Though I was born in Buffalo, when I was ten we moved to Syracuse, “the home of the New York State Fair!” my mother chirped excitedly like some Central New York Booster on speed. I already hated summer fairs, having been dragged through the baby goat barn at the Erie County Fair. I always dreaded summer’s end, not because school was about to start up and I hadn’t lost ten pounds, but because the State Fair was about to begin.
That meant being unable to beg off attending, by claiming I was perfecting my jack-knife at the city pool. On thee hottest day, we would sit stuck in traffic, bare backs of legs stuck to the leatherette of our Ford Fairlane, park in an open scrub field, knowing that we would never see our car again, slog with other family pods to the long lines at the arching gates into a shadeless hell.
The fairgrounds were located next to the Bristol-Meyers plant and Crucible steel mill that everyone knew was dumping into Onondaga Lake. The annual spring regatta generally had the slowest times because no life-respecting coxswain wanted to win and get tossed into the lake. Supposedly the site has been eco-vacuumed, to make room for the Carousel Mall, but friends say that if you toss a cigarette butt, the parking lot will ignite. ‘Third eye’ takes on new meaning. That vision has prompted some local developers to expand and build “Destiny” a mall bigger than the Pentagon shaped mall in Minnesota.
On humid hot fair days the yellowish chemical air carried fried dough particulate from the Midway. The festival of junk food mocked the goody-two shoes Home Ec Pavilion. Even at ten, I pitied performers, squinting and sweating on the mainstage. Loser! Your career is over! Because of early gyroscopic, inner ear damage from spinning/falling down contests with my brothers, I hate rides. If you ever see a picture of me, hair blown back, in mid-Munch scream, elbows locked, it will be me on the stationary horse on the carousel. I loved the hostility of bumper cars, but that was just me blowing off steam.
All this to perhaps explain why I loathe Iowa. The Gateway to the Rectangular States. Not even three million people. All of them farmers who’ve got nothing better to do than pout if a candidate doesn’t have a meal at their house, wear their “I Heart Huckabee” button and pretend to be undecided so they can get face time on camera, and caucus endlessly.
The harvest is in and the fields are fallow. If they farm at all. The farm subsidy pyramid scam actually pays them not to plant. They feel terrible about it. Then when they’re done deciding the fate of the nation, the Children of the Corn State put on their mesh caps, hop in their giant mobile homes, at three bucks a gallon and head on down to some trailer parks for a few months on the Gulf. Jaw with their friends in the Iowa enclave about the sorry state of the world.
Hey, they make up stories about Manhattanites all the time. They hiss we are a Ssssssssanctuary City. We are Sodom and Gomorrah. Oh, and the hotel room rates are too high. I resent America held hostage to Iowa. I hate the roller coaster ride of campaigns, especially because it starts in Iowa. Where are those bumper cars when I need them?
PS – Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons just like they don’t have gay people. I have it on the best of intelligence.

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You’ll be happy to know that I have already broken my first New Year’s Resolution. I wanted to change my name to Plaxico Clinton, but my darling publicist nixed the idea. She’s all about the branding. Also my galpal was against it. And her name is Urvashi.
Some of you think I’d be better off changing my last name. Let’s hear it for those Americans freezing their caucuses off in Iowa for the sake of so-called democracy. Thank you. I wonder if Iowa goes into a deep depression on Friday when everybody decamps for other states. You know what? I don’t care.
We had our annual New Year’s Eve beachfire. Like bad-for-you snacks on Bowl Day, it’s a tradition. The winds were howling, the tide and surf were high, but the skies cleared a little before sunset and we went through with it. Thank god for duraflame logs. Two old Girl Scouts just fainted, but you try to lighting a fire in high winds.
We write down what we want to get rid of from the old year and toss it into the fire. Although the winds picked a couple lists up and blasted them down to Truro, we were able to tackle a couple of lists and get them into the fire. We were determined.
I burned up fear. I always do. Some say it’s an acronym for Forgetting Everything is All Right. Somewhere profoundly that might be true, but just to be safe I also burned up the Bush Administration and war. Let’s get this primary thing done and pick somebody already and get these monsters out of power.
I resolved that each one of you read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. It is a must read. Or listen to it on audiobooks. We did on our drive back to NYC and almost ran over a couple of mini-Coopers. Sorry. Get it. Read it. We’ll discuss.
Happy New Year!!

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For my high school graduation, I asked for and received a doctor’s supervised diet. After the weigh-in and the weekly shot of “vitamins”, my doctor, who was later disbarred for amphetamine abuse, gave me a thought for the week. One week his homily was about the flames of hell. He told me that they burned very verily hot because of all the fat.
People have a grudging respect for Bush because he’s been able to maintain his weight for seven years. That’s all he’s been able to maintain. Remember all the hooting at the pictures of Bill Clinton in his jogging shorts? Now that he has a perfect body mass index, he is internationally beloved.
Primary voters can say what they want, but the reason they like Huckabee is that he lost one hundred pounds. You can never be too thin or too insane. On foreign and economic policy he is a lightweight, but the spirit of a fat guy is still in him. Not Santa. No. Jerry Falwell might have blowed up real good and died, but his ideas are alive and well in the reverend Huckabee.
Forget the homophobia once removed of the debate on gay marriage. The rev goes right for the gays. Though it pains him to say it, he must say that homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle. He’s dragging out that claptrap about love the sinner: hate the sin. And don’t kid yourself, he hates them both, the sinner and the sin. For him, quarantining people with HIV is not a matter of homophobia. It’s a matter of public health and safety. Don’t do me any favors, former fat boy.
One undecided voter in Iowa said that Huckabee lost her vote when he scoffed that there is no global warming in Iowa. She said they used to have snow, now they just have ice storms. Her business, Bees of Iowa, has been harmed by the global warming.
Although I am a secular fundamentalist, tonight before I go to sleep, I am going to eat two Twinkies and pray for a Huckabee Colony Collapse.

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Coming out for Hillary Clinton in one-on-one or small group situations still reminds me of coming out as a lesbian. I’m the lesbian, not Hillary, contrary to the sledge-hammer innuendos of Ann Coulter. Though we wish the best for everyone, Hillary may not be a lesbian. And that’s okay.
And, is it just me, or does Ann look a lot like the young, recumbent and recently unwrapped King Tut?
Approaching the declaration for Hillary is like approaching that triple-solcow moment in a skating routine. Have I got the strength, the torque, the momentum, the sequins to come out to this person? Since I don’t want my inner Dick Button murmuring disappointedly, “Aw, she only did a double,” I declare my orientation for Hillary and prepare myself for the inevitable Hilla-phobia blowback.
The other night at my study group dinner, it happened again. About eight of us meet monthly to discuss some dense, progressive policy book we all claim to have read. I’m generally seated at the kid’s table. Before we got into the book discussion, we were doing our usual recap of recent political events. Several members always end up moaning and thudding their foreheads on the table in the ‘dovening for democracy’ portion of the evening.
When we got to discussing the presidential campaign, my dear partner asked everyone to go around the table and announce who they were for, and cruelly looked at me to start. I took what I knew would be my last bite of mushroom risotto for the evening and declared I was for Hillary.
A fine expectorated Chianti mist was settling from my friend’s mouth, as she bleated in horror, “Why?”
“Other than the fact that I think she would make Bill O’Really’s head blow up and that she is the most qualified for the job. . ,” I started. “WHAT has she done?” my apoplectic friend silent screamed. I continued, “I support her just so that I can get into fights with people about the appalling levels of sexism in the world,” and daubed a small bit of mushroom off my neighbor’s cuff.
Full disclosure: at the gym I’ve been listening to the audiotape of Susan Falludi’s The Terror Dream on my IPOD. Falludi reports so extensively and bloodlessly on the uses of 9.11 to restore “traditional” manhood, marriage and maternity that she has gotten hysterical, vicious reviews which prove her point exactly. The men at the gym seem genuinely unsettled by my mirrored glowering at them.
It was as if I were one of those Dixie Chicks of Bridge and had held up a hand-made sign at an awards ceremony. Talk about gender card. I started to lay them out on the table. In South Carolina, a woman, perhaps Ann Coulter’s grandmother, called Hillary a bitch and John McCain didn’t cut her off. He has, no doubt, heard or even said worse. Maureen Dowd never met a woman she liked, making her a worthy NY Times columnist. Katie Couric can’t catch a break.
My friend rebutted from east, west, north and south. Perhaps I overtricked, when I endplayed her with, “Why do you hate yourself so much?” I’m not proud of it. Let the conversation continue.

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Please don’t tell anyone I’m writing. Let’s just say I’m journaling and then file-sharing. Otherwise there will be a huge inflatable rat outside my apartment.
Some of you have reminded me that I’ve said that a campaign should only be six weeks long and that we’d be a better country if we used the fourteen billion saved to forgive all student loans. You also remind me, rather testily, that I’ve said that in those six weeks the only thing on television should be politics. And the air time would be free. Those of you who have run through your TIVOed backlog think that we are getting dangerously close to such a time. I had nothing to do with it. I don’t want my fella writers to be maligned.
This weekend in NYC, the stagehands went on strike and Broadway pretty much shut down. The traffic was horrific. No cabs were to be found. The New York Times covered the story of one family visiting from Virginia. Unable to see Monty Python’s Spamalot, they instead went to St. Patricks Cathedral. It was a natural substitution in their minds. No one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Especially not Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer who were able to vote in favor of Michael Mukasey, who wouldn’t say torture if his mouth was full of bits of his own front teeth. “This country does not torture people,” George groused recently, “we outsource that to other countries,” he did not add.
This from our Sadist-in-Chief. And I beg to differ. I’ve experienced sleep deprivation. Listening to him try to talk is like taking blows to the head. FEMA waterboarded New Orleans and more.
I’ve got to stop writing now. I made a new resolution for my sixtieth year: I’m doing that four hour work-day regimen. I’ve got about three minutes left on my meter. Support the workers/writers! Entertain yourselves!

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On long flights, I like to watch movies with the sound off. When I get home, I watch with the sound on and compare the actual story with the story I’ve made up. I was so wrong about About a Boy. I hope they never show Snakes on a Plane on a plane.
I also like to watch muted ads to try to figure out what product is being shilled. Whenever I see an actor friend in a commercial, I have a clue, because she claims she specializes in the lower gastro-intestinal tract. So that doesn’t count.
During the World Series, [note to Red Sox: when you sober up, do not even think of hiring A-Rod, he’s a spoiled trouble making diva] between the interconnected beer and erectile dysfunction ads, I laughed every time that woman jogger ran into a parked car. Even when she got up, dusted herself off and slammed into the car again, I laughed. I still don’t know if the ad is for running shoes or lasik surgery, but my girlfriend is shocked at my low threshold for the pain of others. I thought I knew what the unsettling “pre-collision intelligence” ad was about, but it actually has something to do with a car.
Full disclosure: I suffer from the condition known as “pre-collision intelligence” and I wish there were a pill for it. It would have to be the size of a direct TV dish. When I’ve forced myself to watch the train wreck that is the president do a press conference, I have kept the sound off. He seems to have a little pal planted in the front row that he smirks at, like “Can you believe they’re going for this crap again? Whooee!”
First, is it my imagination or is my presidential profiling accurate in assessing that the mysterious hair area 41 between the presidential brows is growing? The area, on others known as ‘the third eye’ has a thatch of hair that now melds into his eyebrows making for a uni-brow that looks like a very wooly caterpillar. It’s going to be a long nuclear winter.
Let’s review: when we have weapons of mass destruction, they are called nuclear weapons; when other countries have nuclear weapons, they are called weapons of mass destruction. Everybody has caught on to the discrepancy. Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Putin, even Castro’s brother are laughing in our faces. We are the Rodney Dangerfield of countries.
As the Republican candidates sink further into a swamp pre-owned by the Democrats and now in foreclosure, my pre-collision intelligence tells me that while boy George jaw jaw jaws about working with other countries to spread democracy, he is fixing to bomb Iran, declare a state of emergency, and a third term. My friends think I’m being paranoid, but watch for the developing silly gism of: Katrina is to California just as Iraq is to Iran. Don’t just watch their lips move. Unmute. “California shows how much we learned from our mistakes in Katrina. [especially if we’re rescuing white people] We’ve learned so much from our mistakes in Iraq. We’re ready for Iran.”
He declared a first term and nobody stopped him. You tell me why not a third?

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On a scale of one to Betty White, the Ellen DeGeneres Iggy Custody Story, unlike the off-the-charts Michael Vick dog-fight gambling story, is about a seven. And this is not just me talking. The home office has run the story through a rigorous, impartial, sampling process that included the Mitt Romney “Irish Setter in the Dog Carrier on Top of the Family Car Going on Ten Hour Ride to the Family Vacation” Story. They’ve been very thorough. The needle on the meter never even brushed eight.
Thanks to YouTube, I caught up on Ellen’s story. When I first heard about the dogfight, the cynical me wondered if it was Sweeps Week. This despite the fact that I have been treating my cyno-malaise with drugs and hot rocks massage. On day #3 of the saga, Ellen delivered a deftly impassioned call for acceptance and forgiveness and let’s move on dog org opening monologue. She mentioned the death threats and violence toward the Mutts and Moms Dog Rescue Shelter and said flatly, “It’s not okay.”
Ellen’s reasoned plea for everyone to sit and stay, could be a blueprint for warring factions everywhere. Condoleezza Rice who is doing the traditional, end of term, desperate, diplomatic shuttling for a Mideast solution might have learned a thing or two. I hope Condi has Tivo.
Watching the intensity of the first day, when Ellen broke down, I marvelled that she had shared none of this intense emotion when she came out, lost her sitcom, and surely struggled with the consequences of coming out. But that’s a lot to ask and really none of my beeswax.
And, full disclosure: I am not a dog person. When I was three, a big German shepherd jumped in my stroller and scared the bejesus out of me. A year later I saw a Boxer tear another dog’s ear off in a dusty, adrenalized swirl in my otherwise placid neighborhood. Dogs know I’m not a dog person, and each one tries to prove that she is not like those other dogs.
For the last few months I have been advocating that the genuine outrage dog lovers and the people who love them evince in these stories should be harnessed for other events people don’t seem to care about at all. I tried to get Nancy Pelosi to use, “Puppies don’t have healthcare,” to override W’s veto of SCHIP.
Ironically, while this Iggy top story rules the week, in Washington DC, GLBTs are trying to pass ENDA, the Employee Non-Discrimination Act. Or actually, they are trying NOT to pass ENDA. How weird is that? The bill had languished around for years under the slobbying efforts of HRC, but suddenly gained a new leash on life, when Rep. Barney Frank tried to get it out of committee, minus the provision for ending discrimination against our Ts, transsexuals. And why now? I bet you can get ENDA with a T when W is gone.
On a scale of one to Renee Richards, it’s not okay.
Three hundred and two organizations have signed an endorsement to re-introduce transsexual protection to the bill. Wisconsin’s fearless Rep.Tammy Baldwin motioned to put trans protection back in the bill.
It’s a wicked mess. How about “Labradoodles need rights too!”?

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As you must remember, we’ve got an extra week before we fall ahead. Although we gain an hour of sleep, we have to start wearing miner helmets to work in the morning. The Bushleaguers say the time change was to save energy, but I think the red twizzler lobby is big. I bet they got daylight savings time extended to the week after Halloween so that the kids would have an extra hour to trick or treat. The dental lobby must also have been in on the deal.
The other morning, as we were reading the paper, my dear Indian girlfriend announced, as if I’d asked, that she had decided what she was going to be for Halloween. I was trying to make sense of the word jumble that is now a Maureen Dowd column and thought for a minute my galpal was talking about reincarnation. I asked, “What are you coming back as?”
She seemed irked that I had not been thinking along with her. “No, for Halloween. I’ve decided I’m going to be an Unconflicted White Man.” The straight was understood. And this year she gets an extra hour for it. Not that they need it.
In the midst of wartime, the UWM lives in complete peace with himself. Donald Rumsfeld demurs that he is ‘out of the loop’ on the war because he is starting an institute to restore civility to civic participation. Dick Cheney chugs along as head of the fourth branch of government, the Execulative. In the Vanity Fair issue, which finally chronicles the media goring of Al Gore, the gung-ho war ho Christopher Hitchens, blithely describes his spa makeover.
Some nights I lie awake in bed, jangled awake from a twizzler sugar high, and think, “They must have some remorse for what they’ve done.” It’s all pure projection on my part.
In China, when officials err, they have the decency to kill themselves. In the US, they go on victory lap, book tours. The rollout for Alan Greenspan’s preemptive saveface-book could be a model for a well-planned and brilliantly executed exit strategy. The retired head of the Federal Reserve was around like a bad penny – Jim Lehrer, Jon Stewart, Charlie Rose. The big party spoiler was Naomi Klein’s book, Shock Doctrine, about as popular in the economic discourse as an unclaimed backpack on a bus. If I Did It v. You Know You Did It.
The If-I-Didiot-in-Chief won’t move off Moveon.org. Somehow the Petraeus/Betray-us [and he did] ad with a really good/bad pun has set off the Grandmaster of UWM. Because absolutely everything else is in order in his world, the Nicknamer-in-Chief has to fixate on this ad.
Admittedly it is “Sticks and Stones Week” here in Manhattan. Whenever the U.N. Security Council meets in mid-town, the city becomes a parking lot. And it’s as if the parking lot is used as a playground for recess by a local elementary school. In addition to the screeching good fun of “Red Rover, Red Rover let Karl Come Over, He Can’t, He’s Spending Time with the Family” [which is secret code for “going to advise the Giuliani campaign” – hey, they didn’t get rid of all the gay translators], there is plenty of good old fashioned name calling.
‘Evil one’, ‘nut job’ ‘fruitbat’ and more epithets echo throughout the canyons. Good thing the Red Sox aren’t in town. Good thing what’s his name isn’t on the radio anymore. Oh yeah. Don Anus.

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Thank god it’s 9.12. This morning we commemorate that morning six years ago when we all woke up, if we had slept, or slept fitfully, and for a waking breath everything was the same. Coffee, paper, jump in the shower. Then, say it isn’t so, it hit. Despite groggy hope, we remembered what had happened the day before, 9.11.2001, our national Alive Day.
Nine-eleven, is now a very real quatro-syllabic number, a fulcrum of before and after, that second when the tide does shift. The day was excruciating this year, the new longest day of the year. The day was tropically muggy and on TV all day the military junta was laying out the fantasy league so-called surge. A dirge.
In other years, before the anniversary of 9.11, I had prepared, steeled myself to the sadness, made plans to be with a neighbor whose firefighter husband had been killed. This time, like soldiers in Iraq, I was unarmored; I had let my guard down. By 2p, I was restless and sad, claustrophobic in our apartment across the hall from new neighbors. I could not read one more tediously brilliant article about how bad it is. The war, the sub-prime mortgage rolling disaster, the trifecta of hypocrisy – Foley, Vitter, Craig. Such as.
That was when I remembered a small notice in the Sunday paper of a memorial service for Molly Ivins, at the Ethical Culture Society Hall scheduled for 4p on, of course, 9.11.
Never have I been happier to go to a memorial service. The soggy, sad crowd slogged in while a montage of photos of Molly – a long leggy sailor; smiling aunt hoisting a gleeful niece; wide-mouth, head back laugher; placard-carrying, hell-raising protestor; wheelchair bound, bald and mugging in a FOX news cap, receiving an award – looped on a screen onstage.
Calvin Trillin, Maya Angelou, John Leonard, Gail Collins, Kathleen Chalfant, and Lou Dubose, spoke of Molly as friend, writer, editor, story-teller, river rafter, partier, bawdy Texas babe and activist. They all quoted her hilarious lines. It was she who, Cassandra-like in The Texas Observer had warned of being bushwhacked by the Shrub from Texas. She wanted to live to see George Bush out of office, but she died from the breast cancer she had lived with for years.
There are memorials and there are memorials. As I shuffled out into quagmire of New York, I felt re-energized by the buoyant life of Molly Ivins, my co-columnist at The Progressive magazine for twelve years. She practiced the power of political satire and activism. Thank goodness for Molly Ivins.

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As Senator Larry Craig revealed on the police tape, (and why was that police tape revealed?) he is not gay and he doesn’t do that sort of thing. No, no, no. Obviously, he suffers from restless leg syndrome. And the side effects of the new drug he is on are an increase in gambling and sex addiction. I bet he will use the RLS Defense for that toe-tapping.

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