Purim is the Jewish holiday made for me. After all, it’s about Asian guys picking up cute Jewish girls, and drinking!

It’s also the Jewish holiday made for comedy writer Rob Kutner (he’s written for the Daily Show and Tonight Show), who writes the comedy sketches that the Shushan Channel perform at Purim for the annual Purim Party at the 92 Y Theatre in Tribeca. For the 2008 show, he wrote the parody Jewno:

And for the 2010 show, he’s cooked up Wolfman, DDS, a thriller featuring a dentist who starts “doing things no suburban Jewish professional would dream of”:

I can’t be in New York that weekend, but if you can make it, go check out the show!

And so, with both a bang and a whimper, Adam Giambrone’s campaign to become mayor of Toronto came to an end, a mere ten days after it began.

What fascinates me about the whole thing isn’t the impropriety or the controversy, but the stories that came out of them. Stories about a career-climbing overly image-conscious politician who’s having a premature mid-life crisis, an equally overly image-conscious “other woman” who took the revenge of a 21st century woman scorned, respectable and not-so-respectable newspapers racing to the bottom, gossip sites striving for more “hits”, clashes of archetypes, oppressed white men who need a hero and how technology has changed our personal lives. Not bad for ten days!

With Friends Like These…

“The White Tiger”, as some wags now call him, had enough going against him before the sex scandal, what with his being the Chair of the Toronto Transit Commission in the midst of a fare hike, customer complaints and a cold war between its workers and passengers, as well as the presumed endorsement of outgoing Mayor David Miller, who lost a lot of support after last summer’s garbage strike.

If you want an interesting indicator of David Miller’s standing in the business community, try mentioning his name at the Island Airport during the middle of the day. At that time, it’s mostly business commuters taking the magnificent Porter Air. I’ve heard his name mentioned many times while waiting for my flight in the lounge, and he’s generally regarded in the same light as pond scum. On my last trip, I heard an older business guy who felt that he had to precede the name “David Miller” with the phrase “the socialist” every time. All this may have something to do with the fact that Miller’s not a fan of the airport, despite the fact that it’s incredibly useful for businesspeople – myself included – and that regular city noise is still far louder than the sound produced by the (rather quiet) planes.

White Man’s Burden

When Giambrone announced that he had had an “inappropriate relationship” with someone other than his live-in partner, there was the usual tsk-tsking in the press. There was one notable exception, however: Mike Strobel, columnist for the low-brow Toronto Sun, had been won over:

Well, he’s got my vote.

I mean, who knew? Who knew what a lusty, savage heart beats under Adam Giambrone’s pale, puckered chest?

Sex with a sultry lass on his City Hall couch? No wonder our wunderkind councillor and TTC chairman wants that nice, big, comfy mayoral chair.

Good for Giambrone.

…

C’mon, Adam, fight back. Clearly, your mojo is working. So embrace it, like madcap Smilin’ Bob in those male enhancement commercials.

You may have lost the prude vote, but the testosterone vote is yours for the tapping. All us suppressed male electors pine for a champion.

Every Tom, Dick and Harry in this town has done what you did, or something like it — or wishes he had.

The line about “suppressed male electors” pining for a champion is pathetic and laughable. He’s a white guy in a white-collar job in North America who makes money writing at the grade 6 level; he has precious little to complain about. Despite the best efforts of that humour-impaired wing of feminism (Michele Landsburg, I’m lookin’ right at you), that status of women has improved without any significant cost – and a fair bit of benefit – to men. His remarks remind me of a conversation I had with a guy who worked in Maxim’s advertising department – he said that the magazine was for the younger guy who’s been robbed of much of the joy of life because of the social changes brought about by the rise of women. I couldn’t take him seriously, since we were both enjoying martinis in the swanky lobby bar at the W Hotel in Manhattan, talking to women who were approaching us to look at my accordion, saying “My father used to play one of these!”

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Archetypes

I’m still amused by the construction that went into the Toronto Star’s photo featuring Kristen Lucas (the “other woman”), Giambrone and his long-time partner (he always referred to her with the rather clinical term “partner”) Sarah McQuarrie. As I’ve said before, it screams “Madonna/whore complex”, with McQuarrie as the fantasy librarian contrasted with a sultry Lucas, leaning against a wall in an overcoat, looking at the camera with an expression that says “I will do things to you that most women can’t even pronounce”, all with a beaming Giambrone looking off into the distance. It doesn’t tell the whole story, but wow, what a story it tells!

What the photo doesn’t tell you is that neither woman knew about the other. McQuarrie thought she had a faithful live-in boyfriend and Lucas thought that Giambrone lived with his brother.

High Tech Meets Hijinks

If we were in the film noir era, Giambrone’s infidelity might’ve been proven through a love letter or perhaps photos taken by a private eye following him around. Since we’re in the era texting and tweeting, the damning evidence that Lucas brought to the Toronto Star after discovering that Giambrone was living with his girlfriend came in the form of text messages on her mobile phone.

The text messages told an old story about nebbish-y student council types who go into politics: they try to have their (mangia) cake and eat it too, sticking with one woman for appearances and to further their career, while enjoying the other for the sex and illicit thrill.

Sex and State Secrets

From Lucas, we got another old story about politicians: revealing inside information to their lovers. As the chairman of Toronto’s rapid transit system, Giambrone let her know that there would be a twenty-five cent fare hike at the start of 2010. This seems rather lame to me; we all figured a fare hike was coming, and I’d have been more impressed if he’d revealed the secret of how they get the caramel into a Caramilk bar.

Controlling the Story, Millennial Style

Lucas also tried to make sure that her story was told. As someone who’s just left her teens – she was 19 when she and the early-thirty-something Giambrone hooked up – she did so in the way that makes complete sense to an aspiring actress/model from the Millennial generation who grew up with MySpace and Facebook. She sent photos of herself – some of them heavily airbrushed in Photoshop — to local celebrity-chasing/party-scene reporting blog Drink the Glitter (she is said to have attended a number of their parties). Her reason? According to Drink the Glitter editor David Robert, “She didn’t want ugly pictures of her out there…she wanted good pictures.”

Drink the Glitter is the sort of blog where they end an article about Hillary Duff and her boyfriend with the line “SEX! TAPE! PLEASE!” and where Harrison Ford’s recent appearance in Toronto at a movie premiere was given the headline It’s Harrison, Bitch! They’re not the only gossip site trying to get the scoop on Giambrone’s illicit goings-on; Zack Taylor’s site is doing the same, and the Toronto Sun is reported these unsubstantiated reports as news.

The National Post’s Posted Toronto blog is on to something when they suggest that in the end, Giambrone, for all his claims of being social media savvy, was out-social-media’d by Lucas. She seemed to be aware, unlike Giambrone, that certain modes of communication leave an electronic trail.

When Others Tell Your Story

Giambrone’s case is the first one where a politician was brought down due to an error in fact-checking. According to the Toronto Star, Lucas came forward with her evidence because in an earlier article, they incorrectly reported that McQuarrie was his wife, and not his live-in girlfriend. This is going to end up as a cautionary story at Ryerson’s School of Journalism.

The day the story broke, Giambrone’s campaign team insisted that he would continue to run for mayor. He implied that the relationship was non-sexual, but that was contradicted by his text to Lucas telling her that she “looked pretty good naked”. In response to the text messages that Lucas brought to the Star, the team produced a “threatening email” purportedly sent by Lucas to Giambrone, a strange bit of evidence that was never mentioned again. If you’re looking for a PR team, you should find out who Giambrone used – and never, ever hire them.

In the end, Giambrone held another press conference in which he delivered a teary apology and revealed that there were more “other women”, and then abruptly left the stage. An aide stepped up and finished the story with the announcement that Giambrone would drop out of the race for mayor, sparing the city of the possibility of “Mini-Miller” running the show.

Denouement

(Photo from David Topping’s Flickr stream)

In what might be an interesting idea for a short story or a movie but a terribly and painfully awkward real-life situation, Giambrone and McQuarrie (who seems to be sticking with him through all this) have travelled somewhere out of the country, presumably to work things out and save the relationship. I don’t know what the best outcome for that story is – personal experience leads me to believe that the best way to deal with a cheating significant other is to dump them – but I hope they get it.

Accordion City’s mayoral election is on October 25th, which makes mayoral candidate Adam Giambrone’s admission to an “inappropriate relationship” incredibly premature. This is the sort of thing we wanted to hear about in the summer!

I have to hand it to the Toronto Star for the photo that accompanies their article on Giambrone’s announcement. It’s wonderfully constructed, with its sly suggestions of both “Giambrone sandwich” and the Madonna-whore complex:

The local media already have already had a wild ride in reporting Giambrone’s attachment status. They’ve already erroneously reported that he was gay, and then married, rather than “long-time-partnered”. After this revelation, that final report might have to be corrected as well.

The Toronto Star’s article is an amusing read, full of fun facts, including:

• The “other woman” is a little on the young side. He’s 32, she’s 20. Giggity!
• He managed to keep both women unaware of the other. Adam, I did this too. But I was nineteen at the time. You’re old enough to know better.
• Heeding the words of Kissinger — “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” – Adam decided to impress the other woman by giving her important state secrets. Alas, municipal politics is pretty small potatoes, so he had to settle for telling her about the transit fare hike. Laaaame.
• Worshipping false idols: “David Miller is like a god to Adam.”
• “You’re great baby, but you’d kill my chances for election” text messages: “You know I will be announcing I have a partner. It is someone named Sarah, who I’ve been involved with in the past. It is important for the campaign.”
• Saucy text messages: "I still think of you when I need … um … stimulation."
• Relationship-killing text messages: “I am NOT marrying [my girlfriend with whom I live].”

I agree with Dr. Nelson Wiseman, political science prof at the University of Toronto quoted in Posted Toronto’s piece on the subject: this scandal will affect Adam’s personal life more than his campaign. As chair of the Toronto Transit Commission, the cold war between the rapid transit system’s workers and its passengers is far more likely to cost him votes.

It’s MLK Day today in the United States, and what better day than today to post the video of his “I Have a Dream” address?

Let’s never forget this line:

"Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring—when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Before the “Bush 43” years, and especially during the early ‘90s, when I was at Crazy Go Nuts University, I often voiced my observation that:

• Conservatives were people you didn’t necessarily agree with politically, but found likeable and would gladly invite to a party, wedding, kegger or road trip, and
• Liberals were people with whom you might agree on a political level, but were tiresome and always threatening to invite you to some rally or other tiresome crashing bore of an event.

I miss the Barry Goldwater conservatives of yore and look forward to the day when they oust the Fox News/End Times-insane among their ranks. I don’t know if any of the Republican Party interns in the photos below posing with Chairman Michael Steele are the more sensible sort, but at least the poses in these photos – which are rather like the poses I’d do with my boss and coworkers – are a glimmer of hope that not all conservatives have gone tragically, completely and humourlessly off the rails.

Have you ever had a coach that asked you to “give 110 percent”? Judging from the infographic below, 193 is the new 110:

If you’re going for sheer entertainment value and nothing else, back Palin. It would be like watching a real-life, large-scale version of Marat/Sade.

Two out of three races is pretty good, but it’s not a sweep.

[Found via AZSpot.]

Speaking as a guy who prefers President Obama over anyone the increasingly deranged Republican Party has to offer, I have to say that no, he didn’t earn a Nobel. Wonkette editor emeritus Ana Marie Cox summed it up quite succinctly on Twitter: Apparently Nobel Prizes now being awarded to anyone who is not George Bush.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has this to say:

This is an odd award. You’d expect it to come later in Obama’s presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment. But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the ‘hyper-power’ as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it’s a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was ‘normal history’ rather than dark aberration.

You can expect to hear much sturm und drang from the already-verging-on-deranged conservative side of the political spectrum; even among officials, the expected window of graciousness through gritted teeth has been skipped. So much for their calls for people to “Respect the Office” when their guy was in charge.

Were I in the President’s shoes, I’d say: “Thanks guys, I’m honoured, but I’m sure that there are more deserving people and I haven’t earned it…YET.”

As the health insurance debate in the United States heats up, we need to remember who the real victims are: health insurance executives. Will Ferrell, John Hamm, Olivia Wilde, Linda Cardellini and other Hollywood celebrities step up to defend health insurance companies in this video from FunnyOrDie.com…

[Thanks to Margot Lewis!]

Here’s a selection of my favourite political editorial comics of the week:

Bloomberg: Canadian Health Care, Even with Queues, Bests U.S.

Allan B. Bevere: On Why the Church in America Cannot Speak Truth to Power

Cogitamus: Wingnut Values on Parade

The Root: Jimmy Carter, True Son of the South, Hits Nail on the Head

FiveThirtyEight: IBD/TIPP Doctors Poll Is Not Trustworthy

[Thanks to AZSpot!]

R.I.P. Patrick Swayze. (In case you don’t get the Kanye West joke, here’s the backstory.)

He forgot a couple: "Martyr complex" and “Can’t spell”.

My spider-sense is tingling, and not in a good way: Disney is buying Marvel Entertainment (yup, that Marvel, as in Spider-Man, the X-Men and so on) for $4 billion in stock, acquiring the rights to all their characters. Soon we’ll see the cast of High School Musical as the newest young mutants to join Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters and a Marvel Team-Up featuring Spider-Man and the Jonas Brothers.

I feel like this:

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Back in April. Adam Sacks of the blog Adam Thinks created this so-funny-because-it’s-true graphic:

After getting so many requests, he’s decided to make it a t-shirt. You can order it online from Printfection for US$20.00:

Squeaking By on $300,000: even in fat times, the headline of that article, which appeared in Sunday’s Washington Post, is far too tantalizing to ignore. What sort of person “squeaks by” on three hundred large?

One such person is Laura Steins, whose life – especially the socio-financial bits – is the subject of the article. She is a a vice president at MasterCard and lives in Birch Hill, a wealthy suburb outside New York City, and a divorcee with the custody of her three children.

I read the article and the the commentary about it on the web about the article and have written my thoughts below.

The Situation

She and her family live in a 4,000 square foot house valued at US$2.5 million; after the divorce, she bought out her husband’s half. The picture below shows both its exterior and interior:

The article’s opening paragraphs flesh out her situation a little more:

"Morning," says Laura Steins, 47, wearing a dark Armani suit and take-charge heels. Her blue eyes are lustrous and her skin is golden, and even with wet hair and no makeup, she radiates confidence.

But she’s months overdue for a visit to her colorist, a telltale sign of economic distress for a woman such as Steins. The smell in the basement could mean a crack in the septic line; unlike a $200 hair appointment, a plumber will be in the thousands. And from the breakfast table comes one more urgent need from a 10-year-old.

"At my birthday party, every single girl had a phone," says Katie Steins, making the case that an enV2 phone with matching cover is just standard in her crowd.

Steins kneels down to face her daughter. "If you continue to tell the world how undesirable your phone is — it’s not a flip, it’s not a swivel, it’s not an LG — you will not have a phone."

Steins takes a breath. Life in this $2.5 million house was built on the premise of two incomes, not the income of a divorced mother of three in a tanked economy. Her property taxes are $35,000 a year, the nanny is $40,000 and the gardener is $500 a month.

"I can ride this storm out," says Steins, which means having tiger-striped hair and getting her kid a generic cellphone and ignoring the stinking basement.

Follow the Money

Although Steins probably considers herself to be part of the middle class – perhaps upper middle class, but middle nonetheless — her circumstances put her farther ahead in the game than most people in her situation. Consider her sources of income, which the article lists as:

At $275,000, she’s making 5.5 times the 2007 median U.S. family income (according to Wikipedia’s page on median household income) and almost 7.5 times the 2007 median income for a family run by a single woman (according to this article in the Washington Area Women’s Foundation blog). It’s almost $100,000 more than the lower limit of the top 5% of U.S. household incomes for 2007.

As far as assets go, Steins has a treasure trove compared to most of us. She doesn’t just have a house on a nice lot in a tony neighbourhood, but all the accoutrements: furniture, appliances, electronics, clothes and so on. On the more liquid side, there’s her personal investment account. If it’s providing $50,000 to “pick up the slack” (her words, as quoted in the article) this year, I have to ask:

• What companies is this account investing in?
• If $50,000 is this year’s payoff, what’s the principal?

You Can’t Go Back

It’s easy for us to ask why Steins doesn’t sell her house. She explains that she doesn’t want to uproot the kids and that it’s near her work. There’s also the issue of the current economic climate: it’s hard to sell a house right now, especially one worth $2.5 million.

Her explanations, while reasonable, sound like rationalizations. As Chris Rock put it in one of his stand-up routines (in a very funny, very vulgar way which I’ll leave you to discover for yourself): once you get used to a certain lifestyle, it’s hard to go back. It’s a fair bet that when she was still with her husband, the household income was closer to a half million per annum.

Steins may also be holding on to her lifestyle, and especially the house, as a source of comfort in the wake of her divorce. In times of overwhelming, unpleasant change, we look for comfort in the familiar, and what’s more comforting and familiar than home?

Keeping Up Appearances

Keeping up appearances is also a factor. There’s a couple of telling anecdotes in the article, the first of which is Steins’ daughter complaining about her mobile phone wasn’t an LG enV2 — a model name so appropriate for the article that it’s downright Dickensian – which is the standard phone among her friends.

The other notable story about the importance of appearances is about a theme party in Steins’ neighbourhood. Its theme was the recession, the food and drink came from Costco, and guests were asked to dress down in old clothes and bring something non-perishable to be donated to the food bank. One guest violates the rules and shows up wearing a blazer and khakis, explaining that he wanted to show up in jeans but his wife wouldn’t let him. “They were so vintage,” she says by way of explanation, “I couldn’t bear it.”

Funny Because It’s True

There’s a quote in the article that made me laugh out loud. It comes from Kathy Shellogg, Steins’ live-in nanny, who in describing the Steins’ food preferences, says “They are big mayonnaise people.”

Violating the Unwritten Rule

Steins is breaking the rule that you learn by osmosis if your parents are professionals and have at one time or another owned a Swedish automobile or a sailing vessel at least 20 feet long: You should appear in the newspaper three times at most – your birth announcement, your wedding announcement and your obituary.

I wonder what she was thinking when consented to be covered in this story.

Wife 2.0

One of the photos in the gallery accompanying the article shows Steins with her daughter Katie, her ex-husband and her ex-husband’s new wife. Wife 1.0 and Wife 2.0 look eerily similar, right down to the way they dress:

Rorschach Test

The article makes a pretty good socio-political Rorschach test. People from different points on the political spectrum reacted to the article differently.

There were over 1,000 comments made directly to the article. Most of the commenters seem to have trouble feeling sorry for Steins, and some asked why the article even made it past editorial.

On sites like OpenLeft, there’s not much sympathy for Steins either; author David Sirota considers the article part of a larger stealth marketing campaign “designed to make us believe that very wealthy people are suffering the most”. A commenter on Brazen Careerist went so far as to question the wisdom of having three children: “That’s expensive and not necessarily ideal, on the kids or the parents, or society.”

Meanwhile, “Freepers” – participants on the right-wing Free Republic message boards – tend see the article as a ham-handed attempt by the Washington Post, part of that cabal known as the Liberal Media, to engender class envy and foment class warfare. Some of them wondered if she or her ex-husband were benefiting from TARP money (they apparently don’t), most praised her for having a good job, a couple said that their employees don’t make as much money as Steins’ nanny and a few wondered if she voted for Obama, being one of them no-good east coast lib’ruls.

The one thing shared by commenters on both ends of the political spectrum was the statement that they could squeak by on far, far less. Since Steins’ income is certainly in the top 5% and likely even in the top 3%, that’s probably true.

The strange accusations about Barack Obama coming from the American wingnut brigade – Socialist! Radical Muslim! Foreign-born! – are nothing new:

Image courtesy of Brian Kane.

Squeaky Fromme is free? Damn, I’m old.

Click the photo to see Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme’s Wikipedia entry.

(I wish I’d come up with the title, but alas, that clever turn of phrase is the name of a team that played at a trivia league in New York City last week.)

What a difference 16 months makes! (And wow, does the Daily Show have an amazing video archivist!)

Last night, the Daily Show did the public a great service by airing two clips. The first was from January 2008 featuring faux journalist Glenn Beck talking about how terrible the care he received at the hospital it was and how it reflected the sad state of the American healthcare system. In true Beck-ian fashion, his piece was called Beck from the Dead.

The second clip is from May 2009. Sixteen months later, the American healthcare system has become, in Beck’s own words, “the best in the world”. Now that the Socialist Kenyan Usurper is driving a movement to bring universal healthcare to the United States – the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn’t provide it to its citizens – it’s now the best system in the world, which the lefties are trying to dismantle. It’s quite impressive how it went from terrible to “best in the world” in so little time.

You really have to watch the clip to see Beck say one thing and then say the exact opposite thing afterwards, with the same fire and conviction. If you’re in Canada, you can watch the clip on the Comedy Network’s site; if you’re in the U.S. the Daily Show site has the clip.

It’s ironic that a show that purports to be a comedy show that just comments on current events is doing a better job of telling the truth than a network that purports to tell you the truth but ends up doing unintentional black humour.

Gawker sums up Glenn Beck perfectly in a couple of paragraphs:

This should serve as yet another bright, shining example of how much of an utter fraud Beck is. You gotta give the guy some credit though — he’s a charlatan’s charlatan, a near-perfect modern television bullshit artist who fully understands how the slightest glance, vocal inflection, or codeword can plant a seed deep down inside of a feeble mind and germinate.

But still, it’s hard not to watch this clip and come away feeling that he’s an even bigger piece of shit than you probably thought he was previously, because it’s just so goddamn obvious that the man will do or say anything to dig his hook even deeper into the sad dolts who tune into to his show each day seeking guidance.