46 year-old El Paso Congressman Beto O’Rourke, currently running against Ted Cruz for a Texas U.S. Senate seat, is the only Democratic rock star around. If he beats Cruz, he could theoretically make a run for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2020. Would Beto be pushing his luck by doing so? Yes. Traditional grooming strategies suggest that O’Rourke will make a big splash at the Democratic convention in July 2020, by which time he will presumably have been serving for a year and a half, and then run for President in 2024. But what if A Democrat beats Trump in ‘2020?

Barack Obama officially launched his Presidential campaign in February ’07, at which time he had been serving as one of Illinois’s U.S. Senate reps for two years. Then he’d been laying the groundwork for months previously. It wouldn’t be that crazy if Beto runs for Prez in 2020; he’d be 48 by then and (if all goes well) a seasoned Washington Senator.

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Are we allowed to talk about this or that actress delivering a certain unzipped quality? Or has that kind of talk been outlawed? I don’t know if I’m any good at describing stand-out, X-factor, special-allure qualities when it comes to actresses, but since seeing Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War last May I’ve become more and more convinced that Joanna Kulig, the 36 year-old Polish actress who plays femme fatale “Zula” Lichon, is the new Jeanne Moreau. Or, if you will, the new Laura Antonelli.

What does that mean exactly? It means that she has a certain irreverent-but-sensuous thing going on. A quality of impudence. Besides being highly fetching there’s something about Kulig that feels a tiny bit bothered or madhouse. In a good way, I mean. Because the slightly crazy ones are always (and please don’t lynch me for saying this) great in the sack.

Moreau wasn’t devastatingly beautiful in a Catherine Deneuve sense, but she had a look on her face that told you she’d been around the block and had known disappointment and unhappiness. Her face had a hard-knocks, downturned-mouth quality. Kulig has this also. There’s something in her eyes and manner that is direct and yet slightly mocking and melancholy. She’s got it, whatever it is. In my book she’s earned consideration for a Best Actress Oscar — no question.

Bill Cosby, 81, was handed a three-to-ten-year prison sentence “for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home in 2004. He will almost certainly go straight to prison today. Before sentencing, Judge Steven T. O’Neill upheld a state board’s finding that Mr. Cosby is a sexually violent predator. The court released Constand’s full victim impact statement, in which she wrote that Cosby “took my beautiful, healthy young spirit and crushed it.” The two jurors who refused to convict Dr. Cliff Huxtable during deliberations over the first trial are presumably feeling disheartened.

A statement from Joan Tarshis, whose account of her own Cosby episode was posted on Hollywood Elsewhere on 11.16.14: “I’m very happy about the verdict.”

From David Ehrlich‘s 9.21 Matchstick Men piece, in which he praised Ridley Scott‘s 2003 film as “The Movie that Made Cage Impossible to Forget“:

“Cage’s fidgety central turn as Roy Waller, which channels the most elegant of the actor’s natural talents — and the most egregious of his meme-ified tendencies — into a singularly humane portrayal that’s too holistic to be sliced into supercuts, but also too feral to have been performed by anyone else. Matchstick Men came out right in the sweet spot of Cage’s career, flitting into theaters through the open window between his last Oscar nomination and his first direct-to-VOD schlockfest. It was after he’d become a punchline, but before he’d become the joke.

“Cage is not as unhinged as he was in Vampire’s Kiss, or as cartoonish as he was in Face/Off or as virtuosic as he was in Adaptation. His performance here isn’t subdued by the middle-class malaise of It Could Happen to You, or possessed by the white man’s kabuki of his police work in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Roy calls to mind a little something from all of those roles, but he doesn’t belong to any one of them.

“And yet, if you took Cage’s entire filmography and crammed it into a blender, Roy Waller is the puree you’d be left with inside.”

A few years ago I took the time to record two Matchstick Men supercuts, both from a discussion between Waller and Bruce Altman‘s Dr. Harris Klein — clip #1 and clip #2. Then, years later, I discovered this clip:

Excerpt for the defensive mansplainers living in the right-wing legislative membrane, we all have Christine Blasey Ford‘s back. The bad guys are naturally going to Anita Hill her as best they can, but if they overplay their hand the blowback will be profound.

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Or imply the wrong thing. Or say something even a little bit complimentary about the wrong kind of person. Or hint at the wrong kind of attitude. Or argue for the wrong position or perhaps even imply that you’re thinking the wrong kind of thoughts…you’ll be disciplined like a bitch. The politically correct Robespierres will arch their backs and point at you and shriek on Twitter about how you need to be shunned, admonished, fired from your job, whipped, corrected, spanked with a wooden paddle, sent into the desert to cleanse yourself of your grotesque mansplaining and male-gazing, etc.

This is in no way a plea for leniency for the odious fraternity of Les Moonves, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Kevin Spacey and Charlie Rose. The world is obviously a better, more humane place without the abusive sexual buccaneering that these guys have come to represent. We are, on the other hand, living through a kind of Twitter-ized French terror. Nobody’s perfect and we’ve all probably over-stepped at one time or another, but the mere presence of a dusted-off guillotine is…well, unpleasant. Society is being course-corrected, of course, but whew, the anxiety vibes.

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So Michael Avenatti’s as-yet unnamed client, a woman who was “both” a witness and a victim of Kavanaugh’s who “had a number of security clearances issued by the federal government over a number of years,” will come forward…what, later today? Certainly by tomorrow. A friend predicted yesterday that when the “third woman” comes forward, Kavanaugh might turn tail and withdraw himself from the process. That would be Trump’s smart play — cut Brett loose, nominate another anti-choice hardliner. I suspect, however, that Congressional Republicans are so angry and obstinate about what they see as a fiendish liberal conspiracy to destroy a good man (i.e., an entitled conservative cut from their own cloth) that they’re telling each other “damn the torpedoes….we’re pushing Brett through no matter what.”