Tan-acious interviewers

While Phillipe and Jorge know that our old friend Senator John Chafee is well above bilking the taxpayers for a "fact-finding" junket to sunnier climates once Mister Winter arrives, his largesse is apparently such that he couldn't resist sending a couple of his young employees on such a mission.

According to Roll Call, the Capitol Hill organ of off-the-record, Chafee aides Amy Dunathan and John Seggerman recently visited the South Pacific paradise of the Northern Mariana islands to attend government seminars on taxes and trade. These seminars, of course, were not available elsewhere. As we are all aware, the United States has a ban on boring conferences.

Defending the vacation, er, excuse us, tax and trade mission, Chafee spokesman Nicholas Graham told the BeloJo that these two truth-seekers asked local government officials "tough and pointed" questions. As all good journalists should, P&J followed up on this claim and asked for examples of the types of questions Dunathan and Seggerman had asked during their stay. To wit:

How much do you want for that sarong?
How exactly do you make mai tai?
What number sun screen do you think
I'll need for the beach?
Just what does your sister look like?

Naturally, a full trip report will be submitted to the good senator.

Too much 'denied'

Secretary of State Jim Langevin's "Access Denied: Chaos, Confusion and Closed Doors" report hit the streets just as P&J went to press. But based on our cursory examination, we say it's about time someone nailed the General Assembly for its age-old practice of deciding the fate of bills behind the virtually closed doors of committee hearings rather than on the House and Senate floor.

Anyone even vaguely familiar with what it's like to try and find out when and where committee hearings will be held and what's on the agenda, or to sit through a committee meeting until midnight waiting for a bill that never gets heard, knows the report smacks of the truth.

And it doesn't even mention the fact that, for generations, "real" deals have been made on the State House's third floor, in the offices of House speakers from Milkshake Matty Smith and Joe "Prince of Darkness" DeAngelis to our own Pucky Harwood and his puppeteer, "George of the Jungle" Caruolo.

Legislators' outrage over Langevin's charges speaks for itself: Methinks they doth protest too much. Indeed, P&J only need to recall Senate Majority Leader Paul Kelly's words to confirm this. Sputtering in response to the report, he said that a third to half of the violations cited were untrue.

Well, Paulie, given the fact that the Senate committees' percentage of violations ranged from 62 to 20 percent, does this mean that, even at your best estimate, 10 to 30 percent of committee meetings held by the members of your chamber were in violation of the Open Meetings Law? If so, does this constitutes open and good government?

Gotcha, boys.

St. Benny of the Hill

The bad news about our bad boys on "Smiff Hill" (as compiled in Secretary of State Jim Langevin's report) is upsetting enough, but at least they have more manners than that other august body across the pond, the British Parliament.

A recent article in the New York Times suggests that classic good-ol'-boy MPs have had problems dealing with the recent influx of female members as a result of the Labor Party's victory a few months back.

While raucous behavior is the traditional order of the day in the House of Commons (legislators there scream out, "Taxi! Taxi!" whenever Patrick Nicholls rises to speak, in honor of his having been stripped once of his license for drinking and driving), the schoolboy-style infantilism exhibited over the sudden appearance of more women in the chamber is something else.

Jane Griffiths, a newly elected Laborite, appeared a bit disconcerted when, rising to speak, she noticed a few of the Tory legislators cupping their hands in front of their chests in what only could have been construed as the universal troglodyte symbol for womanhood. "I don't even think they're consciously being sexist. I think they behave like schoolboys because nobody's ever told them not to," she told the Times.

Griffiths may be right that this is not conscious sexism. Reported giggling among male MPs during a presentation on cervical cancer programs, for instance, may be more a sign of a condition known as "being a moron."

But what can we say about a governmental chamber that allows one of its members (in this case, one Desmond Swayne) to stand up during a debate on women in combat and gravely recite the following quote from St. Bernard of Clairvaux: "To be always with a woman and not to have intercourse with her is more difficult than to raise the dead."

Downhill racers

Two prominent skiing tragedies in the last couple of weeks leave your superior correspondents wondering when the media will begin giving extensive primers on winter-sport safety. We also wonder why it takes the media so long (a fraction of a second?) to shift into plaster-sainthood mode whenever a person dies so cruelly and way too soon.

In our more cynical moments, P&J get the sense that local TV stations and the BeloJo have gone a bit overboard in fostering the notion that Michael Kennedy might have jumped the queue, ahead of Mother Teresa, for those sure to be canonized.

If this is true, he will join, in sainthood, with others who have lost their lives in accidents in humble surroundings. These include St. Grace of Kelly, noted for her work in helping the underprivileged, layabout royalty who lost their shirts at the gaming tables in Monte Carlo, and St. Diana of the Ritz, who selflessly soothed the troubled feelings of the billionaire son of a pushy Mideastern businessman as long as the champagne and jewelry kept coming. And now we add to the list St. Sonny of Bono, who, people have discovered recently, was one of the most brilliant of public officials ever to be elected out of Palm Springs.

We don't expect a whole lot of balance from Kathy Lee Gifford, who attacked the media for excoriating Michael Kennedy by pointing out that, according to previously unreported polygraph tests, Michael was sleeping with his babysitter when she was 16, not 14. (Oh, that makes all the difference in the world.) But we do think that a little balance on both ends of the spectrum is in order.

Of course, don't expect fairness from Phillipe & Jorge, bastions of the unbalanced that we are. Still, there is at least one thing in our mentioning such unpleasantness that could pass for courage. We fully realize that any future interviews with Arnold Schwarzenegger have been placed in serious jeopardy.

Kudos and congrats . . .

. . . to Greil Marcus, who wrote a marvelous appreciation of Vo Dilun's own J. T. Walsh in Monday's New York Times. Mr. Walsh is the Warwick native you've seen in umpteen films (A Few Good Men, Nixon, The Last Seduction, House of Games, Tin Men, Hoffa, Breakdown, etc.) In the last 10 years, he easily has become one of Hollywood's finest character actors. We anxiously await the day when the Motion Picture Academy gives similar recognition and nominates Walsh for an Oscar.

. . . to M. Charles Bakst for his spirited defense of Ira Magaziner's integrity in one of his recent columns. (This "Kudos and Congrats," by the way, is being written by Jorge, as Phillipe was once an employee of Mr. Magaziner.)

Say what you will about screw-ups or some people's contentions that many of Ira's initiatives are "wrong-headed" (and we would disagree with that), but for a slime-bag legislator like William Archer to question Ira's integrity is way over the top. Magaziner is one of the most honest people in government service and a beacon of decency in a very squalid arena. The allegations about him are bullshit.

Speaking of M. Charles, we love ya, Chuckie, but Jim Taricani was right in saying during the waning seconds of last week's Deadly Experiment on Channel 36 that the outrage of the year was the way you continue to comb your hair. This was, arguably, the second most obvious moment of that show's New Year's Eve telecast. Honors also go to Tom DiLuglio's prediction that there will be some sort of major scandal in Vo Dilun politics this year.

Tom had no specifics on what this scandal might involve, but the former lieutenant governor has been around the Biggest Little long enough to know that his out-of-left-field prediction is as safe as shooting fish in a barrel. It also reminds us that DiLuglio's continued presence on the show is what gives it pizzazz.

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