. . . how come we can remember few lines from his speeches not the ideas he presented therein?

As Peggy Noonan put it back in 2008:

Barack Obama’s biggest draw is not his eloquence. When you watch an Obama speech, you lean forward and listen and think, That’s good. He’s compelling, I like the way he speaks. And afterward all the commentators call him “impossibly eloquent” and say “he gave me thrills and chills.” But, in fact, when you go on the Internet and get a transcript of the speech and print it out and read it–that is, when you remove Mr. Obama from the words and take them on their own–you see the speech wasn’t all that interesting, and was in fact high-class boilerplate.

And yet the other Roger Simon calls the man offering such boilerplate “the greatest orator of modern times“.  Now, to be sure, a great orator can deliver a pedantic speech, but one wonders if he were really such a great orator, wouldn’t he be able to distinguish meaningful rhetoric from mere boilerplate?

Just a thought.

. . . but, as Geoff at Ace of Spaces puts it, may not be sufficient:

In FY 2011, we are running a $1.425 trillion deficit. This single year of spending will take our public debt from 62.1% of GDP up to 69.1% of GDP. Now, in our daily life, whenever we run up a debt the first thing we ask is: How long will it take me to pay this off?

. . . .

This is what the President and his crackerjack economic team have wrought. A one-year deficit that is so large that it can only be paid back if everything goes exactly right.

Looking at these and other numbers, Kevin D. Williamson contends “we cannot get spending under control without reforming the entitlements“:

The Democrats’ plan will be to make Paul Ryan the most hated man in America, if not the world. The campaign will be — and already is — personal. It will be personal because the facts are not on their side. Our choices are: 1. raise taxes severely, and pretend that that is not going to have catastrophic economic consequences; 2. court a national fiscal crisis on the Portugal model but on a significantly larger scale, and pretend that that is not going to have catastrophic economic consequences; 3. cut spending.

So, as the Democrats demagogue and make it personal, ask them which option they choose, 1. raising taxes; 2. ignoring the magnitude of the nation’s fiscal mess or 3. cutting spending.  And if they elect option 3, ask to see their plan.  How do they plan to address the problem of ever-increasing deficits?

In the absence of a plan, they have only rhetoric, putting politics ahead of policy.

My friend Rick Sincere just alerted me to an interesting post over at Truth on the Market.  There University of Missouri law professor Thom Lambert takes University of Pennsylvania law professor Tobias Wolff to task for contending that, as Lambert puts it, “if you’re gay, you should support expansive collective bargaining rights for labor unions“:

The three reasons he articulates for equating labor union rights with relationship rights are far from convincing.  The first — the fact that “LGBT Americans come from the same economic and demographic origins as all Americans” – proves too much.  If gay people are really representative of all Americans, then some gays — say, public school teachers – benefit from expansive rights for public sector unions, and other gays — say, business executives in high tax brackets — are harmed by them.  To be fair, Wolff does suggest that gay people may be disproportionately impacted by reduced employment benefits because they lack various legal protections affored to others, but doesn’t that suggest that the real problem, the place where gays should focus their energies, is the lack of equal protection?  Moreover, one could make a strong argument that gay people, who have fewer dependents on average than straight people, have less need for lucrative employee benefits.  In any event, Wolff’s initial argument is hardly compelling.

Neither is his second argument.  Surely the fact that a group expresses support for gay equality and offers gay people various resources does not create a “reciprocal obligation” on the part of gay people to support all that group stands for.

Read the whole thing.

Yes, all too many gays on the left believe they must find common cause with other left-of-center interest groups.  Their real concern is advancing their liberal agenda.  Look, gay men and lesbians should be free to associate with and offer support to various Democratic interest groups and auxiliaries, but they should make clear that this is primarily out of partisan preference or agreement on certain issues.  They shouldn’t try to dress it up as advocacy for gay individuals.

Calling Lambert’s post “worth a read“, Dale Carpenter adds

. . . that Wolff’s argument comes from a long political tradition, going back at least to the 1950s, which maintains that gay rights are inextricably tied to a host of causes supported by self-styled progressives — everything from abortion rights to various left-wing revolutionary movements.   (more…)

Count one of my favorite blogresses as a fan of the fetching Paul Ryan:

What makes him a formidable figure and opponent to the president is his intellectual seriousness. (I will be the first to call for a budget summit, televised like the health-care summit, one with another round of Ryan vs. Obama.) At the American Enterprise Institute (where Ryan last appeared in a debate against David Brooks, who was thrilled by Ryan’s plan), Ryan offered an overview of his vision and his budget plan. He made both the philosophical case (“If the debt poses an existential threat to all we hold dear — if we truly believe that our current path leads to a debt-fueled economic crisis and to the demise of America’s exceptional promise — then let’s dispense with the trivialities”), and he went through the four core elements

Not only has the Wisconsin Republican shown the ability to make the tough choices necessary to put forward a fiscally responsible budget, bu he knows how to “roll-out” the plan, in Jennifer Rubin’s words, “with meticulous care.”

Read the whole thing, particularly to see how Rubin, the blogress in question, details Ryan’s PR skills.

In a post last October, I wrote about one of the advantages we gay conservatives have in confronting the prejudices of some of our left-of-center peers:

. . . over time, the intolerance on the left makes us stronger.  And helps us judge the character of our interlocutors.  For while we often deal with liberal bigotry, we also frequently find open-minded “progressives” who in their interactions with us demonstrate an ability to rise above the prejudices of their peers.

If someone dismisses our political views as a mere product of what they contend are our own insecurities and animosities, then they are not likely to see us an individuals.  Yet, if they respect us as individuals even while disagreeing with our politics, we know they are friends we can count on, those who do not let superficial differences get in the way of real friendship.

Now, I’ve made this argument before and do so again, largely because it seems every time I point out the prejudices certain gay liberals hold against conservative and their dubbing political difference as a manifestation of self-hatred or as some form of whining.  Yet, it is hardly whining to identify and criticize the narrow attitudes of certain individuals.*

Yet, when we write about the hostility we face from some of our peers, our critics pull out their template of our victimhood even if it means ignoring the point of our post.  For example, last month when I blogged about how Mito Aviles, a left-of-center gay man running for West Hollywood City Council treated me with dignity and respect even as he seemed incredulous at the notion of a gay conservative, a critic, within fifteen minutes of my posting the piece, chided me for “crying“.   Another accused me of “playing into the whole ‘Victim Mentality’“.

In fact, I was making precisely the opposite point — that more often than not when we come out as conservative to our gay liberal friends, we frequently encounter some incredulity, but also understanding.  And I had wanted to make clear that while many gay liberals are among the most intolerant people in America today, most are not, indeed some are among the most broad-minded. (more…)

In praising the comprehensive budget plan that House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan introduced today, Jimmy LaSalvia, Executive Director of GOProud reminds us of a criticism Democrats have been leveling against Republicans for the past two years:

The left constantly berated Republicans in the last Congress for supposedly failing to offer alternatives, labeling the GOP as the ‘party of no’. Today, the liberal smear machine is in full force, attacking Rep. Ryan and House Republicans for having the political courage to put forward a comprehensive budget plan. Democrats in Congress are offering no such plan, and the President offers no such plan either; it seems just a few months after attacking Republicans for supposedly failing to offer solutions that it is indeed the Democratic Party that is totally devoid of any plan to solve our budget crisis.

It’s almost as if Democrats (and their allies) were accusing Republicans of lacking a plan in order to “bait” them to present one so they could attack as “extreme.”

Nice to see a gay group reminding us a smaller government which spends less is good for gay people.

UPDATE:  Log Cagin has now followed suit, with R. Clarke Cooper, the organization’s Executive Director, calling the Ryan plan “a serious budget in response to the serious challenges facing our nation today“.

*About the deficit.

Good insight from Jim Geraghty:

I’m watching Ryan roll out his plan here. The public reaction to this will tell us a lot about how serious we are as a country. If the response is general support, or “I think we need something like this, but would want to change this part here or that part there,” we’ll be okay. If there’s a general recoiling and rejection, and a preference to cling (bitterly?) to the notion that small-ball cuts in discretionary spending will be sufficient to control the debt, then we’re doomed.

UPDATE: Peter Wehner has similar thoughts:

Now comes a civic test of sorts. What will be the American public’s reaction to the plan that Ryan presents? Will they rally behind it, or rebel against it?

It’s hard to know. Perhaps we find ourselves in a new political moment, in which reforms and cuts that were once unthinkable can now be advocated without danger of self-immolation. On the other hand, it may be that what Ryan will propose goes beyond what the public is willing to accept. What is reasonable to conclude, I think, is that if the public continues to resist reforms to entitlements—either because of ignorance, demagoguery, or selfishness—we will experience, sooner than we think, the kind of “domestic convulsion” the founders warned about (and which Europeans are now experiencing). Demography and mathematics make that inevitable.

Wehner via Instapundit.

Just over two years ago, in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, Democrats promised us that the key to economic revitalization would be found in a near-trillion dollar stimulus.  Ever more government spending would be sure to jump start the economy.  Well, here we are nearly twenty-six months after the president signed his recovery act and only now is the economy beginning to recover, but not because that “stimulus” is just beginning to kick, but instead as Veronique de Rugy reminds us, because it’s “winding down“:

The unemployment rate for March dropped to 8.8 percent, which we should remember is the rate that the Administration said the economy would reach if the stimulus had not been passed. It took two years to reach this rate, and as it turns out, it is on the way down, not up.

(Via Instapundit.)  Increased government spending, to paraphrase an expression, was not the answer, it was part of the problem.  One man who gets this is Paul Ryan, the fetching Wisconsin Congressman who chairs the House Budget Committee.  In anticipation of the release of the GOP budget which he authored, he took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to explain why his plan is necessary:

No one person or party is responsible for the looming crisis. Yet the facts are clear: Since President Obama took office, our problems have gotten worse. Major spending increases have failed to deliver promised jobs. . . .

The president’s recent budget proposal would accelerate America’s descent into a debt crisis. It doubles debt held by the public by the end of his first term and triples it by 2021. It imposes $1.5 trillion in new taxes, with spending that never falls below 23% of the economy. His budget permanently enlarges the size of government. It offers no reforms to save government health and retirement programs, and no leadership.

Calling his op-ed, “The Path to Prosperity,” Ryan outlines the spending cuts and reforms necessary to get our government’s fiscal house in order while “reforming the nation’s outdated tax code” to help encourage economic activity.  The less government interferes, the more private enterprises will be revitalized.

The Republican budget even “budget targets corporate welfare, starting by ending the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that is costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.”  Seems under Ryan, Republicans are making a comprehensive approach to federal spending and not dodging the tough issues or the sacred cows which increase the flow of red ink.  Everything, Moe Lane writes,  is “apparently on the table.” (more…)

Back when I was trying to break into the entertainment industry as a screenwriter, I used to follow the box office returns most assiduously.  I wanted to know what kind of movies people were watching, what themes and relationships resonated with audiences.  And I would then consider my own story ideas and find which stories were, thematically, most like those which sold the most tickets.  I would focus my attention on marketing those.

Now, all my stories lacked explosions and car chases, but each did affirm the value of certain archetypal relationships, like a man’s bond to his father, a child’s connection to his or her family and the tension between that familial affection and his or her romantic inclinations (see, e.g., Romeo and Juliet).  Back in 2002, when My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which cost only $5 million to produce, snuck up and surprised everyone, capturing nearly one-quarter billion dollars at the domestic box office alone, I had great hope for some of my scripts, a few of which had similar themes.

Attending a panel of industry executives at a Film Festival the summer that sweet sleeper was eating up the box office, I asked if its success would change the way things were done in Hollywood.  To a man (there were only men on the panel), the executives said it would not.

In what other industry, I wondered, would an unexpected success not cause companies to reconsider the way they did business?

Over at Big Hollywood, my friend John Nolte explores a similar theme:

1. Anti-American, anti-troop films flop one right after another both here and overseas. See:Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here.
2. The rare pro-American, pro-troop film makes money overseas. See: Here. Here. Here. Here.Here.
3. Hollywood makes anti-American films one right after another.
4. Hollywood says they don’t make pro-American films because they don’t make money overseas.

Read the whole thing.  Why does Hollywood not learn from the box office?

Perhaps, when I moved to LA, instead of studying the box office, I should have changed my politics.

If the unhappy Barney Frank were a Republican, the media would have a field day with some of his silly statements.  I mean, all they need do is hold Barney to the standards he sets for his partisan adversaries.  Remember just over a year ago in the health care debate when he insisted “his GOP colleagues need to do more to ‘differentiate themselves’ from the hateful speech spewed in the healthcare debate’s final hours.”

Well, last night, Glenn Reynolds reported on some rather angry things said to one of the Massachusetts’s Democrat’s Republican colleagues:

REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN PETER KING gets death threat and bloody pig’s foot. “A frozen pig’s foot and a note laced with anti-Semitic rants were sent to Rep. Peter King’s Capitol Hill office, a congressional source familiar with the situation confirmed to CNN Monday.”

Sounds like hateful speech to me.  Now, under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t hold Democrats responsible for the angry rhetoric of their ideological confreres. But, well, since Barney asked his Republican colleagues to “differentiate themselves” from the angry rhetoric of their ideological confreres, shouldn’t we be asking him to do the same?

I’m not holding my breath.

Over at Big Hollywood, Janice R. Brenman has posted a thoughtful reflection on the struggles and resilience of Elizabeth Taylor:

No stranger to the perils of drug abuse herself, Taylor knew firsthand Jackson could indeed turn his life around.  After her own rehab stint made headlines in the early 1980s, Taylor was in a unique position to speak out to celebrities who abuse drugs to cope with fame and its pitfalls.  While Jackson eventually passed away, allegedly from a powerful prescription drug, there is something to be learned from the lives of both the King of Pop and Hollywood’s golden girl.

. . . .

Elizabeth Taylor’s passing provides us the opportunity to reflect on the perils of fame.  While the plights of celebrities have become a preoccupation and hobby for many people, it is apparent that the lenses under which these stars live result in more tragic endings than fairytale ones.

Read the whole thing.

I have often wondered if it is the superabundance of those “tragic endings” which accounts, in large part, for our fascination with the lifestyles of the rich and famous.  We may not have the wealth or recognition that these individuals, for lack of better word, enjoy.  And their stories remind us that while we may aspire for such things, they aren’t necessary to secure our happiness and fulfillment.  Indeed, in some cases –and for some individuals — they may even be detrimental to those ends.

Later this week, Republicans will present their “2012 budget proposal that would cut more than $4 trillion from federal spending projected over the next decade and transform the Medicare health program for the elderly“:

The budget has been prepared by Rep. Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican and the new chairman of the House Budget Committee, and it represents the most complete attempt so far by Republicans to make good on their promises during the 2010 midterm elections to cut government spending and deficits.

Though Rep. Ryan based the Medicare portion of his budget on a previous plan created in collaboration with a Democrat, Alice Rivlin, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and long-time budget expert, the current plan isn’t likely to get much Democratic support. Instead, it will set up a broad debate over spending and the role of government heading into the 2012 general election.

While Rivlin has some quibbles with the current plan, she generally backs it, reminding her fellow partisans that ”What Democrats have to realize is we have to do something”.  But, Ryan fears that “Democrats will use his budget as a ‘political weapon,’ . . . that they will have to ‘lie and demagogue to make it a weapon against us.’” Given their recent rhetoric, the Wisconsin Republican has good reason to be concerned.

Meanwhile, instead of offering a plan of their own, “Democratic leaders are waiting to gauge the public reaction to Ryan’s plan, which would reduce projected federal spending by more than $4 trillion over the next decade“.  While it’s likely, they’ll offer an alternative, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), the senior Democrat on the budget panel remains “undecided.”

Over at the American Spectator, Joseph Lawler says its “Time to Pre-But Falsehoods About Paul Ryan’s Budget.”

Kudos to Ryan and his GOP team for making a serious effort to hold the line on federal spending — in line with Barack Obama’s promises as a candidate and rhetoric as president.

UPDATE: Ryan, Steven Hayward writes, touting the Wisconsin Republican as a presidential candidate,

. . . wants to have an adult conversation with America about the looming insolvency of the welfare state, and he has a serious plan to fix it. Like Kemp, lots of careerists in the GOP will head for the tall grass when the going gets tough, which I predict will begin on Tuesday afternoon, after Ryan lays out his budget proposal in more detail at a speech at my office, the American Enterprise Institute. (I’m going to be on a plane at the time and will have to miss it, but you can watch the webcast.) Ryan gave a preview of his plan yesterday on Fox News Sunday.

Read the whole thing.

On Friday, a friend posted an icon on Facebook asking, “I was born gay, were you born hateful?”

What struck me was the assumption inherent in this question — and how it parallels the attitude of many in the gay community to those offering views at odds with their own.  Advocates of California’s Proposition 8, they claimed, did not favor traditional marriage because they saw the institution as defining a union between individuals of different sexes, but because they hated (or, h8ed) gay people.

Disagreement, one of her friends wrote, “does not equate to hate in any of the studies that I have looked at lately.”  Liking his comment, I told my friend, a wise a kind lesbian that I agreed with this friend of hers:

Having spent a good part of my adulthood as an openly gay men among conservatives and Republicans, I have found much disagreement on gay issues and even some (oftentimes crazy) criticism of what some deem the “homosexual lifestyle,” but very little actual hatred. I’ve found more hatred, far more hateful attitudes, among left-of-center associates, including, indeed, especially among gay and lesbian left-wingers.

I wonder (and not for the first time) why those who use such venom in their criticism of conservatives and Christians, must themselves label their critics as haters and their arguments as hateful.

UPDATE:  As the friend who posted the icon has since commented, I wanted to make clear that in the first ¶, it is the icon which asks.   Here’s a screenshot of that icon:   

You’ve got to wonder at our mainstream media, eager to report the shenanigans of a crackpot preacher with a congregation of about 50 families.  Had the media not made an international celebrity out of Terry Jones, few people outside of the neighborhood surrounding his “Dove World Outreach Center” in Gainesville, Florida would have known this publicity-hungry former hotel manager was going to burn a Koran.

And now that he has carried out this juvenile stunt, we’ve seen murder and mayhem in Afghanistan:

Stirred up by a trio of angry mullahs who urged them to avenge the burning of a Koran at Florida church [sic], thousands of protesters overran the compound of the United Nations in this northern Afghan city, killing at least 12 people, Afghan and United Nations officials said…

Unable to find Americans on whom to vent their anger, the mob turned instead on the next-best symbol of Western intrusion — the nearby United Nations headquarters. “Some of our colleagues were just hunted down,” said a spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Kieran Dwyer, confirming that the attack.

Via Daily Caller via Instapundit.)  And “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)” has told “CBS’s Bob Schieffer . . . that some members of Congress were considering some kind of action in response to the Florida Quran burning that  sparked a murderous riot at a United Nations complex in Afghanistan and other mayhem.”

“People,” Doug Powers quips, “were murdered in Afghanistan and members of Congress are pondering how to clamp down on somebody who burned a book in Florida. Now that’sproblem solving, DC-style.”

What is it about our political and cultural “elite” that they have to pin the blame for a murderous rampage on the antics of self-promoting Christian rogue. It’s as if, they believe, that the worlds ills stem from the actions and attitudes of white Christian males, the very aspects of their culture rejected by the politically correct.

American Christians must be to blame; the foreign other is always blameless. (more…)

Sometimes it seems the politicians in Sacramento are indifferent to the problems in the rest of California.  Governor Jerry Brown touts the benefits of green energy for the environment while his fellow Democrats ignore the burdens of state regulation on businesses. The state’s unemployment rate is the second highest in the nation.  Storefronts across Southern California sit vacant, their business having dried up.

Expect more such enterprises to close their doors as struggling actors in Hollywood ight find it harder to make money.   Increasing prices to keep pace with the rising cost of food, restaurants will have fewer customers and won’t be able to generate the revenue to keep these aspiring thespians employed:

The cost of beef has gone through the roof, coffee prices are at a 13-year high, and even produce grown right here in California is more expensive than usual.

Grocery prices rose by more than 1 1/2 times the overall rate of inflation in 2010, according to government statistics, and economists predict that it will be even worse this year. For months consumers have grappled with higher prices at the supermarket, while restaurateurs pulled out every kitchen trick they could to absorb food inflation costs.

Well, the party is over. Experts say restaurant-goers can expect to see as much as an 8 percent increase in their checks.

Like many Californians, I too have seen my grocery bill go up in the past year.  One wonders if prices won’t have increased so rapidly if the federal government hadn’t ordered pumping reduced in the San Joaquin Valley in order to protect the delta smelt.  Without the water flowing to farmers in that most fertile of regions, as many as “a half-million acres of the most productive farmland” now lie fallow. (more…)

Liberals, Susan Fleetwood writes,

. . .  seem to have an overwhelming tendency to downplay Islamic abuses towards women (as well as towards gays) under the guise of multiculturalism. Don’t believe me? Well, then I suggest that you read the column by liberal Boston Globecolumnist Susan Jacoby where she asks the question, “Why are liberals excusing religious abuses on grounds of cultural relativism?”

Fleetwood goes on to compare how one conservative blogger and another left-of-center blogger bold certain passages in a section from Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s writings in her New York Times column about the Egyptian revolution.  The liberal “found Ms. Ali’s supposed ‘intolerance’ to be the most bothersome part of that passage, whereas the rest of us find the whole stoning of women and beating of gays to the most troublesome part.”

Read the whole thing.

Once again, we see that conservatives seem more aware of and concerned about the abuses gay people suffer in oppressive, Islamacist regimes.

Via Instapundit.

Those who know — or who are aware of — me primarily through this blog likely think of me as a man consumed by politics. And while, to be sure, politics is one among my many interests, it is only one. For the past seventy-two hours or so, I have not spent much time on the blog, only stopping by briefly to check the spam filter and “rescuing” comments, occasionally and quickly chiming in, wondering (as always) why some people choose to comment without even bothering to understand the post to which they attach their “thoughts.”

It seems they see the space we offer them as a place to vent, projecting their own inner demons (or whatever) onto their ideological adversaries. It never seems to occur to some (but fortunately not all) of them that we might hold our views out of principle, with the conviction that conservative policies are best for all people in this great nation (and around the world), including gay people. Why, I wonder again and again and yet again, do these folks assume we hold these views for sinister means or out of some great need to belong in a community of those who “hate us”?

All that said, I do hope to get back to blogging perhaps even later today — after I run a few errands.

Yet, as these past few days have reminded me that I can full participate in life without blogging regularly about politics, I do hope this post will remind our readers that politics is not all there is to life. And that they may bear in mind (as do most of my left-of-center friends) that just because you disagree about politics doesn’t mean you can’t have other things in common, other passions, other affections, other attitudes toward life.

UPDATE:  Not long after posting this, I found my energy to write about politics again.  Maybe it was the intensity of my cardio workout.

Will the civility police denounce Democrats for “prying into his family’s private health insurance record“:

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown — an upstart Blue State Republican in the cross hairs of national Democrats — is lashing out at the party’s opposition researchers, accusing them of prying into his family’s private health insurance records, and demanding that they stop fighting dirty.

“It seems in bad form. Obviously, when it comes to information about my wife and daughters, it crosses the line. I find it offensive and so do they,” Brown told the Herald yesterday.

Now, to be sure, from time to time, Republican do play dirty tricks, but more often than not, it is Democrats — and their allies among liberal interest groups– who engage in the “politics of personal destruction.”

It seems that the guiding principle of today’s Democratic Party is retaining power at all costs — and to destroy any Republican who threatens that power.

(H/t:  Instapundit.)

Since Dame Elizabeth Taylor passed last week, many people have blogged on that lady’s class, compassion and stardom.  Roger Simon explored what how a young (heterosexual) male moviegoer experienced this beauty in his blog at Pajamas while Camille Paglia examined her sex appeal and screen presence over at Salon.

This past weekend, I watched Cat on a Hot Tin Roof again, apprecaiting it more the second time, better able to see the movie as a different story from the play on which it is based.  In the film, screenwriters transformed the gay subtext to make it more palatable to a general audience.  This allowed them to bring out her sex appeal.  And did she sizzle, especially set against the bitterness of Paul Newman‘s Brick.  We really believe that Maggie the Cat is alive.  And we root for her to win back her husband.

Had the screen Brick been a closet homosexual, her sex appeal would have been wasted.  When he first saw it, his teenage heterosexual hormones raging, Simon “suffered shortness of breath.”  And, watching it this weekend, this gay guy can get what that straight man — or any other — would want to have some, well, private time with Taylor’s Maggie.

She just looked so good in Metrocolor.  Kudos to the set design team of Henry Grace and Robert Priestley and art directors William A. Horning and Urie McCleary for creating backgrounds which allowed her to stand out in every scene.

In the LA Weekly, Patrick Range McDonald reports,  ”West Hollywood residents have been calling and writing City Hall” asking the city to name a street after this classy lady.  (more…)

(H/t: CampaignSpot)