Salon.com > James Verini

All eyes on San Diego

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 12:30:00 +0000

Made up of sleepy beach towns basking in the sun just north of San Diego, the California 50th is surely one of the most placid congressional districts in the country. But nobody would have known that Friday evening at the community center in Carlsbad, where emotions were running high. As surfers stepped off a gorgeous beach nearby, Democrat Francine Busby and Republican Brian Bilbray were exchanging barbs in their last debate before Tuesday's special election, an election "brought to you," as the moderator put it, "by congressional corruption." The district's previous representative, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, was in prison.

"I'm running to restore honesty and integrity to the representation of this district and in this country," said Busby, 55, a school-board official and local professor of women's studies.

"I believe that the amnesty of 11 to 12 million illegal aliens is absolutely absurd and disruptive," countered Bilbray, also 55, a former congressman and lobbyist.

For most of the evening, the two talked past each other. Finally, Busby, in a fit of frustration, said, "We talk about healthcare and he talks about immigration. We talk about education and he talks about immigration. Immigration is an important issue but it is not the underlying issue."

How Emmy works

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 22:27:00 +0000

The atom-hoisting goddess that is Emmy has always assumed a back-of-the-shelf position to her bossy big-screen cousin, Oscar. But she has slowly, in the past decade or so, inspired a similar type of lust among the networks and studio executives who hope her shine will rub off on their shows.

No one, in fact, has used her to greater effect than HBO, the leader in both Emmy nominations and wins in recent years, which will have spent between $2 million and $3 million in its Emmy campaign this year, according to the trade magazine Broadcasting & Cable, far ahead of its competitors.

How, then, to explain the sad case of HBO's "The Wire"? In some ways, the much-vaunted gritty urban crime drama is exactly the sort of product Emmy should love. It was a surprise slew of Emmys, after all, that in 1981 catapulted "Hill Street Blues," the archetypal modern copera, from the brink of cancellation to TV nirvana. And then there were the recent perennials "NYPD Blue," "Law & Order" and "The Shield." Emmy has a serious thing about cops.

The tale of “Red Scorpion”

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 19:21:00 +0000

Before fallen lobbyist Jack Abramoff assumed his role as the most scrutinized man in Washington, he had a brief career as a budding Hollywood producer. He made just one movie, the 1989 Cold War bomb "Red Scorpion." With its blatant propaganda, its collaboration with the apartheid South African government, and financial misdealing, it's notable, even for Hollywood, for being one of the seamiest productions in recent memory.

Last week, Abramoff was arrested by the FBI after a grand jury indicted him and a partner on fraud charges (he's out on $2.2 million bail). In Washington the Senate Indian Affairs Committee has been holding hearings on whether Abramoff, 46, bilked millions out of tribes he represented, and a joint task force is picking through his personal papers, including his credit card records, which show Abramoff purchased trips for members of Congress (including Tom DeLay). His days in the Capitol, it seems, are numbered. (Abramoff's spokesman, Andrew Blum, responded to inquiries from Salon for this article with a written "no comment.")

Missionary man

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 23:27:00 +0000

In the course of just a few months, Tom Cruise has made an astounding public leap: He has transformed himself from one of the world's biggest movie stars into one of the oddest. It's not just his sudden romance with and engagement to actress Katie Holmes, which has not yet managed to shake the air of improbability. There is also the matter of Cruise's sudden outspokenness about, and even proselytizing for, the controversial Church of Scientology, to which he's belonged for roughly 20 years.

Regarding the romance -- who can explain love? It's a mystery, particularly in Hollywood, and we're unlikely to ever get the particulars about Cruise and Holmes. But the buzz in some Scientology circles is that Cruise may have reached one of the highest echelons of the Church of Scientology. While not a lot is known about this level, known cryptically as OT-VII, Scientology observers say that attaining it could explain Cruise's behavior in recent months.

It’s the incompetence, stupid

Fri, 17 Dec 2004 01:05:00 +0000

In his Dec. 15 Salon article, "The Revolution Failed -- for Now," Farhad Manjoo spotlights the "lack of coordination" between the Kerry campaign and the celebrated liberal third-party groups, MoveOn.org and America Coming Together. Lack of coordination? Let me tell you about the disorder and complacency inside the Kerry-Edwards campaign itself. Look no further for why Democrats lost the election.

I put in 300 volunteer hours in the campaign, making phone calls and knocking on doors in tightly contested swing states in the Southwest, both of which Bush took, and in a Los Angeles call center that aided the state campaigns in Ohio, Florida and Iowa. In an attempt to recruit Democratic volunteers, I made hundreds of phone calls; all but a handful of people claimed to be too busy to do even a few hours work for Kerry. This, despite many of them admitting to being scared as hell for the future of our country (not to mention that they were answering their home phones at, say, 2 p.m. on a Wednesday).

Battleground: New Mexico

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 18:32:00 +0000

Las Cruces is a quiet, dusty city near the southern border of New Mexico, and it is where I found myself in the first days of October, exhausted, unpaid, knocking on doors for the Kerry-Edwards campaign in this crucial battleground state.

My job was to seek out registered Democrats and Independents, and, if they had plans to punch a hole for anyone but Kerry -- besides Bush, New Mexicans, an independent-minded lot, might go for Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik or Ralph Nader -- to try to convince them otherwise. Al Gore, after all, won the state by just 366 votes in 2000, after a retired schoolteacher named Chuck Davis found a box of uncounted ballots beneath a table in a polling station.

New Mexico is a battleground state in more ways than one. It represents a kind of collision of past and future, a land upturned by immigration while holding fast to the military and ranching, where nuclear physics is perfected and cow patties are sold. In New Mexico, laboratories such as the one at Los Alamos and military installations annually receive hundreds of millions of federal dollars, a price that goes up when a Republican is in the White House. A third of the population, meanwhile, qualifies for Medicaid.