Most Recent Posts

The sponsor of a bill to make the Holy Bible the official book of Louisiana has withdrawn the measure ahead of a full vote in the state House of Representatives, saying the proposal has become a distraction.

As we reported last week, a mix of Republicans and Democrats had moved the largely symbolic bill, sponsored by Rep. Thomas Carmody of Shreveport, out of committee on an 8-5 vote.

The measure had been scheduled for a floor vote on Monday, but Carmody said he told the constituent who asked for the bill that he "was going to go ahead and return the bill to the calendar [on Monday] and concentrate our efforts on those things that are much more important."

The Times-Picayune reports:

"In introducing the legislation, Carmody always maintained he was not taking steps to establish a state religion, but rather to educate people. Critics have accused him of foisting faith inappropriately into the government sphere. Others thought such a designation would trivialize the Bible and its importance.

"Initially, Carmody had just been intending to designate a specific, historic copy of the Bible, which he thought could be found in the Louisiana State Museum, as the official state book. But lawmakers amended Carmody's legislation two weeks ago to propose making any copy of the 'Holy Bible' the official state book."

In a high-rise office in Rosslyn, Va., Adam Parkhomenko is selling campaign paraphernalia for a campaign that may or may not happen.

"Bumper stickers, magnets, and then we have everything from T-shirts, we have baby onesies that we're almost out of now," says Parkhomenko.

Parkhomenko runs a group called Ready for Hillary. It's more than a Clinton fan club: It's a superPAC, a list-building superPAC.

The next presidential election is more than two years away. Nevertheless, an unprecedented amount of infrastructure is under construction for a Hillary Clinton campaign that is still a matter of speculation.

"Ready for Hillary is focused on the grass-roots piece of organizing, and making sure that all throughout the country, if she does this, that there's an army of grass-roots supporters behind her from Day 1 that are ready to go," Parkhomenko says.

This kind of bottom-up grass-roots organizing was not a strong suit for Clinton's 2008 campaign. But the shadow campaign developing in advance of a possible 2016 sequel is focusing on the ground level. Ready for Hillary raises small donations by selling baby onesies and holding small-dollar fundraisers.

i i

No one can send up sexism with a punchline quite like Amy Schumer.

"A lot of the women's magazines are supposed to like, be confidence building, but they really just scare...you so you buy the products in them," she says in one stand-up routine. "Like, they all will put Jessica Alba or someone like that on cover. And she's super sexualized no matter what magazine. And you're like, 'Good Housekeeping? Why is this even here?'"

But Inside Amy Schumer gives the New York native a chance to turn those sharp stand-up routines into a larger swipe at society's casual sexism.

In one moment from the show, she tries to play a shoot-em-up video game as a female character, only to see that character stopped from going into battle and sexually assaulted, then pelted with questions like "Do you wish to report it?" Then: "Are you sure?" And "Did you know (the assailant) has a family?"

It's a simultaneous slap at the boys' club of gamer culture and the military's terrible response to sexual assaults. In another sketch, she's a beautiful-but-awful tennis star. But the TV announcers aren't really interested in her athletic ability.

"I think the most incredible part about (her) game is how she manages to stay so thin, but still have such large breasts," says one match announcer, as the soundtrack to a cheesy soft porn movie plays in the background. Wonder if Anna Kournikova's ears were burning?

Schumer sells all this cutting-edge comedy with a knowing attitude. She's a smart aleck who talks about sex with the kind of explicit glee usually reserved for guys.

One great example involves a bit about her encounter with a reporter from TMZ. "He asked me, like a slut question, because I'm the 'it' girl for that," she said, laughing. "He asked me about a product called Instead. It is a product for women, you buy it and you..."

Wait a minute. Maybe I shouldn't say too much more about that on a family-friendly website.

Anyways, the calculation at Comedy Central seems obvious: Use sex jokes to get the mostly young, mostly male audience to pay attention, then school them with some eye-opening comedy about sexism and stereotypes.

But for me, that combination also inspires a little guilt. It grabs my attention, I laugh and then I feel a little ashamed for how well the sex talk reeled me in.

There are times when Schumer misses the mark. In one moment from the first episode of this season, she finds out an old sex partner has herpes, she pleads for help from God and he arrives ... in the form of superstar character actor Paul Giamatti.

"Let me be honest with you," Giamatti-as-God says. "You did get herpes. You already have it. For me to undo your herpes, I have to create balance in the universe...I'd have to kill off an entire village in Uzbekistan."

"Yeah ... whatever you think is best," she says, blankly. "Do it." Later, she offers to have sex with God if he'll undo her herpes and he refuses because he's gay.

It's wry and very weird. But Schumer's also working a stereotype: the ditzy slut. And that comes dangerously close to the biggest risk in modern comedy: A comic tries satirizing a stereotype, but just encourages it.

Schumer walks that line brilliantly, but there are others who haven't. Like Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, who discovered just how difficult that kind of humor is during the Academy Awards last year when he sang a big production number called "We Saw Your Boobs."

It was delivered with an "ain't we naughty" kind of attitude. But you waited for MacFarlane to at least nod toward a larger point about the movies' double standard for topless actresses. And he never did. So a serious issue was passed off as harmless fun.

Schumer is too smart to make that mistake. Instead, there's a delicious tension between her attention-getting sex jokes and the social commentary she drops once we're paying attention.

I can't wait to see how guilty she makes me feel next time.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

In a book out Tuesday, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens proposes six amendments to the U.S. Constitution, including measures aimed at preventing gerrymandering (that is, redrawing district lines for political advantage), abolishing the death penalty and allowing limits on the amount of money that political candidates and their supporters can spend on campaigns. Other amendments would promote stricter gun control and abolish states' sovereign immunity. The 94-year-old Stevens writes in the preface to his book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, that of his proposals, "the first four would nullify judge-made rules, the fifth would expedite the demise of the death penalty, and the sixth would confine the coverage of the Second Amendment to the area intended by its authors." He added that he is confident "ultimately each will be adopted."

For the grumpy prescriptivists of the world, there is now an extension for Google Chrome that replaces the word "literally" with the word "figuratively" on the webpages you visit. (Though you're fighting a losing battle, dear purists — the word's more colloquial, emphatic sense — as in, "I'm literally going to kill the next person who comments on my use of the word 'literally' " — was recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary.)

On Monday evening, state Rep. Thomas Carmody shelved a bill to make the Holy Bible the state book of Louisiana, saying the issue had become a distraction. Carmody initially tried to designate a particular copy of the Bible from the Louisiana State Museum as the state book, but the bill's language was eventually changed to refer to the King James Bible, and then just to "the Holy Bible." Critics, including the Louisiana ACLU, called the bill discriminatory and complained that it blurred the line between church and state.

The novelist Salman Rushdie remembers Gabriel Garca Mrquez, who died last week at age 87: "The trouble with the term 'magic realism,' el realismo mgico, is that when people say or hear it they are really hearing or saying only half of it, 'magic,' without paying attention to the other half, 'realism.' But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn't matter. It would be mere whimsy — writing in which, because anything can happen, nothing has effect. It's because the magic in magic realism has deep roots in the real, because it grows out of the real and illuminates it in beautiful and unexpected ways, that it works."

Claudia Rankine has won the $50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize, an annual award given "to an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition." Rankine's poems are an interesting melding of essay and poetry — one of her prose-poems, "Don't Let Me Be Lonely [There was a time]," begins: "There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died. This is not to suggest no one died. When I was eight my mother became pregnant. She went to the hospital to give birth and returned without the baby. Where's the baby? we asked. Did she shrug? She was the kind of woman who liked to shrug; deep within her was an everlasting shrug. That didn't seem like a death. The years went by and people only died on television—if they weren't Black, they were wearing black or were terminally ill. Then I returned home from school one day and saw my father sitting on the steps of our home. He had a look that was unfamiliar; it was flooded, so leaking."