Daughter of Pelosi meets Friends of God

The first that Montana Headlines heard of the HBO documentary by Alexandra Pelosi (yes, her daughter), was a report where she described her journey into the red states to meet evangelical Christians. She used words to the effect that she looked on it as a National Geographic expedition into the jungle to meet these strange people and learn about them.

Her remarks have already provoked the unsurprising reaction from many conservative Christians that it is a bit insulting to have a fellow American talk about them as though they are creatures from the Black Lagoon.

There are certainly more than a few freak-shows on offer in the evangelical world, perhaps even as many as are found in the world of secular liberals, and Pelosi has apparently found a few to film.

Reviews are still sparse, but of the few, Brian Lowry's piece in Variety, asks the interesting question of whether it is possible for Hollywood to find enough common ground with evangelical Christians in order to be able to make money selling its products to this large (50 to 80 million Americans) demographic. After their purchasing power was "stunningly demonstrated" by Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ," it seems that Hollywood has decided that perhaps Christians are good for something after all.

Lowry makes the deeply insightful observation that "not all (evangelical Christians) want to be ridiculed, dismissed and cut off from pop culture."

In turn, "studios, meanwhile, covet their business, and if there's one enduring truth about Hollywood, it's that you don't need to see eye to eye on everything to take somebody's money."

Lowry doesn't seem to think that Pelosi's film will be of much help in getting the gravy train moving, though:

The media does itself no favors, then, by painting all evangelicals with the same broad brush. Nor does the big-city elite's thinly veiled condescension help, as is evident within the Pelosi documentary, in which she pursues the whole exercise with a slightly bemused demeanor, as if she has just parachuted onto the dark side of the moon.

"There's something very strange about these people -- they're all very happy!" she gushes at one point.

In response to the observations by some conservative commentators that she is being condescending and, well, bigoted, Pelsoi's defense of herself is surprisingly lacking in adeptness for a scion of one of liberaldom's blue-blood families. You know, the class of people who come up with the rules of speech and behavior for the rest of us, and the punishments for breaking them.

It basically boiled down to her saying that after this experience, "some of my best friends are those people."

State employee legislators

Sometimes grasps for power over-reach and draw more negative attention than expected. A great high-profile example was the almost certainly fraudulent South Dakota election in which Tom Daschle's Democrat machine engineered Tim Johnson's 2002 narrow victory over John Thune.

Daschle got his pet senator elected (losing control of the Senate anyway, though), but in the process he drew attention to his techniques of manipulating the reservation vote in South Dakota and galvanized the Republican party into being determined not to let it happen again.

The unintended consequence was that Daschle ended up losing his own seat to John Thune two years later, with the Thune team treating the campaign like a do-over, in which they had plenty of time to watch and analyze all of the plays on game-film -- preparing the necessary defensive and offensive strategies to win.

Sen. Sam Kitzenberg, D-Glasgow did a slick move this past year by being given an unadvertised Montana state government job, and then switching parties to throw control of the Senate to the Democrats. This in turn drew attention to the fact that Senate President Mike Cooney, D-Helena, had been awarded a similar unadvertised state job that pays over $75,000 a year -- roughly three times what the average Montanan makes (we know that Montana Democrats care about such things, since Sen. Conrad Burns' Senate salary was repeatedly compared to the income of the average Montanan in the recent Tester campaign.)

Legislative attention is now being drawn to conflicts of interest in state employees serving in the legislature, as it should be. Not surprisingly, 7 of the 9 legislators in such a position this session are Democrats.

Republicans are proposing a bill, which, "should it become law, would outlaw precisely the kind of job Cooney took. Asked about the bill Tuesday, Cooney said he doesn't 'have any thoughts.'"

Right.