Obviously, we should all stop watching Woody Allen movies if we believe that he molested Dylan Farrow. It therefore follows that if you plan to watch “Blue Jasmine,” you believe that Farrow is lying or the victim of false memories implanted by her mother. Those are your two options. To say that we don’t know whether Farrow is telling the truth and to continue watching Woody Allen movies is to introduce an alarming moral calculus—to measure the quality of “Annie Hall” against the possibility that he molested a child, and then say probably everything is fine. Until we can figure out the truth of Dylan Farrow’s accusations for ourselves, we conscionably can neither watch nor stop watching Woody Allen movies, unless we advance the tenuous argument that art and the artist have nothing to do with each other. Basically we are screwed, is what I am saying here, from both a moral and an epistemological standpoint. That’s also what I say in this consideration of the problem in the Missoula Independent, which is what you get instead of a blog today. Click through, mickey-fickeys.

The sum news disseminators of western Montana are so close to producing one Ravalli County treasury item per day. This morning, we hear from KGVO that embattled treasurer Valerie Stamey claims no one has contacted her about the audit and investigation of her office. It’s possible that’s because she’s the primary object of that investigation. It’s possible that most government officials would not comment on an ongoing investigation, particularly not to imply that it is bullshit. But Stamey is not most government officials. My column today in the Missoula Independent tries to come up with a unifying theory of Stamey, based on her bizarre ad lib while leading Bitterroot Republicans in the Lord’s Prayer. Surely, someone who adds a joke to a prayer must be a particular kind of person, but what? “Sociopath” is too easy. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

Today is not quite every other Thursday, but it is an other Thursday, and that means my column is running in the Missoula Independent. It’s about Missoula’s war on poverty, which lately seems indistinguishable from a war on poor people. In its quest not just to find a solution to its own problems but also to address the larger issue, the Westside Neighborhood Association submitted a model ordinance banning soup kitchens within 300 feet of any residential zone. The city council plans to make it law next week, but they’ve backed off from an ordinance banning panhandling downtown. Or have they? The war on poverty cannot be won with half measures, and until all forms of helping/asking for help are banned, we’ll have to suffer poverty’s effects. In the meantime, I’ll sit indoors and type. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

 

It’s possible that Fred Van Valkenburg’s plan to sue the Department of Justice rather than submit to an investigation of his office has nothing to do with Reel Big Fish’s show at the Wilma Sunday night. They’re happening at the same time, though, so Kant would say that one is as good a cause for the other as anything else. And Kant isn’t the only one. The RBF show and Van Valkenburg’s mad temporizing are the two subjects of two opinion pieces I have in the Indy this week, so they are inextricably linked in my mind. Regular readers of Combat! will recognize our old friend the rabbinical story of the cracked plate in at least one. They will also return, hopefully, for Friday links tomorrow. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to stare open-mouthed at live updates about Chris Christie.

 

Combat! blog’s Christmas/illness/lassitude adventure continues today, when we wing our way to Los Angeles and the warm embrace of Mike Cassady’s cats. I’m flying through Denver, so probably the next you hear from me will be in the airport Marriott. If all goes as planned, though, I will spend this week nursing my ruined gut with macrobiotic brunches and Hawkeye football and—most importantly—not writing the blog. I have other things to write in the meantime, and I need a break. While I indulge my laziness, how about you read the New York Times’s long analysis of the definitive non-scandal of 2013? Fox News has already released a slew of articles quoting anonymous sources who say the Times report on Benghazi is utterly false.  I’ll leave it to you to determine which accounts are reliable. We’ll be back on Monday, January 7 with our own signature mix of conjecture and bias. Keep hope alive.

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