Random political thoughts

-I find it hard to get enraged at Alec Baldwin over the angry message he left for his daughter, and think all the media attention the situation is getting is very annoying. Sure, it was a nasty message and involved a few nasty words, but we all know that these Hollywood types are pretty lacking in self-control in real life, anyway. Was anyone surprised when Russell Crowe threw that phone? It doesn't matter how nice/decent/genuine the characters they play on screen may be; these people are actors. They smoke and drink and sleep around and have bad marriages and poor parenting skills. (This is a sweeping generalisation, but it's true more often than not.) Aside from not leaving the country like he promised he would do, Mr. Baldwin hasn't really done anything that out of character.

-I still don't get the hoopla over Don Imus' firing. I never listened to him or liked him before, so it's no skin off my nose, but according to several articles, he's made nasty remarks and sarcastic, cutting comments about other people before. In fact, that's pretty much his shtick. Why this particular comment crossed the line is as puzzling to me as I'm sure it was to him. I'm not condoning his remarks, by the way, simply pointing out that it's rather hypocritical of whoever was listening to him before (I mean, for him to be on the air, there must have been a substantial market for whatever he was peddling) to decide that this kind of nastiness is suddenly not acceptable anymore. Kind of like if Howard Stern suddenly got canned for public indecency: one would have to wonder just which straw it was that broke the camel's back. And why no one warned him that they were suddenly changing the rules.

-I'm sure this VA Tech shooting is going to bring on another tiresome round of gun-control legislation, possibly banning whatever type of weapon it was that the shooter used, possibly banning a whole range of weapons. What such reactionary proceedings fail to take into account is that there were already laws against what this guy did, on several levels: there are obviously laws against murdering people, and there are already laws against having handguns on school property. Why do they think that another layer of legislation is going to stop someone from doing something wrong? If someone wasn't intimidated enough by the law against carrying a gun onto school property, is he suddenly going to be quelled by another, higher law stating that he must not carry even this type of gun onto school property?

-While I'm pleased at the decision of the Supreme Court to uphold the ban on partial-birth abortion (and frothing with rage at the spin the major media are putting on it: ''"so-called" partial-birth abortion'; oh, yeah, what else would you call it when a baby is partially birthed and then aborted?), it's a bit hard to muster the spirit for even a minor Hurrah when you consider the reasoning which allowed this decision to slip by: they got away with finding the ban constitutional - sans a health-of-the-mother clause - only because they pointed out that there are alternatives which do have that clause. It's a bit sad that the decision had to include the reasoning that, if all else failed, at least the fetus could still be dismembered in utero.