Part Three Best Argument for Social Security ...

Part Three

Best Argument for Social Security Overhaul Proving Bush's Point. Gov. Bush hasn't gone far enough, in our opinion, in his proposal for partial-privatization of Social Security, but at least he's recognized that the New Deal entitlement is about as modern at the hula hoop.

In late August, on a talk show in Atlanta, a listener called in with the following story.

"My father died in 1991 at the age of 59, never collecting a payment from Social Security. Mother died in June of 2000 at 63, never collecting a payment from Social Security. When I called this week to report my mother's death, SSA informed me that my mother's estate qualified for nothing, not even the $250 burial benefit because she wasn't married nor had dependent minor children...

"Assuming my parents worked since age 18, they paid into SSA for 86 working years for zero return. Had my parents been able to invest $50 per month at five percent interest for those 86 working years, they would've had $230,000 in the bank rather than nothing from Social Security.

"You would think someone would have at least sent the family a thank-you note expressing the government's appreciation for them dying so young.

"Also, as a small business owner, I am required to 'invest' 15.3 percent of my salary into SSA. Is there any way I can withdraw from the program or am I just screwed like the rest of America?"

Best Art Reporter Michael Kimmelman

The New York Times

Well, They Have to Get Something Right. No one covers the art world's many flatulent subtleties and dung-covered controversies better. His style is reserved, sober and never panders or obscures. His coverage of the "Sensation" show made sense of it all and never took sides, and his profiles of artists are penetrating, knowing, compassionate. He is that rare critic/writer who's savvy enough to call bullshit, but big enough to still love art, to seem giddy about writing about it.

Best Media Ad Campaign Salon

Penny Stock. We've made no secret about our feeling that Salon has always been absurdly overhyped, both by itself and by its fans among the middlebrow doofi who pass (in a herd) for media pundits. A couple years ago it was briefly supposed to be a political player, an "important" purveyor of news and gossip. Then that bubble burst, and the hype switched to how the IPO was going to make zillionaires out of all the principals. Then the stock price dove straight into the toilet, and this year's buzz was about how Salon was diversifying into a multimedia/merchandising "network" incorporating the online magazine, online radio, a virtual shopping mall, a tv show and the kitchen sink. Only a few scraps of this mighty vision have materialized at the time of this writing?despite all the wide-eyed touting from places like The New York Times that really should know better (well, there's some nepotism there)?but that's the nature of buzz, isn't it? If the hype is sold well enough the disappointing lack of follow-through may go unnoticed. So Salon just sits there, looking ever more like just a shell of itself, with even its best, most loyal columnists, like Camille Paglia, having some time ago put their shtick on autopilot.

But the one thing we've always given Salon is how very good they are at generating that buzz. Hyping themselves is their most impressive skill. They sure do know how to shine that penny (or, as the late curmudgeon Stanley Elkin is reputed to have grumbled about the inept but hopeful students in his writing classes, "polish a turd"). Thus the two great little tv commercials they ran earlier this year. They really were small gems of image advertising and product positioning. There was the one that showed kids playing with presidential candidate action figures, cracking wise at one another, ending with the tag, "smarter voters made daily." Simultaneously ironic and iconic, it subtly evoked the great old political spots of the 60s. The more generic one, showing a bunch of famous people at a ball?politicians, movie stars, rock stars, the pope?brilliantly suggested that Salon is funny, smart, smartass and hip. That Salon itself doesn't exactly deliver on that promise is, again, beside the point. Neither is it relevant that you can find a lot better commentary?political, social, cultural?on a lot of other websites that don't have Salon's media budget. The commercials themselves, qua commercials, were small, wise triumphs.

Best Inspirational Website Rotten.com

Warms Our Cockles. The header on the opening page says it best: "END TIMES ARE HERE? Critics hail impending Armageddon as 'Feel-Good apocalypse of millennium' Cities consumed by locusts?" Rotten.com describes itself as "The soft white underbelly of the net, eviscerated for all to see: Rotten dot com collects images and information from many sources to present the viewer with a truly unpleasant experience." It's actually very amusing and frequently educational and uplifting. "Motorcycle" is just the thing to forward to that good buddy who refuses to wear a helmet, as proof that there are things worse than death. "The Incident with the Bird" and "The Incident with the Fish" just serve to demonstrate that even feminists are right once in a while, and the "Tupac Autopsy" and the "Mayhem" series will bring you to full waking consciousness faster than a triple espresso with a crack chaser.

The "Circular File" contains many light-hearted images guaranteed to bring a smile to the most jaded of faces, such as the "Crafty Squirrel" or the "Missing Dog Head." The "Testicle" exhibit has the biggest balls of all, Tony Millionaire's claims to the contrary notwithstanding. We use Rotten.com to begin our daily routine, much the way certain Midwestern geriatric cases use Guideposts. The site reaffirms our faith in a world gone mad and encourages us to press on through the encroaching craziness and to always look on the bright side of life in this, the best of all possible worlds. Rotten.com makes us proud to be human again. There aren't too many websites that can do that.

Best Racist In a Weekly Newspaper Peter Noel, the Village Voice

Noel Coward. In an August cover story, Peter Noel, the Village Voice's black-man-of-record, called Colin Powell and other black conservatives Uncle Toms who were "asking African Americans to sell out." Noel should watch whom he calls an Uncle Tom. Why is Colin Powell's being a Republican more Uncle Tom than Noel's role as HNIC (Head Negro In Charge) for the white folks who own and run the Voice? Perhaps Noel would reply that the Voice is good white folk and the GOP bad white folk. This would make him not only a racist, but more of a white folks' dupe that Gen. Powell could ever be. In black culture there's an old tradition of the Field Negro calling the House Negro an Uncle Tom, even when they're both working for The Man.

This notion that blacks can't hold conservative views is one that elitist intellectuals, black as well as white, have imposed. In fact, large numbers of blacks hold conservative views in areas like religion and sexuality, as well as saying they're for school vouchers?all areas where the black rank and file tend to be more "Republican" than "Democrat." Why won't Noel allow them to vote that way, if they choose, without insulting them all as dupes? As though a wealthy pluotcrat like Gore won't sell them out just as quickly, dun them for taxes while dooming their kids to four or eight more years of cruelly ineffectual schooling, and so on.

Best Lost Cause Ralph Nader

Self-Fulfilling Prophet. We would be rich indeed if we had a shiny, barely circulated Susan B. Anthony dollar for every numbskull we encounter who proclaims, "I'd vote for Nader, of course, but he doesn't stand an ice cube's chance in hell." The reality is that he'd stand an iceberg's chance in the North Atlantic of sinking this kleptocrat ship of fools in a New York minute if the disenchanted and demoralized electorate would get behind him. Defeatism has no role in American politics. It's no wonder the two fratboys won't debate him: he'd clean the carpet with them. The lesser of two evils is still evil. However much we may disagree with him, Ralph Nader is not evil. That alone should be reason enough to vote for him.

Best Sign of Alternative Weekly Entropy The Stranger

Oh Yeah, You Bad. At the annual convention of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies last June, New York Press and Seattle's The Stranger were identified as the "bad boys" of newsweeklies. We'll accept the designation in our own case, but?without intending to prove anyone's point?we regretfully note that in the case of The Stranger, it was a bit anachronistic. The Stranger's not nearly as "bad" as it used to be, and that ain't good.

For its first few years, the Seattle upstart was one of the few?the very few?"alternative weeklies" in the country we could honestly and regularly say we liked and admired. Founded and published by Tim Keck, who'd been a founder of The Onion (and this year started up a new one, the Portland, OR, Mercury), The Stranger had a fun and funny renegade attitude that instantly distinguished it from all the drab Village Voice wannabes on the one hand and the machine-tooled New Times monolith on the other. Keck's still one of our favorite people in the business, but we're thinking, now that his new Portland project is up and running, that he needs to pay a little more attention to The Stranger again. Over the last year or so we've been watching The Stranger devolve into just another dull, kneejerk AAN weekly, increasingly indistinguishable from its rival, the Voice-ish Seattle Weekly. Used to be when New York Press freelancers asked us if there was another weekly in the country where they might find work, we could send them to The Stranger. Now they've all quit writing for The Stranger, complaining that it's no longer open to stories that aren't straight out of the AAN hippie-lefty Voice-clone playbook. Time was The Stranger used to subvert and shake up readers' expectations. Increasingly, under editor Jennifer Vogel it just plays up to them. If you changed the names of the local politicians and bands mentioned, you could exchange the editorial for that in any two dozen other weeklies around the country, and not a reader would notice. There's the death of the "alternative" weekly for you. The "wildest" notion Vogel's come up with this year was an all-fiction issue. To hear the whoops and huzzahs from certain morons in AAN, you'd have thought she'd invented a new alphabet. Wow, fiction in an alternative weekly. That's new.

Great cover art, though. It's the only thing left about The Stranger we like: beautiful cover art, week after week. Too bad there's so little behind it anymore. Get back involved, Tim.

Best Criticism of Charles Rangel Damn Good Point. There are a lot of reasons to detest the greasy slimeball known as Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel. Still, here's the best attack that we've heard yet on the rotund one: "The problem...that we have [is] professional African-American people that make a living out of searching out racism. And they find it easier to reach out and to get some Jew that's out of step with the rest of the Jewish community, and to point that out as being Jewish racism, when they know throughout our country we have racism coming from WASPs that are more powerful, that can do more damage, but they don't single them out."

So who said those pearls of wisdom? Why, Charles Rangel. Except he was trying to defend that NAACP guy out of Texas who dared to make a clearly anti-Semitic reference to Joe Lieberman.

All right, here's his actual quote: "The problem...that we have [is] professional Jewish people that make a living out of searching out anti-Semitism. And they find it easier to reach out and to get some black that's out of step with the rest of the black community, and to point that out as being black anti-Semitism, when they know throughout our country we have anti-Semitism coming from whites that are more powerful, that can do more damage, but they don't single them out."

Still, we got the message. Rangel's saying that he's an opportunistic tool who runs around creating controversy. And the same goes double for Al Sharpton? We won't argue, Congressman.

Best Joe Lieberman Moment Sept. 3, 1998

Seems Like 100 Years Ago. There was a brief period in American history, we'd like to recall for high school students, when Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman was hailed, by both Democrats and Republicans, as a man of conscience. All of that vanished when Al Gore chose Lieberman as his runningmate for the 2000 election: Faster than you could say Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick or Kathleen Willey, the Senator chucked all of his principles and became the Howdy Doody of our national political culture.

But for the record, let's stipulate that Lieberman wasn't always a self-promoting shill, a discredit to both his religious beliefs and the principles that elevated him above standard pols like Barney Frank, Bill McCollum or David Bonior.

Speaking on the Senate floor two years ago, in the wake of Bill Clinton's belated admission of perjury, Lieberman was a beacon of truth in his party. That he eventually voted to acquit Clinton of impeachment charges does diminish the following statement, but it's powerful nonetheless, especially considering that so few of his colleagues had the guts to imitate it.

Lieberman said, in part: "[T]he President apparently had extramarital relations with an employee half his age and did so in the workplace, in the vicinity of the Oval Office. Such behavior is not just inappropriate. It is immoral. And it is harmful, for it sends a message of what is acceptable behavior to the larger American family, particularly to our children, which is as influential as the negative messages communicated by the entertainment culture. If you doubt that, just ask America's parents about the intimate and frequently unseemly sexual questions their young children have been asking them and discussing since the President's relationship with Ms. Lewinsky became public seven months ago. I have had many of those conversations with parents, particularly in Connecticut.

"And from them I conclude that parents across our country feel, much as I do, that something very sad and sordid has happened in American life when I cannot watch the news on television with my 10-year-old daughter anymore."

Strong, stern stuff from the Senate Scold. Which makes it all the more disheartening to witness Lieberman's cynical embrace of Al Gore, the cowardly Vice President who didn't resign during the Clinton scandals, but instead lauded him, on Impeachment Day, as one of the greatest presidents in American history.

Best Sign of Desperation from the Village Voice Tom Tomorrow

And Yet, Very Funny. We weren't too surprised to see Ted Rall claiming in an editorial cartoon that the Republican Party supported David Duke's bids for political office in Louisiana. But we were honestly a little saddened to see Rall's Voice cohort Tom Tomorrow sink to a real level of desperation. We know it's not going to be an easy presidential election, as the lefties have to pretend to be appalled by Al Gore even as they're itching to cast their votes for the sleazy Veep this Reelection Day. But the "This Modern World" strip hit a delusional low very early in this campaign.

The big gag for the strip of May 31, 2000?or, rather, Tom Tomorrow's idea of a big gag?was that cartoonists deserved to take the summer off just like the big networks. (It was too early for Tomorrow to realize that a debuting network show would become the most talked-about subject of the summer.) The final frame of his comic featured the crazy outcome of Tomorrow's planned vacation, as Mr. White Guy looks at his local alt-weekly and has a good laugh: "Ha, ha! That wanker's never seen a supermarket scanner before!... Hey, wait a minute?this is a cartoon about George Bush Senior!"

Let's ignore the use of the word "wanker," which probably suggests the big Monty Python influence that entertained young Tom between rounds of Dungeons & Dragons. Instead, ponder the deeper meaning of the reference to George Bush Sr. Everybody now knows that President Bush was never baffled at seeing a supermarket scanner. It was a false story planted by the Democrats during the '92 election, and promptly perpetuated by obedient drones like the one at Newsweek. Sure, there are probably some who still believe the story, and we usually wouldn't make a big deal about it. But isn't this the same Tom Tomorrow who routinely lectures us all about how we blindly follow the media and never question the big lies? Could it be that Tom Tomorrow is just as moronic as the WASPy caricatures that he relies on to make his simplistic arguments? Or could it be that Tom Tomorrow is just as willing to lie as any good Democratic operative, trusting that his audience is too misinformed to have any notion of the truth? The best part is that it really doesn't matter. Douchebag, heal thyself.

Best Antiglobalist Slogan The New Federalist

Lyndon, We Hardly Knew Ye. The best antiglobalist slogan we've seen recently wasn't on a protester's banner in Seattle or L.A., but was in fact a headline of The New Federalist, the Larouchite newspaper. The Larouchites, as Alan Cabal has pointed out, have been preaching antiglobalism since the WTO protesters were in diapers. The headline of the July 31 edition of the "National Newspaper of the American System" said: "Rich Nations to Poor: Let Them Eat Laptops!" Below that was a bizarre illustration of Alan Greenspan as Belshazzar, unable to read the writing on the wall.

Best Jerry Brown Quip He's Still the One. We happen to loathe the Grateful Dead cult that blossomed in the 70s (although we'll admit six or seven of the Dead's songs aren't half-bad), but the famous song lyric "What a long strange trip it's been" seems apt when describing Jerry Brown. The former California governor, three-time presidential candidate and current Oakland mayor was unfairly slimed as "Governor Moonbeam" somewhere along the way, a Mike Royko label that stuck with an unimaginative media. Brown's bare-bones '92 primary campaign against Bill Clinton is bound to be studied in the future: as usual, the Californian was ahead of his time, proposing not only a flat tax, but telling the country exactly what a corrupt politician Clinton was.

Unfortunately, Brown didn't have the money or clout to derail the Arkansan's political triumph. Just like in '76, when a thirtysomething Brown made a late attempt to stop Jimmy Carter with the most charismatic campaign since JFK's, he came up short in the end. That's life.

Anyway, Brown was in town not long ago and was asked at a forum why he's supporting Al Gore for president. After all, isn't Gore the embodiment of all that Brown lambasted in '92?the gobs of money, the lavish campaign spending, the empty promises, the race-baiting? The Mayor widened his eyes and simply said: "Jerry Brown didn't endorse Gore. The Mayor of Oakland did."

Best New York-Based Website About Wisconsin Dairy Aire

www.dairyaire.com

Mention My Name in Sheboygan. Wisconsin my not be the most derided and maligned state in the nation, but it's up there. That's why it's so nice to see a couple of born and bred expatriate Wisconsinites shamelessly celebrating their heritage and all that comes along with it.

Out of a small office in Soho, two old friends?Kerrie Adami from Madison, Jeff Johnson from farther north, Eau Claire?have been putting out Dairy Aire, a monthly Wisconcentric webzine, for about the past six months now, posting interviews with famous (and semi-famous) Wisconsinites, like publishing icon Barney Rossett and accordionmeister Polka Ken, as well as first-person pieces by displaced and wannabe Wisconsinites. And each, in his own way, explores what it means to be from America's Dairyland, whether writing about the Tommy Bartlett water show in the Dells, or about growing up in Stevens Point, or just about driving through on the way to someplace else.

See, the thing is, Wisconsin isn't like other places. Things happen there that just don't happen anywhere else?or like anywhere else. People talk different and look different. So do the animals. You got your booyah, and the big brat fest, Oconomowoc, things like that. Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer and Tailgunner Joe. The Packers and the Badgers, of course. And beer enough to make all the weirdness seem normal while you're there.

And after being on the East Coast so long, Dairy Aire helps make it all seem weird to us again.

Best Letter to the Editors of a Literary Magazine Mcsweeneys.net

Return to Sender. This ran last November in the online McSweeney's:

Dear McSweeney's,

Thank you for the polite, if not lengthy, rejection letter for the story I sent you titled, "Harry Finds the Ham." I have always wanted to be a writer, and I finally said, "It's now or never," and sat down and wrote, "Harry Finds the Ham," (my first story ever!) after reading McSweeneys No. 3 from cover to cover. Overall, I found your comments to be both extremely insightful and sensibly put. But I have to be honest, after reading what you said about my use of plot device (recall the chart you drew on the second page), I wondered if maybe you missed (my fault, and I'm sorry) some of the key things you had to get in order to understand the story. So I wanted to run them by you. I hope that's okay.

1) The central metaphor is the bonzai tree. So by the end of the story, when Phil says, "Here's a quarter," you know the bonzai tree has changed back into a werewolf and you begin to realize that what Phil means is, "You can't run forever without stopping." That's why the title has the word ham in it.

2) That scene in the apartment can be boiled down to this: Jeanette never finds out that Tom fed the goldfish catnip. And Tom can't bring himself to confess, even after the goldfish leaps out of the bowl and runs up a tree.

3) The story takes place somewhere in the future.

4) When Paul looks down and sees that he has hooves instead of feet, he's not in the dream anymore.

That's it. You were definitely right-on-target with everything else. I can't help but wonder what you make of the story now, especially when you remember how Kate describes her first trip to heaven!

very grateful, Chad Fordham, Newark NJ

Best Way to Get Your Press Release Ignored The Dave Liebman? Make your organization's slogan "The Sacred Art of Acting Within the Practical World." Put that at the top of the release, above where you explain that "any fan of Dave Liebman" should be apprised of your man's talents on the saxophone. Describe said musician's sound as "paradoxically full yet light" (like a Riesling?) and be sure to mention the title of his latest release, Cosmos. Then sit back, relax and wonder why you didn't get a review.

Best New Media Website Smartertimes.com

If Wishes Were Horses, We'd All Gallop to Work. What all the large-staff, mega-budgeted Internet content-site start-ups must ignore or bet against is that the Net really seems more conducive, when it comes to fast-moving content sites, to boutique operations: one or two people with a vision, an obsession and lots of time to implement. Look at Matt Drudge, Mickey Kaus, Jim Romenesko. Possibly the three best, most up-to-the-minute media-commentary (or media-and-politics) sites on the Web, and they're all one-man shows.

As of this last June, add Ira Stoll to that list. Every morning, seven days a week, the Brooklyn-based 27-year-old gets up, reads The New York Times, then goes to his computer and fires off a scathing critique. Stoll's a conservative, so his focus is on pointing out all the myriad ways the Times betrays its liberal, pro-Democrat biases in its supposedly objective news reporting. You don't have to agree with Stoll's politics to see that nine times out of 10 he's caught the Olympian daily out cold as it distorts, ignores or slants the facts, and occasionally just plain tells untruths. And you don't have to be a conservative to see that Stoll's serving a great purpose in piercing the Times' vaulted myth of objectivity in its reporting. We know New Yorkers who read the Times the way fundamentalist Christians read the Bible, naively accepting everything they find there as indisputable Truth and unimpeachable Facts. It's spooky?they don't just read it, they believe in it. That the Times managed to establish itself as the temple of this secular religion for educated urban sophisticates is one of the great media marketing triumphs of the 20th century. But it's depressing to see otherwise intelligent, appropriately skeptical minds being so gullible when it comes to this one blind spot. We wish every New York Times reader would follow up their daily dose of the "Truth" with a visit to smartertimes.com.

Best Political Magazine The Weekly Standard

www.weeklystandard.com

Murdoch's DC Gem. First things first: What the hell is up with Weekly Standard editor and publisher Bill Kristol? He runs a brilliant magazine, has a full dance card of tv pundit turns and is rightly considered one of the top intellectuals in the Republican Party. What more can a man in his profession desire? We suppose it's to be John McCain's chief of staff in the Oval Office, but Bill, that dream died months ago. It's no secret that Kristol and the Bush family are not simpatico, but we find the editor's recent behavior rather strange?willingly giving "panic" quotes about the GOP candidate to hostile newspapers like The New York Times. Does Kristol, who's devoted so much time and energy in an often futile attempt to explain how corruption and deceit has defined the Clinton-Gore administration, really want another four years of Democratic rule in the White House?

These are questions that keep us awake at night.

Nevertheless, the five-year-old Weekly Standard remains the leading journal of political opinion in the United States.

Seven reasons why:

1. Unlike most magazines, there's a genuine diversity of views in the Standard; it doesn't adhere to a monolithic doctrine like almost every other periodical in the country, whether it's the mind-damaging New York Times or quaint Village Voice. When Kristol was off in the Twilight Zone with McCain, more than one Standard staffer fielded a steady stream of phone calls and e-mails asking, "Is Bill off his rocker?" Actually, we think he was, but what of it? Likewise, we don't agree with the magazine's staunch stand against trade with China, but at least the arguments presented are principled and smart.

2. The Standard's cover art, whether it's an illustration by C.F. Payne, New York Press contributor Fred Harper or Thomas Fluharty, or oversized photos of Bush, Gore or Fidel, has no equal.

3. Staff writer Matt Labash is among the finest journalists in the country, and is as yet unspoiled by too many tv appearances. His June 19 piece, "Al Gore, Sanctimonious Slumlord," was one of the most important of the 2000 campaign, even though most Gore newsletters, like The New York Times, Newsweek and The Washington Post, ignored it. Labash traveled to Carthage, TN, political prop-home of Al Gore, where the Veep owns property and rented out a house to Tracy Mayberry and her husband Charles. Rent checks were made out to Gore himself, although the candidate didn't actually get his hands dirty and inspect his tenants' lodging.

Mr. Populist, who sends his own children to private schools (unlike George W. Bush) but is a champion of the teachers' unions, might've gotten an eyeful if he inspected the dwelling that's just 150 yards from his own. As Labash reports: "[T]he plaster was coming off the walls, the linoleum was peeling off the kitchen floor, the basin of the bathroom sink was a constipated sludge puddle, the guts of one toilet tank had to be held together with Sunbeam bread bag twisties, and both bathroom toilets overflowed?when they flushed at all."

When Mayberry and her husband complained, they received an eviction notice.

And Labash adds a nice twist: "If it were possible for Dickens to mount a comeback and this time go Southern Gothic, a stop by the Mayberry homestead would give him a good leg up on source material. The house sits a mere chaw-hock from the Gores', and is nearly as close to the Golden Nugget Lounge, a kicker bar that promises karaoke and one-dollar longnecks for the ladies. Around the perimeter of the Mayberrys' medium-sized yard is a barbed-wire cattle fence, a gentle reminder to their children not to wander off onto the Gore property where they could get intercepted by Secret Service agents or electrocuted on another interior fence."

Labash goes on to describe the general filth of the house: the 20 cans of Raid the Mayberrys used this spring to exterminate black widow and fiddle-back spiders and flying cockroaches, the ceiling cracks and dents in the kitchen floor.

The Mayberrys have since relocated. As for the November election, Mrs. Mayberry told Labash, "Gore can kiss my ass."

4. John Podhoretz, the New York Post's cross to bear, no longer works full-time at the Standard.

5. The opening "Scrapbook" section, usually comprised of five or so short bits, is biting, satirical and dead-on about the elite media's Democratic bias. For example, in the Sept. 18 issue: "The Scrapbook considers it an appalling invasion of privacy, not to mention an invitation to the worst sort of Tartuffery, that we require our political leaders to disclose their charitable giving in their tax forms. But given that we do, last week's anti-Cheney frenzy in the press was amazingly one-sided. In our Nexis search, only four of the 162 stories we turned up mentioned the Gores' embarrassing 1997 tax returns, which showed a total of $353 in giving from an income of almost $200,000. Like the Gores, the Cheneys will no doubt ratchet up their giving next year to achieve a respectable over-all percentage. But will this actually be charity, or the result of a very public shakedown? And still reporters wonder why politicians call them names."

6. The Standard owned the Elian Gonzalez issue. Week after week, Chris Caldwell (who writes the "Hill of Beans" column for this paper) wrote passionate editorials in defense of keeping the Cuban boy in the United States rather than sending him back to be a puppet for Fidel Castro. A snippet of Caldwell's body of work on the subject, from the April 10 issue: "The Miamians who are surrounding Elian's house, the Cuban-American community organizers who urge widespread civil disobedience should federal authorities seek to remove him, and even those local elected officials who say they will refuse to cooperate with those same authorities, have our support. They are protecting more than Elian. They are protecting their country from a historic disgrace."

Obviously, we know what happened to Elian not long after those words were written. While Bill Clinton talked pussy on the golf course, he let Janet Reno do his dirty work: she seized the child and finally shuttled him back to Cuba. What a rancid chapter in American history. When you have occasion to sing "The Star Spangled Banner" and come to the words "land of the free and the home of the brave," think of Clinton and Reno and try to withhold tears of rage.

7. Finally, we can't think of a single magazine that boasts such an all-star stable of writers and editors: David Tell, Fred Barnes, Richard Starr, Tucker Carlson, Labash, Caldwell, Kristol, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, Andrew Ferguson, Claudia Winkler and J. Bottum. And that's just the A-team.

Best Glossy Gay Magazine that Doesn't Double as Pornography Hero

Our Hero. If you only read Metrosource, or Empire, Next and HX, you might believe that gay life is all about the difficult choice of whether to catch Junior at Twilo or have some "Drama" at Limelight, or maybe the crushing problem of where to dine and shop within gay neighborhoods. Those publications have their place, but we want an intellectually and esthetically stimulating glossy gay magazine that doesn't just emphasize parties and sex and fashion layouts of underage things in spandex.

Fortunately, Hero came along in 1998, with the mission to reach a specific, but apparently ever-growing, demographic?gay men interested in having and maintaining committed relationships. Hero's circulation currently stands at 30,000, and publisher Sam Francis expects it will continue to grow this year. The bimonthly boasts the same mainstream advertisers that other gay magazines have attracted?Bud Light, United Airlines and Prudential Securities, for example. What first attracted us to Hero was the cover line on its premiere issue: "Real Men Cuddle." Subsequent issues have featured profiles of, among others, GLAAD chief Scott Seomin and photographer David LaChapelle; pieces like "Couples that Work Together" offer ample support for the lovesick, for the hopeless romantics in the gay community. We especially enjoyed the August/September issue's wedding guide, which profiled six couples' ceremonies, provided a lengthy planning section and gave suggestions for "10 Great Honeymoon Ideas."

Best Zoned-Out Egghead Robert Kuttner

An Innocent Rejoices. Robert Kuttner, a syndicated columnist and coeditor of The American Prospect, melted upon hearing Al Gore's acceptance speech in Los Angeles last month. More money to be wasted on public schools: yes! A war against the drug companies that save people's lives: yes! Commitment to hate-crimes legislation: yes! Special treatment for gays, blacks and union members: yes! An abortionist on every block: yes! More litigation to stifle entrepreneurs: yes! Multimillion-dollar rewards for trial lawyers: yes! Power to the people: yes!

Right on, Bobby.

In an Aug. 20 op-ed article, Kuttner summed up his glee: "In abandoning his [Democratic Leadership Council] roots, Gore stumbled on the political reality that Democrats win the hearts of ordinary voters not by repairing to the bland center but by being champions of working families. And they do it by using ample government interventions to balance private power. FDR could have told him that. Welcome back, Al."

Mama mia.

We think Kuttner, in his Boston bubble, has either been nipping at the cooking sherry or smoking some orgasmic Thai stick. If Gore is indeed elected, the pitiful editor will have a rude awakening when not a goddamn promise is kept by the new administration. On the upside, Kuttner and his crew at the Prospect (Robert Reich, by the way, an AP founder, favors school vouchers) will have plenty to complain about next year.

Best Internecine Media Assault Felicity Barringer

The New York Times, July 24

Slant-Eyed. We know it's a cheap lede, but scout's honor here: not during our most Swiftian moments could we have conjured up the below-the-fold Post hatchet job on the front of the Times "Metro" section on July 24. We wish Barringer had declaimed with some fire in her belly, but the piece, "Running on Adrenaline and Ideology at the Post," reads like she wrung her hands throughout. Her thesis: "However straightforward [the Post's] news articles, its headlines and columnists tend to goad, gloat and cheer." While we hope an editor stuck in that lame "tend to," we can't shake the feeling that Barringer thought there was a sort of judiciousness about the attack.

Notice the distinction between the reportage on one hand and the headlines and commentary on the other. Once made, Barringer presented, frankly, a worthy newspaper: sensational headlines betrayed by journalistic sobriety, the temptation to insert commentary denied. In order not to defeat her own purpose, Barringer had to undermine the distinction early and often.

Barringer's example of how the Post covers a story was the mid-July piece about Hillary Clinton's alleged "fucking Jew bastard" remark. "The allegations of an anti-Semitic slur fit nicely" into the ideological framework of a conservative paper, she quoted the Post's former City Hall bureau chief as saying. Okay, there's something?were the story not picked up by the Daily News, as Barringer admitted. But back to the vacillation and the hand-wringing: "The Daily News ran its account of the accusation against Mrs. Clinton the same day, but not in the first papers off the press." Finally, after Hillary issued a denial, the story appeared "in all news outlets, including the New York Times [!], Newsday, the Buffalo News and the Times Union of Albany." Doesn't sound so much like ideologically manufactured news anymore. "But the Post was first," we're reminded.

But the marquee attraction was the eighth graf. First, we got a clue as to why the story was written at all: "[C]onservative critics have long defended the Post, saying its news coverage seems biased only to those with a built-in liberal frame of reference." There was the claim of biased coverage, insufficiently supported by the rest of the article?and then the coup de grace: "Conservatives who see the New York Times as among the voices of a liberal city say the Post is a necessary ideological counterweight." So, you defend the honor of your paper against the inevitable counteroffensive your incoherent article raises. And you mold the opinions of the entire city in the image of the paper while pretending to do exactly the opposite. Does the Times really see itself as Barringer described? Did she originally write something to the tune of "conservatives who see the Times as a liberal paper," only to have an editor butcher the phrase?

Best Half-Naked Celebrities on the Internet Celebpecs.com

Rrrrrrooowwww!! We can't remember exactly what we were searching for when we stumbled across this comprehensive amateur site from the UK. Suffice it to say that the photos?of Stephen Dorff, Hugh Jackman, Jude Law, Taye Diggs, etc.?held our attention. These are photos in the public domain (from magazines, movie stills and the like), but you probably haven't seen them all before. You can also find out what some of these guys have to say, which can be quite funny, and how old they are, which is sometimes surprising.

The British thing means that there are a lot of guys from Manchester United, Leeds and EastEnders as well as far, far too much Boyzone. Perhaps British origins also explain Lenny Kravitz's surprising success in site polls. While some of the poses are sort of embarrassing, in a what-was-he-thinking kind of way, we particularly liked the shots of Jackman (Wolverine in X-Men), David Duchovny wearing only a strategically placed teacup, Johnny Depp (on the site by popular demand, apparently, since an older version's copy deemed him "too slim") and Johnathon Schaech. Celebpecs.com also features regular "PecVote" and "PecChat," is continually updated with new pics and, in case you were wondering, the number-one product visitors buy from the site's associates is Antonio Sabato Jr.'s Workout for Life.

With more than a million visitors in its four years of existence, Celebpecs.com is not exactly a secret, just a whole lot of fun, and possibly a necessity now that summer's over and all the men are putting their shirts back on.