Heard any Good Harvard Blonde Jokes? How many blondes does it take to write an amicus brief? Or make a decent film critic? USA Today plans to find out. In an apparent attempt to get at the finer points of tort law and pink handbags, the Gannett national daily last week had the Harvard Club of Washington send out a mass e-mail trolling for fair-haired Harvard Law grads to preview and critique MGM Studios’ “Legally Blonde II: Red, White & Blonde,” which opens July 2. Here’s the e-mail, which was forwarded to THE SCRAPBOOK by one of our many Cantabridgian correspondents:
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: USA Today special preview screening of Legally Blonde 2
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 15:10:48
USA Today seeks five or six blonde female Harvard Law School grads in the Washington DC area who have spent time working on Capitol Hill and are willing to write a critique of the upcoming comedy Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde. In the sequel, Reese Witherspoon’s lawyer Elle Woods is in DC trying to get a bill passed that would outlaw product testing on animals.
There is a free early screening of the movie at 7:30 pm Thursday June 26 at the multiplex at 4000 Wisconsin Ave. A USA Today reporter will attend the screening as well and have a photographer take the picture of each blonde Harvard Law School participant. We will need to meet at 6:30 pm in order to beat the crowd and have enough time to take the photos.
The deadline for the written critiques would be Friday June 27. They don’t have to be long but should address certain points, such as: whether the legal process and what Elle encounters on the job is at all realistic, whether they ever encountered some of the trouble that Elle has with being taken seriously sometimes, whether she is a good role model despite her fondness for pink and chihuahuas, whether this promotes or harms the image of female lawyers in any way, and any other points they might have once we all see the movie.
USA Today wants to make this a fun package. And the critiques only need to be several paragraphs long. They can be emailed to the reporter the day after the screening. Interested blonde Harvard Law School grads should send their names and a daytime phone where they can be reached to [email protected]. It helps to have already seen the first Legally Blonde movie, but this is not required.
THE SCRAPBOOK hears that reviews based on the “Gender and the Law” 3L seminar will not be accepted. We take no position on whether posing for the USA Today photographer promotes or harms the image of female lawyers in any way.
Better Late Than Never
In our October 29, 2001, issue, we printed a sketch, “I’ll Take It From Here,” which had been e-mailed to us from the USS Theodore Roosevelt, then under way for the North Arabian Sea. We asked readers to contact us if they knew who the artist was. We thank subscriber Stacy Kresic of Concord, Ohio, for remembering our request and calling in with the answer to this long unanswered question.
Many have claimed ownership of the poignant drawing, which circulated via e-mail, the web, and even on T-shirts (Donald Rumsfeld has one) after the September 11 attacks. But we’re satisfied that the answer is Jeff Grier, an art teacher at Madison High School in northeast Ohio. According to a June 3 article in a local paper, the News-Herald, the sketch was first conceived by Grier’s colleague, Madison High math teacher Tom Hernan. Grier has since adapted the sketch into an oil painting, which caught the attention of a Pentagon official who saw it on the Internet. Grier presented it on June 13 to the Pentagon, where it will be on display indefinitely.
Partial-Truth
A couple weeks back, THE SCRAPBOOK had occasion to praise Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll for a memo he’d sent to the paper’s section chiefs about pro-choice bias in news coverage of abortion politics. “We may happen to live in a political atmosphere that is suffused with liberal values (and is unreflective of the nation as a whole),” Carroll reminded his colleagues on May 22, “but we are not going to push a liberal agenda in the news pages of the Times.” So far as we’re aware, Carroll & Co. have made good on this promise–at least over the ensuing month.
But the rest of American journalism? Not so good. A case in point: Recent news coverage of congressional legislation banning partial-birth abortions.
In its latest incarnation, that measure was approved by the House of Representatives June 4 and is now finally–after eight years–headed up Pennsylvania Avenue to a president who’ll actually sign it. Previous iterations of the bill were routinely vetoed by President Clinton, who just as routinely justified the move with one or another version of the same “factual” argument: that partial-birth abortions are a rare and necessary medical intervention generally employed to rescue the mother from grave health risks.
Even at the time, and even to non-specialist ears, the logic of this argument seemed peculiar. What self-respecting doctor, confronted with a genuine medical emergency, would resort to a surgical procedure that takes three full days to complete? Sure enough, President Clinton’s partial-birth “facts” have long since been thoroughly debunked as fraudulent. Long-time WEEKLY STANDARD readers may remember, in particular, a lengthy investigation by the Washington Post resulting in a September 17, 1996, story concluding that “in most cases where the procedure is used, the physical health of the woman whose pregnancy is being terminated is not in jeopardy.” Also, there was that spectacular, February 1997 confession by Ron Fitzsimmons of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers that he’d “lied through my teeth” about the rarity of partial-birth abortions, a confession that was reported at the time by the New York Times: “In the vast majority of cases, the procedure is performed on a healthy mother with a healthy fetus that is 20 weeks or more along, Mr. Fitzsimmons said.”
It’s a funny thing, then–raising at least an inference of bias, you would think–that even the Post and Times have lately resuscitated Fitzsimmons-like “lies” as objective truth. From the Post’s news account of the House vote June 4: “Doctors typically perform [partial-birth] procedures for health reasons, when the fetus’s head is enlarged and when doctors want to reduce the likelihood of retained fetal tissue that can lead to infection in the woman.” And from the Times: “The procedure…is rarely used, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit research group. . . . Abortion rights groups and many doctors assert that the legislation passed tonight could affect several procedures that are sometimes necessary to preserve the health and fertility of the woman.”
If THE SCRAPBOOK weren’t opposed to human cloning, John Carroll of the Los Angeles Times would be our first candidate.
