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The news that the Sasha and Malia dolls are no more depresses me for one reason: Why didn't I realize that the Ty Co. would "retire" them, as it did with Beanie Babies back in the day, and buy up as many as I could find to sell on eBay? Mariah and Sydney—as the dolls, unchanged in appearance, have been renamed—just won't appreciate in value the same way.
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Looks like it's back to Barbie for kids seeking presidential playthings; the Sasha and Malia dolls are no more. Ty, the company that caused such controversy with its Sweet Sasha and Marvelous Malia, no longer offers the First-Daughter-inspired toys. From the New York Times:
On Tuesday, the company's Web site included pictures of the two dolls beneath a red sign that read "Retired."
"We appreciate the company's response to this matter,'' said Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Obama.
It must have been Emily's argument for protecting the Obama girls' privacy that swayed them. Or maybe the first lady's complaint had something to do with it. Either way, we're still waiting for someone to snag sashaandmalia.com so we can watch Mother Lion Michelle in action again. So far her track record for defending her young from commercial predators is as impressive as her outfits.
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Thinking a little more, Emily, about Nancy Killefer's tax-woes-related withdrawal from her post as Obama's "performance czar," it's not fair. There's no sex-based discrimination here. But aren't we condemning Killefer, Tom Daschle, and Tim Geithner for expressing an amplified version of an attitude we all share?
This morning, in my day job at the New Republic, I posted a rather righteous denunciation of Daschle, proclaiming that he shares characteristics with the villainous CEOs now dominating our national imagination. His tax error was just like the bumbling, thoughtless mistake the big-auto execs made when they flew to their bailout hearings on private jets, I fumed. It was "carelessness. It was about growing too cozy in one's Master of the Universe status to think very hard about whether you need a private jet or a private limo, or how to keep things above-board if you use one. ... We just can't afford to excuse this kind of careless attitude among our Big Machers anymore." Stone him!
I still think Daschle had to go, for PR reasons. But after reading Emily's post below, I also thought of the phone call I made yesterday afternoon—to an accountant, the first one I've ever used. I used to take pride in going all hairshirt with TurboTax, but TurboTax is not known for its wizardry at finessing your freelance income, and last year I started to have the uncomfortable, resentful sensation that I was paying the IRS more than my savvier journalist colleagues were. Now, the accountant I called is utterly on the level, scrupulous about receipts, beloved by friends of mine, a very pillar of the tax-preparation community. But when I got him on the horn, the first thing he asked me was, "You're looking at a bill of about X thousand dollars, right? Would you like me to ... get rid of that?" I felt like I was in an alley, looking inside somebody's trench coat.
Obviously, we'd all like to get rid of our tax bill, using whatever little tricks, loopholes, or gray-area fixes possible. Obama himself ratified this attitude when he told John McCain in a debate, "Nobody likes taxes. I would prefer that none of us had to pay taxes, including myself." Amazon.com sells endless titles to get us out of paying taxes: Loopholes of the Rich: How the Rich Legally Make More Money and Pay Less Tax, Legal Offshore Tax Havens, Tax Loopholes for eBay Sellers, Doing Business Tax Free: Perfectly Legal Techniques. (Note the books' cheery emphasis on "legality," suggesting our natural instinct tells us this whole business is a bit dirty.) One friend suggested I build evidence to claim a home office for the tax write-off by carting a fax machine and staplers home from my real office, arranging them on my dining room table, and snapping a photo. Most of us don't go so far as to actually just not pay our taxes, but our cynical attitude vis-a-vis our tax obligation begets the assumption that bilking the U.S. Treasury isn't morally wrong. Just leave that little envelope from the IRS sitting in the mail pile for a few more days, now. Everybody does it.
People who actively love to pay their taxes are, of course, elastic-waistband-jean-wearing, fanny-pack-sporting, good-government dorks. A Huffington Post writer recently revealed her membership in this unnatural club in an article called "Why I Love Taxes," which featured the following treacly, after-school-video exchange: WRITER: "Actually, I love paying taxes." HELPLESS STORE CLERK: "Really?" WRITER: "Yeah. How else do you think we have libraries and street lights and clean water and the Internet?"
But there should be ways to diminish the mass philosophy of tax cynicism that made Nancy Killefer and Tom Daschle possible. Forcing everybody to pay their taxes quarterly might be one. Over the course of an entire year, I become so attached to my growing savings-account balance that I refuse to accept, come April, that the money was never mine in the first place. How about it?
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Emily, sorry, but I gotta say that the idea that a sex-based double-standard constitutes a theme of the endlessly entertaining Obama Administration Tax Follies is ridiculous. This was all timing, timing, timing. Three officially makes a trend, and Nancy Killefer had the misfortune of being the third Obama-ite to turn up with an outstanding bill to the IRS. (And Killefer did doom Tom Daschle—not, I assume, in order to make the punishment evenly distributed by sex, but because her prompt withdrawal made it OK to contend that no, not everybody has tax problems, and yes, they can be considered a disqualifier for Cabinet service in the new Obama era.)
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When Nancy Killefer withdrew her nomination for chief White House performance officer this morning over unpaid nanny taxes, I got outraged e-mails screaming double-standard. Tim Geithner gets away with his tax mess-ups, which included a nanny-related screw-up, but Killefer doesn't? And what about Tom Daschle and his chauffered car?
But now Daschle's nomination is sunk, too. Is that evenhanded enough for us? Does it matter that Geithner's nanny tax troubles were of a pretty minor and technical variety (his kids' baby-sitter overstayed her visa for a short period)? And did Geithner just get lucky because his confirmation came first? Or is Kilefer's fate proof that unpaid nanny taxes trip up women seeking higher office more than men?
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Willa, I'm glad you talked about Ginia Bellafante's great Times piece about Burn Notice. I've loved the show from the start, but I always stumbled over Gabrielle Anwar's character, Fiona. At first I couldn't get past Fiona's lack of repentance for her past as a member of the Irish Republican Army. I know Americans always had a soft spot (and deep pockets) for the IRA, but post-9/11, we're all agreed they were terrorists, right? Then I realized that the show's creators are just into blowing stuff up. (Exhibit 1: the weird promo that tells viewers the show's Web site will help them improve their "spy skills" while showing the show's hero, Michael, use a cell phone to trigger a massive explosion. I worry that visiting the site could land me on a watch list.) The whole IRA thing was just a handy excuse to explain why she knows so much about guns and ammo.
As Ginia and Willa point out, Fiona has no time for the "He's Just Not That Into You" meme. She has always been the boy in the relationship with Michael. She's prone to violence while Michael is the gentling, moderating influence who makes sure that no one gets hurt when she shoots and bombs. He's the home body who wants to keep his loft and his yogurts (the only thing he eats) to himself. She's the more sexually aggressive of the pair. She even thinks like a man: In Episode 2 of the current season, Michael freaks out when it appears that Fiona has been killed in a booby-trapped house. When he gets home, he finds her there, oblivious to the idea that he might be worried—not because she's a jerk but because she's so confident that she can take care of herself that it doesn't even occur to her that other people could be anxious.
And yet, I'm worried that they're softening Fiona up. In the first two episodes of this season, Fiona has displayed a very uncharacteristic affection for kids. That would be fine—tough women have hearts—except that it has made her into an unreliable operative. In Week 1, she bonded so completely with a sick child that she screwed up the case by getting into a girl fight with the target of the investigation. (Both of them were wearing bikinis at the time. Burn Notice's Miami setting allows for more swimwear scenes than an Australian soap opera. Usually Fi dons skimpy outfits to take advantage of tough guys who become as weak as kittens when they get a glimpse of her fabulous gams. It wasn't so obvious why the meeting with the sick-kid-scamming female mastermind had to take place in a hot tub.) In Episode 2, her emotional response to a situation—a teenage football star's sister had been sexually harassed by a local gangster—got in the way of rational thinking, which, as Michael's voice-over always reminds us, is essential for a good spy.
Fiona doesn't need "He's Just Not That Into You." She needs "It's OK Not To Go Gaga for Kids."
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Dana, I've been on the Paul Rudd rom-com love train since his turn as Cher's caustic yet smitten step-brother in Clueless. But I fear that the romantic comedy slump we're mired in isn't because of uninspiring stars, it's because of a cultural shift. Look at Paul Rudd's next movie, I Love You, Man. At least the way they're marketing it, the central relationship of that film is not that of Rudd and his intended, played by Rashida Jones. It's between Rudd and his new best bro Jason Segel.
If you think about the most popular romantic comedies in recent memory, they're ultimately about friendship: Sex and the City, Bride Wars, the Apatow canon. In all of those films, the romantic male-female bond is always secondary to the same-sex friendship. With the prevalence of divorce and general relationship misery, perhaps it's not that romantic comedies are in a slump, it's the idea of lasting romance in general.
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Willa, upon watching the trailer for Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, an upcoming romantic comedy starring Matthew McConaughey, I must concur that it looks like a load of poo (and a lazy ripoff 
of one of the great stories of all time, A Christmas Carol). But I must also step up in defense of the good McConaughey, the one who gave the perfect drawling conviction to that deathless Dazed and Confused line about high school girls ("I keep gettin' older, they stay the same age") and who recently played a sublimely shallow Hollywood agent in Tropic Thunder. That very quality you describe—McConaughey's Zen self-absorption, how manifestly not a catch he is—works to his advantage in satire. In a way, McConaughey's golden-boy looks and laconic charm have held him back from finding the kind of character roles he does best; like Owen Wilson, he's gotten trapped in male-bimbo parts in a subgenre I've come to think of as Pottery Barn domestic comedy (Marley & Me is a chilling recent example).
Romantic comedy is in a slump right now, as much for lack of heroines as heroes: It's a genre that lives or dies on the appeal of the leads, and honestly, who cares about the hard-won romantic bliss of bland cookies like Renée Zellweger or Jennifer Garner? Still, Ricky Gervais and Téa Leoni made a terrific couple in Ghost Town last year, and I predict that 2009 will be the year that we finally discover what a rom-com treasure we have in Paul Rudd.
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The trailer for Matthew McConaughey's forthcoming Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (think Scrooge for an unrepentant womanizer) has arrived on the Internet and, inevitably, it looks mediocre (Jezebel slagged on it over the weekend). How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days notwithstanding, McConaughey has never appeared in a decent rom-com, and, obviously, not for lack of trying. He's the genre's current go-to guy and demonstrates how far these once mighty films have fallen. A job previously done by Cary Grant is now being done by a dude whose all time best line reading involves the phrase "I get older, [high school girls] stay the same age." No fair. Can I at least get a Hugh Grant or a Ryan Reynolds over here?
The underlying problem with the McConaughey persona is that he's just not a catch, unless it's your life dream to stay buff by playing bongos and running on the beach all day. He brings his laid back, surfer vibe to all his roles, meaning his characters have a nice mellow charm, a lazy sex appeal and no ambition or native intelligence whatsoever. He is so obviously not a guy worth fighting with, let alone over, for an hour and a half—splitting a pot brownie and having a skinny dip sounds much more his speed.
Yet, on a strictly human level, I can't help but admire him: I think maybe he knows the secret to true contentment. Unlike most actors, who spend their extremely fortunate lives constantly striving, seemingly as burdened with the stress of professional success as the rest of us non-Adonis, non-millionaires, McConaughey appears to be legitimately satisfied with his extraordinary luck and to have fully embraced his professional mediocrity (only his frequent co-star Kate Hudson seems as willful or happy a hack). He's the guy who wrapped a Steven Spielberg movie (Amistad) and decided that caliber of film just wasn't for him, his spot in the canon be damned. I don't dig his movies, but maybe he wants to hang out and teach me to be Zen sometime?