Mount Holyoke College prof Douglas J. Amy insists that “Government is Good,” and has a whole detailed site all about why.

Cenk Uygur, meanwhile, explores the other side of this ideological divide, and decides today’s big business power-grabbers aren’t interested in democracy or even capitalism; but that’s only to be expected from “corporatists.”

Political PR maven Jonah Sachs insists progressives have gotta stop being so damned rational. He argues that public opinion in this country isn’t swayed by analytical arguments but by emotional appeals.

Guess who uses social-media sites the most? That long-neglected demographic caste, the stay-home moms.

Paul Krugman wrote it weeks ago, but I’m still trying to get to the end of his long essay asking the musical question, How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? The answer to his query’s easy, really. Economics is either the most or second-most fraudulant “science” out there (competing with sociology). Economic theory has less to do with the world most of us live in and more in common with the virtual worlds created by or for role-playing gamers

Henry Gibson, who passed away Monday, had a long and solid acting career ranging from Nashville to Magnolia and Boston Legal. But he’ll always be known as “the Poet” on the original Laugh-In. Gibson was a prime example of that show’s basic premise. Laugh-In was suit-and-tie guys (what we’d now call the Mad Men generation) looking gently askew at Those Darned Hippies. Saturday Night Live, by contrast, WAS Those Darned Hippies.

At least Gibson died without the tragic career footnote faced by Peter, Paul and Mary co-singer Mary Travers. She faced her cancer-ridden final months with the indignity of having one of her group’s hit songs reworked into the unauthorized political hatched-job “Barack the Magic Negro.”

…makes films. He also collects films. Here’s a full hour culled from his vault of vintage toy commercials—Batteries Not Included.

Rotten Tomatoes decided to celebrate the Fourth by determining the most appropriate movie for each state. Obviously, some states have more choices than others. (Wisconsin’s list entry is a short within a documentary).

Washington gets Singles. Not the greatest film made here (or even the greatest film set here), but a reasonable portrayal of what at least one generation thinks of as the scene that made Seattle famous.

I’ve got another piece on Seattle PostGlobe. It’s about the folks who really, really love the Film Festival.

Remember, gang: PostGlobe is not the downsized version of the old P-I Web site. It’s an all-new local news site started by P-I refugees. And it could use your suggestions and your support.

…what the odd temporary readerboard sign for a Hal Ashby film festival was doing up outside the Showbox one day last week, we now know. It was part of a Target TV commercial with Pearl Jam. Really.

…to Marilyn Chambers, one of the very first people to become a celebrity for performing real sex in a movie. She continued on, despite typecasting and the advance of years. Her cable softcore comedies of the 1990s were minor entertainment trifles that proclaimed, without preaching, that the formerly young still have bodies and can still enjoy their use.

Of late, I’ve been noting the eerie similarities between two U.S. corporations with similar names:

• American International Group (AIG), the insurance and investment giant now under fire for funny-money shenanigans; and
• American International Pictures (AIP), innovators in teen-oriented exploitation features from 1955 to 1980.

Let us compare and contrast, shall we?

AIP: First release: the original The Fast and the Furious.
AIG: First business: corporate insurance for US and European firms in China.

AIP: Worked on low budgets. Shot some films in as few as two days.
AIG: Spared no expense, at our expense, to enrich its own speculators.

AIP: Carefully market-tested titles and posters before making each film.
AIG: Brazenly insisted its mortgage-based derivatives were safe and secure.

AIP: Redubbed the original Mad Max from Australian into American.
AIG: Stamped questionable investment products with “AAA” ratings.

AIP: Mixed-and-matched film genres to make new hits (I Was a Teenage Werewolf, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini).
AIG: Sliced-and-diced mortgages into credit default swaps and other slabs of tainted loan-burger.

AIP: Used subsidiary names to release even-lower-budget films (including the original Little Shop of Horrors).
AIG: Renamed its consumer insurance division “21st Century” to protect it from the now-tarnished AIG brand.

AIP: Helped launch the film careers of Annette Funicello, Jack Nicholson, Cher, Vincent Price, Pam Grier, Peter Fonda, and producer-director Roger Corman.
AIG: Paid “failure bonuses” to high-ranking derivative traders and executives.

AIP: Taken over by sitcom producer Filmways (The Beverly Hillbillies). Film library now owned by MGM.
AIG: Taken over by the U.S. government.

AIP: In-house formulae of sex, horror, and comedy helped inspire The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
AIG: Media critic Robert Stein has decribed politicians’ and pundits’ response to the bonus scandal as “Bailout Rocky Horror Shows.”

AIP: Known for its hokiness, its audacity, its improbable stories, and its ridiculous monsters.
AIG: Not much different.

The Art of Warner Bros. Cartoons. This traveling exhibit is now on display at the Museum of History and Industry, which almost never acquires exhibits produced elsewhere. It’s got 150-some pieces of original art, most of which were in Steve Schneider’s coffee-table book That’s All Folks! The Carl Stalling Project CD plays on the PA. A mini-theater plays some of the Looney Tunes Spotlight Collection DVDs to adoring/adorable young’uns.

I’d seen most of the art pieces before in printed form. I wasn’t prepared for how small they were in real life. The ink lines on the cels were sometimes hair-thin; yet, when filmed and projected, these figures almost always moved in perfect flicker-free sequence. I left with more appreciation for the ladies of the studio’s ink and paint department, who turned the animators’ pencil drawings into what you saw on screen. They were expert craftswomen.

The venerable art-house distributor’s parent company defaulted on a loan. New Yorker Films’ library, put up as collateral on the loan, will be auctioned off. Somebody with connections needs to step in and buy all 400-some titles. This priceless repository of world cinema should be kept and nurtured.

Just saw the documentary Obscene, a profile of longtime Grove Press/Evergreen Review publisher Barney Rosset. Rosset specialized in hibrow and “daring” lit for the GI Bill generation of college kids and for their ’60s successors.

He also specialized in anti-censorship court battles. He successively succeeded in legalizing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, and the film I Am Curious (Yellow).

Now in his 80s and still feisty, he’s full of colorful stories about his life and times.

But the most shocking image in the movie involves a right-wing smear campaign against Evergreen Review in 1972.

The magazine, in its last years, had become part lit journal and part “artistic” skin mag. One issue contained an essay by WA’s own Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The appearance of Douglas’s words within the same staples as erotic art photos was enough to give then-House Minority Leader Gerald Ford an excuse to call for Douglas’s impeachment.

We see a press junket event with Ford and two other Repubs. Jerry holds up the magazine, lingering on each page of the nudes, demanding that we all be outraged.

Two years later, Ford would become the beneficiary of another impeachment drive, and would propagate the self-image of a conciliatory Mr. Nice who just wanted to bring everybody together.

It’s good to learn this other side of Ford, as just another right-wing sleazemonger.

This year’s most famous (real) pregnant teen happens to live in a town that’s a homonym for the name of last year’s most famous (fictional) pregnant teen. The result, of course, is a Photoshopped movie poster advertising that quirky comedy hit, Juneau!

A few of you might have noticed that the Obama campaign’s got a a really slick graphic-design department.

One of this design team’s major motifs is a solitary, serif capital “O.”

To many, that letter, presented in that context, is reminiscent of a magazine whose figurehead and co-owner is a big Obama supporter.

To others of us, it reminds of The Story of O, the classic novel and movie about bondage, discipline, submission, pain-as-pleasure, and the total surrender of one’s being to a figure of strong authority.

Damn, doesn’t that sound exactly like the ol’ Republican seduce-n’-swindle syndrome, from which Obama promises to deliver us.

Oh, and the time remaining until Election Day? Nine and a half weeks.

…refer y’all to any Wall St. Journal opinion essays. But here’s one I like. It’s all about a serious modern poet’s love for Warner Bros. Cartoons. Really.

Utne Reader has discovered Seattle Sound’s item about an online sub-sub-genre of “slash fiction,” this version involving the likes of Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl, among other bad-boy duos of rock.

“Slash” fiction, for the uninitiated, is a four-decades-old shtick in which mostly female writers imagine guy-pals of celebrity or fiction as if they were hot n’ heavy gay lovers. Most observers believe it started with Star Trek fan fiction.

I’d go back earlier, to the college English profs who’d give an easy A to any student essay that “proved” the major characters of any major literary work were really gay.

Cobain, as many of you know, sometimes claimed to be bi; though there’s no knowledge of his ever having had a homosexual experience. I used to figure he’d just said that because, in Aberdeen, to be a “fag” was the worst insult you could give a boy, while in Olympia and Seattle, upscale white gay men were the most respected “minority group” around.

Fiction based on real-life celebrity caricatures is also nothing new. The New Yorker did it in the 1930s. South Park has been doing it for a decade.

Anyhow, there are further slash frontiers out there than Seattle Sound or Utne have bothered to explore. They include “femslash,” women writing about female fictional icons as if they were really lesbians. It might have started with fan-written stories about Xena and Gabrielle. It’s spread to include other SF/fantasy shows with at least two female cast members, and from there to other fictional universes. The grossest/most intriguing, depending on your tastes, might be the stories imagining half-sisterly cravings between Erica Kane’s daughters.

In all the years I’ve been doing this gig, I’ve never once mentioned stamp collecting… at least as far as I remember. But I just ADORE the UK post office’s new Hammer Films and Carry On stamps, derived from period movie posters.