People get nose jobs all the time. It's become something of a status symbol: once you've made it, you get to make totally unnecessary and costly changes to your face. Jennifer Aniston got one, as did Katie Holmes, Beyonce, Marilyn Monroe, Halle Berry, and of course, the late Michael Jackson. The list is astonishingly long. What do the celebrities named above have in common? They were all beautiful before their nose jobs. So what gives?

In January, Ezra Roth wrote a piece for this blog about the nose job "epidemic" in Iran, where thousands of women aspire to the Western (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) ideal of beauty. He wrote that Iran leads the world in rhinoplasty, with up to 70,000 operations per year.

Now I don't know about you, but I find Iranian women very beautiful -- and not in the asexual way one might describe an elderly woman as "beautiful." No, I find them sexy and gorgeous. Indeed, desirable. And I find them desirable precisely because they don't look like the women I went to college with in southeastern Minnesota. Likewise, I thought Halle Berry was a lot hotter when she looked less like a white woman.

To wit, on Sunday I called a friend with whom I often have dinner to see if she was free. She said no, because she's recovering from a nose job she got on Friday. She didn't tell anyone she was going to get one, and she asked me to keep it a secret. (I figure as long as I don't name her here, I'm not betraying that trust by writing a post about it.)

About 15 hours after official word that Michael Jackson was dead ricocheted around the world last week, I realized something about what makes the headlines -- and it had nothing to do with Farrah Fawcett or Ed McMahon getting short shrift.

I was in a public space with two large TVs tuned to CNN on Friday, and news of MJ was everywhere. He dominated the front page of the Times and every other paper that morning, too. The subway was full of people reading articles about him. And above ground, he's all anyone seemed to be talking about.

Then it occurred to me: if Michael Jackson hadn't died, we all would have instead been talking and reading about one of the country's front-runners for the Republican ticket in the 2012 presidential election, and how he used tax payers' money to visit his mistress in Argentina. We'd have been talking about how he publicly denounced such behavior in other politicians just a few years ago, revealing himself to be a hypocrite who's arrogant enough to believe he could get away with it.

Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina who went missing over Father's Day weekend, only to turn up a few days later claiming that he'd been hiking the Appalachian Trail, was the hot story on Thursday morning. He had just confessed to his affair, and a case was mounting against him for all the betrayals and hypocrisies listed above. What's more, the GOP had just lost someone it was calling one of its strongest contenders against Barack Obama just three years from now.

But by the next day, he was a sidebar, and the news -- TV, newspapers, blogs, and chit-chat around the water cooler -- was all Michael.

If I had HBO -- let alone a TV -- I'd spend my evening tonight watching Liz Garbus's acclaimed documentary, Shouting Fire: Stories From the Front Lines of Free Speech.

A hit at this year's Sundance Film Festival and praised by critics for its engaging approach to such a complex subject, the film takes a hard look at just how fragile the First Amendment really is. Garbus considers diverse cases in which Americans voicing unpopular views were kicked out of schools, lost jobs or otherwise censored to the point of undermining one of the central liberties that (we think) defines American life.

Among the film's subjects is Ward Churchill, a former University of Colorado professor who was attacked for an essay he wrote after 9/11 in which he referred to the people who worked in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns." Adolf Eichmann was a member of the Nazi party and is often called the "architect of the Holocaust" -- not because he planned it, but because of his organizational prowess and reliability in executing the plans of those who did. Likewise, argued Churchill, the people who worked in the WTC were complicit in engineering the capitalist system the terrorists meant to destroy.

He defended his position, and by speaking he only made matters worse for himself. As did the rest of the film's subjects, such as Tyler Chase Harper, a San Diego high school student who was suspended for wearing a T-shirt that said "Homosexuality is Shameful" during a gay and lesbian awareness event. Subjects like Harper may provide the balance the film needs to make its point to all Americans regardless of political leanings.

Garbus, whose father, Martin Garbus, is a First Amendment attorney, also includes footage of the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, at which more than 1,800 people were arrested -- many for no apparent reason. As Gina Belafonte writes in the New York Times, these shots recall those taken much more recently in Iran, suggesting that the suppression we are witnessing in that country is just as present in our own.

As I said, I'll have to wait for Shouting Fire to come out on Netflix, but if you have HBO, take a look -- and drop a comment to let people like me (TVaphobes) know how it is.

The film's HBO schedule can be found here.

[Image: Still from Shouting Fire]

President Obama announced this weekend that the House has passed the so-called "climate change bill" -- a sweeping piece of legislation that aims to curb global warming, radically reduce pollution, and generally move the United States -- and by extension, the planet -- toward a greener future.

The bill passed narrowly, with a vote of 219 over 212, and eight Republicans voted in its favor. This didn't prevent Minority Leader John Boehner from reading large portions of it aloud on the House floor, not because he supports the bill, but because "people deserve to know what's in this pile of shit."

Fortunately, Boehner's opinion is the minority one (pun intended). Though the majority may be small in this case, it was large enough to squeak the legislation through. President Obama spoke optimistically about the changes we can expect to see as a result of this Congressional move in his weekly address:

My longtime friend Jason and I were walking through the very affluent Nob Hill neighborhood here in San Francisco. Jason is the extreme opposite of affluent. I love Jason to pieces and have always been struck by his absolute and complete satisfaction with living as simply as he can. Jason is incredibly intelligent, good looking and charming and could have almost anything he wanted in life but scoffs at most everything people want. We photographed each other throughout Nob Hill but the picture that says the most is his proud declaration of what he is happiest with, his minority status.