Voter ID bills: Aw, it's on.

Remember last week when the Legislature passed a law requiring voters to provide one of several forms of ID at the polls, and Gov. Perdue vetoed it? Similar measures are at various stages of passage and enaction in Wisconsin and Texas, and New Hampshire's governor vetoed one yesterday.

I'm not going to get into a debate about the motivation behind these bills, but I generally oppose them because they're a waste of money. In North Carolina, voting under another person's name or voting more than once is already a felony. In 2010, something like 23 cases of voter fraud were refered to authorities. The most conservative estimates for how much it would cost to issue IDs to the hundreds of thousands of voters who don't have them, train poll workers and enforce the new regulations - the most conservative estimate - was over $1 million. That's in a state that's getting ready to fire thousands of public school teachers and health care workers. For a few dozen instances per election.

Keep in mind that some of the same people who supported the voter ID bill here in N.C. also wanted to cut the early voting period by one week - because they say it's too expensive.

And even in states that do have serious problems with voter fraud, is requiring a piece of paper really going to magically fix them? I'm just remembering that time in college when two of my housemates succesfully used the same fake ID just minutes apart at the same restaurant. Gun rights advocates are constantly telling us that we need to do away with regulations because they don't work anyway. Well, um...

But the biggest argument used against voter ID requirements is that they depress minority turnout, amounting to a modern-day poll tax. Here's the thing... It seems, intuitively, like that should be true, but there isn't enough evidence to say definitively "Yes, this is so." The existing laws just haven't been around long enough to give us the data to work with. For instance, in the first presidential election after Georgia passed its ID law, minority turnout went up dramatically. But, of course, that was the 2008 election when turnout was up across the board.

Which is why I think it's a good thing that several Senators are asking the Justice Department to look at whether these laws really do threaten voting rights. There are enough of these laws on the books or in the works to justify federal-level interest, and the DoJ has resources that your average state legislature doesn't.

I hope that the Department will take this up. And I also hope that its results, whatever theyare, aren't politicized. (Hey, I can dream.) For my fellow progressives, that means this: if the Department of Justice in a Democratic administration finds conclusively that voter ID requirements do not discourage minority voters, then we stop insisting otherwise.

Newsweek's Zombie Royals Cover

It’s allowable that professional journalists would’ve done some sort of story to acknowledge that Princess Diana would’ve turned 50 this week, particularly in light of her oldest son’s wedding earlier this year and the renewed affection for the British monarchy that it brought about.

It’s impossible to believe that professional journalists thought it was a good idea to photoshop a picture of Diana and Kate Middleton, the late princess’s daughter-in-law, as if they were actually together in life. It’s just as gross for a national newsmagazine to publish a story speculating what Diana would be like today, including a graphic of her fake Facebook page.

What the hell was Newsweek thinking? This belongs in the Onion, or the National Enquirer, not an allegedly serious weekly newsmagazine.

And I'm sure Diana's family isn't at all hurt or traumatized by this. Geez...

Bev hauls the Legislature out of my uterus

It will be hard for me to say this more clearly than the Charlotte Observer already did in the op-ed calling the Legislature’s abortion-restriction bill “an insult to women.” So let me just give a big kudos to Gov. Bev Perdue for vetoing the bill today, her 10th veto this year of bills passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature. (Ten vetoes will happen when the governor is a moderate Democrat and the Legislature conservative Republicans.)

The bill, which the Observer describes as the first of its kind in the nation, would’ve required not just an ultrasound (following a 24-hour waiting period), but for a doctor to describe what the ultrasound is showing. The bill included eliminating state funds for Planned Parenthood as well.

Let’s be clear: this is not about preventing abortion. Because the best, most effective way to do that is to increase funding for Planned Parenthood and other programs that educate women and provide contraception. If people whose stomachs are turned by abortion were serious about keeping abortion from happening, they would do the exact opposite of what this Legislature, and others around the country, tried to do. They wouldn’t be trying to shut down the organizations that provide women, in particular poor women, birth control, basic health care (including pap smears and mammograms) and – Hello – prenatal care. (They also wouldn’t be axing education and health care if they were truly “pro-life,” but that’s a separate issue.)

The bill was indeed an insult to women. It comes from a place of deep distrust of any woman – college student, middle-aged mother, whomever – to make decisions about her own pregnancy and childbearing. And, though nearly anyone can agree that terminating a pregnancy is a tragedy, I am and always will be vehemently suspicious of letting the government get involved with that decision.

(I don’t understand conservatives on this issue. Y’all are convinced that Democrats want to take your God-given right to own an assault rifle – even though no one has tried since the assault weapons ban expired during the last administration – and you think every attempt to simultaneously lower taxes and the cost of health care is either socialism or Nazism or somewhere in between, but you’re totally ok with a bunch of guys elected to two-year terms encoding in state law what your highly trained doctor can and can’t say to you during a medical exam?)

Abortion restrictions of this type are insult to women.

This part may be difficult to read. I intended it to be.

Let’s take me, for example. If you read this blog, you probably know that I was raped not quite four years ago. Afterwards, when I went to the hospital, I was offered the “Plan B” pill – basically a high dose of the common birth control pill, administered in two doses several hours apart. Hell yes I took it, and if it hadn’t been offered I would’ve demanded it.

But let’s say I’m unfortunate enough to live in a state that bans Plan B, or maybe I didn’t go to the ER. Now, a few weeks after being raped, I’m pregnant. Now what?

Well, maybe I happen to live in one of the 90 percent of U.S. counties without an abortion provider. So I have to find a provider somewhere else. Maybe I have a car. Maybe not, and I have to hitch a ride from a friend. Maybe the doctor I find is in the next county, or maybe two or three hours away. Assuming I get the ride, there’s that 24-hour waiting period to consider. So now I’m getting a hotel room on top of the gas and food (for my friend, too, if I’m hitching that ride).

Maybe I have a job with paid time off. Or maybe I work hourly, in which case I’m not only losing money, but I most likely don’t have health insurance. Boy, I sure hope I had hundreds of dollars lying around. For not just one doctor’s visit, but at least two, assuming I don’t need any follow-up care.

In the doctor’s office, I’m already 99 percent sure I don’t want and can’t handle this baby. But before the doctor can perform the medical procedure I came here for, she has to perform an ultrasound. Now, if you’ve ever been pregnant at this stage, you know that an ultrasound isn’t the thing you see in the movies where the doctor squirts jelly on your stomach and views from the outside. It’s a wand placed inside your vagina far enough to view the uterus.

Keep in mind that hypothetical me was raped a few weeks ago. Nothing traumatic about that.

I can tell you from personal experience that, within weeks of what happened to me, I was most definitely NOT in the emotional shape to deal with something like the above scenario.

Ok, ok, lots of abortion opponents who like to think of themselves as reasonable create little loopholes in their ethics like “only in cases of rape or incest.” Go back through what I just wrote, only this time pretend it’s not about what could’ve happened to me. Pretend the same thing is happening to a teenager, or a single mom who’s the sole source of income for her family, or a woman who desperately wants her baby, but knows that having him will kill both of them.

As with anything in life, reproductive rights are far too complicated and personal to be handled by public legislation. Any government is woefully inadequate to deal with this, and therefore should trust women, families and their doctors to decide what’s best for them.

And, for what it’s worth… if you’re someone who’s ever thought, forwarded an email or bought a bumper sticker telling the government to get out of your gun cabinet, then you should absolutely respect my wish that the same government stay out of my uterus.

Bueller? Bueller?

When I started writing this blog almost four years ago (wow… does NOT seem that long ago…), I wanted to avoid the trend in opinion writing (not just on the Internet, but there’s certainly plenty here) of picking out something in the conventional wisdom and then taking the opposite opinion just for the hell of it. If you’re genuinely against the grain on a certain topic, hey, it’s a free country. But it was the whole contrary-for-the-sake-of-being-contrary thing that just seemed tedious to me. And I also didn’t want this blog to turn into “Look what this idiot wrote.” Frankly, that’s boring.

So it’s with total blogger integrity that I present this essay from The Atlantic and say that, while I appreciate the writer’s point of view, I disagree.

It’s been 25 years since “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” was released, which means that it’s been slightly less than 25 years since my mom persuaded my older sister and I to watch it, telling us that “that girl from ‘Dirty Dancing is in it.’” And the film’s continuing popularity seems to bug Alan Siegel, who thinks it’s an unrelatable, whitewashed fantasy with an unlikeable hero.

Well, yeah. First of all, if you’re expecting any studio comedy released in the 80s to explore race and class relations without any cringe-inducing moments, you’re in for disappointment. Why “FBDO” should be singled out for criticism – when it takes place in one of the whitest, most privileged places in the U.S. at that time – among all the other all-white, “greed is good” films of the era is kind of silly. Siegel should definitely not watch “Adventures in Babysitting” or “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”

For me – not that I could articulate this as a school-aged middle-class kid – Ferris Bueller was less a hero to be emulated than a fantasy object. It’s escapism. Bueller is sort of the trickster character that shows up in myths and stories practically since people started telling stories. He doesn’t change; people around him do.

And even as that single-digit-aged kid, I could recognize the slightly absurd fantastic elements of the movie. At the end of the movie, Ferris’ girlfriend Sloan watches him scurry off, saying to herself, “He’s going to marry me.” You’re what, 17? Enjoy looking back on that moment, honey. If I could appreciate this sheltered, naïve moment of youthful idealism at an age when I thought the Muppet Babies were real, why can’t a real-live grown-up writer?

But I do appreciate what he’s trying to say. We should look critically at why Hollywood did, and to a large extent continues to, pitch affluent white guys as “universal” figures while neglecting equally entertaining stories about people who aren’t in that demographic. But I think we can do that without guilt-tripping the people who quote Ferris Bueller in their high school yearbooks.

Lighten up, honey. Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story…

Movies are a fiction medium. Even those supposedly based on true events, even documentaries. The point of films is to tell a story. And when telling a story based on actual people and events, that necessarily means leaving things out, compressing time, combining characters and inventing totally fictional characters. Because the point of a film is to tell a story. If you want accuracy, go read a book.

I saw this played out (with varying degrees of success) with three movies this week: “The King’s Speech,” “The Social Network” and “Green Zone,” all released last year. The first two are explicitly based on real people and events, and the third a fictionalization of real events.

“The Social Network” is of course “the Facebook movie.” “The King’s Speech” interested me because, aside from the fact that it swept all the awards, I’m reading a book about the pre-World War I relationships between cousins Tsar Nicholas, Kaiser Wilhelm and King George V, so a film about George’s son (like him, a “spare” who ended up on the throne) rounded things out a bit.

One thing that struck me about “The Social Network” was how I kept forgetting that Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay and David Fincher directed it. Both Sorkin and Fincher have very noticeable styles that at times have overwhelmed their work. Yes, the film looks like it was shot with all the lights off and sounds as if someone were sitting on the mics the whole time, which is Fincher-y, but it’s not as aggressively Fincher-y as, say, “Se7en.” The only scene that struck me as “Oh, my hell, slow the f- down” Sorkin-y was the opening one.

Technique is sadly not as transparent in “Green Zone,” of which sherpas in Nepal could probably watch 30 seconds and say, “Oh, that’s Paul Greengrass. By the way, do you have any dramamine?” (Dear Hollywood: when I’m doing a crossword puzzle during the half-hour-long climactic chase/shootout because I’ve given up fracking trying to see anything, it’s time to put the shaky-cam on a tripod and set up some lights.)

But that’s not my main beef with “Green Zone.” It’s a well-made thriller (at least for the first half, which I’ll get to in a second), but I feel like it would work better if it were set in a fictional country and war. Because, set in Iraq in the weeks after the U.S. invasion in 2003, frankly, it’s kind of preposterous.

So we have a soldier, Matt Damon, who’s supposed to be securing the WMD left behind, which of course didn’t exist. The first half hour or so is brilliant, with engrossing scenes that really made me feel like I was there in the “fog of war.” There’s one scene where Matt’s convoy is trying to drive through a street crowded with Iraqis begging for water. First he tells some of the men to get out of their Humvee and clear a path; then, as the crowd grows more agitated, you can see the soldiers tense up: are they about to be shot at? Is one of these people going to set off a suicide bomb? Nothing happens, but you (as a viewer) get that heightened awareness that soldiers in combat feel.

There’s more tension in that two minutes than in the rest of the movie. After that the film moves from realism into garden-variety thriller territory.

*here be spoilers*

Chief Matt (his character did have a name, but c’mon, it’s Matt) knows from experience that the WMD intelligence is BS. So when an Iraqi man gives him a tip about a wanted general hiding nearby, he jumps on it, finding a notebook that lists the general’s safe-houses. It turns out that the general is the Pentagon’s confidential source on WMD, only the Pentagon official who handled him (Greg Kinnear) lied to the administration, and media, about what the general had to say (that there really weren’t any WMD). Matt has to find the general and get him to tell the truth (because then the war will end immediately…?), while Greg is using Army Special Forces to stalk the safe-houses and kill the general before he can be brought in from the cold.

The friendly Iraqi kills the general, a move that my 12-year-old nephew who wasn’t even watching the movie saw coming. (True story. Alex called me and said, “Aunt Sara, I was just playing Angry Birds when I had the overwhelming sensation that, somewhere, a character is going to disappear for a large chunk of time and then conveniently reappear when it’s time to shoot the bad-guy-who’s-secretly-a-good-guy.” And I said, “It’s okay, honey, Aunt Sara’s just watching a bad movie.) (That is not a true story.)

Here’s where the preposterousness comes in. If you accept that an Army officer serving in a war zone during active combat operations somehow has the free time to investigate the Pentagon’s WMD source (which I don’t); if you accept that the Army officer can find evidence of a wanted Baathist and not turn it over to his superiors and then face absolutely no consequences (which I don’t): in what universe does an Army officer e-mail confidential information to every news outlet on the planet (as Matt does at the end) and not get hauled off in handcuffs?

*end spoilers*

Personally, I think the story of how we got into the Iraq War needs to be told. I think we need to record and tell and tell again how bad intelligence and wishful thinking did such a disservice to the most professional military in the world by using them as political props. And that’s what bugged me about “Green Zone.” It’s not a movie, it’s an op-ed in search of a plot. And it’s cowardly because it couches valid criticism as a half-ass fictionalization. Frankly, pinning the real-life shenanigans that led us into that war on a fictional Pentagon official is a cop-out. If you want to tell this story, then tell this story.

And don’t turn a New York Times reporter into a Wall Street Journal reporter (with a fake URL: “twsj.com”… what was up with that, anyway?). Was that supposed to make it easier on anti-war audiences? Because the actual reporter who basically printed the Bush Administration’s talking points verbatim worked for none other than the alleged house organ of the left.

It’s odd that I hold films presented as a true story to a lesser standard than one that’s ostensibly fiction, but that’s based on real events. I suppose that I just assumed that “The Social Network” or “The King’s Speech” would do all of those things I mentioned in the first paragraph – compress events, omit those that don’t advance the narrative, etc.

Someone once told me that a fantasy or sci-fi story had to work even harder at creating verisimilitude because they are set in unreal environments. “Green Zone” failed on that point for me. If the filmmakers had picked a direction – either totally fictional or totally true to life – I think this could’ve been an excellent, and important, film.

The Jon Stewart School of Journalism

Remember when Jon Stewart went on “Crossfire” seven years ago or so and utterly dismantled its entire reason for being, and Tucker Carlson said Stewart should start a journalism school? (And Stewart responded, “You should go to one.”) Stewart’s appearance on Fox Sunday Morning and interview with Chris Wallace may not have had as many fireworks, but it was better in many respects, in part because Wallace let Stewart have his say. (At least online. The interview was heavily edited before it aired on TV.)

Part 1

Part 2

It’s a revealing interview, and required viewing for anyone who likes to understand where her news comes from. Whether you’re a “Daily Show” disciple or a Fox News devotee, this is a great discussion about some of the decisions that go into getting stories on the air.

Stewart and Fox viewers are on the same side in some ways, because both are disaffected with what they see when they turn on the news. And that news doesn’t have a liberal bias. It has, as Stewart says, a lazy, sensational bias. (Chuck Klosterman had a great essay about this in Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.)

Case in point: the Nancy Pelosi press conference that all the 24-hour networks cut away from as soon as she announced that she wasn’t going to discuss Anthony Weiner (which he also talked about on his show Monday night). We can all agree that this is ridiculous and worthy of parody.

(But we’re the same people who turned up our noses when Jon Meacham tried to turn Newsweek into a more long-form analysis publication, so what do we know?)

Quickie: White House response

Following the announcement earlier today that 10 members of the House of Representatives will sue the president and Defense Secretary, and following previous House resolutions and a letter from the Speaker of the House, the White House now says it will respond with a report on the mission.

"The administration's report will include a legal analysis for the mission and address a June 3 House resolution that raised questions about the president's goal in Libya, how he hopes to achieve that goal, why he has not sought congressional authorization for involving U.S. troops abroad and how much the conflict will ultimately cost..."

Also...

"In a coincidence of scheduling, Obama and Boehner are set to play golf together for the first time Saturday, a day after Boehner's deadline for information from the administration and the day before he says it could be in violation of the War Powers Resolution."

And you wonder why this is such a fun hobby for me.