When the 25th anniversary Blu-ray of Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam War movie, Full Metal Jacket, showed up in the mail last week, I knew what was going to happen. As I glowered at the lavishly packaged thing and it glowered glacially back, my inner Jiminy Critic chirped up with his usual reproach to my anti-Kubrick bias.

“Practically everybody but you knows that Stanley is the greatest thing since sliced eyeballs,” he said, making that tired joke about Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou for the gazillionth time. “You chump, did you even notice that 2001: A Space Odyssey just vaulted into sixth place in Sight and Sound’s poll of The Greatest Movies Ever Made? And you haven’t seen this one since it came out.”

As a fan of game shows and an avid trivia nerd, I was disappointed that I couldn't attend the Jeopardy tapings this past weekend when the show rolled into D.C. However after reading a Politico article describing Alec Trebek’s ideological inclinations, I’m glad I missed out on hearing him cavorting on politics:

“People [are] relying too much on the government,” the “Jeopardy” star said over the weekend while holding forth with the press during a day of taping in Washington.

Tigger and Eeyore are battling it out inside me this week. I can’t tell whether to be depressed over what Maureen Dowd calls “the attempt by Republican men to wrestle American women back into chastity belts” or invigorated by the myriad ways women are chronicling it and fighting back. Are women really gonna get dragged back to the scarlet-letter era—why not just repeal the 19th amendment!—or is all this going to set off a revitalized third feminist wave? 

Eeyore: In a surreal move, the Arizona Legislature’s Senate Judiciary committee has introduced a bill that would:

NBC News political director Chuck Todd, singing the oldest self-flagellating hymn in the media book, laments his colleagues' lack of awareness of the good people between the coasts. Todd is ordinarily a smarter and more reasonable guy than your typical pundit, but this is just about the dumbest thing I've heard all week...

Back in the dark ages when I worked on campaigns, contributions from supporters always made me feel a little guilty. Some of them anyway -- not the rich guy who maxed out, or the candidate's business partner who gave his house as a crash pad for the staff to sleep in when they shuffled out of the office at 1 am -- but the nice little old lady who gave $50, or the earnest schoolteacher with a check for $100. I knew it meant a lot to them, but I couldn't help thinking it would go to something that wouldn't do very much to make the world a better place, like pizza or some ineffectual mailer. And that doesn't even get into the money that's milked by the armies of consultants.

That's why I was actually pleased to see this analysis by the Los Angeles Times of how some of the people running superPACs are turning them into dandy profit machines. Here's just one example:

Winning Our Future, a group backing former House Speaker Newt Gingrich that has been buoyed by $11 million in donations from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his family, paid its president, Becky Burkett, $206,000 in January for executive management and fundraising services, according to campaign finance reports filed this week. Gregg Phillips, the Austin-based consultant who serves as the super PAC's managing director, got $90,000.

Winning Our Future spokesman Rick Tyler said the super PAC pays its staff for "fundraising successes." Tyler said the payments Burkett and Phillips received in January included compensation for work they did in November and December, before the super PAC was launched on Dec 13. He said their salaries were determined by the super PAC's "senior leadership" — which consists of himself, Burkett and Phillips.

At $206,000 for three months, that's $824,000 a year. Not bad. But you know what? More power to 'em. There aren't any (or not many, anyway) kindly little old ladies donating to superPACs. It's almost all millionaires and billionaires. So if the slick operators running these machines want to get rich with Sheldon Adelson's money, where's the harm?

And they won't be the only ones getting a taste. The superPACs won't have any just-out-of-college field grunts making $1,500 a month and sleeping on somebody's couch. The primary activity of most of these groups will be media -- direct mail, online ads, and most of all TV. Which means that the mail consultants and the media consultants will no doubt be charging their usual rates, or maybe a bit more. Hey, there's plenty to go around, and it's on Shelly!

There are only a half-dozen or so media personalities who have both a nationally syndicated radio show and a nightly program on cable television, and most of them are superstar conservatives like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. Perhaps the least known is Thom Hartmann, a familiar voice to progressives who is nonetheless largely unheard-of among the broader public. For the last year, Hartmann has been trying to thread a difficult needle. Can he reach the top echelon of political media stars while retaining an outside-the-Beltway sensibility that finds the work of activists and organizers more compelling than the work of senators and congressmen? And can he do it from, of all places, Washington?