What is fascinating to me is that Condie Rice has remained untouchable amidst all the outing of Republicans. Is it her businesslike air, her race, the fact she seems to have no sex or racial identity, that she occasionally allows rumors to circulate linking her to this foreign secretary or that? If her relationships with other women, usually musicians, were not exactly front-page news at Stamford and the other universities where she worked, nor were her flings exactly state secrets. And several of these relationships lasted several years as the FBI well knows. But a quiet agreement seems to have been reached of the "don't ask, don't tell" variety when she came to Washington. I'm surprised. Although being "out" might have raised some eyebrows among the few remaining Arab countries where our planes can land during the day, it might have added badly needed cache to the Bush Presidency elsewhere, in France or Spain for instance, where tolerance is still valued.

Tim is right on. What's a guy to do? A married man, a senator in a state where zoophilism (sex with sheep and other animals) is preferable to homosexuality--if Craig wants a sexual adventure, there aren't too many places where he can get it without notice. Don't get me wrong. Getting rid of this stalwart of neandrathal sexual politics won't get anyone East of Oklahoma City crying. But when we put Craig's sin on a scale with the routine lying, fraud, torture and killing of civilians and such that have become our daily news fare since 9/ll, something screams out for adjustment.

there are many levels to the serial killer plot that the reviewers are missing. The most obvious is that it illustrates the self-fulfilling prophecy, that if you treat something as real, then it is real in its consequences, and whether it actually happened, is "really real," is largely irrelevant. In this sense the serial killer plot is designed as a parallel to the Iraq war...also based on fabricated information, picked up and celebrated by the media, and then quite real in its consequences...

But the more subtle point of this plot line is that McNulty, in focusing only on the lie and its immediate consequences, has missed the underlying reality...there is serial killer that is wiping out homeless men and that killer is the one Carcetti identifies, the lack of funding for services, the deterioratio of the quality of life and so on. By creating the "lie," McNulty has inadvertently struck a deeper truth about the political nature of the crisis everyone faces. But this truth unfolds behind the back of all of the governing institutions-- school, press and police. This is the Shakespearean aspect of the drama...the absurdity of trying to figure out who is responsible..the quest parodied in the corruption trial. The cowboy mentality invoked by the invite to have a shoot out to settle the drug war is yet another paradoy of this same point.

Gone Baby Gone was far and away the best film of 2007 and certainly Amy Ryan deserves a nod for best actress. The movie is coherent, visually stunning, morally compelling and actually deals with contemporary dilemmas, how to live with the decisions we make, our responsibility to the truth, whether the best parent is always the "good" parent, without preaching to the converted. Juno addresses similar issues, but through the fuzy lens of paraody. While Daniel Day Lewis is unbelievable, There Will be Blood, like Michael Clayton, is narratively incoherent, not to say implausible, because it never adequately explains why the characters do what they do. Similarly, since we never believe Clayton is corrupt (or that he lives up to his reputation has "fixer"-- he never fixes anything in the film)his redemntion falls flat. Savages is a great film of its kind, but too small ultimately. The only real competition is Blood, a masterful work also about choice, but here the futility or illusion of choice in the face of death is the message.