What worries me, and many other adoptive parents I know, is that Madonna's mission to Malawi will scare off countries that currently allow adoption, fearing the worldwide publicity will create the perception that their children are for sale. She's given international adoption a major image problem. It's already bad enough that when you adopt overseas people think you're "skipping off to buy a baby," as I've been told, and that was before Madonna made headlines.

Plenty of adoptive parents figure out pretty quickly that if you want to avoid problems, do a little research and avoid countries with dicey adoption histories and poorly established programs. In my family, we never considered pressing a country closed to outside adoptions for an exemption; but then again, we hadn't donated $3 million to one of them either. We did think a lot about how our child would view his adoption when he grows up. We dismissed a possible facilitator because she seemed, well, shady. As my husband pointed out, you don't want "60 Minutes" showing up at your door 15 years later, informing you that your baby broker was corrupt. Try explaining that one to a vulnerable adolescent. 

Studies have tried to debunk the value of celebrity endorsements, as if a nation deliriously hooked on entertainment could never be duped by Hollywood. But seeing as we've now elevated our presidential hopefuls to celebrity status -- people turn out for an Obama rally like Jersey girls to a Bruce Springsteen concert -- it seems only fair to weigh their chances based in part on the company they keep.

Among the tiny percentage of Americans who do contribute large amounts of money to political campaigns (the number who give a thousand dollars or more to any candidate hovers around one tenth of one percent of the population), Hollywood contributors are almost alone in not trying to buy themselves anything so concrete as a tax break or a watered-down regulation. Although the entertainment industry itself does have corporate PACs, which do the industry's bidding and spread its wealth accordingly, most of the contributions handed out by individual members of the entertainment industry are ideological money that buys them nothing.