Limited, Inc.

Remora LI looked forward to some raw conservative outrage over yesterday's vote in the Senate. Aren't we talking about a vast increase in the regulatory apparatus? I mean, sure, it is sweetened with some fire-eating go straight to jail legislation, which is always pap to the right-wing palate. But if that kind of legislation is actually enforced, we are talking about jailing white boys in suits. Okay, realistically, we know the swat team approach to fraud will die very quickly on the vine. At least Alan Reynolds in the National Review has the guts to defend the potential pool of defrauders: "I'm all for suing the pants off anyone proven guilty of fraud, barring co-conspirators from serving as corporate officers or directors, and using prison sentences when appropriate (though victims can't squeeze much reimbursement out of jailbirds). It is the uncritical rush to "reform" accounting and to encourage runaway regulation that worries me. The curiou

Remora The celebrity interview, the celebrity face, the celebrity breath, the celebrity hair, eyes, nails, teeth, spunk, navel, birthmark -- we drink it and drink it, to quote Todesfuge in a blasphemous context. But is there a point, some magical critical point, when the sheer idiocy of it becomes too much? When the magazine reader, that slackmouthed denizen of the grocery story line, spews it from his mouth? When the factoid isn't enough, when the best fed bodies lugubriously placed in expensive toy palaces, which they systematically and noisily destroy (we call this film, we call this the block-buster) no longer support the backstory? That possibility looms in this NYT article that anatomizes the non-event of Tom Cruise errected, cruise missile like, on four major magazine covers in the last couple of weeks. Time went for him, Premiere went for him, Esquire went for him, Entertainment Weekly went for him, and they discovered, like melancholy druggies, that the high wasn't