Thirty years after the fact, the Los Angels Sheriff’s Department is reopening its investigation of Oscar nominee Natalie Wood’s death.  After the Black Dahlia murder, her enigmatic drowning off Catalina Island endures as the Southland’s most renowned mystery.   House Republicans, too, remain fixated both on 1981 and dead actors in their sisyphean struggle to recreate the Reagan era.   One can easily overlook, they would aver, the Gipper’s alchemizing our great nation from the world’s largest creditor into her largest debtor by recalling his Ag Secretary John Block’s historic effort to re-categorize ketchup as a vegetable.  As if to channel the Alzheimer-in-Chief, Hill Tea Partiers recently introduced legislation to count pizza and Tater Tots as vegetables in school lunches.  According to an appropriations committee spokesperson, the new rules would not only “prevent overly burdensome and costly regulations [but also] provide greater flexibility for local school districts to repay the $5.6 million that Conagra and other frozen food makers spent lobbying us.”

When Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt famously quipped about a sub-committee comprising “a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple,” it failed only by a fraction to eclipse Nixon and Ford Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz’s infamous apothegm: “The only thing the coloreds are looking for in life are tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit.”  Since then, society’s attitudes about race and gender (everyone still hates Jews) have thankfully shifted, albeit unequally.  While we no longer a priori rule out a gynic presidency (recall: Hillary’s run), revelation that Sarah Palin porked black basketball player Glen Rice killed her political viability more abruptly than a second-trimester abortion.  Yet for those who condemn Herman Cain for his sexual predations, the fact that both his accusers are white has become distinctly irrelevant.   Now that’s what I call progress.