It looks like President Obama managed to deliver a speech to (some of) the nation’s schoolchildren without mentioning health care (unless you count the advice to wash your hands) or otherwise touting the benefits of socialism. I hope that we can all heave a big sigh of relief and get on with more important things.

Because that would be better than what happened back in 1991, when the first President Bush gave a similar address to the nation’s kids. (Takeaway: Math is important. Don’t do drugs. And stay in school.) As Byron York points out today, Dick Gephardt said back then that, “The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students.” There was a congressional hearing. And the Washington Post complained that Bush had turned “students into props.” This time around, Congress is controlled by the president's party and a little too busy for such silliness, but the Post’s E.J. Dionne blames the far right for its “relentless” attacks and is upset that, after the speech turned out to be benign, that there has been“not a word of apology [from the right] for helping set off a dishonest and destructive episode.”

Now, isn’t there something more important we can talk about? Like Charlie Sheen’s unintentionally hilarious account of his imaginary meeting with President Obama to let him know 9/11 was an inside job?

Tags: Barack Obama, Obama speech to schoolkids, socialism

Willa, Melrose Place seems utterly redundant to me now. Its great innovation was, as I recall, to make TV watching cool again. Before Melrose Place, TV was in a sit-com stupor, a vast wasteland of cinematic junk suitable only for children and old ladies. Then suddenly Melrose Place came around, and my post-college friends were gathering in batches weekly to watch what was really just a daytime soap that happened to air at night. (For the record, I will say that I resisted, in a smug, self-righteous way, and made endless fun of my then-boyfriend, now-husband for participating.)

Of course, making TV cool again gave us Sex and the City, The Sopranos, The Wire, and also endless bad reality shows and night time drama rip-offs. But why we need a new Melrose Place in that mix is beyond me. The new show is, as you say, just as dreadful as the old. It seems to have updated by throwing in a little ER, a little CSI, a little Gossip Girl, and some offhand web-speak: "Let's give them something to tweet about," says our new Heather Locklear, as if that will mask how outdated her type really is.

Tags: Melrose Place

Should you doubt that Melrose Place has a unique purchase on the hearts, if not the minds, of longtime television watchers, I direct you to the following positive reviews: “It’s as fresh as yesterday’s daisy,” “It's still not good, mind you, but it's more honest and enthusiastic about its badness, you know?” and “[It’s] operating at the same level of glorious mind gunk as its predecessor.“ No, really, those are all positive reviews, and they are all totally on the money. The new Melrose Place is exactly as bad as the old Melrose Place, and in the special 2+2=5 hours that occur after a long day of work, that’s entertainment.

Now that Melrose 2.0 exists, it’s hard to remember why anyone was ever “worried” that it wouldn’t come off. Is there any format easier than the nighttime soap opera? All you need, apparently, is a whirling plot, no shame, and some pretty people who can keep a straight face. And yet, Pasadena, Models Inc., Central Park West, and a handful of other quickly cancelled primetime soap operas suggest the previously qualities are not all that is required for success. Mediocrity may be ubiquitous, but addictive mediocrity takes chemistry. Is Melrose just making it look easy?

Melrose 2.0 has done two very smart things—whether by luck or pluck I cannot say. The first is to understand the importance of the batshit crazy chick to high camp, and therefore to the long term success of any soap opera. In this, the new Melrose really learned from the old Melrose, which, at its over-the-top peak, had three lunatic ladies running around simultaneously: Marcia Cross’s Kimberly, Laura Leighton’s Sydney, and Heather Locklear’s Amanda. The new Melrose only has two loonies on hand (or two and a half, if you count the self-same Sydney, who appears in at least the first two episodes, but only in flashbacks, as she’s been found dead in the pool). One of the new crazies is played by a googly-eyed, possibly sedated Ashlee Simpson and the other by Katie Cassidy (more on her in a minute). Since characters only tend to get crazier as these shows progress (how many car accidents, stalkers, rapes, murders, kidnappings, arsons, hijackings, brainwashings, illnesses, heartbreaks, betrayals, and affairs could you take before you lost it?), two is a promising start. Women are the engine of soap, and unhinged women mean the soap will likely be wackadoo. Wackadoo is good.

The second smart thing Melrose 2.0 has done is to cast a decent Heather Locklear replacement. Katie Cassidy (daughter of teen heartthrob David) plays publicist Ella, in full Locklear mode. (As Slate’s Troy Patterson puts it, she delivers “regular bitchery in the manner of Locklear, queen of brittle.”) At 22, Cassidy’s Ella is basically a young Amanda Woodward, not yet as polished, poised, or as good as getting the guy, (or the girl—Ella’s bisexual) but on her way. Melrose 2.0 is positioned to tell the Amanda Woodward creation myth—Amanda’s name has just been changed to Ella Simms. If it can do that, tell the story of how a young, ambitious, insecure, fearless young adult becomes a Woodward (or a Miranda Priestly), it might start edging away from being good in a bad way toward being good in a good way. Crazier things have happened.

Tags: Melrose Place, soap operas, Television

This is a guest post from Caitlin Moscatello, who has written for Sports Illustrated and Salon.

Pink. It’s the color of “pretty” things—lipstick, frosted cupcakes, Barbie’s dream house. And for the very same reason, it’s the shade female athletes have historically avoided. When the WNBA launched in 1996, not one team included pink on its uniforms. And when Billie Jean King pummeled Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes in 1973, one of the greatest moments in women’s sports, she did so in tennis whites.

And yet pink, with its implications of femininity, is the color of choice for Serena and Venus Williams, who entered this year’s U.S. Open ranked Nos. 2 and 3 in the world. (Venus is out, as of Sunday. Serena plays in the quarterfinals today.) Serena, sponsored by Nike, and Venus, wearing her label Eleven, both chose pink for their dresses ... and shoes ... and rackets. Serena has said that pink is her favorite color. But it’s hard to ignore the contrast between the Williams sisters’ shade of choice and the vulgar scrutiny they’ve endured for being muscular and female—and perhaps, muscular, female, and black.

It started back in 2001, when sportscaster Sid Rosenberg called then-20-year-old Venus an “animal” and added that Serena, 19 at the time, had a better chance of posing for National Geographic than Playboy. He went on to say both players were “disgusting” and referred to them as “boys.” Just this past June, Kevin Garside of the UK Telegraph wrote, “Billie Jean King had to play Jack Kramer to test herself against a masculine presence. The women have Venus and Serena.” (Garside failed to note that it was Riggs, not Kramer, whom King defeated.)

But the sad reality is that tennis, in many ways, has become a sport for “pretty things.” Despite the fact that Serena and Venus were the last women standing at Wimbledon (Serena defeated her sister in the final), they had been assigned to Courts One and Two instead of Centre Court during the tournament. Officials admitted that for female players, attractiveness was taken into consideration when assigning courts. Their reasoning: Presumably, male fans will buy tickets to see tall blondes play potentially mediocre tennis over “less attractive” women playing at the top of the game. Never mind that the Williams sisters have been two of the most highly-ranked tennis players for the past decade, combining for 18 Grand Slam singles titles and 9 Grand Slam doubles titles.

According to Forbes.com, Maria Sharapova—current president of tennis’s tall, blonde, and pretty club—earned $26 million last year (mostly through endorsements), despite missing the majority of the season with a shoulder injury. Even in this year’s Open, she failed to make it past the third round. Meanwhile Serena, who finished last season as No. 2 in the world, reportedly took home $14 million. And unlike Sharapova, she breezed through the early rounds of this year’s. She’ll also pair up with her sister to try for their third Gram Slam doubles title of the year. And she’ll do so—whether as a fashion statement or shield from “ugly” comments—in pink.

Tags: U.S. Open, Venus and Serena williams

In the middle of our workday we all need a little laugh, a little cute overload, a little pick-me-up. Which is why we are introducing an occasional post we're calling Brain Candy. It'll just be whatever amusing meme is whipping through our e-mails and Twitters. Today's post is brought to you by The Princess Bride: real live Rodents of Unusual Size! Anyone who saw the Rob Reiner classic as a kid knows what I'm talking about. Those terrifying, gigantic, forest-stalking rat-like creatures populated many of my prepubescent nightmares. In any event, researchers in Papua New Guinea have apparently found a new species of giant rat and they've called it a Bosavi woolly rat. These rats are over 30 inches long and weigh more than 3 pounds. According to Smithsonian biologist Kristofer Helgen, "It's a true rat, the same kind you find in the city sewers." How ... comforting.

Photograph by Bruce M. Beehler/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: Bosavi woolly rat, papua new guinea, rodents of unusual size

So many women fear leaving the world of paid work voluntarily to spend time with their children. They wonder if they can ever return to where they left off, and some of them worry that they can never come back at all. Emma Gilbey Keller, the editor of DoubleX's Your Comeback blog, wrote an inspiring book about women who returned to their chosen fields triumphantly. That book, The Comeback: Seven Stories of Women who Went from Career to Family and Back Again, is just out in paperback, and if you want to read a buoying story about women in transition, Emma's book is the perfect choice.

Tags: Emma Gilbey Keller, going back to work, the comeback book

If you’re keeping score of acts of conservative judicial activism by the Roberts Court, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the campaign finance case to be argued Wednesday, is a potential twofer. If the Supreme Court does what advocacy groups from the right-wing Citizens United to the ACLU want, and strikes down the ban that prevents corporations and unions from spending independently to back a candidate, it will be telling Congress to get lost by scuttling an important part of McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. That’s why Solicitor General Elena Kagan warns in her brief for the government that such a decision would be a “direct affront” to Congress. A ruling against the FEC, which stopped Citizens United from airing an anti-Hillary documentary/long attack ad paid for in part with corporate funds, would also necessarily strike down two of the court’s own major precedents. Those are a 1990 ruling upholding a similar Michigan control on corporate and union spending on elections, and a 2003 decision upholding McCain-Feingold’s provision that corporations and unions can’t buy radio and TV ads, in the weeks before an election, which mention the name of a candidate. (There’s another underlying ruling at issue here: The court’s 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo that campaign donations equal speech, and so deserve the same protection. But that’s a precedent no one’s talking about disturbing.)

As Lyle Denniston points out on ScotusBlog, the two sides lay out the stakes cleanly in their briefs. The FEC warns against loosing “vast sums” of corporate money on elections with “pernicious consequences”— “increasing the risk of outright corruption, or at least its apparent existence, making politicians beholden to corporations (and labor unions),” as Denniston says. Citizens United challenges the premise that corporate funding of elections is suspect. The court was simply wrong in the past, the group argues, to see the wealth of business as “corrosive and distorting” for politics. The court will wrap the choice in legal tests and language, but that’s the basic question: Would turning on the spigot of corporate campaign funding that McCain-Feingold tried to turn off make politics fairer, or dirtier and more laden by the burden of quid pro quo?

Watching the lobbyists swarm over the healthcare debate, it’s hard to see why the country would be better off with more ads and influence, more injection of the interests of corporations and unions into politics. But you could also conclude that this part of McCain-Feingold is an ineffective stopgap. What matters more, for preventing quid pro quo, is that corporations can’t contribute money directly to a candidate, Eliot Spitzer argues, even if they can still spend for his benefit on their own.

I’m not convinced. The problem is that more radical solutions, like public financing for federal elections—proposed by the late Senator Edward Kennedy in the 1970s—or a trade of free TV time for candidates in exchange for government licensing of the airwaves, have failed. How will they ever stand a chance if the Supreme Court tells businesses to go ahead and spend whatever they want independently to get their candidates elected? They won’t. Instead we’ll get more money, more ads, more noise.

Tags: campaign finance reform, citizens united v. fec, mccain-feingold