Come See Me Moderate Panels At SXSW!

If you’ll be in Austin for SXSW, starting today, I hope you’ll consider dropping by the panels I’ll be moderating on Saturday and Sunday, both at 3:30, both in room 16AB of the Austin Convention Center at 500 E Cesar Chavez Street.

On Saturday, with some of my Slate buddies, including David Haglund and Noreen Malone, as well as director Sarah Gertrude Shapiro and the hilarious and wonderful actress Anna Camp, the panel is Changing Rules for Women and Sex on TV. We’ll be talking a lot about who gets to have sex on TV, what our expectations are for what kinds of sex people will be having based on their ages, body types, etc., what sort of sex television is selling us on, how TV handles sexual assault, and TV’s fertility panic.

And on Sunday, I’ll be MCing This Panel is Not Yet Rated, a conversation with Chairman of the Classification and Rating Administration Joan Graves, film critic Scott Weinberg, director Vincenzo Natali, and producer Travis Stevens. On the menu: the history of the MPAA ratings system, our tangled-up attitudes about media violence, and the different treatment of sexuality and violence in on-screen entertainment.

I think they’ll both be great events, so if you’re around, please consider coming by! And I’ll try to hang out after both panels as long as possible, if folks want to meet up. I am always game for coffee, or more importantly, for Shiner Bock and meeting all of you.

View the original article here

Death of the Moderate . . . Democrat

It is worth noting that on Tuesday several moderate Democrats went down in flames in Pennsylvania, continuing a trend that has escalated since 2008. Liberals do not want moderate Democrats in their caucus.

What is most interesting about it from a conservative perspective, however, is how there has not been a ton of coverage about the death of the blue dogs — more dogs dead in Barack Obama and the left’s war on dogs. Had moderate Republicans been defeated, we would have major stories on pretty much every news network and on the front page of every paper in America.

Routinely we hear that Republicans cannot win in New England, despite Republican successes in New England in 2010. Routinely we hear about the GOP driving moderates out of the party. Big tent cliches surround the stories. Rarely does the ongoing purging of the Democratic Party make such news.

In fact, the Democratic Party has become increasingly hostile to moderates, though the media rarely cares to focus on this because the reporters who’d pay attention often are to the left of the moderate Democrats and proclaim their position the center. Those moderate Democrats are, therefore, well outside the mainstream.

I do not lament the decline and fall of the Blue Dog Coalition. The United States remains a center-right nation and Democrats must continue to run as “centrist” to appeal in swing states. Their true colors ruin their chances. The fewer “centrists” they have, the more difficult it becomes for them to appeal to voters, including Hispanic voters who continue to be some of the most socially conservative voters in America.

The lesson, here, though is that partisans in both parties prefer their candidates to stand for something and fight for something. The media’s predominant bias is a good government bias and reporters hail those Republicans and Democrats who work across party lines to get things done in Washington. And what have they done?

We’re at $15 trillion and counting to what they’ve done. But it was done in the name of good government — a concept that is always framed as our salvation and will ultimately be our damnation as we go bankrupt with repeated good government compromises.

View the original article here