with, ladies? That is the question. Oddly, that was a big topic on the Rush Limbaugh show today.

CNN had to pull a story that they had on their website after reader backlash. "Following a firestorm of negative feedback, CNN hastily deleted from its website late Wednesday virtually all mention of a study about the effect hormones have on women’s political preferences. 'A post previously published in this space regarding a study about how hormones may influence voting choices has been removed,' a message posted on the website at 8:15 p.m. read. 'After further review it was determined that some elements of the story did not meet the editorial standards of CNN...'..."