The re-mastered rip-off.

Can you imagine the look on Keith Richards' face if he were told, say 40 years ago, that not only would the Rolling Stones become unimaginably famous and wealthy, but in addition, his band's recordings would be sold and resold, over and over, in varying formats? He'd think you were from Pluto. Forget for the moment the shameless number of "greatest hits" collections: I'm thinking, for example, of how many times Between the Buttons has appeared in my succession of households.

First was the "Ruby Tuesday"/"Let's Spend the Night Together" hit single (both songs appeared on the subsequent LP). Then two copies of Buttons, the first worn out by repeated listenings and a crummy record player. When I went to college and sold my collection of albums for a buck apiece, I picked up the cassette version of the '67 classic. Years later?I'd avoided the eight-track option?it was time to pick up the CD release.

It's fairly startling, or maybe I'm just a sucker. That's certainly the way I felt two weeks ago upon buying three of Bob Dylan's ballyhooed "remastered" classics, which, in the words of Legacy Recordings' Steve Berkowitz, would "reawaken" fans to "how brilliant these records are." Berkowitz told Luke Torn for a Sept. 24 Wall Street Journal article, "Our goal was not to change them [Dylan's recordings]. Our goal was to represent, in a more [audio] verite way, what the musicians actually did. You can make them sound better, but they've gotta feel the same."

What a bunch of happy horseshit. Love the sales pitch?which I succumbed to?but after listening to the "enhanced" Highway 61 Revisited, I've got news for you: "Queen Jane Approximately" sounds almost exactly the same as it did in 1965. Granted, perhaps a trained musician or anal audiophile will pick up a slight nuance, but my hearing, unlike the peepers, has not deteriorated a whit with age, and this is a scam. Legal, obviously, but a scam.

Stephen Williams, writing in the Nov. 4 Newsday, really poured it on thick in praising the "Super Audio CD" unveiling of 15 Dylan recordings. He writes: "'Tangled Up in Blue,' which really needs no help, arrives in the remastered version as even more goose-bumpy. The renovation of the recorded Dylan canon will continue at a somewhat more restrained pace early next year with the planned release of SACD hybrid/surround of Bootleg Series, Volume 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964?Concert at Philharmonic Hall. There's enough material for a couple of dozen more albums in the future, but no firm word on the agenda. Still, as the Dyl himself has said, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

Had I read this woeful last sentence?one that even a middling junior high school editor would've deleted?before visiting Barnes & Noble recently, there'd be $60 more in my pocket today.

Crank Up Old Sparky

I'm not a crime blotter buff, but two items in the past week caught my eye simply because they were so ridiculous. First, there was Seattle-area serial killer Gary Leon Ridgway is striking a plea bargain that'll spare him the death penalty in exchange for admitting to 48 murders. The 54-year-old Ridgway, who by all rights should be fried, said, "Choking is what I did and I was pretty good at it? I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight."

How charming. This is not a case in which DNA samples might exonerate a person after he's been executed. Ridgway admitted to 48 killings. What rational reason is there to let such a man remain in prison, at great expense to the state, for the rest of his natural life?

Meanwhile, in a far less serious but nonetheless absurd story, a 13-year-old Texas boy has been charged with a misdemeanor and suspended from school for three days for giving a female classmate a hickey. According to the Nov. 7 Fort Worth Star-Telegram?which patted itself on the back for not giving the name of Master Hickey because he's "a juvenile," yet identified his mother?the youth, if convicted, will have to pay a $283 fine. Naturally, there's a he-said/she-said dispute between the kids of whether the physical contact was consensual, with both sides offering various corroboration. The boy's mom said: "I don't see paying nearly $300 for a hickey. It doesn't make sense. You have kids in Dallas schools having oral sex. This is a hickey."

Well-said. This could never have happened in 1967, a more innocent time, when I was a seventh-grader. By the end of the school day, you had to weave in between couples necking and more at the lockers just to get inside a classroom. No one paid any attention to the lucky devil dogs; it was that commonplace, and date hickeys were a daily occurrence.

Blame it on John Ashcroft.

CBS is Chicken and Daschle's Nuts

The flap over CBS scrapping the biopic The Reagans leaves me mystified. Since when has television, on the networks or cable, made truth or taste a determining factor in what to air? Apparently, the script, starring the husband of Barbra Streisand, now the grieving widow of the First Amendment, took factual license, just as CBS's Dan Rather does every single night. I don't understand the strategy of conservative crusaders, who organized a preemptive strike against the network with threatened boycotts of advertisers, and ultimately prevailed. Seems to me that these well-intentioned men and women would've had far more leverage after the program had actually been shown to a national audience. The main question really ought to be: Why hasn't CBS chairman Leslie Moonves been fired?

I'm in the strange, and wholly unpalatable, position of siding with Newsweek's Jonathan Alter on this weird controversy. Sure, Alter in his Nov. 4 online column gets off to a rocky start, saying, "The Gipper is safe and the hated liberal media humbled. It's a big victory for the 'Elephant Echo Chamber,' the unholy [emphasis mine] trinity of conservative talk radio, conservative Internet sites and the Republican National Committee."

Still, Alter was right on the button by skewering CBS: "In its press release, the network said the decision to cancel the docudrama?was based 'solely on our reaction to seeing the final film, not the controversy that erupted over the draft of a script.' If you believe that, you think 'Survivor' is a nature program. You think CBS is still the Tiffany of networks." (Alter moonlights for rival NBC's affiliate MSNBC, but his point is still valid.)

Sen. Tom Daschle, who can't be in a jolly mood these days, what with his party's chairman Terry McAuliffe demonstrating alarming ineptitude almost daily, Democratic presidential contenders telling an MTV audience with whom they'd like to party in a nationally televised "debate" in Boston, and the economy quickly becoming a non-issue for the Dems next fall, was nearly hysterical. Daschle, appearing on the Democratic medium of choice, National Public Radio, said of CBS last week, "They totally collapsed? [It's] a clear victory for the far right. I have to conclude if they can do it with CBS, they can do it with anybody else. They are going to be watching for the next target of opportunity and use it for whatever they can. I don't think there is any doubt that we'll see more of it in the future."

You get the feeling that if Republican Bobby Jindal, the dynamic 32-year-old whose parents were born in India, wins the Louisiana gubernatorial contest on Nov. 15?he's tied in the polls, but as in Baltimore, Newark and Chicago, Democrats tend to rise from the dead on Election Day?Daschle will voluntarily ask for a straitjacket. Tom, get a grip: This nonsense of "If they can do it with CBS, they can do it with anybody else" is pure South Dakotan malarkey. If that were true, the New York Times would've sent Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins?all notorious for distorting the truth?packing a long time ago.

A more charitable gent?sorry, no dice when it comes to the Times?might feel a twinge of sympathy for Collins and her out-of-touch-with-ordinary-Americans group of editorial writers. When Dr. HoJo Dean opted out of public financing, the Times was in a real tizzy about how to explain it all. On the one hand, they own the campaign finance reform issue; on the other, the paper's braintrust is so desperate to defeat President Bush, they're willing to excuse the refreshingly candid Vermonter (via Park Ave.) for his breach of Times protocol. After all, if Dean makes short work of his competitors, they'll have to endorse him next November.

Last Friday, as Dean's charade of asking his online supporters whether he should forego public funds was taking place, the Times editorialized that well, maybe he should, but Doctor, please be responsible. It reminded me of poor Joe Lieberman's absurd pander to special interest groups in the 2000 campaign when he said of affirmative action: "Mend it, but please don't end it."

The Times concluded: "While his retreat is understandable, Dr. Dean should show his commitment to principle by pledging right now that he will voluntarily spend no more than the $45 million limit in campaigning against other Democrats, and save the rest of his private funds for challenging Mr. Bush." This pitiful plea is remarkable for its astonishing naivete. Does anyone really believe that Dean won't spend whatever it takes to win the Democratic nomination? That he's more interested in a good-government gold star from the Times as opposed to pulverizing John Kerry and Dick Gephardt and running against Bush in the fall?

On the subject of denial, just look to Washington Post pundit E.J. Dionne Jr., an elite Beltway Democrat who wrote a Nov. 7 column claiming that, according to his reading of a Pew Research Center study, the country's political polarization is identical to that of 2000. He begins: "The red states get redder, the blue states get bluer, and the political map of the United States takes on the coloration of the Civil War."

Yet two days later, Dionne's Post colleague David Broder, who apparently did more than skim the Pew report, notes that Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota and Washington?all states that voted for Gore in 2000?have, since 9/11, more registered Republicans than Democrats.

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