Tag Archives: Johnny Depp

Here’s Hoping the January 6 Committee Has Its Show Biz Pants On

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They stormed the Capitol, then posed for selfies | The Economist

The cheap and easy joke is that if producers want to guarantee an audience for these January 6 hearings they need to put Johnny Depp and his girlfriend on the stand. Or at least get a celebrity masked singer to blast out The Star Spangled Banner.

Whatever the issue — a worldwide pandemic, a military invasion, gun slaughter — Americans insist on being entertained. Not necessarily with a laugh, but with a story that has easily identifiable villains and relatable heroes, spectacle and most of all … pace. The characters and scenery need to change frequently. Things may not drag. If your show is “slow”, you’re dead. “Boring” is the cardinal sin of show biz. Alternate viewing is a half-second away. With a tap of a button your vitally important, democracy-protecting message, and — oops — your long-gestating cri de coeur, has been replaced in America’s family rooms with pizza-spinning super heroes.

So here’s hoping the (mostly all) Democratic committee staging the hearings over the next couple weeks are being honest when they say they’ve applied basic show biz thinking and pacing to the packaging of these 90-minute, primetime events.

The critical question is whether they’ve got enough suspense, revelation and sex appeal to reach beyond the usual Trump-reviling choir. Personally, I’m skeptical I’ll see or hear anything I don’t already know or suspect. And that includes the promised video-taped depositions of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

I have no confusion whatsoever about the “hows” and “whys” of Jan. 6. I understand what drove it, who fomented it and who was meant to benefit from it.

But I understand the central purpose of this capitol hill mini-series. It is, not to put to blunt a point on it, to create enough populist mass to compel Attorney General Merrick Garland to finally, formally indict Trump and his long … long … list of stooges and cronies responsible for everything that went into a plot to overthrow an election/stage a coup. Poor ratings and bad reviews may be taken as a sign there’s insifficient public “will” to prosecute Trump, with all the certain hellfire of backlash from MAGA-land that would ensue.

But … maybe … possibly … with a good, compelling TV show producing a large audience and that dominates a half dozen consecutive news cycles, the Justice Department will accept the risk of a US v. Trump trial and indict a man who has obviously, clearly committed a staggering long list of crimes against … contractors, bankers, insurance companies, individual women and oh yes, the vaunted Constitution.

So yeah, I’ll be watching.

I just suspect “The Masked Singer” will pull bigger ratings.

As Sordid an Example of “Legislating from the Bench” as We’ll Ever See.

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How the Federalist Society came to dominate the Supreme Court – Harvard Gazette

Not that there was really any question, you understand. But with this “leak” of the Supreme Court’s imminent abortion ruling we can pretty well dismiss the notion that there is ever a “settled” argument in this great, grand democratic experiment of ours. Given sufficient connivery, bad faith and partisan fervor, nothing is ever truly decided and settled.

Court watchers and other sage heads — like Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick — are at the moment undecided about why and who leaked Sam Alito’s 98-page screed/draft of the court’s upcoming opinion. Was it someone trying to gin up enough public outrage to … do something about it? On a court where there’s a locked-in-stone five votes to decide in favor of anything the Federalist Society/evangelical right has on their to-do list?

Or was the leak from someone sympathetic to overturning Roe? An arch-partisan wet dream that has never polled higher than 30% with Americans since 1973? The thinking being that given Americans’ inability to focus on anything longer than two weeks would mean the howling and protesting — from the majority of citizens — will be exhausted by June when the formal decision is expected to be handed down?

Predictably, FoxNews world is already declaring that the “real scandal” here is … the leak … not Alito’s thinking.

Whatever, there’s little doubt that overturning a “settled law” that has maintained 70% support for 50 years will be the signature decision of John Roberts’ court. This vote will be his legacy. And as I’ve followed the news since last night, Roberts has neither said or signalled anything about how he will vote or whether he’s trying to work the team to modulate the greatest example of “legislating from the bench” in modern American history.

The Roberts angle of this is interesting because from everything I know about the guy he is the classic between-the-forty-yard-lines institutional conservative … getting trampled like so many others of his fading ilk by hyper-partisans with a truly hypocritical regard for constitutional integrity. Like so many old-school, country club Republicans, he’s watching the cumulative effect of so many of his status quo/progressive-resistant decisions coming back to wreak havoc on the dignity of the institutions they claim to so revere.

The abortion argument is so treadworn there’s nothing fresh to be said about it. My personal attitude — shared by many in polling over the decades — is that while I could never consent to it in my relationships, and certainly not as “casual” birth control, the idea that The Government has any standing to dictate to a woman what she can and cannot do — even in the case of rape or her health for chrissakes — is about as anti-democratic, anti-libertarian and anti-American experiment as it gets.

What makes the pro-life argument even worse — which is to say even more hypocritical — is that poll after poll and study after study shows that Godly-divined, Christ-sanctioned anti-abortion partisans are nearly as rabidly opposed to social welfare spending — for people like single-mothers — as they are to choice. For them, support for life stops at birth.

Here’s George Carlin’s classic “pro life” rant.

Amy Klobuchar popped up on Rachel Maddow’s show last night making brave sounds about how this means liberals and everyone else in favor of Roe as it stands has to, you know, band together and gird for the fight to change Congress before this authoritarian stampede gets any worse.

To which I say, “Well, good luck with that.” As someone pointed out on Twitter this morning, over two million people have signed a petition to cut Johnny Depp’s ex-wife out of the next “Aquaman” movie because she was so so crazy mean to Johnny.

By contrast, the outrageously sordid tale of Clarence Thomas’s wife cavorting with abject nutjobs and insurrectionists — with his full knowledge — trying to subvert the Constitution by overthrowing an election has faded from public interest with no apparent legal consequences.