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Take Out Venezuela!On a date!REBECCA SCHOENKOPFPublished on September 01, 2005ITEM! I saw some darling college girls this weekend, though I did my best not to actually talk to them, as they were trying to sell me a tank-sized Navigatorfor a $100 chance. It was the St. Jude's Clambake Saturday for the children's cancer research hospital, held at Newport Dunes.There was a little boy moonwalking in front of the band;he didn't have cancer, but the teen whom my cigarette smoke enveloped in the spotlight sure had. The Surfaris of Wipeout fame were playing; they're a Christianite band now, playing a lot at Calvary Chapel,and they were good, and there was dinner, and lots and lots of pretty girls. I always promise to hit the various charity galas, and I never have a lick of fun when I do. But my debonair and debauched friend Gordy Grundy ran the auction, and Joe Isuzu emceed, and Lee Iacocca looked very fat and friendly, and St.Jude's never ever asks uninsured families to pay. It sounds sort of socialist to me, but with any luck, that'll be outlawed soon like the good Lord intended. * * * ITEM DEUX! My boy and I were gonna go to New Orleans in November. Now, maybe not so much. But one thing that does make me feel better, as I consider that fine proud place under floods and water snakes and toxic soup, is knowing that George W. Bush, a man always ready for any contingency, cut $71 million this year from the Army Corps of Engineers' flood management program for the city. From a June 6 article about the cuts in New Orleans CityBusiness? "A study to determine ways to protect the region from a Category 5 hurricane has been shelved for now." * * * ITEM THE THIRD! Perhaps the only thing interesting about The New Yorker's profile of local megablogger and radio bloviator Hugh Hewittlast week was the offhand note that Diane Sawyer used to be an assistant to Richard Nixon. It kind of blows away Hewitt's main contention in life and in his pretty head about the frothing liberal media—a liberal media even Ann Coulter has noted isn't. (Her latest column: "If anything [the media] is moving right.") I'd talk more about his quotes on the political direction of the Catholic Church—"They were wrong on the Soviet Union, wrong on nuclear weapons, and wrong on poverty," he said—but then I'd have to actually call him for comment, and you know I really don't like to be fair. * * * ITEM AGAIN! "In 1900, American women did not have the right to vote. If Iraqis could develop a democracy that resembled America in the 1900s, I think we'd all be thrilled. I mean, women's social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy." That's Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Middle East specialist for the CIA. But what I keep asking—and asking, and asking—is what happens when Iraqis democratically elect the first person who'll call to tear down the Great Satanor kill all the Jews? What have you got to say to that, Hugh Hewitt? And where can I get one of those fetching burkas? * * * ITEM ONE MORE TIME! It's not a cliché: it's a classic! * * * And ITEM! I've been pondering on kids a lot lately, with some friends popping them out and others losing their only ones to far-off colleges, and some people's kids getting slaughtered over there while my little buttercup has begun to smell like a man and has a shiny new deodorant stick to prove it.
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