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Free at last! Newsweek leads this week with the next chapter in the Martha Stewart saga — her pending release (most likely on Friday) from the Big House.
Proving F. Scott Fitzgerald couldn’t have been more wrong when he remarked, “There are no second acts in American lives,” the cover story lays out the battle plan for Stewart’s resurrection, which includes, but is not limited to, two new TV shows, a fourth line of furniture, and, of course, a swelling bank account. As the article notes, “The Kmart-Sears merger due to close in March could double the shelf space for her pastel housewares. And Martha’s name and face could soon be stamped on everything from DVDs to women’s clothing.” And what’s a housewares diva without an A-team of spin masters and marketing gurus? Martha is being “carefully stage-managed by a new team of New York and Hollywood A-listers like reality-TV guru Mark Burnett, Donald Trump and Stewart’s new CEO Susan Lyne, the ex-ABC exec who, appropriately enough, greenlighted “Desperate Housewives,'” Newsweek tells us.
Take-home lesson? Jail — what could be better!
In slightly more weighty matters, in this week’s New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin writes about the “nuclear option” currently being considered by Senate Republicans to push through President Bush’s judicial nominations. As it stands, the plan is to declare filibusters unconstitutional, on the grounds that they impede the business of the government. Under the plan, (recently scrubbed up and rechristened the “constitutional option”) a simple majority of Senators — 51 — would be able to approve judicial nominees, without having to deal with the minority party whatsoever.
Currently, it takes three-fifths of the Senate — or 60 senators — to break a filibuster. With the Senate currently split 55 to 44 (with one independent) in favor of the Republicans, the change would effectively “render the Democrats almost powerless to stop Bush’s choices, including nominees to the United States Supreme Court.”
Although the media has been ignoring the story since December, when word of the plan first leaked, Toobin is not alone in tackling it this week. John Heilemann at New York magazine has a similar piece called “The Big Bomb in the Senate.” While Toobin provides a well-researched history of the idea and concentrates on the prickly politics of filibustering, Heilemann adds some pop and fizzle, focusing on Ralph Neas of the liberal group People for the American Way, who is putting on the full-court press to try and halt the rule change. “If Republicans win on the nuclear option,” Neas says, “they could get John Ashcroft confirmed as chief justice, or Pat Robertson.” Whatever happens, it’s guaranteed to be messy. On February 14, the president resubmitted to the Senate seven nominees whom the Democrats filibustered in the last two years. As Toobin says, “The confrontation may be delayed, but now, clearly, it can’t be avoided. Last week, [Sen. Arlen] Specter told the Washington Post, ‘If we go to the nuclear option … the Senate will be in turmoil and the Judiciary Committee will be hell.'”
In another bit of unexpected synergy, Time and The Weekly Standard both weigh in on Harvard president Larry Summers’ rather unfortunate comments over gender equality in the sciences. As one might guess, however, they take slightly different editorial angles in their coverage. Time‘s Amanda Ripley plays it straight by interviewing neuroscientists, sociologists and psychology professors to provide an informative and well-balanced piece exploring the cognitive differences between men and women at various stages of development.
The Standard‘s Harvey Mansfield, rather unsurprisingly, uses his bully pulpit to bash, in order, the Harvard faculty, liberal men, and of course, feminists. Mansfield theorizes that the faculty is so frightened by Summers’ intelligence, abilities and intentions that it has set out to humiliate him. It’s an interesting notion: Ivy League faculty members being frightened of intelligent people.
Finally, in The Nation, David Moberg takes a long look at the labor movement. Using poster boy Andy Stern — president of the Service Employees International Union — as his jumping-off point, Moberg expands the piece into a thoughtful examination of organized labor’s many woes. After a couple thousand words spent scaring the wits out of labor supporters, he ends on a slightly more uplifting note, writing that “labor leaders must overcome their institutional rivalries … The cheery side of labor’s plight is that even though there are many obstacles to organizing, there’s no shortage of opportunities.”
–Paul McLeary
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